Pitchmarks #81 - "(Not) Only on Sundays"

The best part of forty years ago, my father gave me - keen to encourage my apparent desire to join what Bernard Darwin called “the bravest, stupidest race in the world…golfers” - a collection of Henry Longhurst’s writings. Such was the way with Dad - he would disappear into his passions by reading about them, and though he never played golf - or at least never got hooked by it, though he watched me hook plenty - he knew how to find the best writing on it.

The years drift away, carrying with them most recollections of this private man, but I keep nearby a few fragments of his life, and like to think that they point at a similar passion for his retirement pastimes as I hold for golf. A CD of Erik Satie’s delicate Gymnopédies, together with a vague memory of how hearing the first of those “naked dances” touched my Dad one day through a department store’s speaker.

A handful of books, Longhurst included, and a little notebook in which he recorded his reading from the moment he retired until the moment he slipped away. To see, in his distinctive handwriting, that he did read my Christmas gift back the other way some years later - “The Piano Shop on the Left Bank” - is a delight, and it tickles me that I am now, finally, most of the way through my Longhurst, albeit a little late in the day to tell Dad.

The instant he retired he knew exactly what he’d spend his remaining time doing, and so followed devotion to the garden, and to classical music. To carefully stuffed tobacco pipes and to home-brewed ales. And somehow this rare ability to know what mattered to him, what lit up his world has changed me. Made me look for the clues, for the connections to the deeper places.

So when it occurred to me that I must read more - for both pleasure and gain, for there is much to learn in the writing craft by absorbing the greats - it was obvious where to start. Darwin’s place in my own stumbling narrative is obvious - his portrait above the Dining Room in Woking, from where this mad escape plan towards writing was hatched; his ghost in that red leather chair or on the bank of The Pulpit at Rye, watching his chosen species migrate across that mighty dune, day after day, year after year.

Not so long ago, I stumbled back across Darwin writing about his own path in life, and - despite every advantage that the grandson of the grandest of scientists could wish for - he followed his heart once golf found him, and stayed true to that path to the end. “I’m afraid I would do it all over again”, he concluded, and I recall reading that line for the first time, and feeling once more that tug towards uncertainty, and the blank page at dawn.

And then, when a period under Darwin’s spell finally wears thin, I pick up Longhurst, and imagine a teenage me unwrapping this volume, and carrying it around forever before reading it. And by the second paragraph of the Foreword, I am hooked, snap-hooked perhaps; a violent and sudden connection after all this time: “To write about [golf], as I have every Sunday for the best part of thirty-two years, brings one a host of friends, to say nothing of innumerable correspondents whom one may never meet…this is a blessing not to be measured in terms of money”.

And I think about these Sunday morning missives of mine, and the people I’ve been able to meet, and the others I hope to someday, and as the sun peers over the horizon and our tee-time edges closer I know it will be another day that begins and ends in gratitude, and I am grateful. So, so grateful. So many new friends; so much in common, all found through the prism of this daft and heavenly game, and its glorious, windswept corridors.

No amount of money could measure the blessing I feel, so I’ll keep Darwin and Longhurst nearby and let Henry have the last word, written sixty-odd years ago from inside one of his crumbling Sussex windmills, “Jack” and “Jill”. For after all this time, after decades of meaning to do this - to write - I now know deep inside that feeling of which he speaks, and am now struggling to keep it “Only on Sundays”…

“I can only hope they will give as much pleasure in the reading as they did in the writing”
Henry Longhurst