Pitchmarks Archive ADVENTure #17 - "Lunch Unavailable"

Because some things are just not worth diluting...

I was about six months into my first role as Secretary of a golf club when the Murray Scott Bowl came around. In old, traditional golf clubs, there is often a calendar of events that the committed member will seemingly prioritise above all other options in their personal and domestic diaries.

Woking is no different in this regard, the likes of the “Match Dinner” and “The Wooden Spoon” pivotal dates in the cyclical nature of Club life, and the source of many entertaining stories. For the New Member - a label which many of the old school would continue to bestow on a newcomer for anything up to a decade - these events were not only a great chance to meet the rest of the Club community - and of course severely deplete the lower reaches of the wine list, to the delight of the stock-taker - but also part of the whole experience of membership.

To participate in such days is a rite of passage on Hook Heath, along with smashing a window with a violent hook down the 14th, watching your ball drift merrily towards Jessie’s Pond at the last, or dragging heavy furniture around the patio to attempt a doomed recovery, while what feels like the rest of the world hold their breath before exploding with laughter, spilling their refreshments and building memories in the process.

To feel confident running a Club it is important to get through that first, full cycle - and from there, the form is known and the second and subsequent years should hold fewer surprises, but while this was my first Murray Scott foursomes, I felt by this stage that I had some idea of what the afternoon would entail. The cards were all prepared - names, handicap allowance (back in the days when you could be reasonably expected to understand such figures), tee time - and I had dutifully ticked each player in as they rushed from car park to the spike bar to the carvery.

I recall a slight surprise over the fact that this board competition was being played off the modest yellow tees, but double-checked and was reassured, albeit without being given any solid reason. The justification would become clear…

Having walked through the Dining Room, winking at the great Bernard Darwin as I passed beneath him, his painted gaze watching a scene he’d have known a hundred times - the Woking membership deep in conversation, corks popping, laughter ringing through the walls of this charming and delicate Clubhouse. Feeling confident that all was as it ought to be, I returned to my desk, to catch up on the inevitable mountain of paperwork, whose predictable, steady flow makes the role akin to that of Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder up the hill.

The Captain walked in, and asked if I had been briefed on “the form”. I was then told in no uncertain terms that my most important act of the day would not be to prepare the competition as I had so far, or ensure a decent menu for the critical prandial element, or even to work out the scores (and he would himself reinforce how secondary this latter element is a few hours later when declaring “I lost the card somewhere…we did ok…put us down for twenty-something”).

No, the key task - one that is not written down anywhere, but whose continuity relies on the sense of mischief of a few dozen Members - is simply in the announcement to the (eventually) silent Dining Room that the afternoon’s start times would be delayed by 30 minutes, to avoid rushing lunch. I thought he was joking for a while, but, after finally lashing a spare knife against a wine glass long enough to bring an expectant hush from those sat under Bernardo’s watch, the resultant cheer shook the timber frames of the building, and all present roared with a tribal laughter. No wonder they play off the yellow markers, I thought to myself.

Such occasions punctuate the year for the staff and members at the Club, a celebration of all that is good about golf - this strange game that seems so mysterious and unfathomable to the outsider, yet which builds the strongest of connections for the lucky few who “get it”. Among the many formats available, foursomes is an even tighter niche than golf itself - the responsibility shared with a playing partner through the inevitable cock-ups bring great humour, and the Bye-Law of “no apologies” reigns supreme. It will test the strongest of friendships, but all those that survive the test (and nearly all of them do) are even stronger for the experience. It requires humility and patience to play foursomes well, and as we all know, some golfers just aren’t built that way.

Murray Scott was a Past Captain of the Club, and the glass bowl for which those gathered are in theory competing (though few give a damn about the result, even if most can put an actual, factual score to their efforts) was given to the Club in his honour. He was a regular in the lunch then foursomes roll-ups, and the event that bears his name is played in the appropriate spirit, or should I say after imbibing the appropriate spirit.

Those 30 minutes, like extra time in the World Cup, are frantic - perhaps 20 of them are spent on pudding, with the dregs poured out of any bottles in sight. A further 6 are spent in the ritual of necking Kümmel, another peculiar custom in the wooden panelled bars of the finest clubs in Britain, outside of which virtually no-one even knows what this clear fluid is. The slim glasses, whose aniseed stench floats across the Clubhouse, are banged back down, and so begins a dash for the changing rooms and then the tee, shoelaces flapping as the players hurriedly emerge into the light, try to remember where their clubs are, and which end to hold.

One year, a previous incumbent in my chair was busy checking the scores when a fellow competitor overheard the likely winners conversing on the patio. Legend has it one said “thank goodness we didn’t drink wine at lunch”, and as word of this outrage spread through the field, a steward’s enquiry ensued. The pair, halfway through working out what their speech should comprise, apart from the non-negotiable final Woking line (“have a drink on us”), were informed that while they had returned the highest Stableford score, they would not be placing their unusually steady hands on the fragile glassware. At some point, the decision was made that they were guilty of “not having lunched appropriately”, and the next best pair instead bought the drinks, and were listed on the board.

As disrupting events go, Covid-19 was a category one player. World economies, international politics, technology, the health and security of millions of people, etc, etc. Nothing is quite the same as it was, and at times in 2020 the prospect of people ever enjoying a raucous club lunch in the way they had for decades seemed impossible, and for spells it was. In a game whose appeal for many lies in friendships and golf’s innately social nature, the ever-shifting landscape of infections and public fear ripped the heart out of many Clubhouses, while the courses, when open, got battered by play, as golf was one of the few things we could actually do, albeit without being allowed to rake a bunker, or shake hands. Or share a ball…

In the UK, the guidance was shifting as fast as a post-WHS handicap. Beyond the binary “Open”/”Closed” and “Working”/”Furloughed” designations, for hospitality there was a string of confusing developments that would fit better in the works of Kafka than in the 21st century. For a spell there was no food, not only on the tables at the Club, but on the shelves of the supermarket, for those brave enough to step outside in this Bladerunner-esque nightmare. And very few toilet rolls.

Then takeaway became an option, and the ever-popular bar hatch at the 14th re-opened, through which members had been passed swift chasers to build strength for the final loop of four since time began. It hardly mattered whether the required social distance was one metre or two at that point, since it was obvious that, for many, the school lesson in which they learned what a metre actually looked like lay beyond the scope of their memory.

Having negotiated the queue, which would at times spill out onto the green behind them, so thirsty were these wretches that all hope of a safe interaction would disappear before our eyes as the failing hearing of a customer would force the staff member, trapped in the bar behind like a rabbit in the headlights of particle transmission, to lean right in. Later we would be seen frantically checking pockets for masks, while others walked around with a plastic face shield as if welding could take place anytime, unannounced.

At some points we ate inside, sometimes out, but the one constant - an inevitable one given the often daily shifts in law, guidance, perception and compliance - was that very few could actually remember what the latest position was. Buried under emailed directions, and hammered by the insistent, terrifying signage and endless sanitisers, we did our best, and that all-important constituent of a good Woking member - the aforementioned sense of humour - was present for nearly all, with plenty of fresh material from which to draw.

The patio would sometimes be standing only, its absurd designation as an “indoor” space linked to the smoking regulations, despite the cold wind whipping leaves under the Wisteria, and the constant flow of golf ensuring a more or less equivalent danger from incoming balls. For a short period, alcohol (and let’s face it, for the members it was going to need a certain amount of this to retain any sort of will to live through this prolonged, apocalyptic nightmare) was only available with a substantial meal, triggering further debate about what that might represent.

Perfectly good sandwiches would suddenly be served with a salad garnish, which would be swept into the food waste a few minutes later, as the government placed an outer limit on how long you could take to eat the sandwich (but not the salad, obviously). The tables would be smothered in chemicals, and the whole cycle would start over. Perhaps my standout moment was when some parliamentary buffoon - I forget which one, they blend after a while - publicly suggested that a Scotch Egg was not the foulest creation of western society, as I had long suspected, but in fact the textbook example of “substantial fare”, heralding great laughter across a nation that was fed up of being told what to do.

Our liberties stripped away, with planes grounded, and at one point even travel over some notional boundary of Zone 2/Zone 4 no longer permitted, it was no surprise that golf surged. If you are reading this, you love the game already, beguiling mistress that she is, but those on the fringes of the sport had no other option but to watch daytime television or spend a bit longer home-schooling their offspring. So as the world started to open up again, the demand kept going up.

Friendly golf, visitor golf, society golf. Corporate golf, tournament golf, inter-club golf. Gradually the golfing public, starved of alternative entertainment, forced down the doors of clubs all over the country, and a fixture list that would normally exist with plenty of slack built in - in order that, for the two or three thousand pounds a year you were investing in membership, you might be able to simply decide to play golf, and be able to do so - was suddenly at breaking point.

So at Woking we shoe-horned in most of the postponed fixtures with something of a blitz spirit in evidence. “This virus won’t stop us” was the message, and the Club sought to put everything back as close as possible to what had existed before. Every board competition got played, bar one, and the Murray Scott Bowl, scheduled not once or twice but three times in 2020, fell foul of another late wave of infections.

In the winter months, as a third lockdown kicked in, we returned to the devastating routine of staring at each other’s bookshelves on conference calls, but the work never stops at a golf club, and after threading my way through the deserted streets of north Surrey one morning, the sign-writer and I shouted at each other from beneath our stinking masks, to get the Club ready for what we all hoped was the final re-opening of this creaking, leaking building.

We’d just about survived, it seemed, albeit with collateral damage, and the various timber boards of the Club would simply depict the winners with no mention of the challenges of finding sustenance around the fixture, or of adopting a flinching mechanism to limit human contact. The history of the Club would read as a continuous one in the shadowed gold leaf of the wooden tablets hanging in the corridors, as if nothing out of the ordinary went on in that year. With one exception…

If you walk in the door at Woking today, you will hear it slam behind you, and feel the draught of cool air rush under it, where the front end of this temporary structure of 1902 has sunk, and the door no longer fits. To your right you will have the spike bar, now open again, and often full of laughter. The Dining Room is to your left, and as you peer in, Darwin’s twinkling eyes face the same way from right above you.

Take a few more steps and you will come to the board for the Murray Scott Bowl, and alongside the list of winners, all celebrating their unique contribution to Club life by posting a decent score despite the boozy prelude, you will find the only entry that could have been chosen for this competition, at this Club, in that awful, dreadful, unforgettable year.

It reads:

“2020 - Lunch Unavailable”

When choosing which essays to pull from beyond the threshold of the paid subscriber, I hadn’t originally selected this one. I had about 20 on a list, all of which amused me or reminded me of special days or places or people, which left me a few spaces to fill. But this year I returned a couple of times to Woking, and it was lovely to be back, and to stroll down that quiet corridor, or gaze up at Darwin’s face above the “Mouseman” tables of the Dining Room.

The first visit was with two American brothers, who both felt this was the strongest - or perhaps their favourite - essay in “Grass Routes”, along with our mutual friend, the writer who’d kindly sent them a copy of my book. We had a wonderful game, and that this rambling, personal missive was the source not only of our time together at Woking but an ongoing friendship that defies the miles between us feels precious to me. So thank you, Mike, Jeff and Robin!

Then last week I played with another three friends, and again my side lost but not before we’d shared 36 holes of fun and laughter and triumph and disaster. We played the way people play at Woking - quick in both pace and wit - and it was a delight to see the old place in such good shape, for they meant the world to me, those years on Hook Heath, and the many friends I made. Another shout out, to another Mike, and to Arvind and Jon (and Bella and Ross, the canine caddies). We’ll get ‘em next time, partner…

The lockdown stuff changed us all, I think, but how wonderful to go back now, with all that firmly behind us, and find that the only indication you might find lurking of that crazy time is in those two words on the board for the Murray Scott Bowl. No wonder Darwin loved the place so…