A whole tabletop of land between our deep valley and the next coombe along, the tree-choked catastrophic rift we called The Lost Domain
And so, what with one thing and another, I began spending a lot of time up there. The thing that really got me about this clifftop golf course (in existence from 1906 as a nine hole course, redesigned by Braid as a fully-fledged 18 hole course in 1921, finally decommissioned, if that is the right word, in 1956) was that not a single trace of it remained as far as I could see.
It was mindboggling. 1956. They took away the flags and the tee markers, I imagined, and let the sheep back in. And at some stage, they must have demolished the clubhouse. Or perhaps it didn’t need demolishing. It had been, I was told, a wooden building – and it wouldn’t have taken many winter gales and salty squalls to turn it into matchwood. I couldn’t even find evidence of foundations within the vestiges of the privet enclosure.
And so it came to pass, one afternoon, after yet another fruitless survey of the site, that I stomped back down the hill and into the smuggler’s snug. I was hot, flustered, sweating and had burned off any need I might have had for small talk. When the barmaid (actually, tell the truth, it was the owner, a formidable woman who’d run businesses, serious businesses, so they said, down in the big city in Plymouth) came to serve me, I didn’t even order a drink.
“The golf club,” I blurted. “I can’t find the club house.”
She smiled patiently. “It’s not there any more, dear.”
And I, beside myself with impatience, must have looked like I had bladder control problems as I jigged from one foot to the other, shimmering with energy, fists clenched.
“Yes I know. It’s… The thing is… I just thought I’d be able to work out what was what up there.”
“What?”
“Whether there might be any remains. I’m just interested, that’s all. I don’t know whether I’m looking in the right place.”
She was smiling at me again. I suppose that’s when I realised how bizarrely I’d been acting. Like a distressed child, I suppose. “I’ll get Simon,” she said. “He’ll know.”
The bar was emptying now. (Because of me?) They’d obviously stopped serving lunches ages ago. I’d been hoping that one of the old geezers would be sat in their usual corner at the end of the bar. The village boasted at least two fully-paid-up wiseacres, to be found there in the snug every lunchtime, usually taking their time over a couple of halves of the locally brewed bitter. They’d have known what I wanted to know. Simon probably wouldn’t. I was pretty sure I knew who Simon was. Sometime barman. Middle aged. Mid-50s probably and exceptionally slow. I mean in the way he did things. Laboured, measured. He was the giddy limit if you were thirsty.
So I knew he’d be useless.
Anyway, eventually he came through from back-of-house and I put the proposition to him slowly. Had I got it wrong? The site of the clubhouse up there on the cliff? He pulled at his chin, as if tugging an imaginary beard. He grimaced. “You know the coast path? You know how it comes down them steps to the gate onto the road?”
“We’re talking about the cast iron gate?”
“That’s the one. Well once upon a time that was the back way up to the clubhouse.”
“But it’s not there anymore. The clubhouse.”
“No,” he said, slowly weighing this for every last ounce of its inherent truth.
Once or twice I shaped to say something, I don’t know what, and then thought better of it.
“No,” he said yet again, going even more wistful, his eyes clouding as he gazed ever deeper into the past. “No,” he said. “That’s no lie.”
We stood there in silence for a while. I was pretty sure there was something else I wanted to say. Needed to say. But I couldn’t think what the hell it was. It was dark in that low-beamed old pub and the brightness of its sunlit garden was framed in its open doorway. I could sense flowers, mote-like insects drifting in the sleepy air, a warm silence. And yet I was almost beginning to feel cold in my sweat-soaked tee shirt.
“Did you play?” I asked. I suppose I was only seeking some sort of polite way of ending this exchange. A way, I suppose, given how uncomfortable I suddenly felt, of saving myself from any further awkwardness.
“Did I play?”
“When it was still a golf course,” I added.
Eventually, he smiled. “I couldn’t have been more than ten,” he said.
We looked at each other for what seemed like for ever.
When it closed. He meant, when it closed. The golf course. I couldn’t have been more than ten, when it closed.
