As I write this, in the early morning of a frosty mid-January day, there is a cricket match in progress in a far warmer corner of the world, playing for the bragging rights for perhaps the most famous ashes in the world. Or rather, they are not actually playing for them at this stage, as this is the fifth and final test in the series, and Australia - whose 1882 victory had prompted the satirical story that English cricket had died, and would be cremated and sent Down Under, promptly creating The Ashes - have long since ensured that they will win the latest edition of that sporting classic.
As I glance at the scorecard, a green curser flashes, indicating that the teams are “at lunch”, which if my experience working in golf clubs in England is anything to go by, is at least an element in which the tourists might stand a decent chance. In certain spheres of amateur golf, lunch is the key part of the day, an area of the whole experience in which each player has genuine pedigree, regardless of their handicap index; the result of all those hours of practice. And then they will head out again, with three hours of golf in which to walk it off. I doubt the cricketers are lunching in quite the same enthusiastic manner, although if they were, it would explain a lot.
But I am not here to talk about cricket, nor am I qualified to do so. Instead, something happened yesterday that got me thinking about ashes on a more personal level. Playing a few holes in the receding light of a winter afternoon, I noticed up ahead a group of six or seven people, shuffling along with the sort of long coats and hats that feature in the wintry scenes of Dr Zhivago. Straying from the public footpath, they seemed to be taking a very direct route towards the ditch by the sixth green, that marvellous, strategic, diagonal hazard into which I would shortly deposit a Callaway.
I keep watching, peering down from the bunker beside the fifth green, where my ball had landed, ignoring my clear direction to “get up” (I think it might be time for a different brand of ball…), and as I putted out a handful of strokes later, the group stopped briefly on the sleeper bridge that crosses the ditch ahead, and started back again, walking slowly. And then it dawned on me what was happening here.
Every now and then, working in the office of a golf club, you will get a call or a personal visit from someone, apologetically explaining that a recently lost family member had asked for their ashes to be spread in a given spot, in recognition of what that place meant to them. It’s a strange conversation to have, this, but nice in a way, as spreading a little potash on turf, or in this case in the ditch, isn’t harmful, and it is a ritual that the family want to go well out of respect for their dearly beloved.
So you are able to agree to the request, and smile, and know that this tiny gesture is helping those concerned work through their own process, of grief, and adjustment to the slings and arrows of life. I hold back from stepping on to the sixth tee out of respect, practising (and repeatedly missing) that slippery downhiller instead, in order to avoid rushing their passage back to the car park, and to their lives.
Sometimes the family are non-golfers, and they can be a little nervous about the situation, for they don’t realise how often this happens. Their tone can be almost apologetic, as if it is ridiculous to even ask, or for the dear loved one to have requested it in the first place, thereby putting them in this awkward position. Very occasionally, you pick up a vibe that suggests they are bemused by the affection their loved one had for a particular hole, or bunker, or indeed for the golf club or the wider game itself.
For there are two types of people in this discussion - the golfer and the non-golfer - and for the latter - the sensible person who has not let this game, this terrible, sublime addiction, grab you the way it can - the concept and appeal of chasing a white ball around a field, effectively in fancy dress, can be not only hard to understand, but perhaps a little irritating. Golf costs a fair amount of money to play, but it is also greedy in terms of time, and now and then you sense a conflict here, as if golf, and the clubhouse and friendships it engenders, may have taken a person away from their family more than the non-golfer might have expected, or wanted. At some courses, it apparently takes four hours and more to play one round, and that is without the previously mentioned “good lunch” factored in. Sometimes lunch is the drawn out part, and the golf is over with relatively quickly…
The non-golfer might also be perplexed at the effect of the game on the returning golfer’s mood. One day, she comes back full of the joys of life, buzzing with energy, and this might be that she played really well, or that her opponent put their Callaway in a ditch, as I will shortly. After all, as a Past Captain explained in a speech I once heard, “by and large, every shot makes someone happy”. On another occasion, there will just be a moody silence, a dark gloom lurking, and the non-golfer has no way of knowing if this is just a bad day in general - we all have those - or if the dreaded shanks had come to visit. The non-golfer will likely be in the dark about such swings in temperament, for there is little of golf that looks sensible to the outsider.
As the family disappear into the pines, I approach the white tee markers, smiling as the glinting sun starts to disappear to my left, and put a hybrid down just short of the last, right fairway bunker. Walking down this gorgeous hole, alone again with only my thoughts and the occasional train hammering past for company, I reflect more on how much these holes and landscapes come to mean to us, and how our whole self-perception is tied up with a sense of connection to the places in which our lives play out.
For the golfer, this is often their version of the “happy place”, this giant, green amphitheatre. The spot where many of their hopes and dreams are based, and where those same dreams are shattered, repeatedly, but with just enough - perhaps just one great shot, or one belly laugh - to keep them coming back next weekend, and next year, and so on and so forth, until they can no longer walk. And then? Then they just come for lunch, where it is clear their expertise lay all along.
At times, and this is one of them, the “good walk spoiled” as (non-golfer) Mark Twain called it, feels deeper than simply exercise or sport; it can feel revelatory, as if, at this particular golf club where a clock adorns each player’s woollen sweaters, time is standing still for a moment, allowing us to soak it up, be present. I take in another breath of the rapidly cooling air, and hit a high draw that seems to hang above the flag before landing a full club short in the water, yet again, and that feeling of serenity is once again gone, as I berate myself in a manner I would never accept from anyone else.
Crossing the bridge towards the seventh tee, I can see some of the dusty remains of those ashes trying to flow out towards the eighth fairway, but they are caught on the reeds at the side, and this golfer’s remains bobble in the freezing water. It’s guesswork, but I wonder if whoever is now before me had the same innocent hopes as their many failed approaches hung in the air, against the backdrop of pine and heather in this heavenly corner of the golfing world. Presumably, if they’d requested this spot for a ceremonial spread, they’d have once shared the same feelings, and perhaps language, that I just had, as their ball also dived in the murky water.
Over at New Zealand Golf Club, where I worked for many happy years, I had the great privilege of being able to take my dog to work, a headstrong but beautiful Cairn, from rural County Monaghan in Ireland. Lizzie was part of the fabric of the club for those years, lying prostrate in the office for hours on end, or begging at the servery counter throughout lunchtime. Occasionally, I would sneak out for a few after work, and she would come along, sprinting early on, but soon losing patience with the monotonous search for my ball in the heather. But she came to know the glorious routing as well as I did, and towards the end of the round, she would start to push ahead a little.
I would often step on to the sixteenth tee, only to see her look away, having checked that I was indeed still heading east, and disappear along the foursomes path to the penultimate fairway. It was always a battle to keep this at times belligerent animal from scrounging food scraps, and her biological clock was not built around the hands of a timepiece like us poor souls, but instead around the habitual movement of food waste through the clubhouse in the mid afternoon. By taking a position at the outside crook of the dogleg seventeenth, a Tom Simpson masterpiece of a hole, Lizzie know that she would have at least a ten minute head start on me, which was all she needed.
Time after time, I would emerge from the woods, and as I lay down my bag to play towards her, she would seem to nod from the distant elbow of the semi-rough, turn away, and run straight at the Clubhouse, regardless of whistles or shouts. I was helpless, outwitted every time not just by the game of golf but also by dear old Liz. These days, I stop for a moment on the maintenance path, down which the staff drive towards the eighteenth fairway, for that is where her ashes went, when old age and a mischievous life of foraging finally caught up with her.
It is always a great pleasure to walk that course, a marvellous legacy of a great architect quietly nestled in the Surrey heathlands, but for me, so much that is meaningful in our own lives happened in those years I worked there, and breathing in the air to remember this trusty, four-legged friend, and those precious, happy times, just enriches the experience each time, beyond the simple joy of the sport itself. I hope that the family who are by now in the Woking car park do remember to go back as often as they currently think they’d like to, for these quite moments help us to remember the important stuff, and not get buried under the rest of the noise. Life is short, and we must grasp it with both hands. Or paws.
I continue thinking about this melancholy incident for much of the evening, and as I sit here twelve hours later, it occurs to me that while I often feel conflicted about heading off to grab some dawn or twilight golf, in and around family life and my work, the time spent away in pursuit of this quaint old pastime benefits us all. By bringing golf back into my life, I am investing in myself, and the happiness that results from this proactive step rubs off on those around me. I might be absent for two hours, or, if I am playing with someone else, nearer three, but I will return refreshed, positive, in love with life and grateful for all that I have.
For golf still lights me up as it did back at the age of eleven, when the teacher’s strike meant football was cancelled, and I would be forced into exploring other pastimes. When I have golfed, I come back a different, better person, and it is this sort of deeper experience that reminds me to make the time to play.
I am not surprised so many golfers choose to have their ashes spread through the green. It is certainly hard to think of another place that has had such a positive influence on my life. Golf teaches us how to be patient, humble. How to cope with failure, lots of it, and the occasional, memorable, slightly unbelievable success. How to treat ourselves and others. And how to live joyfully, with balance and laughter. It feels like a home from home.
I check the cricket once more before posting this, and the tourists are all out for 188, another stage in this humiliating deconstruction. If English cricket was cremated in 1882, perhaps this is the series when the ashes free themselves from the reeds of the ditch, and float away for good. But at least the cricketers only walk away defeated sometimes. As golfers, fighting against the odds and the elements, we have to put up with that almost every time we go out. And we wouldn’t have it any other way!
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Ashes to Ashes
New Zealand GC is a special place