Mark Us Doon Fur a Five, Son

I breathed in this morning world in which the dew hung heavy and succulently on the grass. My father would get me up early on these summer no-school mornings and we’d head up the two miles to the Corpy golf course.

“They don’t use tees on this course, son, they use Tennant’s lager cans!”

Through glades and lanes and industrial sites from Kennishead High Flats to Deaconsbank golf course within the confines of Rouken Glen, a large and pretty park area on the far southern outskirts of Glasgow, probably it was even in East Renfrewshire where my father’s aspirant parents used to live in Clarkston before retirement to the leafy lanes of Ayr. When I think of Rouken Glen I think of large rhododendron bushes and tiny waterfalls. As a kid it was enchantment to me. Even in my near perpetual juvenile anguish it was Eden.

I should have enjoyed it more while I had the chance.

The golf game my father and I played was a farce. My father with his basic factory wage and his thriftful upbringing had purchased a half-bag of clubs not worthy of the name. Golf clubs need bend and whip; these clubs wouldn’t bend for Jehovah himself. If, as was the case all too often, one mis-hit and connected with turf instead of ball, the meaning of the word ‘judder’ became painfully apparent.

My father would intersperse his golf game with an aggressive range of swearwords picked up, no doubt, in his long years on the factory floor. These oaths would ring through the hazy morning air and travel miles to unsuspecting ears that could only guess at their origin.

There was one hole – the sixth – that seemed never-ending. It was a par 5 which meant that for my father and I, finishing it in single figures was an unlikely miracle. A drive would thud and skitter hopelessly fifty yards into the rough from where maybe two shots would be required to extricate the smug little white orb. Then a slice, then a hook, then a sklaff and by the time we got to the little burn before the green (or, often, in it) composure would be rent asunder and the pristine game of golf would now be resembling an anarchic slog looking only to be put out of its misery.

We could never play the last for fear of paying greenkeepers fees. The last was maybe the toughest hole on the course being all bunkers and undulations, it was the course’s final flourish leading one to the cheering crowds in the imaginary grandstand.

“Mark us doon fur a five, son,”

Those words to me have remained  a defiant salute to optimism trumping an awful reality for a lifetime. ‘Mark us doon fur a five, son’ could have been the battle cry of soldiers going over the to top at Passchendaele or the words of a Scotland men’s football team manager before his wards steps out once again to glorious failure. It should maybe even be the title of a new national anthem.

‘Mark us doon fur a five, son

A glass half full for us

Yer longer deid than alive, son

In unfounded claims we trust