The Exploits of Engelbrecht (3 page)

It was the morning after St. Vitus’ Dance, and Engelbrecht, the dwarf surrealist boxer, and I had decided to restore our jaded nervous systems with a round on the Surrealist Golf Course at Mooninghill.

I don’t know if you’re
au fait
with Surrealist Golf. It’s a bit different from the other kind. To start with a surrealist golf course has only one hole. But don’t get the idea that it’s any easier on that account. It’s a devilish long hole, so long it may take you all your time to play. Par is reckoned at 818181, but anything under 1000000 is considered a hot score. The hazards are desperate, so desperate that at the clubhouse bar you always see some pretty ravaged faces and shaky hands turning down an empty glass for the missing members. The pro. says that Bobby Jones’s famous 66 on the Old Course at Sunningdale would be equivalent to a good deal more than a 666666 at Mooninghill, not that Jones would ever be able to get round our course on account of his well-known predilection to nervous dyspepsia.

Engelbrecht and I are both long handicap men; he’s 1113 and I’m 1104; and as we weren’t feeling particularly strenuous that morning we thought we’d hang around the clubhouse and see if we couldn’t pick up a quiet foursome. We hadn’t been waiting long, when who should show up but little Charlie Wapentake and Nodder Fothergill. They had both been to the dance and were still feeling the effects—indeed Charlie Wapentake couldn’t stop flapping up and down as if he was on a clothes line—and a quiet foursome was about all they were fit for. We rounded up two sets of caddies, bearers, and camping equipment, a couple of White Hunters, trackers, snake charmers, and one or two other specialists, including a diver and a psychiatrist, all of whom are necessary to cope with the various hazards. Then we started on the long, long climb up to the tee.

The tee at Mooninghill is a tiny plateau on top of the great height from which the course takes its name. All the wind in the world seems to meet up there and a good deal of the woe as well, some say. The green is way out of sight, of course, thousands of miles away. You drive off into space.

It was our honour, and Charlie Wapentake was flapping about so I was afraid I should miss the globe, so I begged Engelbrecht to take first whang, his nerves being stronger than mine. Engelbrecht, as you may know, is not easily daunted. We chained him up to the tee box so he shouldn’t be carried away by the wind and he wanged off like one o’clock. The deuce of a beat, but there was a nasty hook to it, and soon after the ball left the club-head the wind changed and carried it Way down East.

The Chief Caddy shook his head. “I dinna like the looks of it,” he said. “Tis heading for the Native Reserve.”

There’s no nonsense in Surrealist Golf about putting down another and losing a stroke. We watched Nodder Fothergill top theirs a few yards over the precipice into the Valley of Dry Bones. Then we shook hands all round and wished each other luck.

“See you on the green,” we said cheerfully as they roped themselves together for the descent. But soon after we had started on our eastward trek, we caught, borne on the wind, a scream followed by a harsh cackle of laughter and a loud report. I saw our Chief Caddy wipe away a tear. “Puir Mr. Wapentake,” I heard him mutter, “such a nice wee man.”

The Native Reserve is the largest bunker on the course. It’s so large it’s never been properly explored, and once every five years the committee sends out an expedition in search of the missing members. We halted for a bit on the edge of it while the Chief Caddy unshipped his astrolabe and calculated the line of flight of the ball. Then we crossed the border into the great unknown sand-trap.

Presently we heard those drums again and our trackers came back with a report. They’d found the ball all right, but it had landed in a tribal Ju-Ju House. It was going to be the devil to play out as the Witch Doctor had taken a great fancy to it, thinking it was a god’s egg.

However, our White Hunter bribed the tribe with Trade Goods and they smoked out the Doc and we went in through the hole in the roof which seemed to be the only entrance there was. It took us a couple of days and 2173 strokes whanging away in there with our niblicks before I managed to loft it through the hole. When we got out we found the Doc had rallied the tribe with a powerful curse and the caddies were hard put to it to keep them at bay from behind a zareba. The direct route back to the fairway was cut and there was nothing for it but to play on into the heart of the great bunker. We had to play mighty fast too, sprinting in between shots.

When we camped for the night it was still sand all round as far as the eye could see, and our score was 3673. In the night we heard a monotonous thumping, followed by a whispered string of curses, and counting, way up in the hundred millions. We looked out and saw by the light of the moon a skeleton hacking away at the sand with a niblick. “Tis one of our missing members, puir fella,” said the Chief Caddy who had poked his head through his tent flap. “Name of Bartholomew. I ken him by his crabbed swing.”

We broke camp at dawn. Our ball was lying quite free grinning up at us. The undercaddies who had been guarding it all night stepped back and saluted. Engelbrecht took his spoon. I whispered: “For God’s sake! Not wood and sand!” But he waved me away. “It’ll be blood and sand,” he said, “if you don’t shut up.” However, he caught it a nice clean clip that sent it flying straight and true, and we watched it disappear into a mirage of the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square.

“Well begun is half done,” said the Chief Caddy smugly. But when we got up to where he calculated the ball lay there was a terrific hiss and a queen cobra reared up, spread her hood and put out her forked tongue at me. Inside the embrace of her coils I saw a clutch of eggs and among them—our ball.

“My God, Engelbrecht,” I said, “you don’t half leave me some little white lies.”

The White Hunter raised his elephant gun but the Chief Caddy struck up the barrel and the charge exploded harmlessly into the firmament breaking all the windows in a mirage of Elm Park Gardens that had just appeared. “Mon! ye maunna do that,” he said, whipping out a hefty omnibus volume. “Listen to this:
‘Rule
108,
Section
16
, Subsection
24,
Living Hazards, Animal:
Under no circumstance must violence be used to dislodge a living hazard… Paragraph 98, Sairpents: only one of the club’s registered snake-charmers may be employed to dislodge a sairpent. Any infringement whatsoever of this rule forfeits the match.’”

“To hell with that,” I said. “It’s only a friendly game and anyway our opponents are dead.”

But Engelbrecht wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on playing by the rules and the Chief Caddy backed him up. They called down the line for the snake-charmer. The idea was that as soon as he’d piped the cobra off her nest I was to rush in with my niblick. I was in such a sky-blue funk that instead of hitting our ball I hit one of the cobra’s eggs. By this time the cobra was waltzing on her tail to the strains of
Pale Hands I Loved,
on a wheezy clarinet, and she didn’t seem to notice. But she noticed all right when Engelbrecht, with his usual combination of sangfroid and rashness, took his number six and sent the ball and most of the eggs flying a good hundred and sixty yards. And for the next hour it was tip-and-run again until we managed to shake her off in a sandstorm.

We had some quite peaceful golf after that. One or two incidents but nothing out of the way. We encountered a wounded sepoy and were able to remove the golf ball, one of the old gutties, and patch him up. He was pathetically grateful and told us his grandmother’s remedy for superfluous hair. We thanked him and hoped it might come in handy for getting out of the rough. Later, a brush with the Senussi, when Engelbrecht drove into them just after their Muezzin had sounded the Call to Prayer, threatened to become nasty, but we formed a square and beat them off. The worst moment was the nick-of-time when the Foreign Legion arrived; then we thought we really were going to lose our ball.

The score was now 12173. Still in the bunker and our water running out. But Engelbrecht found water with the last shot of the day, a powerful slice into the well of an oasis. That evening we drove into a caravan and heard a strange story that was going round the bazaars of a new record for the course, though whether it was a record high or a record low, we couldn’t make out.

Next morning I played our 12174th stroke, exploding with my niblick from a camel’s hoof print, and as the cloud of sand cleared away the Chief Caddy gave a great shout. We had reached the fairway. By way of celebration we issued a sniff of benzedrine all round and I wrote the White Hunter a post-dated cheque. Then we held our breath while Engelbrecht addressed the ball.

You’ve probably gathered by now that Engelbrecht over-swings. There’s no doubt about that and I’ve often begged him to hold himself in check. Even so I was not prepared for the deathly slice that followed. Leaving the clubhead at an angle of 45° the ball curved across the fairway in a vast drooping parabola.

The Chief Caddy put his head in his hands and rocked to and fro. “Lord save us,” he moaned, “plumb in the middle of the Butlin Holiday Camp.”

Caddies, bearers, psychiatrist, snake-charmer, and all gave vent to a deep groan.

Next to the Native Reserve the Butlin Holiday Camp is reckoned to be the fiercest Hazard of them all. The committee leased the site to Butlin after Salvador Dali played his exhibition round on the course and complained that the last half was too easy. Since then many a surrealist golfer who’s sliced into it has preferred to play his way quietly out to sea rather than face the prolonged stay which is often required.

It took us six weeks to play out of that Camp but my recollections are very vague because I went down with a severe go of sand-fly fever and was delirious all the time. I remember a fierce argument over the identity and ownership of the ball between the Chief Caddy and the Superintendent of the Children’s Play Pen, and being chased between two endless beds of flaming geraniums by a 200-lb blonde in an American sailor’s cap with
Kiss Me Quick
on it. I remember the camp chaplain trying to make Engelbrecht put five hundred pounds in the “cuss box”, and the torture of being got out of bed every other minute to play my stroke. The rest is a merciful blur, and I did not recover the priceless gift of consciousness which distinguishes us from the brutes until long after we had played our way out.

But our troubles were not yet over. The psychiatrist crocked up with a severe nervous breakdown and Engelbrecht’s slice had to go untreated. There followed a succession of awkward lies from each of which I was too feeble to play out. Dr. Edith Summerskill’s Shopping Bag; Gandhi’s Loin Cloth; Molotov’s Desk in the Kremlin; the Lincoln Imp Tea Rooms; a
salon de décrottage
in old Marseilles; at each of them I foozled hopelessly and appealed to Engelbrecht: “You got us into this, chum, and you got to get us out.” And little Engelbrecht grinned cheerfully back and swung his niblick. There was no daunting that indomitable dwarf.

It was eleven more months and ten more days after we had driven off the first tee and I had just played our 2674321769th, a tricky little pitch out of the window of the 3.30 from Waterloo, when the Chief Caddy let out a yell and started dancing a reel. We had reached the green.

We took all Engelbrecht’s wooden clubs away from him lest he should be tempted to press, because the green at Mooninghill is the size of an English county and proceeded to foozle our way smoothly and quietly towards the huge hole. We should have done a lot better if the psychiatrist had been functioning to treat us for the anxiety neurosis which is one of the special features of that green. At last, after several hours of being too short, too far, and upping the rim, we managed to tie up the ghostly hands that had been pushing our ball back from the hole and Engelbrecht sank a six-incher for 2674322269.

The clubhouse was
en fête.
We could see its lights blazing from miles away in the inky night. And who should be the first persons we saw as we stumbled into the bar but Charlie Wapentake and Nodder Fothergill. Not only were they not dead, but by a strange combination of circumstances, the legitimacy of which is still being debated hotly by the committee to this day,
they had done the hole in one.
It appears that before Charlie had a chance to play their second out of the Valley of Dry Bones, a huge vulture swooped down and flew off with the ball. Nodder and their White Hunter opened fire and winged the vulture who eventually dropped the ball down the vest of one of the competitors in a Japanese Women’s Cross Country Race. She lost her way round the world while being chased by a Zen Buddhist monk and ran across the green and the ball slipped down the leg of her track shorts and rolled into the hole.