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My father’s life was as long as a par six. He lived through two World Wars, the reigns of four monarchs and the offices of 24 prime ministers, dying within a few months of his 103rd birthday. In our family he was known as Taid, which is Welsh for grandfather as my mother was known as Nana.
Taid gifted me many things, temporal and spiritual, financial and physiological. His blue eyes for example, which, whatever they did for him, have got me both into and out of trouble, his long legs and his love of sport. Though he and my mother met and fell in love playing mixed doubles at a tennis club in southwest London, his sports were rugby and golf. He was good at rugby, being tall, lean and fast, and played for his school on Saturday mornings and sometimes for the local club in the afternoon.
Golf gave him pleasure from his teens to his eighties. It fascinated and entranced him, a lifelong pursuit of the impossible. It raised his hopes for the way a depressing series of bad shots could be followed by one of such skill and execution that it would send him to the next tee eyes blazing with excitement. He got his handicap down to six and was never prouder than when he went round Stinchcombe Hill Golf Club in Dursley, Gloucestershire, his home course, a par 68, in a gross of 71. His handicap at the time was 12. And he devoured Henry Longhurst’s golf articles in the Sunday Times each week.
When he was in hospital a few months before he died he often talked about golf. “I think I’ll go and hit some balls at Stinch tomorrow,” he said one day as his catheter glugged away beneath his bed and morphine raced through his veins. On another occasion I asked him which was his favourite hole at Stinchcombe. “The fifth” he replied. This hole is a par-4 with a slope tumbling down to Waterley Bottom on the left and a green resting on a ledge at the end. “I had a three there once.”
He had a full flowing swing. “In to out,” he would say as he exaggerated his downswing so much that he seemed to brush his right foot with his clubhead. Conventional wisdom suggests that this should have resulted in a hook but, somehow, he got his clubface square at impact. This trick was not imparted to me and I have spent 50 years trying to keep my clubhead on plane and on line.
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