I guess old age is maybe creeping up rather more quickly
that I thought. I wrote ‘Target One’ ten years ago which really isn’t all that
long. Well. It shouldn’t be. Yet when I re-read it a few days ago, it was like
reading a book written by someone else altogether. Obviously I could remember
the main bones of the story, but about 70% or so was completely fresh to me.
Bloody hell.
For some reason I feel mildly embarrassed to say that I
actually quite enjoyed it. Saying that doesn’t seem right somehow. Un-British
and all that. It put me in mind of one of my very favourite authors, Grahame
Greene, who was just about as British as they come. Greene labelled every one
of his books as being either a ‘novel’ or an ‘entertainment’. A word of warning
here. If you are feeling a bit down in the mouth, don’t even think of going
anywhere near one of Graham Greene’s ‘novels’. Before you know it you’ll be
reaching for a bottle of pills or standing on top of the railings of a very
high bridge. ‘A Burnt Out Case’ has to be one of the bleakest and most soul
shredding books ever penned.
Anyway. As usual, I digress. I bring up the legendary Mr
Greene because as I rattled through ‘Target One’ it occurred to me that it is
very much of an entertainment. Anyone who has read a few of my books will maybe
agree that they can also be divided into novels and entertainments. The novels
tend to stray into the gloomier edges of this aging Lancastrian’s mind. Take a
lad from the rainy valleys of the north, age him through the eighties, and as often
as not you get a dark view of life. Guilty as charged. Ten years of working at
First Base hasn’t helped much in this regard. Any place were the heroin tide
washes in will always be home to more hard stories that it is really
healthy to hear.
‘Target One’ is happily none of the above. ‘Target One’ is
very much an entertainment and it gladdened by heart somewhat to remember I am
capable of this sort of thing!
So where did it come from? I guess most authors tend to draw
on a variety of feelings and emotions and loves and hates when they concoct a
tale. Sometimes it is something going on in the world around. Something in the
news or in front of your nose. A theme. An injustice. Poison from History. A
mood abroad.
All sorts.
‘Target One’ started with a place and the place was the
Turnberry Golf Course on the wild west coast of Scotland Upper
Nithsdale valley where all the coal mines are long dead and gone.
Sanquhar, Kirkconnel, New Cumnock. It is our Upper Silesia .
Our West Virginia Upper
Nithsdale valley exudes sadness and melancholy like a dusty diary
under a heap of attic junk.
I vaguely recall my mind wandering back through
Dyonne’s young life. First steps and first words and first time at Anfield.
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Spiderman and Stanley Collymore. When the kids
fly the nest, adults get a sinking sense of their own mortality. An era has
passed and it will never return.
Maybe as a valley Lancastrian, other post-industrial valleys
will always bring out a maudlin view of the world.
Anyway. We landed up at the car park and took in the gleaming white
walls of the hotel which it has to be said is a pretty spectacular place. The
last time I had been there was back in the long hot summer of 1977 when Jack
Nicklaus and Tom Watson fought out one of the greatest head to heads in
sporting history. I had the privilege of watching Jack twice during the baking
days of that distant summer and it has left a deeply imprinted memory of utter
greatness. The likes of Jack are few and far between. I have been lucky to see
a few in my time. Live. Real time. In the flesh. In the moment. Viv Richards,
King Kenny, Johan Cruyff and Seve Ballesteros are probably the only ones who
were in Jack’s league.
Nowhere could have provided a more perfect setting for
the generation crossing majesty of Jack Nicklaus that week. I have always loved
everything about Scottish links courses. I love the way that over hundreds of
windswept years they have become re-embedded into the landscape to such an extent
that it is hard to see where nature ends and man begins. These are the places
where sport gives mankind the opportunity to fight a battle against nature
without worrying over much about losing. If you decide to climb a Himalayan
mountain or trek across the Sahara , then there
is a pretty big risk factor. Sure you get the chance to slug it out with nature,
but if nature wins you’re deader than dead.
Finding a way round eighteen holes of a great Scottish links
course offers a chance to pit yourself against the elements without having to
worry about those same elements wiping you out. If you try to take on a links
course swept by a gale carrying horizontal rain, there is no point trying to
use brute force. If you do, the elements with laugh their socks off at you. The
only way you stand a chance is if you use your brain and your guile. A links
course in a gale is a place for craft and artistry and imagination. Planning
and percentages and nerveless execution. It is the canvas where only the true
greats can paint their pictures. Surely there can be no sight in any sport to
compare with watching a genius like Seve Ballesteros playing through a gale.
Once I had left Dyonne to start out on his years of
adulthood, I parked up and took a walk over the manicured fairways and between
the dunes. It was a wet day and evening was coming on early. Nobody was about.
Just a clutch of seagulls and oystercatchers. Out at sea, the rocky island of Ailsa Craig
When you walk across the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, there
really can only be one destination: the ninth tee. Nowhere on earth can there
be a golfing place where man meets nature to such an extent. The tee is perched
on a rocky outcrop surrounded by the sea. God alone know how old the rock is.
Hundreds and hundreds of millions of years and then some. The golfer has to
stand in the teeth of the wind and hold the nerve. It is about 200 yards to a
ribbon thin strip of fairway that runs up by a lighthouse. The two hundred
yards is made up of sea and rocks and beach and seagulls and tussocky grass. No
wonder it has inspired hundreds of postcards and paintings and photos. If you
Google it you aren’t spoiled for choice.
I felt like the last guy on the planet as I stood on the tee
and felt the wind and the rain in my hair and remembered watching Jack crash a
one iron up the right hand side of the fairway all those years ago. I had been
17 and the Berlin Wall still had 12 years to stand and Liverpool
had just won the European Cup for the very first time. In the midst of such
absolute eternity, it was hard not to feel all the years that had passed since
I had last been on the ninth at Turnberry.
I must have stood there a while watching the gulls flap
around in the gale. A dad who had just delivered his son into the big world of
adulthood. A man looking back at the boy who had once followed Jack through the
dunes in a heart of a barely remembered a heatwave summer.
Pieces started falling into place one by one. Suddenly a
story started the process of forming in my head. The blighted old coal towns of
Upper Nithsdale would be in it. And a
terrorist plot. And a man’s fight against addiction. And in the end everything
would come down to a few hours where two men would fight it out in the wind and
the rain on the Ailsa course.
And the key to the whole tale would lie with the tee on the
ninth hole.
A couple of months later the story was written and printed
and done. Most people seem to like and enjoy it. Lots have told me that it kept
them turning the pages deep into the wee small hours of the morning.
It is an entertainment that seems to have entertained, and
right now you can download yourself a copy absolutely free of charge from the
Kindle Store. Just follow the link below.
http://is.gd/w2mu0s
Having just read it as a stranger with a fading memory I
feel quite happy to recommend it!
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