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drop all this protocol rubbish and get down to playing some golf.
    In the spring, the hankering came to an end. In late March, Bushy, Jamie, Ross and I were permitted to play the course unaccompanied by an adult member for the first time, and from here things began to change. With the longer days, after-school golf turned into a golden reality, and we began to take full advantage of our new habitat. At four o’clock on any given weekday, you could find between three and five of us striding up the first fairway, screaming at our airborne Titleists – ‘Bite!’, ‘Run!’, ‘Go!’, ‘Get down!’ – as if they were disobedient guard dogs. Assigning famous alter egos for one another, we swung into the dusk and beyond, then said goodbye without asking if we’d be meeting at the same time in the same place the next day, because it went without saying that we’d be mad not to.
    For more than half a year, to varying extents, we’d done a terrific job of pretending to be other people. We’d pulled our trolleys around the greens as mindfully as we’d instructed our parents to drive around the clubhouse car park. We’d replaced our divots after a shot on the course as neatly as we replaced our cutlery after a meal in the men-only bar. We’d spoken when spoken to in front of our elders, and always in the most cheerily uncontroversial manner possible. We’d talked to each other about brands of clubs, knitwear and wrist action, but not much else. Unsupervised golf didn’t free us from these shackles, but it loosened them considerably. Gradually, we began to test for rebel credentials and talk to each other like friends, not humanoids.
    ‘Have you ever been in a fight at school?’
    ‘Might have been.’
    ‘I was in one last week. Some twat who reckoned he did karate. I battered him.’
    ‘How come your dad can’t afford a better car?’
    ‘I suppose cars just aren’t important to him.’
    ‘Have you heard of Curiosity Killed the Cat?’
    ‘Yeah. They’re shit. I prefer U2.’
    As we set out on our round that night in April, it was with the fresh, thrilling insight that we were all normal, cursing adolescents after all, but with something else bubbling up inside too, a wriggling frustration that had built up over the winter months that we hadn’t quite found a way of releasing. Running down the fairway didn’t feel strange; it felt predestined. Nobody remembers who started first; it seemed to happen poetically, in perfect synchronicity. I’ve often wondered if other golf club’s junior sections have had similar experiences, if a fairway sprint is a natural induction ceremony in the life of all teenage golfers. It certainly felt like it for us, because, after it happened, nothing was ever the same.
    The seventh tee at Cripsley is shielded by a passage of conifers. Beyond that sits a gurning hundred and fifty yards of gorse, with a corridor of grass cut through it for players to walk along until, finally, the hole is governed solely by the colossal Georgian mansions which flank the right-hand side of the fairway. On a normal evening, a resident of these mansions would be able to look complacently out of one of the windows of their eleven bedrooms and admire a scene of utter serenity, punctuated by only the most infrequent, refined examples of human life. But not if they’d happened to be looking out of their window today, at just after 6 p.m.
    ‘How good is this? We’re running up the seventh fairway for no real reason!’ Ross shouted, as we ran up the seventh fairway for no real reason.
    ‘We’re severely fucking about!’ he observed, as we severely fucked about.
    ‘Ashley’s balls have dropped at last!’ he continued, as Ashley, neglecting to check if the zip was fastened on his golf bag, allowed four or five brand new ‘Go Further’ ninety compression balls to scatter between his feet.
    The initial impulse, while running on a golf course, is to break down laughing. In fact, it’s possible that