We may still drive into the first Corset, however, and if we do, Heaven help us! We shall be playing a nightmare game of racquets against its unflinching sides, and the other man will win the hole.
With the turn at Sandwich the nature of the course begins to alter, and in place of doing threes—or perchance sevens—among the hills, we shall be travelling over the flatter ground in a series of steady fives, with, let us hope, an occasional four. There are plenty of good holes—better, perhaps, than some on the way out—but they do not make the same appeal to the imagination, nor are they so characteristic. One, at least, deserves a special word of mention, the fourteenth, or ‘Suez Canal,’ where many and many a second shot has found a watery grave. Those who love the hopes and fears of a lucky-bag will enjoy the seventeenth, where the hole lies in a deep dell with sharply sloping sides. Man can direct the ball into the dell, but only Providence can decide its subsequent fate, and whether it will lie stone dead or a round dozen of yards away is a matter of chance. There is no chance about the last hole, where we must hit two good, long, straight shots; it is a fine finish, and will leave us with happy recollections as we take our way to one or other of the neighbouring courses. We are in the midst of a perfect tangle of courses, since within easy reach are Deal, Prince’s, Kingsdown, and St. Augustine’s, at Ebbsfleet.
The Deal course is little more than a stone’s throw away from Sandwich. It is the same kind of country, the same, or very nearly the same, kind of turf, and yet the general impression produced by it is quite different.
There is this difference to begin with, that it is less remote and solitary. The club-house stands on a high road and the outskirts of the town come creeping out to the edge of the links. Men, women and children, butchers’ and bakers’ carts pass and re-pass along the road: there are live creatures to be seen engaged in other avocations than golfing, and, altogether, as compared with Sandwich, the scene is one of business and bustle. The links themselves are more open: one might almost say more bleak of aspect; there are not so many little secret hollows and valleys between the hills; Deal is altogether less snug (I can think of no better word) than Sandwich.
To say this is to make no comparison of the merits of the two courses, which is an unnecessary and invidious thing to do. It is quite enough to say that the golf at Deal is very good indeed—fine, straight-ahead, long-hitting golf, wherein the fives are likely to be many and the fours few. There are those that contend that it is almost superhumanly difficult, but unless there be a high wind, I think that they exaggerate a little. The difficulty lies in hitting far enough, and not so much in the intrinsic terrors of the holes. If we can hit far enough to carry the hummocky country and attain the region of good lies: if, in short, we are long drivers, we need fear no particularly subtle devilry, but the driving has to be something more than merely decent.
Playing the ‘Sandy Parlour’
