However, we have all been taught that we ought not to judge by appearances, and that people cannot help their looks. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that the appearance of Littlestone does not do it justice, and that there is in fact very good golf to be played there. Moreover, it is much better golf than it used to be, since with Braid, as the villain-in-chief, and Mr. F.W. Maude, as second conspirator, a vast number of pot-bunkers have been scattered about the course, and Littlestone is no longer the paradise it once was for the erratic slogger. If the course has a weakness now it is no longer a lack of bunkers; rather is it something, that no human ingenuity can alter, a uniform flatness of stances and lies. Shot after shot has to be played from a perfectly smooth, flat plain; there are none of the little hills and hummocks that add so much to the fascination and the difficulty of Deal and Rye.
Still if there are no little hills, there are, at any rate, some alarmingly big ones, and the holes that we remember best are those that are mountainous and more than a little blind. At the second, after driving down a shaven avenue, we have an imposing second shot to play over a big hill, which is made the more terrifying by two bunkers in its face. The sixteenth is another fine slashing hole, where we have to make a momentous decision, whether to try heroically for a four or ingloriously for a five. In old days it was really a case of Hobson’s choice. It was hopeless to attempt to carry over that cavernous bunker cut in the face of the hill, and there was nothing for it but to play a dull, safe second, and hop over with the third shot. Now, however, a short cut, a kind of north-west passage, has been cut through the rough ground to the left, and two shots, perfectly steered and perfectly struck, will see the ball disappear over the hill-top to lie in safety on the big, flat green beyond.
These two are of the more flamboyant order of hole, but there are others less imposing, but quite as good. At the eleventh there is one of those uncomfortable tee-shots, which are so excellent. There is a canal, a nasty, insidious serpentine beast of a canal, which winds its way along the left-hand side of the course, and it is our duty, in order to gain distance, to hug it as close as we dare; yet if we show ourselves the least bit too affectionate towards it, this ungrateful canal will assuredly engulf our ball to our utter destruction. To push the ball too far out to the right is to make our second shot unpleasantly long, and it is a hard shot, one that we desire to make as short as possible. Bunkers guard the corners of the green, and the putting is billowy and difficult; in fact, a four is far more likely to win the hole than to halve it. There are plenty more good holes: the ninth, a short hole, which demands the most accurate of iron shots, and the fourth, with its green on a sloping, narrow neck among the hills. The lies at Littlestone are flat and easy, but they will not be a bit too easy for some of the shots we shall have to play from them.
“Kent, sir—everybody knows Kent—apples, cherries, hops and women,” observed Mr. Jingle, and to-day he might properly add “and golf courses”; but now we must leave Kent and cross the Sussex border to get to Rye—and there are surely few pleasanter places to get to. It looks singularly charming as the train comes sliding in on a long curve, with the sullen flat marshes on the left and the tall cliff on the right, while straight in front are the red roofs of the town huddled round the old church. We have only a few yards to walk along a narrow little street; then we twist round to the right up a steep little hill and under the Land Gate and we are at the Dormy House, old and red and overgrown with creepers. Rye is such a friendly, quiet spot; never in a hurry, and never with the least appearance of being full, save, perhaps, for a short time in the summer, when it is infested with artists. It is the ideal place for the golfer who is wearied out with a fortnight’s fruitless balloting at St. Andrews, which has resulted in his once drawing a time, and that at 12.30.
The fifteenth green
At Rye we just loaf down, without the least anxiety, to the little steam tram which is to carry us—with a prodigious deal of panting and snorting—out to the links at Camber. This, indeed, is the one disadvantage of Rye, that the golf is not at our front door-step. Rye still stands upon a cliff, but it is a cliff that the waters have long ceased to trouble, and Camber, where the links are, is two miles away. However, when we do get there, the golf is as good, or very nearly as good, as is to be found anywhere.