Merchants

There is a palpable air of excitement in the air tonight as it has been announced that Scotland’s golfers are to be released into the wild again. Sadly for many others this means that their ability to enjoy government approved walks across many golf courses will come to an end. Mrs FB is among those lamenting. The lockdown period has seen her stride out across local courses, sometimes with Fantasy Bob tagging along at a respectful distance.

She has grown very fond of the Merchants of Edinburgh course, which is close by and offers commanding views over the City and the countryside beyond.

It has to be said that she did not find particularly interesting FB's recollections from the few times many years ago that he played it of the quirks of the course. But her interest perked up when she saw a plaque installed in a wall at a far point of the course which reports that during the First World War, these very fairways were trod by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen while they were patients at the adjacent Craiglockhart Hospital. The plaque gives some brief biographical details and quotes from each of their works, but makes no comment as to whether they were golfers of any great skill.  It is intriguing to think of them both, niblicks in hand, conversing poetically, not about the merchants of golf in Edinburgh but the merchants of death in France to whom they had been exposed.

Mrs FB is a great admirer of Sassoon – a dashing horseman in his day - whose Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man she particularly commends. FB reminded her that Sassoon was also a keen cricketer. ‘Nobody’s perfect’, she retorted.  He played enthusiastically and references to cricket can be found several times in his writings.  Mrs FB had obviously put to the back of her mind that her favourite volume contains a celebrated description of a village cricket match – the Flower Show Match.  It captures that world before 1914 when everything seemed to be in its rightful place.  A world that was shortly to be shattered and whose pieces, perhaps, have never come together again.

By contrast, Wilfred Owen does not seem to have had any cricketing interest.  As Mrs FB said, nobody's perfect.