they should pray. Tom sat and prayed with Nancy, each of them holding one of Wee Tom’s hands, hands that were small and too hot. The child’s hair was wet with sweat, his eyes glazed.
Thomas Morris Junior died on 9 April 1850. Tom, with Nancy beside him, wrapped the little body in spotless linen. He lifted Wee Tom and placed him in a box of yellow elm, the wood so fresh that it wept sap. Later that week they put the box in the ground in the cemetery at the east end of town, beside the ruins of St Andrews cathedral.
Tom Morris, so recently St Andrews’ hero, walked the town in a daze. His friends worried about him. What would Tom do? The answer came from an R&A member who found him a job as golf professional at a brand new club in Prestwick, on the far side of Scotland. Tom agreed to pack up his golf clubs, his wife and his sorrow and go west to Prestwick.
Before they left, he and Nancy bought a tall white stone for Wee Tom’s grave. They paid a stonecutter to etch the child’s name and his birth and death dates on the slab, along with a verse that looked forward to Resurrection Day.
Their departure was put off until 1851. There were details to iron out. Where would they live in Prestwick? Who would join the new golf club there? The Prestwick course was another matter – Tom would have to build one. But for every trouble, he thought, the Good Lord provides a reason to rejoice. As he and Nancy prepared to leave home she was plump and happy, with a new life kicking inside her.
THE SUN OVER Prestwick moved backwards. It rose over inland hills, not the grey water that meant east to Tom, and set behind a mountain in an unfamiliar sea. Tom knew this water was no proper sea but the broad Firth of Clyde. He knew the mountain in the water, Goat Fell, was part of the Isle of Arran, a twenty-mile rock that rose from the firth. He knew he was on Scotland’s west coast, so far west that to go much farther you would need gills. But knowing his location on a map did nothing to ease Tom’s sense of dislocation. He was homesick.
Not that he complained. His wife was homesick, too, tired and fretful, and Nancy had other worries – a house to furnish, a child to clothe and feed. Their second baby, another son, had been born that spring, just before they left St Andrews. ‘An extra gift from God,’ she called him. They named the boy Thomas Morris Junior, after the boy they had lost. It was common when a son died young to give his name to the next son. It kept the father’s name alive. But they never called this boy Wee Tom. This one was Tommy. Loud and hungry from the start, he seemed to have life enough for two.
The Morrises lived in a tidy cottage provided by the Prestwick Golf Club. Members kept their golf clubs in wooden lock-boxes in the Morris cottage and held their meetings in the parlour. The cottage sat across a rutted road from the Red Lion Inn, where on 2 July 1851 the Earl of Eglinton and forty-nine other gentlemen had founded the club over dinner and drinks. It was Lord Eglinton’s friend Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie, one of the R&A’s most prominent members, who convinced Tom to bring his wife and son to the world’s edge and rebuild Prestwick’s golf course. There was much to rebuild. What Tom found was fifty-odd acres of dunes, brush and ragged grasses with knee-high flagsticks scattered here and there. Some Prestwick golfers played randomly, aiming for any flag they could spot from wherever they found a ball. They clambered up and down towering dunes, slipping on sandy pathways, shouting ‘Fore’ and ‘Bloody hell!’ This was the thimble of turf where Tom was supposed to build the best links in the west.
That autumn he walked the links until he knew every acre. As Keeper of the Green, Tom was charged with teaching lessons and supervising caddies, but his prime task was maintaining the links, known collectively as ‘the green’. Prestwick’s threadbare green was a funnel-shaped patch of straw-coloured dunes, tan and purple heather, red poppies and wind-whipped bentgrass, the last of which was at least green. To the west was the beach. On the inland side ran a muddy stream, the Pow Burn, and the railway to Ayr and Glasgow, with the vine-covered ruins of a church beyond the railway. A rough road marked the links’ southern border; the northern edge, 770 yards away, was a low stone wall. Sheep roamed the dunes and dells, keeping the grass down and leaving their droppings on half-bare putting-greens. There were rabbit scrapes everywhere – oval depressions where buck rabbits shat and then rolled in their scat, marking their turf. Tom marked his territory with sticks, pacing off distances, imagining and re-imagining these dunes and hollows in hundreds of configurations. Suppose he put a putting-green here and dug a bunker beside it – where would the next hole be? Suppose he filled in a bunker, grew grass on top and made it a putting-green?
Tom had helped Allan lay out a few holes at Carnoustie, across the Firth of Tay from St Andrews, but this would be the first course he built himself. Sitting on a dune that cast a fifty-yard shadow, scratching his side-whiskers, he looked out over the Firth of Clyde to Arran, the long island on the western horizon. Sunsets made Arran appear to be on fire. The shore swept south towards hazy cliffs called the Heads of Ayr. Between Arran and the cliffs a little bump called Ailsa Craig poked out of the water. Prestwickers had another name for Ailsa Craig: they called it Paddy’s Milestone because it marked the midway point between Belfast and Glasgow, a crossing thousands of starved Irish had made and were still making in their coffin ships only to find the potatoes blighted here, too. The only work for them, the lucky ones who found work, was slaving in mines or feeding coal to the blast-furnaces that made Glasgow thrum all day and glow reddish brown at night.
Walking the wall of dunes between the beach and the links, Tom watched steamers and clipper ships going to and from Glasgow, thirty miles northeast. Closer to shore, brown seals broke the water. Still closer were knee-high waves, seaweed, driftwood, foam and sand. When golfers appeared on the links he turned to watch them, but sheep almost always outnumbered the golfers. One day the Earl of Eglinton’s greyhounds came streaking across the links, training for a race.
Tom learned to enjoy Prestwick’s weather, which was less raw but no less fickle than Fife’s. Low clouds rolled in to pelt the coast with rain that turned to long white darts of sleet. Then the sky would relent as the land held its breath. The light changed in these lulls. It might turn yellow, purple or grey. Next might come drizzle, hard rain or diffident sun, or sometimes a mist that moved inland like a curtain, bright sunshine behind it, endless sky over water so clear that you could see fish in it.
At night, sitting up by an open window while Nancy and the baby slept, Tom made pencil sketches of the links on landscaper’s paper. He drew holes and combinations of holes, with arrows showing the line of play. The arrows started out sensibly enough, then tangled like seaweed. It was a maddening exercise – there wasn’t room for eighteen holes. But each night he also read his Bible: Ask the Lord to bless your plans …
Pacing, thinking, hearing the surf at the foot of the links, he might walk to the room where his wife and son slept, Nancy with her worries and Tommy with his chestnut curls and long lashes. What man hearing the sleeping breaths of his wife and child, could fail to take courage into the next day?
Tom saw what he should do. His course would be twelve holes, not eighteen. It would start with a long, unforgettable monster. The second hole would climb over towering dunes to a putting-green guarded by a huge, hungry bunker. Golfers who made it that far without surrendering would forgive him the zigzags ahead.
The club paid several labourers to help, but Tom did much of the digging and carting himself, using shovels, wheelbarrows and his bare hands. His opening hole was the longest in golf, measuring 578 yards at a time when a 200-yard drive was a long poke. The drive had to clear a swamp, the Goosedubs, staying clear of the humpbacked dunes to the left, and from there it was three solid clouts to the putting-green. The second hole, called Alps, led golfers up dunes that presented an optical illusion: they appeared to be mountains much further away. Tom planted surprises all over the links, turning
