The North Berwick links which lay between our house and the sea is very narrow and the holes lie parallel on a strip of land which seems barely wide enough to allow play in even one direction. There a little rocky cape juts out into the sea and on its sloping sides are the first and seventeenth holes - "Pointgarry Out and Pointgarry In."

Of course there was no golf played there on Sundays and on that day our favorite spot, Pointgarry, saw a different scene, as a children's service was held in the afternoon just at that place amongst the rocks where an overstrong approach to the seventeenth would have fallen plump in the middle of the congregation. I fear that I heartily disliked those services for were not our mornings spent in a stuffy church with windows hermetically sealed where we sat on the hardest of pews and listened to endless expoundings of the most involved portions of the old Testament.

The days when there were big matches were red letter ones for us as our nurse generally yielded to a little coaxing and would take us to follow amongst the gallery for the last two holes. The first of these that I can remember was a tie for either the New Club or Tantallon Club medal between the late A. M. Ross, a very well known Scottish golfer of the old school, and Jack McCulloch, afterwards my brother-in-law, who about that time published a clever little book called "Golf in the Year 2000."

I cannot remember anything about the play in this match but very fresh in my memory is the awe and admiration I felt for people who could do anything well enough to be followed by a crowd so large that it had to be kept in order with a rope!

Equally keen was our disappointment when our favorite was beaten. As several clubs played their tournaments there, hardly a week during the summer passed without at least one match which hundreds of people would follow.

I have often been told that my devotion to a club and ball began at the age of two when I used to disport myself on the links outside our garden gate attired in the then fashionable stiffly starched attire of babyhood. It was then that the late Robert Chambers, head of the famous Edinburgh publishing house told my mother that I should be a great golfer some day a harmless pleasantry that hugely pleased her although a Sassenach and one whom to this day does not know a niblick from a brassie.