That same sun, having now risen from behind the gasometers, stretched down a tentative ray towards a rarely washed bedroom window at Number Six Abaddon Street. Passing with some difficulty through the murky pane, it displayed itself upon an inner wall as a pale lozenge of light surrounding a noseless statuette of Our Lady.

This mantelpiece beatification of the blessed Virgin was as usual lost upon the room’s tenant. John Vincent Omally was what the textbooks are wont to describe as “a late riser”. Usually the lozenge of light would move noiselessly across the mantelpiece wall until it reached the cracked mirror, and then reflect itself on to the face of the sleeper, thus awakening him from his restful slumbers. But today, as for some days past, it was to be denied its ritual.

Today it would find but an empty pillow, showing naught of a recumbent head but a slight indentation and a Brylcreem stain. The coverlet was tossed aside and a pair of ragged pyjama strides lay in an athletic splits posture upon the linoleum. A timeworn tweed jacket was missing from its appointed hook behind the door. It was not yet eight of the clock and John Omally was no longer at home to callers. For John Omally had important business elsewhere.

John Omally was gone a-golfing.

“Fore!” The cry echoed across the allotment, struck the wall of the Seamen’s Mission and passed back over the head of a curly-headed son of Eire, clad in soiled Fair Isle slipover and rolled-up tweeds. “Fore and have a care!” Omally swung the aged club, the relic of a former and more refined age, with a vengeance and struck the little white pill a mighty blow. The ball soared some four feet into the clear morning air and fell to earth in the midst of Jim Pooley’s radish patch.

Jim stifled a titter and read from a dog-eared exercise book entitled The Now Official Handbook of Allotment Golf: “Unless rendered totally inextricable, by nature of being unreachable, i.e. under more than four feet of water or beyond climbing capability, the player will play the stroke. Should the player, however, endanger the growth of his opponent’s radishes he will forfeit the hole.”

Omally scratched his head with a wooden tee and eyed Pooley with some suspicion. “I don’t recall that bit at the end, Jim,” said he. “May I venture to ask whether the rule applies to runner beans, possibly of the variety which you uprooted from my plot yesterday whilst attempting that trick shot of yours on to the fourth?”

Pooley made a thoughtful face. “Beans are not specifically mentioned,” he said, carefully examining the note he had so hastily scribbled. “But if you are making an official request to have them included in the handbook then I think we might stretch a point and pencil them in.”

At this moment the two golfers suddenly threw themselves down commando-fashion into a clump of long grass. An explanation for this extraordinary behaviour was almost immediately forthcoming as the distinctive tuneless whistling of Small Dave signalled the approach of that midget as he took his regular morning short cut through to the Butts Estate.

Allotment Golf had not yet caught the eye either of the allotment holders or the general public, and both Pooley and Omally wished to keep it that way. They would have greatly preferred to golf upon one of the municipal courses but circumstances had decreed that their photographs now appeared upon every persona-non-grata board throughout the county.

It had all appeared so trivial at the time, the small disagreements, the occasional bout of fisticuffs; hardly police matters one would have thought. Golfers, however, are a clannish bunch with rather a conservative attitude towards sport. The two Brentonians’ extraordinary conception of the game had not been appreciated. Their constant rule-bending and wild club-swinging, their numerous bogus claims to the course record, achieved for the most part by omitting to play the more difficult holes, their total disregard for other players’ safety, refusing to shout “Fore”, before what Omally described as “heavy putting”, had been too much to bear. The secretary of one course had shown moments of rare tolerance: he had respected Pooley’s request to play the holes in reverse order, he had suffered Omally playing in cycling cape and fisherman’s waders one particularly wet day, but when Pooley relocated all the tee markers (in order to make the game more interesting) and Omally had dug a second hole upon the third green in order to sink a birdy four, stern measures had been taken. The two potential Ryder Cup winners had been given what the French refer to as “La Rush de la Bum”.

Thus in a moment of rare inspiration, necessity being, like Frank Zappa, the mother of invention and Jim Pooley being a man of infinite resource when cornered, Allotment Golf had been born.

It had much to recommend it. There was no queuing up to be done, no green fees to pay, no teeing off in front of cynical observers to be suffered; above all, they could invent their own rules as the fancy took them. As originator, Jim took sole charge of the exercise book until every detail was clarified. This, he told Omally, was what is called “a divine right”. A certain amount of subterfuge was called for, of course; they had no wish to alert any of the other allotment holders to the sport for fear that it might catch on. It had been a moment of rare inspiration indeed on Pooley’s part, but one which was to play its part in changing the face of Brentford as we know it for good and all.

“Fore!” Small Dave had departed upon his round and John Omally set to it once more to shift his ball from Pooley’s radish patch and belt it heartily towards the fourth hole, which lay cunningly concealed between Old Pete’s wheelbarrow and his battered watering-can.

Norman was one of those early birds which catch the proverbial worm. Running the down-at-heel corner-tobacconist’s at anything remotely resembling a profit was pretty much a full-time occupation. Norman went about it, as he did with everything else, with a will. “One must remain constantly in the field if one wishes to ladle off the cream which is one’s bread and butter,” he constantly explained to his customers. This remark generally met with enough thoughtful head-nodding to offer the shopkeeper the encouragement he needed.

Norman had been up since six, sorting through and numbering up the day’s papers. It was Wednesday and the first crop of specialist journals had arrived. There was the Psychic News for Lily at the Plume Cafe. This Norman numbered in large red figures as the new paperboy had the irritating habit of confusing it with Cycling News and delivering it to Father Moity at St Joan’s. There was the regular welter of sporting mags for Bob the bookie, and a selection of Danish glossies for Uncle Ted the greengrocer. Norman folded a copy of Muscle Boys into the widow Cartwright’s Daily Telegraph and hummed softly to himself. There was a busy day ahead and he intended to take advantage of its each and every minute.

Nick, the big-nosed paperboy, sidled into the shop, chewing gum and smoking what the lads at the Yard refer to as the certain substances. “Kudos, Norm,” he said.

Norman looked up from his doings and eyed the youth with evident distaste. “Good morning, Nicholas,” he said, giving his watch minute scrutiny and rattling it against his ear. “Can that be the time already, or is the old Vacheron Constantine running fast again?”

The paperboy flicked idly through a copy of Bra-Busting Beauties. “Look at those charlies,” he said, salivating about the gums, “you’d think you’d gone deaf, eh?”

Norman thrust the bundle of folded papers into the worn canvas bag and pushed it across the worm-eaten counter. “Away on your toes, lad,” he grunted. “Time heals all wounds and absence makes the heart grow fonder.”