Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  I usually allow myself one goal per match.

  When it comes to Dad vs. Dad, on the wing, things can suddenly become full-on.

  The best example of this escalation is the Father’s Race, on school Sports Day. At Rosendale School, the state primary where Henry and George go, Sports Day is about as All Shall Have Prizes as you can get. The worst a child will come away with is four 4th place stickers. Each year, the Dads are called on to line up for a 50-metre sprint.

  Henry and George used to beg me to take part, so I did; now they beg me not to, so I don’t.

  Everything is immensely unserious, on the start line – completely about showing willing, taking part – until about five seconds before the on your marks. At that point, a dozen more Dads, younger, more muscled, arrive out of nowhere and start to bring their elbows into play. By get set, the atmosphere on the track is one of mock-focus. Jokes are made, men laugh. But on go, some of the Dads take off as if they would rather die than come anywhere but first.

  I tried my best not to come last.

  I usually finished about fourth from last, but at least I was ahead of the games master.

  After the finish, the top three disappear – and I never see them again, in playground or at school gates, until the following year’s Dad’s race.

  I end up believing some young men only become fathers in order to win the Dad’s race at Sports Day.

  There can only be one winning team in Dads vs. Lads, whether we let them nutmeg us or not.

  We are slowing while they are speeding up. We are beginning to flail just as they are starting to fly.

  It is our job to be vanquished.

  To be a father is to be a loser.

  Usually willingly.

  5

  BOARDER

  In 1947, aged eight, my father found his father dead, slumped over the lawnmower on the long, sea-facing back lawn of 20 Clifton Drive, Lytham Saint Annes.

  John Percy had been very much a distant, Victorian father – observing his newly-bathed youngest son each evening, round the side of the Times. Head and all four limbs still intact. ‘Very good, very good.’ Now off to bed.

  My father insists it was the war killed his father. During the D-Day landings, John Percy had been in charge of sanitation for the whole South of England. Not a conventionally heroic role, but vital: if half the Allied troops had been shitting themselves with diarrhoea rather than fear, the 6th June 1944 might have gone very differently.

  Once John Percy was dead, my father was left with his older sister Shirley (teenage, but before the invention of teenagers) and his mother, Muriel. They had chickens in the garden, because of rationing. This female-dominated interlude didn’t last long.

  ‘He died, and I was whipped off fairly rapidly,’ my father remembers. ‘I wasn’t allowed to the funeral. I went to the Mattersons.’

  The Mattersons were friends of the family who had a house in the Lake District. ‘It was very Swallows and Amazons, that bit.’ And then my father went to boarding school.

  First, he went to a Preparatory School, Charney Hall, Grange-over-Sands, near Lancaster. ‘My mother wanted me out of the house.’ Then, aged thirteen, he went to Shrewsbury School.

  He thrived there.

  He was always a big lad.

  One legend has him going on a hiking holiday and taking his dumbbells in his rucksack, so that he could do some weightlifting in between climbing peaks.

  By the time he left, he’d broken the school record for putting the shot. It’s a good tongue-twister: ‘Shrewsbury School’s Shropshire Shot-put champion.’ His photograph hung for many years in the Games Pavilion.

  Another photograph was found recently – my father throwing the discus.

  Figure 7. Nice shorts, Dad.

  It looks to me as if the discus were heading off into orbit. I can’t imagine it ever dropping.

  Imagine a punch thrown with that force.

  My father loved boarding school.

  We have no certain evidence that William Litt hated his boarding school, but it’s hard to see what he would have found to like.

  The school he almost certainly attended was St Bees, founded in 1583. St Bees is a chilly, windswept, isolated place – jutting out into the Irish Sea, the westernmost point of the North of England. Close by is Fleswick Bay, where smugglers used to bring in contraband on moonless nights.

  ‘Enter so that you may make progress’ is the inscription above the long-bricked-up door of the school.

  The headmaster at the time William would have been there was The Reverend John Barnes.

  The defining anecdote about Reverend Barnes is that, when unwilling or unable to give the Sunday sermon, he occasionally sent boys from St Bees to preach in his stead. (This, I have to say, makes me rather like him.)

  Reverend Barnes’ pedagogic approach was that of all unwilling teachers: force the children’s noses further and further into books, make them learn hard stuff by heart.

  On Friday the 27th May 1796, when William would have been 10-and-a-half years old, the patrons of St Bees dined in the schoolroom, to celebrate the flourishing state of that Seminary and to commemorate founder’s day.

  ‘At this meeting,’ according to a report in The Cumberland Pacquet, ‘some remarkable instances were given of the retentive powers of the mind, in the recital of Latin and English poetry. The students afforded the highest satisfaction.’

  ‘The silver medals were awarded to Mr. ROBERT BENN of Hensingham and Mr. BENSON of Cockermouth, for reciting Gray’s “Elegy,” and to Mr. WATSON of Whitehaven for reciting Thomson’s Poem “Spring,” which contained 1,174 lines, to Mr. PONSONBY of Hail and Mr. BOWERBANK of Croft, near Darlington, for reciting the Second Book of Virgil’s Aeneid which contains 804 lines…’ (Gray’s “Elegy” is a mere 128 lines.)*

  I imagine the adults, proudly smug; the boys, semi-fossilized with boredom.

  Although we have no idea whether William enjoyed school or not, we do know that, when given his liberty, he headed somewhere completely different. He went to the village green. He hung around with the sons of craftsmen and labourers.

  He chose to fight.

  My father, also, chose to fight.

  Within my family, it’s the best-known story of his time at Shrewsbury School.

  I asked him about it recently. He chuckled. ‘It was Tim that put me up to it.’

  Dad was talking about his best friend, Tim Bevan, later to become a Brigadier in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry.

  Tim was House Captain of Boxing, Oldham’s Hall.

  ‘Annual inter-house boxing came around. Tim needed a bruiser. Although he was nearly as tall as me, he was the weight below me. Light heavyweight. Tim was a quite a good boxer. But he was short of a heavyweight boxer. So, like a chump, I stuck my hand up, said, “I’ll do it.”’

  This was not the very first time my Dad had been in the ring, but he wasn’t very experienced.

  I asked my Dad, did Tim Bevan give you any tips, before he sent you in? ‘Yes,’ said Dad, ‘“Hit him.”’

  ‘Him’ was the house master’s son, David Matthews. As such, it might have been a good idea for my Dad to make the bout resemble a contest but…

  Dad comes out at the bell. Thumbs the sides of his nose with his big juicy boxing gloves. Two steps forwards. And in a few seconds, it’s all over. His fists go blam, left and right, like torpedoes fired from a submarine. They don’t need to be brought back. Doof! Doof!

  ‘I did knock the poor chap to the floor,’ said Dad. ‘He was hospitalized. I broke his nose, I think.’

  ‘Were there repercussions?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. Bill Matthews, who was the house master, took it all very much in his stride. He was a very phlegmatic man.’

  My father fought and won.

  I didn’t.

  I suppose there must have been a first fight, one I lost to The Other Boy and that set him up as the winner and me as everything else. I wish I could remember it, but I can’t; it�
��s not available – forgotten or, more likely, repressed. Instead, I remember a small incident from my first evening at Culver House (my boarding house) – before the nasty stuff began.

  After eating, a few of us boys were given permission to go and play football on the school playing fields. (Note: This access never happened again.) These wide acres of grass were behind a high wire fence and tall hedge a couple of streets away from Culver.

  At this point in proceedings, I was getting on well with The Other Boy, whom I’d only just met. He was a bit silly, a bit cool. He had a very brown face topped off by a floppy quiff. I thought he looked liked a cross between Elvis Presley and a St Bernard. Perhaps he had just come back from summer holiday abroad. He was a bit of a rebel. We were going to be good friends, I could tell.

  After we crossed Clapham Road, The Other Boy immediately began to climb over the tall iron gates to the playing fields. He was high up in the air, one leg on either side of the spikes, when I decided to see if the gates were unlocked – they were, and The Other Boy swung round in a big ridiculous arc as I and the other boys with us strolled effortlessly through.

  Everyone laughed, and The Other Boy laughed along – I remember this. I remember because later on, when The Other Boy became my worst bully, I would wonder if this was when he began to hate me. Quite without meaning to, I had defeated him, humiliated him. His easy way into the playing fields had been comically undermined by my easier one.

  I can’t remember the first fight between us, but perhaps, for The Other Boy, this was it. If so, without trying, I won it; I wasn’t to win many more.

  No, I can’t remember the first fight, because all the fights soon became one, and it wasn’t so much a fight as a situation, a steady state of being hurt.

  (Why, I thought at first – Why doesn’t my father come and rescue me? Why doesn’t he break the bullies, like he’d have broken that dog? Why? Because I never told him anything was wrong. That would have been weak.)

  Of the three years I spent as a weekly boarder at Culver House, this is how they appear to me:

  The Other Boy has me down, defenceless, my hands trapped by his knees, my body beneath his body.

  This is the worst place to be. At least, it’s the worst that I’ve been in this far in my life.

  I’m hot. I know my face is pink and bulging. Everything else in the world has disappeared. There is only this bed with the green cover and two bodies, one on top, one beneath. Sometimes The Other Boy’s hand smells of toothpaste and sometimes of cock, but usually of both. His hand covers my mouth to make sure I’m quiet. I feel my mouth, full of spit.

  It started just after lights out. He waited until the house master was gone then jumped on me, began the fight. I wasn’t quick enough or strong enough. I lost.

  When someone has you down, you can’t do anything, can you? You are the purest kind of loser. They are in total charge. You are nothing but their victim. You can’t do anything to them, and they can do anything they want to you. They can punch you or force you to open your mouth and then spit in it. You can try spitting up at them, but it will fall back in your face.

  Completely defeated, the only thing you can do is think – think about what you will do once you’re free again, once this pain ends. Because it will end. It has to. The Other Boy will get bored. He has to sleep. Eventually. Someone might come in. Hopefully not the house master, because then The Other Boy will be punished really badly, and he’ll make you suffer even more, later. This won’t go on forever, though it will definitely happen again.

  I have to decide what to do, when he releases me. There are boys who will start the fight again, and maybe they’ll win and be the one on top. Anger can make you stronger – anger of a first defeat, a defeat because the opponent cheated or ambushed you.

  If someone grabs your arm from behind, pushes it up, you can’t do anything, you’re powerless, but you haven’t lost.

  But this getting-back-into-it always seemed ridiculous to me – the reversal of power just made clear how limited that power was.

  There are boys who will get up and start the fight again, and lose again. They are likely to be treated worse, the second or third time they are pinned down, as the bully will be getting bored.

  The bully is already looking for the best way out of the scene. Once they’ve spat in your mouth, what next? Well, what? ‘Give me your…’ ‘Promise me that you’ll…’ ‘If you ever X, then I’ll Y…’

  In order to get out of the pin, the loser will promise anything. The bully is already looking out for his own dignity, looking out for a gain. What can they get from the loser? ‘Give me your… Yes?’ Punch. ‘Yes? You promised – you promised. Everyone heard you. You have to.’

  No, when you are a pure loser, you can’t do anything, when you’re pinned down, but you can decide something. You can decide to change your life.

  At some point, at Culver, I decided that I was never going to fight. I was never going to use my strength on younger or smaller boys. I was going to be as unphysical as possible – because the physical was where you got hurt. Hurt was caused by physical force. Physical force was bad.

  I lived with The Other Boy in my dorm for three years before I resorted to magic. A short while before this next and final incident, I believed that, through the force of my psychic powers alone, I’d broken a friend’s arm – in order to give him and the rest of my Ampthill gang a demonstration of my powers. John Fortescue fell off a log or off his bike, and broke his arm or wrist.

  I had made this happen, I knew, by silently and intensely willing it. My thought-magic had worked, against unsuspecting John Fortescue. I was so powerless, I’d been reduced to Bedfordshire voodoo.

  Back at Culver, I decided – after this successful trial – to use all my magic force to get rid of The Other Boy. I expect some small rituals were performed. Mainly, it was visualization. I thought of him gone.

  And then, in a scenario I could not have made more perfect if I’d written it in a short story, he fucked up entirely and was expelled.

  The perfect scenario my powers brought about was this: during morning break, The Other Boy sneaked away Someone Else Who Bullied Me’s briefcase, his leather schoolbag, took it into one of the toilet cubicles, and ripely shat in it. Then he replaced it on Someone Else Who Bullied Me’s peg.

  I expect The Other Boy expected to get away with this. How could shit be tracked down?

  I don’t know how or why he was caught. It happened almost immediately.

  Looking back, I can see that he was an extremely unhappy little boy, perhaps quite disturbed, and that he wanted to force some form of crisis.

  One evening that previous year he had tried to run away from the boarding house, in bare feet. Sometimes he cried with homesickness. I didn’t know much about his home. Except that it had orange carpet on the stairs.

  I remember how scared I was on The Other Boy’s last night at Culver. There were no longer any consequences to his actions. He could do anything to me, what did it matter? Perhaps he’d kill me – psycho that he was. Of course, the house master didn’t think to separate him from the rest of us. The Other Boy slept in his usual bed – to the right of the door, separated from it by an ugly chest of drawers. I expected a last hurrah of agony, but The Other Boy – in disgrace, probably fearing his parents, his father, maybe already having spoken to him on the phone – slept meekly.

  This was the last time I used magic.

  *

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’

  If you had asked me, around the age of eight or so, I would probably have said, ‘A soldier.’ By the age of thirteen, after Culver, I was a pacifist – and if you had asked what I wanted to be, I wouldn’t have answered. I didn’t have an answer. I no longer had any idea what I wanted to be. But I knew it definitely wasn’t a doer of violence.

  It all went together, a big jumble of thought and hate and not wanting to have to fight. In there were John Lennon singing ‘Imagine’ and ‘Working Class
Hero’ and ‘Give Peace a Chance’, a few things I’d heard about Mahatma Gandhi, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I was a Cold War Kid. For me, all escalations of violence terminated in the atomic bomb. Cartoons showed cavemen with clubs turning into politicians with Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. The logic of force was the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction.

  Figure 8. The photo I show people to prove to them that I did once have hair. Lots of hair.

  After The Other Boy was finished with me, I wanted to be unphysical. If it had been possible, I’d have chosen not to have a body at all. But that choice wasn’t available. (Not until I began dematerializing into words.) Instead, in order to make life easier for myself, I needed to pass as physical. Whilst at school, I would have to play up and play the game.

  Before I went to BMS, I would have defined myself as sporty. Sportier, really, than I was allowed to be. Alameda School in Ampthill didn’t take itself too seriously, in terms of competition. During games lessons, we played football. (I remember coming off the pitch, one frosty afternoon, my pink fingers so cold that they couldn’t undo my shoelaces.) We climbed ropes in the sports hall. We had a sports day. That was about it.

  At BMS, a public school, things were far more competitive, far more serious. Partly because I was in the boarding house, and therefore easily bring-inable for events, but also because I was quite well-coordinated and fit, I represented the school at lots of sports. I thought I was a fast swimmer, especially breaststroke, but never was asked to show my paces. Instead, year after year, I was consistently in the second team for rugby. Early on, they had made me play hooker – dogged punch-bag in the middle of the scrum, glory boy of throw-ins. I couldn’t escape that position; I wasn’t fast enough to be a wing or aggressive enough to be a flanker or fat enough to be a prop. We played against Stowe and Haberdashers’ Aske’s. I couldn’t escape until the season changed.