Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  Figure 27. Me.

  * With more than a little help from my editors, Sam and Elly.

  † Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893, p. 69.

  ‡ Henry & Mary, 1st ed., p. 280; 2nd ed., p. 160.

  § Quoted by the Memoirist in Henry & Mary, 2nd ed, p. vi.

  ¶ Cleator Moor, Notes, News and Views. [by “Denton”]. ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.

  || Private letter.

  ** Shrewsbury, Bridgeworth, Chester, Stourport, Burton-on-Trent, Tewkesbury, Worcester, Bedford, Hereford, Bath, Manchester.

  †† Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 9 August 1877.

  23

  TOUCHLINE

  In Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, there is no touchline or, rather, there is more than a touchline. The divide between the ring and the rest of the world is more emphatic.

  When it takes place outdoors, there is a rope, looped between thin iron posts with hoops at the top. This can be circular or square. The crowd is kept back; the wrestlers, entering, have to decide whether to hike themselves over or dip under. Sometimes, within the rope, there is also a circle of strewn sawdust – the bag remaining off to one side, to repair the ground on muddy days.

  Indoors, the edge of the mat is all.

  A couple who are friends of mine didn’t want to know the sex of their child before it was born. The romance of only discovering ‘It’s a boy!’ or ‘It’s a girl!’ was something they wanted left for the delivery room. So they specifically asked at the three-month scan not to be told. But then the bright skeleton appeared on the screen and, routinely, the nurse began to go through their usual spiel – ‘That’s the spine. That’s the heart. That’s the scrotum.’

  And with that single word, ‘scrotum’, the couple’s future world turned from a sludgy mixture of sparkly pink and dull camouflage into a definite boyish palate of green, brown, grey and black.

  Ballet lessons, shared lipsticks, getting deafened at boyband concerts – all suddenly went pop.

  Instead, there was football.*

  Hours and hours of football.

  When I found out that Henry would be a boy, I anticipated him learning to ride a bike and me and him kicking a football back and forth.

  And that is the thing I now most often do do – with him and George – play football.

  Dad vs. Lads.

  A kickabout in the park is one thing. But if boys get serious, and most of them do, there’s the team, the training, the match.

  Six, eight or ten years after they are born, you are likely to find yourself separated from your son by a long straight white line painted on grass or astroturf or some other surface. They will be playing, and you will be reduced to watching them win, lose, draw, cheat, get sent off or get injured. They will be a competitor and you will be nothing more than a spectator – at best and worst, their biggest fan.

  If you want, you can go and get a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, or sit in the steamed-up car. Because for all the direct effect you will have, once the whistle is blown, you might as well be at work on the other side of the world. Or in prison. Equally, you might be dead, cremated, buried.

  It’s just possible they may listen to your shouted advice (‘Pass the bloody ball!’), and this may change the game for the better – it’s unlikely. (‘Dad, shut up!’)

  The touchline isn’t a symbol of something. This isn’t ‘like’ fatherhood, ‘like’ it’s going to be for the rest of their lives. Being behind a line of some sort is being a father. The touchline just makes it explicit.

  What the touchline means is the opposite of what it says – it’s the don’t-touch line, it’s the all-you-can-do-is-shout line. Your control and influence is reduced to barked instructions, screamed celebrations, significant facial expressions, coded hand signals (if you’re sadly desperate).

  If you want to retain your dignity, pray silently and without moving your lips. Otherwise say Come on!, say Referee!, say No!!, say Yes!!!

  As my sons were being born I felt helpless, and that feeling has never gone away – in fact, it has intensified.

  The most useful thing I ever did for my sons was feed them, from a bottle or a spoon. I suppose cleaning their bottoms, washing their little bodies, drying their folds – that was necessary, too.

  I also, twice, saved George from drowning in a holiday swimming pool.

  The feeding and cleaning, however, could have been done by any stranger – male or female – brought in off the street.

  It didn’t have to be me.

  What’s left, apart from these essentials, is bringing them up, teaching them how to be human beings. And men.

  Good men.

  And then, after or before the match on the real pitch, comes something worse – comes your son getting dropped from the team. If the coach is a coward, and has texted or emailed you, you have to explain this to your son, just as you have to explain that granny has died or that grandpa will never again know who they are when they go to give him a hug.

  ‘You’ve been dropped.’ It’s like taking a hammer to their glassy confidence. You/they start out with a recognizable F.A. Cup-shaped chalice and finish with, if you’re lucky, not shards and smithereens but an angular piece of abstract art. Let them glue it back together, with psychoanalytic help, in the years to come.

  ‘You’re out.’ The coach, who was your friend, becomes a force for evil in the world. The team-mates, who you supported and who supported your child, become toxic. You define the extent of your magnanimity in direct relation to their results: if you celebrate when they lose, you become a less moral person.

  ‘Well, good luck to them’, is perfectly ambivalent – it can mean just what it says, or the exact opposite. You are unlikely to know, even as you say it, what you mean by it.

  My job as a father is to stand on the touchline. I have thought about this a lot. What do my sons learn of life, through sport? What does it mean? For them? For me?

  I am superstitious, I have recognized this about myself; I take the touchline very seriously. I feel similarly about cutting across the corner of a football pitch, when the action is up at the other end (so the pitch is live, the rules apply), as I do – within a churchyard – about stepping on a grave.

  I feel the full significance of the touchline when I see other fathers casually crossing it, to get a better look at the game. I shudder in horror. It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they are presuming – even as non-players – to have a place there, too. But they have no place.

  What sport means to me changes all the time. My values change in relation to it. As a boy, I loved the impatience of John McEnroe, as an adult, I revere the patience – the other side of the net – of Bjorn Borg.†

  The longer I go on, the more football seems to be the problem.

  I regret that we live too far away from Cumberland for Henry and George to take part in wrestling. From all I’ve learned of it, it’s a better sport than football. It teaches better things. Although I’m sure the boys and girls who take it up also want Barcelona away strips, they are playing an anti-football. C&WW shows an alternative.

  It could have been, if William Litt had been a different man, that I ended writing about another non-writing occupation – ceramics or pigeon fancying or competition vegetable growing or Morris dancing or cheese-mongering or bookbinding, and in that, and in the people involved in that, I might have found something essential.

  I am very glad William led me to wrestling. I think it’s where I needed to go, to learn what I needed to learn.

  However much I neglect it, I still have a body. I realize now that this body was capable of more than I gave it the chance of doing.

  Lots of life is like a fight, but even more like a wrestling match.

  But however much its forms might change, there is something essential – on an animal level – about fighting. Boxing, paradoxically, despite its brutalit
y is a very sophisticated form of combat. Most playground fights turn into wrestling matches – either Cornish or Icelandic, with clothes or belts being grabbed.

  Wrestling is – as far as we know – a universal human activity. It was also, most likely, one of the very earliest leisure activities. Children, who weren’t yet old enough to hunt, would playfight, as do chimpanzees. I wouldn’t make this claim for Morris Dancing, cheesemongering, bookbinding. And I wouldn’t, of course, make it for writing – or even for storytelling. However, perhaps in the form of retelling the fight, re-enacting the hunt, it came closely after fighting – the action replay: that, I think, is also essentially human (not animal).

  Then what does this tell us? Surely this is what we should be hoping to create – a human society that permits small conflicts, unserious, in which there is a clear outcome.

  We desperately need a model of conflict that results in a winner but does not result in the destruction of their opponent. Perhaps wrestling could be this – if one opponent was not there, the other opponent would fall face first into the mud.‡

  What do we do with all our young men? How can we allow them to fight without destroying themselves and also, perhaps, us?

  ‘You’re scared of everything,’ says George, when my prohibitions vex him. ‘When I’m twenty metres from a cliff you say, “Don’t fall off the cliff, George” – and I’m like twenty metres away. You’re paranoia.’ I try to explain that I am trying to keep him safe, and that’s my job, and he says, ‘But I’m like twenty metres away. Dad, you’re scared of everything.’ And perhaps I am.

  Perhaps, after all, I am an apology for a man; in which case this could be my apology for mankind.

  When my sons cross the touchline, I am scared for them. I have some idea what faces them.

  I, too, deal in a line, but a very different one, black not white: a long, extremely broken line that is miles and years long, and passes through this sentence, as the tip of the pen loops and squiggles and zigzags, jumps to i-dot, j-dot, t-cross, doubles back to cross out stupidities and wrongnesses of all sorts. I clove to this line and the line has come to cleave to me.

  What we have of William’s that is most worthwhile is the product of a similar inky line. But he could not have written with such authority had he not entered the ring many times, and successfully. His physical involvement is where his authority came from.

  I had no such involvement – my world was word-bound, and had been for decades.

  It is less so now.

  * Terms and conditions apply. Other childhoods are also available.

  † I also admire the foolishness of Borg, attempting to make a comeback still playing with a wooden racquet.

  ‡ ‘He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.’ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, Dent, 1910, p. 163.

  PART THREE

  SHAKING HANDS

  24

  CHAMPION

  26 October 1811

  Having laid aside his hat and coat, William Litt walks proudly into the ring. His eyes move upwards, judging what he sees. This is the beginning of the science. There is grass and there are people and then there are high hills and then there is the sky, and he is familiar with all of them.

  He is familiar with the grass, because, since he began at the nobler art, he has often been thrown down upon it. The ground has bruised him but never seriously broken him. That is why he is still here. But today, as he would say, he does not intend to renew his acquaintance with his Mother Earth.

  He is familiar with the people, and the people are divided up as absolutely as the other things he sees. There is grass, then people, high hills, and then sky. The people are labourers, yeomen, gentlemen and the nobility. And he knows all of them – he has sported with the labourers, drunk with the yeomen, read poetry to the gentlemen and received the patronage of the nobility.

  He is familiar with the high hills – Weddicar, Whillymoor, Blake Fell, Hen Comb, Grike. When he has to travel, and he has enough time, he prefers to walk. This is Cumberland, what he will later call in a poem his ‘Mountain Home’. And when – years from now – he is in exile, and dying, it is the hills for which he will yearn. It is this yearning for the hills that will kill him.

  And he is familiar with the sky. He has grown up on the most westerly point of Northern England, where there are sails to be looked out for and sunsets to be admired. Where the clouds are examined for signs of tempest by dozens of sailors, awaiting the tide that will take them to Manhattan or Quebec. Where the rain or lack of rain is discussed by gentlemen farmers, like his father, who worry over the wheat and potatoes. Where poets have come, in order to be closer to the sky and the hills but not necessarily to the people.

  This is Arlecdon Moor, about four miles east of Whitehaven. It is common ground, wasteland – but not for too many years longer now. His father, who holds the position of ‘Commissioner for the Inclosure of Waste Lands’, will have something to say about that; and he will have something to say in return, in print. He will regret that the green tops of vegetables now wave over the place where the mighty have fallen.

  But for today, Arlecdon Moor is his domain. This is where the best wrestling in the best style takes place, and where, as part of the festivities of the Arlecdon Fair, he has wrestled for around half a decade.

  Undefeated.

  Never once thrown.

  And this has made him, in the North, very famous. Wrestling is the most popular sport, from Whitehaven to Keswick, from Carlisle to Liverpool. William Litt’s name is familiar as a household word. Football, he will later write, is an exercise that has dwindled down to nothing, compared to the estimation in which it was formerly held. It is wrestling which grips the crowds.

  Supposing two individuals, one a celebrated Wrestler, and the other a distinguished football-player, are present at any place of amusement where there is a large collection of people; the Wrestler will be noticed and gazed at by almost every person present; while the other will be regarded with comparative indifference.

  And what do they see, the crowd encircling William as he walks towards the other man?

  His hair is dark. His skin is pale. He is about six feet tall. Years later, a friend will remember him possessing a rare combination of physical strength, with the most perfect symmetry of form. His countenance and manner, the friend will write, with regret, were manifestly thoughtful and pleasing. Another witness will remember him most distinctly as a tall, straight, handsome, respectable, mild-looking, well-dressed man.

  He is dressed conventionally, as far as wrestling goes, apart from one detail – of which some observers disapprove. He has on a loose white linen shirt, stout leather breeches buttoned at the waist and gartered just below the knee, but instead of the usual white stockings and leather slippers, he is wearing top-boots. This distinguishes William, is quite eccentric – perhaps even a little showy, a little arrogant.

  Top-boots, as sported by jockeys, are the closest thing England has had to national dress. They became popular a hundred years before today, but not for Wrestlers. Top-boots usually end just below the knee, and often have a higher, softer leather cuff turned down to form the distinctive pale leather ‘top’. They are tightly fitted, to show off a fine leg, and leather hoops are needed to pull them on.

  Perhaps the boots are part of William’s image – a Gentleman Jim of the wrestling ring, a man who wears a white flannel suit down a coalmine. Their leather soles can’t be all that practical for getting a grip upon the grass, unless he’s had them specially cobbled. They are very different from the rough wooden shapes that Harry Graham hews from alder trees, in the groves up near the borders.

  Today is the 26th of October 1811 – a Saturday. The labourers, fancy free, have come for some fun. The swains. The plebeians. This bout has been talked of for weeks. It is to be a battle of acknowledged champions. At stake is 60 guineas. The greatest sum ever yet wrestled for in Cumberland or West
morland. Enough money to buy a farm.

  The man awaiting William upon the green is Harry Graham of Brigham, a small village eight miles to the north of here. No apology for a man, he is around 22 years of age, by occupation a clogger – and is, in his own opinion, a competent match for any Wrestler whatsoever. He is more than that – when William comes to write his own account of this most famous of bouts, he will say, ‘No Wrestler ever entered a ring in higher condition, or with greater confidence than Harry Graham.’

  Except, perhaps, William Litt – upon his home turf, before his home crowd, in previous years.

  But William does not wish to fight this day. Only a few weeks ago he was suffering from ‘extreme illness’, and asked for a respite – time to recover, before the bout. This request was refused. He still feels a great listlessness, just as he did when losing to Joseph Bird at Carlisle Races, but if he doesn’t go ahead with this match William will forfeit six guineas.

  There is no need for a so-called ‘writer’ – within the ring – to take the wrestlers’ names; every man, woman and child here knows who William is, and has an opinion on whether he’ll win or not. Most have put money on him, a very few against him.

  Nor is there need for a crier, to call William out of the crowd of Wrestlers, standing or lying, such as that which assembles to contest for the belt at Carlisle Races. Here, today, there are only two.

  This challenge match has come about because of some loose words of Harry Graham’s associates, and a wager that followed therefrom. The day after the Carlisle Races, William had umpired a bout between Harry Graham and the great Tom Nicholson – in which Harry Graham was fortuitously victorious. Circumstances, William believes, had been very much in Harry Graham’s favour. Both wrestlers had spent the preceding evening in a manner that was neither sober nor prudential. Tom Nicholson having just won the belt at the Carlisle Races, and with so many friends wishing to celebrate with him, found himself – the next morning – quite the less fit of the combatants.