Your cousin asks you to ‘say something’ at the christening of her daughter and it genuinely is an honour to be asked and really-all-confusing because in your mind your cousin is still a baby herself, or at least a very small girl, and despite the age difference you feel close to her, so it really is a no-brainer. Yes. Yes, you would love to stand up in front of her friends and family, your family, and ‘say something’. And is it?… yes, it will be the first time you’ve ever stood up to ‘say something’ in a church. A quaint little village church at that. A day out.

There’s a moment of humour between the both of you after she suggests you read some of your own poetry and you remind her that your own poetry is probably completely unsuitable at the christening of such a small, innocent, and new person. Unsuitable for a quaint little village church. Unsuitable for joy.

As with so many things, life takes over and you forget most commitments, and a mention of the christening (from your dad?) a couple of weeks beforehand jabs you to the head and you’re reminded of agreeing to take part in something that is extremely important to a number of people you care a lot for.

Time to focus and embrace the impending deadline.

* * *

Around that time I was writing a blog post about A Man’s World by Donald McRae, which charts the life and career of the extraordinary boxer Emile Griffith. While writing I was cross-referencing Griffith’s career on BoxRec.com and was shocked to see that his final bout was against the British fighter Alan Minter. I had to sit with this information for a while.

In my head existed two images which I couldn’t reconcile in my confused little brain:

1. Emile Griffith – all rare-grainy black and white footage, appearing as if through mist, fighting for world titles in the Madison Square Garden of the late 1950s / early 1960s. Suits and cigar smoke from beneath Fedoras. Typewriters at ringside. Antiquated ‘strongman’ poses in sepia photographs.
2. Alan Minter – grinning out of ITV’s lustreless 1970s technicolour, gloves raised at The Royal Albert Hall, and running around on Superstars. Though I think I’ve confused Alan with Dave ‘Boy’ Green, and ITV with the BBC. Minter appears through the mist of my own muddled memory of TV repeats of events from before I was born (everything that came before is only myth).

How could these two have been of fighting age during such culturally different periods? How could they ever have met in a ring in Monaco in 1977?

I began thinking of A.J. Liebling and his thoughts on boxing’s obsession with heritage and lineage. A reliance on a lineal timeline to identify its place in history, to contextualise the existence and rank of contemporary boxers among the champions, contenders, journeymen and has-beens of previous eras. Liebling talks about his pride when punched on the nose by Jack O’Brien, and the honour of being part of an historic ‘laying-on of hands’, along an unbroken chain through the history of the sport, to the great bareknuckle fighters of the 1800s and further. Much further.

He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light-heavyweight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. (Liebling, The Sweet Science, Penguin Classics, 2018, p.1)

* * *

Your cousin gives her baby daughter the middle name Ellen, which was the name of your old nan. You remember sitting on ‘Nell’s’ lap in her Peabody flat in Pimlico in the 1980s, and it suddenly dawns on you that this woman, at various stages of her life, bore on her lap the weight of so many people due to be sitting in that quaint little village church. Your dad and his siblings, yourself and the eldest of your sisters, and your cousins, who are now bringing their own children into the world.

And she (as one person) existed as many figures for all of you, through different decades and cultural points. But lineally she links you all. This lap is the lap you all sat in. And with the simple act of choosing this name your cousin links you all, via this service at this quaint little village church, through nearly 100 years of family history to your old nan’s own birth, and the lap, unknown to most if not all of you, that she sat in. Held and comforted, not knowing herself the extent of what she was part of. Would prompt.

* * *

This traditional idea of boxing history runs contrary to the modern notion of time as a fluid concept, emanating from a central point, perhaps even looping back on itself and never not existing. Time which radiates out in all directions from a fulcrum, affecting everything and nothing. And in many ways this sense of time is probably more aligned to the chaos experienced in the ring. With the actions and reactions of the fighters functioning as beacons from which some notion of time can ripple out and away.

A left hook to the jaw in the middle of round five can render the preceding thirteen-and-a-half minutes irrelevant, the impact of the punch being of such pressing and all-consuming importance that what has come before is immediately forgotten and erased from memory, either by choice or by force. A new beginning has been created, all further action extending, in all directions, from this blow. As Joyce Carol Oates says, the boxer ‘has been knocked out of Time’.

And of course, sometimes (or often?) a boxer may experience such blunt force trauma to the head that she doesn’t regain consciousness until several rounds later, with no recollection of the intervening rounds. A temporary suspension of time for the concussed, as it continues to race by for her opponent, and those spectating; simultaneously trundling on for those outside the venue, unaware of the time-altering drama within.

* * *

All of you who sat in Ellen/Nell/Nanny Nell’s lap had your own deeply important moments at which ‘times’ began, spiralling out from that Pimlico-rooted, three-bar fire-adjacent armchair. Your futures smashing into what would become the pasts of your younger relatives. You decide to try and convey the enormity of how she, now occupying a place in everyone’s pasts, once occupied so large a space in all your many fluid ‘presents’. How she was a beginning of all of you, but with herself being an end to so much – personal histories, traditions, and customs – while being the genesis of so much more than any of you will remember or know.

You can think you know someone. You can be awash with stories of upbringing, family, careers, and mannerisms, but with every detailed mapping of that person’s coastline only more unknown terrain is revealed. The more you focus, the more becomes unclear. With every handwritten letter discovered in a deceased relative’s flat, more questions emerge about who this person actually was.

You’ve all been touched by the same person but marked in different ways.

* * *

I hadn’t thought much about the importance of naming ceremonies prior to the christening. I don’t have children of my own, who would, no doubt, have diluted my youthful zest for rejecting tradition. There I was, confronted with my growing obsession with a sport itself so consumed by its own idea of heritage. My bookshelves disappearing under the growing number of books I had collected on the subject. All of them, in one way or another, tackling the question of where we place ourselves in the world. Where and how we place our feet, how we stand in front of opposition. How we lead. How we counter.

Books written by former boxers, by spectators, by people who have existed in the world of the business of professional boxing. Books contemplating fantasy matchups between old-timers and contemporary boxers. Books facing up to the difficult truths of the sport, and the inherent physical dangers faced by its participants. Tellingly, not a single book written with the sole purpose to look forward. To what might be. There is no ‘tomorrow’ in boxing. There is only what’s happening today, and what happened before this laying on of (gloved) hands.

* * *

The priest drops water on a baby’s head as she screams, and we move collectively from having that Nell existing in our pasts, to having another who will hopefully surpass all our futures. At the pub after the christening you take your turn in holding Saffie Ellen, wiping her face when it’s messy, placing her in your lap as you sit and chat with people you haven’t seen in many years. The smiles on their faces not quite able to hide the inner turmoil caused by the fact that you are no longer a boy yourself. Confusion arising from how you could possibly be a 42-year-old man, and what this means for them.

The face-wiping is itself a hand-me-down from your nan, perhaps not as obsessive as you remember. These memories likely coloured by ‘TV-nans’ and the drunken exaggerations of relatives. The slightest drip, dribble or smudge carefully picked off with a (spit) damp tissue, from a working-class matriarch living with the knowledge that there perhaps wasn’t much materially that she could provide. She could at least keep us looking presentable. Wiping clean the dirt of our pasts and keeping us facing forward.

* * *

The most insightful engravings of Georgian bareknuckle prize fighting and its fighters are ones which portray the boxers between rounds. In some forest clearing, selected for being accessible enough for The Fancy to find their way to the spot, yet difficult enough to get to that the Old Bill would be held up long enough to see the illegal match concluded.

During these rest periods the boxer’s ‘second’ would drop onto one knee, with the thigh of the other leg parallel to the ground. The calf, ankle, and foot of that bent leg supporting the full weight of the fighter. The intimacy of these moments is always so beautifully tender. The more experienced man physically bearing the weight of the other under his supervision, cleaning his face, providing sanctuary from his opponent and the crowd. Presumably reassuring him that everything is going to be OK.

With time in the bout momentarily frozen – and in such close contact – the moment exists only for these two men. So absorbed in their own version of suspended time, their own relationship and lineage, that they don’t notice their mirror image in the opposite corner. An opponent consumed by his own moment of timeless compassion with the man who has brought him to this point, and will, he hopes, pull him through into a better, less traumatic future.

* * *

Today’s champions are never given the credit they probably deserve; instead, they’re told constantly that they grew up in surroundings too comfortable to develop the fighting edge of those who came before. Only after the passing of more time can they themselves be looked back on in awe, their flaws and humanity forgotten. Frozen in photographs, fists raised, eyes finally allowed to stare out at a future that misses their kind.

And in our family we drift from our own upbringings, either naturally or through the wrench of social reforms. We finish school at a later age and don’t have to consider a childhood of employment. Successive governments do the right thing (mostly), and we don’t have to grow up as quickly (mostly). But for every step toward what Nell would have considered a better future we’re another step from our shared pasts. Most of us were lucky to have her lap though.

About

David Turner is a joiner, writer and sound artist from London. He is co-editor of the boxing fanzine The Spit Bucket, one half of the sound art collective You Don't Know and is the founding producer of the Lunar Poetry Podcasts series. His first (and possibly last) collection of poetry, Contained, was published by Hesterglock Press in 2020.

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