Toby Litt - Wrestliana

Figure 1. At the oval, pine dining table, signing copies of my first book for family and friends. Photo taken at my fathers insistence; smug expression, entirely down to me.

I knew nothing about Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, the kind of wrestling William loved at which he was good enough to win two hundred belts.

Although Id grown up in Ampthill, a Georgian market town, in a Georgian house surrounded by Georgian furniture (bought and sold by my father, who dealt in antiques) most of what I knew about that period had come from Jane Austen.

The one physical connection I had with William was the family copy of his densely worded novel, Henry & Mary. This was kept on a bookshelf in the hall. I had been curious about it when I was a boy, because when you opened it, you didnt just see print. It had some old-fashioned handwriting in the back. Someone had copied out a poem called The Enthusiast and written under it by William Litt Author of Wrestliana. I had added some scribble, in pencil.

It was true that William and I had writing in common. But he was known as the author of the first ever history of wrestling an early and important piece of sports journalism. My first book was called Adventures in Capitalism. In it, I wrote about made-up characters living in a very shallow, extremely technological now. I wrote about quick lives going violent and perverse and weird and sometimes haunted. Thats the kind of writer I was, not a historian or a historical novelist. I told the stories I wanted to tell, and they were about the world I lived in and the time I knew. My father was the antique dealer. The past belonged to him.

What I was really worried about, and had always been worried about, was that my father didnt just own the past; he owned the present and future as well. He owned the whole world.

My writing had always been part of a struggle to prove my own existence, my own complete independence, from my family, but most of all from my father.

If I did owe anything to William Litt, if there really was something in the blood, then that blood had come to me through my father and that was something I wasnt ready to admit.

Yet.

Without me knowing it, my father had begun to do some of his own research. In 2005, he wrote to the Secretary of the Cumbria Family History Society. An article about William Litt had appeared in issue 109 of their magazine. He had heard it was very interesting. Could he have a copy?

Unfortunately, the Secretary replied, all copies were gone, even her own but she could put my father in touch with the authors, Mr and Mrs William Hartley of Egremont, Cumbria.

My father wrote to the Hartleys, Bill and Margaret, who were delighted to hear from him. They knew exactly who Yours Sincerely of theirs. He was there in the family trees they had constructed, over the course of thirty years of research.

From local newspapers, theyd excavated Williams patriotic poems, his sports reports and his combative letters. In parish records, theyd discovered the fates of his children and grandchildren.

I got to read some of these in 2009. A visit had been arranged. My father and I took most of a long rainy day to drive up from Ampthill to Cumberland, to the Hartleys comfortable bungalow.

They were very welcoming, quietly enthusiastic. Bill is a spruce, gentle voiced man. He had made much of the Georgian-style furniture in the house, chests of drawers and side tables. Margaret, equally soft-spoken, immediately made us feel comfortable by serving us a proper roast dinner.

During the next couple of days, Bill took us to the sites of William Litts life. They were all very close together his birthplace, the farm on which he grew up, the pub he mismanaged.

I was curious but not fascinated. Already, my father and the Hartleys had come to believe I was taking notes for a book Id write, probably a historical novel with William as hero.

Finally, Bill took us to a cosy new-build cul-de-sac in Cleator Moor.

Our family place.

Not my place.

For a start, I didnt speak the language.

I knew that in order to write The Life and Adventures of William Litt, a novel convincingly set in eighteenth and nineteenth century Cumberland, I would have to spend at least a year mastering the dialect.