A Blow to the Head

I am looking for my dead grandfather in the British Library. Around me the new building is calm and white, a little like a hospital for books. I peck my way through layers of computer filing looking for copies of his favourite, long defunct, magazine Health and Strength. Here, according to the story he always told, I will find his photograph: a picture of a young man, a boxer: a middleweight before his marriage, before his daughter, before me.

I wait for the delivery of 1935 and 1936 and, without intending to, remember his scents. My grandfather smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Brylcreem and soft, soft skin. Although he was a fighter and a steelworker most of his life, his hands and feet never hardened. Each new pair of work boots crippled him. His boxing stories were filled with magical strategies for toughening his fists. When I stayed with him and my grandmother in the school holidays, I would be given the task of picking tiny metal pieces from his uncallused fingers and palms with a needle's point. I realized this was a kind of honour, he usually did the work himself, but now he was trusting me, making his hands a helpless weight in mine. The whole process made me feel sick, all the same: I knew that I hurt him.

On the desk in front of me the Reminder to Readers warns that 'Books and manuscripts are fragile objects. Please take care and do nothing which might damage them.' The living and reading are intended to be gentle when they visit, to remember that the information stored here is vulnerable, quite easy to destroy. I don't believe my grandfather ever considered his weekly bible might end its life in such sickly company. Then again, he neither liked nor anticipated his own decline into frailty.

He was, after all, a man of certainty and solutions. A tool setter for most of his life, he spent hours calibrating machine tools, measuring out their tolerances for error, refitting and modifying them to meet every conceivable demand, the trickier the better: in retirement, he mended old radios, televisions, doorbells, clocks. His unshakeable assumption that I had inherited his general physical confidence and dexterity meant my childhood was littered with unmanageable gifts: the bicycle I couldn't balance, the roller skates that scared me—I only dared to use them over gravel—and the gleaming, implacable pogo stick. We both wanted me to enjoy these things, but I never could.

Far more comforting were his remedies for likely and unlikely threats. Crouching between his shins, my arms slung over his supporting knees, I would watch old horror films long past my bedtime and we would discuss the fatal weaknesses of vampires, werewolves and monsters of all types. We knew how to finish them, every one. And he would tell me, in only the twitch and surge of television light, how to deal with any real attacker. There, with the safest man in the world, I learned how I should stamp on insteps and scrape shins, gouge eyes and chop at windpipes, or jab with the heel of my hand at the base of noses in a way which he neglected to mention might well prove fatal if it sent the assailant's nasal septum spearing back into his brain.

Which my grandfather would not have minded. It was a gently accepted fact that he would have killed anybody who harmed me, who even thought of it. These were among his quieter gifts, the ones I didn't notice at the time: his unconditional belief that I was precious enough to be so very well defended, and my certainty that I can defend myself. I have many of the usual kinds of fear, but fear of attack is not among them. I have never, it so happens, lost a fight and I have never seen the strength and size of the male body as a threat. I have had full freedom, if I've wished, to find it only beautiful. My grandfather, Joseph Henry Price, he gave me this.

When it arrives, in leather-bound volumes, Health and Strength has its own kind of beauty. Billed as 'The National Organ of Physical Fitness', it mingles articles on the perfect punch and sexual advice with photographs of the physically fit. Men in leopard-skin trunks and gladiator boots tense and grimace happily. A man carries a small live pony draped resignedly around his neck. Here and there, sturdy Nordic women brandish hoops or beach balls in states of noticeable undress. 'Greek' scenes are recreated in homoerotic tableaux involving a good deal of oil and sometimes fig leaves. A range of small ads offers trunks, boots and leaves, all available for convenient purchase by mail.

The effect is chaotic and hardly what I'd expected Joe Price to find comfortable—I recall him as a man who thought twice before removing his jacket and who had no time at all for homosexuals. But there is a unifying theme here, something I know he understood: the need to be admired, to be an obvious success. It's most visible amongst the amateurs: the clerks and NCOs, the shopkeepers and factory workers who once hoped to make their own fabric a thing of pride. Six decades adrift, they still look out, perpetually pale and young and keen, snapped balancing on park benches, kicking in a brief Sunday's surf. They're three years away from a world war and showing their bodies as precious things, their best assets. A Mr Harvey stands alone in 1936, braced and British and facing the desert near Cairo, naked with his back to the camera. His arms and calves are tanned, the rest strikingly white from his knees to the bared nape beneath his savage army haircut. Other articles in the same year praise 'George VI—our Athletic King' and feature, without irony, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott lounging together in trunks—'two noted Paramount stars who believe in the value of Physical Culture.' This is the promise of health and strength, the longed-for gift of physical democracy: film stars, commoners and kings all equal when stripped to the skin.

As I turn through the cheap, yellowed pages I realize how much my grandfather lived by what he found here. He left school in 1930 at the age of fourteen, walking straight into the mouth of the Depression. His family was working class with pretensions to gentility, his father a handsome man who dressed well but was violent in drink. One of four children, Joe wanted to defend what he found precious: to guarantee safety for his mother and himself, to assure his own dignity and success. It would have been tempting to believe that positive thinking and hard exercise could bring him all he wanted by acts of will. Variations on the theory were popular at the time. By the late 1930s Health and Strength includes more and more German snapshots: worthy National Socialist bodies, stripped and staring towards horizons bright with eugenic promise.

Joe Price didn't embrace the politics or the spurious science, but he did put his faith in the logic of effort and will. He believed that he could and must fight to build a life worth living. More an individualist than a pacifist, he would spend his war in a reserved occupation, avoiding the daily risks of steel. He once told me he thought all conflicts should be settled by champions, squaring up, the only blood shed in the ring. His idea of combat was always individual. To build a character and a future, solitary effort was the key, and the most worthy drove themselves the hardest, took the greatest punishment: the boxers. Boxing suited his philosophy, his expectations and temperament. The magazine is filled with their faces, the men who made Joe's choice and boxed. Amateur and professional, each one measures himself against the classic pose: shoulders cocked, head ducked, hands ready and high, eyes confidently alert, perhaps that touch brighter with the possibility that, 'If you do achieve success, then your fists may well be the means of your seeing the world and meeting some of its most famous inhabitants.'

The path to personal advancement through sport: it's never offered with much enthusiasm to anyone outside the underclass, the risks are too great, the rewards too ephemeral. Boxing is held in reserve for the special cases, the young and poor who might be needed by the military, who might be troublesome if they weren't given discipline early enough. The myth is as powerful today as it was in the 1930s, the thought that—as Health and Strength put it— 'There is no sport like boxing to develop and cultivate a feeling of assurance and self-control. It gives you an aggressive spirit, properly leashed.' Watch African American and Hispanic kids trying to knock each other's lights out in any United States amateur bout, watch every nation offering up representatives of its least prosperous groups in Olympic competition or televised professional spectacles, and you'll realize boxing remains an occupation for the hungry.

I remember sitting in a Brooklyn church gym hall, watching a young Irish fighter losing, the only white boxer of the evening. His father, a small man who had obviously led an outdoor life, was behind me, trying to smoke away his nerves—he never normally touched cigarettes. He quietly rationalized the proceedings for me. This was a chance for the boy—coming to America—he'd never even, no offence, seen a black man at home and people had been very kind and, as long as he didn't get hurt, it could all be great for him. As long as he didn't get hurt.

Another father had brought along his son, a boy of eight or nine, who was a fan of World Wrestling Federation wrestling, but was already slowly pacing and turning his fist in the air ahead of him, working through the proper motions of a punch. Weaned on the glamour and choreographed fakery of the wrestlers, this was his first time at a boxing match and he was enjoying it well enough, tolerating the lack of pyrotechnics while his father tried to make a lesson of the evening. He wanted the boy to understand how fit a boxer has to be, how hard he has to try, about winning and losing and being only a few generations away from Ireland themselves, and this somehow having to do with life's realities. The boy kept on practising his punches, hardly listening, the man looking at me now, his voice softened, his eyes making it plain that this was something too hard to say, too hard to consider all at once. Then we both looked away while I remembered that my grandfather took my mother to watch boxing bouts and wondered what it might have been that he was trying to teach her. I'd only really agreed to come there that night in case it let me feel nearer to him, edged me back towards all the things I could no longer learn.