Wrestliana by Toby Litt

Author:Toby Litt [Toby Litt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910296912
Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
Published: 2018-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

12

HUSBANDMAN

Like most children, I wanted to know what my parents were like before they became my parents.

My mother said very little on the subject, although she gradually let me understand (when I was old enough) that my father hadn’t been her only boyfriend. My father, without meaning to, gave me quite a deep glimpse into one of his might-have-beens.

By the time these revelations happened, I already knew about my father’s life after he finished doing National Service. A friend called David Sutherland, who was studying at Trinity College, Dublin, had said to him something like, ‘Come on over, the craic’s great, and they’ll let just about anyone in.’

The young David, mostly – I expect – to please his mother, began a law degree. The craic was great. This was Dublin in 1958. He had digs in the Merrion Square house where Oscar Wilde was born.* He bought the writer Brendan Behan a pint – everyone did. After a year, he gave up on the Law and switched to German and geography. (This was easy for him – he already spoke German and had a photographic memory, so could remember maps at a glance.) He wrote a play. He began to haunt the antiques shops.

One Trinity-era story has my father-to-be drunkenly attacking a privet hedge, along the front of college, only to find it pristine the next day. Further attempts to desecrate its infuriating perfection were only met by further miraculous moonlight repairs.

Another story finds him arrested on O’Connell Street for crawling on hands and knees, barking like a dog, or perhaps for being so drunk he thought this normal behaviour. The Dean of Trinity is brought to the police station, to bail out the disgraced undergraduate. When he appears in the cell, Dad looks up at the Dean and says, ‘I see they got you, too’.

David Sutherland, the friend who enticed my father to Dublin, was rich – he drove an Aston Martin, and his father part-owned the company. I think there was a certain amount of whizzing very fast down country lanes. My father still has friends from this time, male and female. But he hadn’t kept touch with ex-girlfriends.

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