Fists

Kids’ birthday parties. This one was in a room three stories high, full of slides and tunnels and swings and pools of plastic balls “And”, said my son breathing deeply, “great, it doesn’t smell of piss."
For two hours lads and lasses with a median age of six tore up and down ramps, slid spinning and swerving down tubes of dark, played hide and seek. At one point there were five in the chilling area with its small chairs and tables. The three girls still had their cardies on and were sitting elegantly chatting, with lots of eye contact and meaningful gestures. The boys had their shirts off and sat on the backs of their chairs with their feet on the seats, sweating and silent. It was the girls, though, who came to the adults in tears, because of emotional anxiety or strain, unkind things said or nothing said at all.
Next evening I was watching three of the lads fighting, all-in wrestling, pummelling with hands and heels, heads and knees, jumping on each other, sitting on heads, rolling and thrashing, total commitment to whole body impact. They were young animals. They were five, six and eight years old. It was just before bath time, and the five year old was on the point of complete exhaustion. Every minute or so he’d take ten seconds out, lie absolutely relaxed, then throw himself squealing and growling back into fray. When he could hardly stand I sent them all off to the bath. No tears before bedtime, though they had all taken bumps and thumps that under other circumstances would have sent them squalling to their mums.
I’m no fighter myself, a physical coward in fact. I would endure a fair amount of humiliation to avoid the pain of a fist in the face. But fighting is in the culture and the nature of a lot of males. In the old days men from my village used to meet men from Lizard on the cliffs above Dollar Ogo and fight. Later, in Cumbria, Workington would fight Whitehaven, Aspatria would fight Maryport, Wigton would fight among themselves and everyone would go to Carlisle for a Saturday night punch-up.
I was discussing all this with my son, father of the five year old, how natural, even hard-wired fighting seemed to be. Sure, he said, when he was younger, a good fight was the pleasantest way to finish a night out with the lads.
The sociable fight, like the little lads’ rough and tumble, is fighting as sport, groups of four or five against each other, in there with the fists by choice. I once heard a woman speaking, a Quaker pacifist, about the moral necessity of knowing how flesh and bone feels against the knuckles. She said that the most dangerous men are not those who know that feeling, the potential crunch. The ones we should fear are the clean and obsessive ones who have always shunned the violent contact of their own skin with others’, who cannot fully imagine the reality of bloodied stumps and splintered bone; they, she said, will be the ones who will give word to launch the missiles and bombs against unknown people far away, the ones whose damage to the human frame will come by the ton.