Generations

From the prologue to a private memoir for my now-adult son, it gets into some of my feelings about the generations of our lives.

It had been two years that I’d been taking you to the kick-boxing gym in London’s East End, and something was beginning to change. When we'd begun, and you were just 11, you'd often end your sparring sessions by diving to grab onto your teacher's ankles, gleefully holding while he tried to step away; playful as a bear cub wrestling with the adults.

Now though, close to 13, you were concentrating on real boxing in the practices: connecting with quick, accurate punches and kicks: twisting your body into them; whapping into the cushioned hand pads that Stuart – your teacher – held out as moving targets for you.

This day, mid-July and with the friend you usually shared lessons with away in America, Stuart was working you especially hard. He always had an undercurrent of teasing affection – he'd known you your whole life, his family being longstanding friends - but that also allowed him to switch into a harder mode: insisting that you do real punches, and real hooks; quick-shifting slips to the side and all the rest.

The boxer Stuart chose for you to spar with that day was Ian, a London fireman in his mid-20s; especially fit from weights and his training in emergency rescue; not at national level (as several of the other gym members were), but a good solid London kick-boxer. You two sparred, first slowly, then at medium speed, with Stuart sometimes calling in instructions. And then, when Ian let loose with a quick right front kick, you smoothly moved around it and came up on Ian's now briefly exposed side. You stretched one arm behind his back, grasped his raised leg with your other arm, then lifted him and swept his supporting foot. For a brief moment you were holding him up, and then – whoosh! – you flung Ian down to the mat in a takedown.

No one was hurt, for Ian knew how to fall, and you'd thrown him neatly. But you stepped back and stared at what you’d accomplished, as did Stuart – who I could see from where I was sitting, on the cement ledge beside the mat, was already beginning to grin. Ian got up, and gave you a high-five, and then you both continued. Once the session was over, and you and I were walking back from the gym, down London’s Old Street, past the low Victorian buildings and small pubs, we chatted as usual, easily about the rest of the day: but both of us had that same near grin. An apprenticeship was over: adult life was no longer around a distant corner.

When I’d been a child, much younger than you, I remember wrestling with delight with my own father. I and as many of my sisters as could fit would dive on and try to pin him, but he'd twist – and quite unfairly tickle – and then, with a welter of giggling children holding tight on to his shoulders, he'd stand up, and look befuddledly to one side or another, asking out loud Where oh where could we be. He promised me that when I was 15 he’d no longer be able to outwrestle me. But that was too far away to imagine in any clear way. He was a strong man, yet to us he was far greater than that: an infinitely powerful entity, whom we could safely clamber on forever. But he was already near 60 when my first memories of him began – as you know I was a child late in his life, the very last in a large family – and just a few years later, when I was 10, heart problems he'd repeatedly had finally led to his death.

I was startled: beyond measure pummelled by this violation of the universe. Strength and support should not disappear, but now they had. For several years, well into my teens, I was often quiet, aching at this gap. But in time its distance became manageable: I grew up and enjoyed several careers; by 30 greatly wanted to start a family of my own, which became you and your sister.

When you were just about 12 months old, two older relatives from America came visiting. They'd both known my father well. It was a sunny day in our London apartment, and you fast-crawled over, then grabbed on to the edge of the couch where they were sitting, and pulled yourself up to a wobblingly proud standing position. And my relative on the couch, who’d known my father a generation even before I'd been born, put his hand out for you to grasp, and looked you in the eyes, and slowly said ‘Sam. Bodanis’. For he had known that as my father's name as well, and life – in you, one eager standing toddler – was starting to come full circle.

Now, walking from the boxing gym, loose paper fragments tossed up into the air from the Old Street traffic, I realized: it’s just a few months till your bar mitzvah; your official coming of age. I knew very little of my father, and although I spent hours on end chatting with you and playing, there were many things you knew little of about me. My memories of our years together in your earliest youth were already fading: overlain by new activities. I realized: I wanted to write a book recounting at least some parts of our 13 years so far together; working in memories of my own past, and my father, along the way. This is what words can preserve. It’s the book I would have wished to receive when I was young. It will be a gift, for the future, to you, my son.