The
problem was that my parents picked a real stinker. My recollections of it seem
to come straight out of Dickens: two large rather dark rooms illuminated by a
fire, with fifteen or so children, all older than me, working in small groups, supervised
by a solitary, curt, menacing old crone, who seemed to assume that I should
know what I was supposed to be doing without actually bothering to tell me.
After a couple of days of bewildered anxiety, things came to a head. The sour
old cow gave me a sum much more difficult than any I had encountered before:
say, a four-digit number divided by a three-digit number. I guessed how to do
it, and got it wrong. Without offering help, she told me to do it again. I
failed a second time; she warned me to try hard; I did; I failed again; and she
told me to hold my hand out and, grasping it firmly, she caned the palm three
times, hard. My first reaction was astonishment: none of my kindergartens had
been Catholic establishments, so I was unprepared for this kind of assault.
Then it hurt, a lot! My precious palm! When I first started having therapy
twenty-five years later, this was one of the first traumas I recalled, and I
was astonished at the power of the feelings that came flooding back: anger - no,
fury; self-pity; humiliation; a deep, deep sense of hurt; and a pure
indignation at not so much the unfairness, but the insanity of punishing
someone physically for getting an answer wrong. It is terrifying how much of
this deeply unkind, utterly pointless, in fact, mind-bogglingly
COUNTERPRODUCTIVE kind of behaviour was meted out to children over the
centuries by half-witted, power-crazed zombies like this heinous old bat - a
large proportion of such psychopaths allegedly acting in the name of an
all-loving God.
