It was with a sense of grey despair that I read of a young father in England being forbidden, by some politically constipated magistrate, either to live in his home or to see his son for six months. Daddy had — in my opinion, quite rightly — given his son a smart couple of smacks on his backside when the boy tried walking in front of a moving car. ‘You will live apart from your family until your trial in six months’ time,” snarled the outraged beak. ‘What is more, in the interim, you will only be allowed to visit your son in the company of an approved third person.”
Justifying their action in arresting the man, police officials said ‘the level of force used was over and above what is necessary to discipline a child”. Against what established criterion was this decision made, one wonders. Is there some sort of ‘smackalizer” English policemen carry around, a sort of parental violence meter, used like a breathaliser. Or does the 18-year-old arresting constable use his discretion?
Talk about a nanny state and the first one that springs to mind is, as shown above, New Labour’s version of England. In its almost psychotic need to be politically correct, Tony Blair’s government has long since lost the plot.
While it arrests fathers for smacking their kids, the same British government — responding obediently to directives from Washington — sends the country’s young men to be blown up in Iraq. In its pilgrim enthusiasm to protect children’s rights, the same British government pays not the slightest attention to installing some sort of control over commercial television’s children’s programmes, which are dedicated to brainwashing rugrats into such desirable social disciplines as ‘brand loyalty” and ‘consumer choice”. You can just hear the Home Office psychologist: ‘Don’t you dare smack little Johnny for emptying his porridge over granny’s head. Instruct him instead. Make him draw faithful reproductions of the Sony, Coca-Cola and Cadbury trademarks.”
What is next? Will governments like New Labour expand their remit? Will parents be drilled in how loudly they may address their children when educating them in the niceties of domestic conduct? If mummy’s reported shouting at her brat at a volume in excess of acceptable decibels, will some magistrate order that she be fitted with a sound- reduction muzzle for six months?
Over the long and brutalised years of his upbringing, I regularly assaulted my son. The sheer savagery of my attacks on his frail little body was fuelled by the seriousness of his offences. Setting fire to the garage at the age of five deserved appropriate response, I felt. Today my son is a fine young man with a fine job and shows no negative signs whatsoever of a rigorously disciplined young life. The only thing that stopped me beating him was that, inevitably, he grew too big and strong. One day he wrenched the sjambok out of my hand and chased me around the garden.
Why did I beat my son? The answer is quite simple: I, in my turn, was also well flogged. Remember Auden? ‘I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.” Child abusers are almost invariably those who have been abused themselves. It started quite early for me. Quince sticks applied to the bare legs for quite minor infractions like hiding under the table so as to look up ladies’ dresses. Steadily the violence erupted from there, became a long painful line of welts, bruises, oedematous hands, bleeding cane-lesions. I was at a boarding school which, like others of its kind, was a crucible of physical injury of one sort or another. Such ugly cruelties are dispensed after lights out, they would embarrass the Marquis de Sade himself.
‘I think it’s time you met Betsy,” the headmaster would drool as he selected a particularly well-oiled rattan cane from his rack. By the time we got to the caning we were already wounded. We had an arithmetic master with giant hands and pinching fingernails like little curved chisels. After his classes the boys would compare the haemotomas on their upper arms.
It didn’t get a lot better when my discipline was under the benevolent supervision of Catholic Christian Brothers. Their favourite was a dense leather strap with a whalebone core. Whipped viciously onto the open palm, one stroke for every Latin declension misremembered. You couldn’t hold a pen for a day.
Was I ruined beyond repair by all this gratuitous ferocity? When, as a disgusting, drinking, smoking, swearing, unwashable teenager, a large bony uncle stepped in and in perfect calmness took me around to the lawn at the back of the house and literally beat the daylights out of me, was I irreparably emotionally fractured? I don’t think so and the uncle must have cursed at the number of times thereafter he had to pump up his flat tyres. All five of them. If I was feeling generous, I did the spare, too.
I am quite sure the do-gooders will flap their arms at this gentle nostalgia. But then the same humanly philanthropic lobby will probably trespass into our bedrooms next, telling us what positions will threaten our dignity, what mutterings tend to degrade. It’s all been done before.