ONE day in primary school, about 1960, I was with other boys in my class playing a game of football in the school yard, supervised by the teachers when I heard a little boy screaming.
I turned to see what was happening and the teacher was slapping a child about the head with his hand.
The child was the younger brother of one of my classmates. He had just started school so was about six years old.
The teacher was, at that time, about 27.
This six-year-old had given grave offence, apparently, though how he could have done or said anything to warrant being beaten about the head is hard to imagine.
Actually he thought he was being funny. He’d cracked a joke and it hadn’t worked.
At a pinch we might wonder if he had been misheard and the teacher had thought the child had said something obscene.
But there he was, teacher himself, slapping this child’s head as if he was trying to swot away something repulsive.
And what did we do?
We sided with the teacher of course, told the little boy he should have more respect. We resumed the game when the teacher called us to order again.
Here’s another story about the same teacher.
There was a boy in our class I’ll call Sandy.
Sandy’s father was a soldier in the British army on the Rhine and Sandy was living with an aunt.
The father had come home on leave and Sandy, at 11 years old, missed him so much when he returned to his regiment that he tried to make his own way to Germany.
This caused him to miss school for a few days.
When he returned, this teacher call him out to the front of the class for a caning.
He took off his jacket and draped it across the back of his chair and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. Then he laid about Sandy with the cane, not just on the hands — there were only so many times a boy could keep holding his hand out.
He swiped the cane across his arms and when Teddy fell weeping to the floor the teacher continued to lash at him, breathless with exertion and rage.
More than thirty other boys in that class will have gone home and told their parents what the teacher had done.
Well, it was a long time ago. Maybe somebody complained. Maybe the headmaster had a word with him. But he should have been arrested and charged with criminal assault on a child. He wasn’t.
He went on to be a trainer of teachers, his reputation untarnished, perhaps, for all I know, even reinforced.
I could fill a book with stories of teachers beating children.
Corporal punishment was legal in those days but surely many routine beatings went far beyond what the law allowed. Or were there no limits?
I have been thinking about this because of an RTÉ programme last week, Leathered, which described the culture that allowed this, particularly against boys taught in schools run by the Irish Christian Brothers.
The Christian Brothers have been shamed by accounts of sexual abuse of children.
No such shaming attends the disclosure of the beatings.
I think this is because they were so routine. All men of my age in their schools suffered them and we don’t want to claim to be exceptional or to present as victims.
One of the most common responses when you ask us about the times we were beaten is to say, “Sure it never did me any harm.”
Or, “sure if you went home and told your mammy your father would take the belt to you too".
Actually, my father never took a belt to me.
One of the common features of stories about the beatings is that they were performative.
The men doling them out would laugh off what they were doing, bring a sense of fun to it.
Brother Gibbons - who is dead now - had this wee thing he did of giving a child ‘a wee warning’.
He’d hold out one of the boy’s hands and say, “I’m not going to slap you; I’ll just give you a wee warning.” And as he said it he would drop the leather strap lightly onto the boy’s hand, over and over again.
I counted him doing this sixteen times on my friend as he sank to his knees weeping, his hand raw red, while Brother Gibbons continued to smile and repeat his line, as if it was all just as much for our amusement as his.
And perhaps one of the other reasons we didn’t complain and don’t make much of it now is that we were ashamed of ourselves. We sided with the teacher. We had to come back into the class and please him as best we could, day after day, for years.
Their sadism was our normal.
