Y’dig?

They were four or five inches wide, over a foot long and made of a reddish brown leather. One of the tawse was serrated, the slits in the leather forming strands about nine inches long. Tawse, according to my Oxford American dictionary, were formerly used for punishing children in schools, except in my case. I never saw them in any school I attended, my father had them made in the shipyard where he worked and he brought them home to use on me, or maybe to scare me when I was about four of five.

I never saw him much for the first years of my life. As he put it himself, he worked all the hours God sent for the only time there is full employment under the capitalist system is when there’s a war on. Submarines would come into Belfast from the Atlantic fleet having been pounded and depth-charged by German warships and with men working night and day, they’d be refitted and back at sea within forty eight hours.

In my early years I was so unused to seeing my father that when I did see him, I cried. I was terrified of him. Later, when the tawse appeared, the terror reached new levels. He hung them on a nail he’d knocked into the wall beside the fireplace, so, as he said, they’d be in easy reach for him and my mother. The coal fire in our living room fire was the only source of heat and even the hot water for the house was heated by a boiler at the back of the fire. The fireplace in houses like ours was the focal point of the house, and my attention was never far from the tawse.

I couldn’t articulate much of what I felt at the time but there was an acute sense of betrayal, of injustice, and deep inside me I  knew something was very wrong – how could my father love me, his only child, if he needed to present me with the terror of this instrument in full view of everyone who came into the house? I can’t remember getting hit my them, but that seemed neither here nor there, and their presence slowly turned my fear to aversion, then to hate. My father was popular and well-respected, outside in the street people called him Mr. Wherry, whereas they mostly called each other by their first names. He was always joking with the young guys, a marked contrast to how he treated me.

One day the tawse disappeared. My father searched the house, looked in every cranny and cupboard, he raked through the ashes in the grate to see if I’d thrown them in the fire. There was no trace of them in the grate or anywhere else in the house. The disappearance of the tawse was a subject of conversation and speculation for years afterwards and the mystery of what I’d done with them was never solved. Indeed, It’s only now in writing of this that the truth of what happened to them is plain. If it wasn’t me who took them, it can only have been my mother. She must have gotten rid of them and too subtle to admit it to my father.

Many years later and long after I’d left home at 17 for good, I learned that my aunts and uncles used to tell my father that he was far too hard on me and furthermore, I wasn’t the sort of kid who was going to take it for any longer than I had to. I never realized at the time what a terrible blow it was to my mother when I went to live in England just weeks before my 18th birthday, but when she was dying and I told her I loved her, she said through her pain, “You couldn’t wait to leave me.” There was no denying the truth of this, and I wanted to ask her whose fault she thought that was, but for once in my life I kept my mouth shut and said nothing.

admin Awareness, Knowledge, Truth, Understanding, human brain, ydig Beating children, Domestic violence