Spare the rod and spoil the child

I have been asked by Glenn at anewbelief, to write an account of not only my experiences of being abused as a child, but also of the effects of the abuse that remained with me over the ensuing forty something years.  What follows is merely a short summary, as the full story could possibly fill a book.

Before I begin, there are two things that I cannot stress strongly enough.  Firstly I must state that despite the physical and mental abuse I and my siblings suffered as children, I do believe in the bible, teaching in proverbs, that to “Spare the Rod” is to “Spoil the Child”.

Secondly, and this may come as a great surprise to many; is how anybody who has suffered abuse themselves, could not only uphold the teaching, but practice it on their own children also.  For those of you with some perverse twist in your psyche’s that creates in you a fascination for the darker side of life, you are not about to read, “The Confessions of a Child Abuser”, or anything like it; so you will need to read the life story of some of my siblings, who to this day still suffer from the trauma of their childhood experiences. 

This story, short as it is, is nevertheless one of triumph and not one of disaster.  I may have once been a victim but I am not one now, nor have I ever been as far as I am aware.

Like so many other verses in the Bible, this proverb is also often misquoted.  You are no doubt familiar with the verse that is probably misquoted more than any other.  You may have heard it many times as: “Money is the Root of All Evil”.  The actual quote is that it is the "LOVE of money which is the root of all evil!"

Most gardeners will tell you that roses need to be cut back at the end of each growing season, at least to the first two buds on each stem.  The reason for this is that without the pruning, next years growth would produce long spindly stems with small blooms having a week scent.  With pruning, the shrub apparently starts life anew each spring, but what is unseen underground is a strong root system that develops more each year, taking more nutrients from the soil and producing a shrub with sturdier stems and an abundance of fragrant blooms that are a delight to anyone who sees them.

You can no more turn a Rose into a thing of beauty by starving it, thrashing it to within an inch of its life, verbally abusing it, locking it in a dark cupboard or totally ignoring it, than you can produce a well balanced worthwhile adult from a child treated in similar fashion!

The rod which we should not withhold from our children is the rod that is used to guide cattle.  I will repeat this as it is so important.  The rod was used to GUIDE cattle; not to beat them with, and any Jew would be horrified to hear that some take the verse literally and inflict physical harm on their children.

While I was a teenager' an elderly lady asked me if I thought that smacking a child was right or wrong.  Not having any children of my own at that time I replied that there may be occasions when it was right to do so.  I have never forgotten what she said, even kept it close to my heart, for she said, “When you smack someone you can only ever knock them away from you; never towards you.”  Unfortunately neither my father nor his step father before him understood this and took the biblical verse literally while completely missing the true meaning behind it.

My father never knew his real father having been conceived as a result of a clandestine relationship between a smooth talking, but lesser member of the aristocracy and his mother, a young woman both gullible and naïve.  My grandmother’s family were reasonably well to do, sufficiently so as to be able to entertain royalty; but due to public opinion and the stigma attached to illegitimacy in the 1920’s, she was quietly sent away.  Eventually a man was found who had some wealth of his own, but who also saw in my grandmother, a beauty and charm that though tainted by the illegitimate offspring, was more than he could otherwise have aspired to possess.

I do not believe that either my father or step grandfather were in the slightest way cruel men, but saw themselves as upholding the best current principles and guidelines for raising children; that is as far a the corporal side of punishment was concerned anyway. My step-grandfather thought that the riding crop or horse whip was the answer to all parenting problems; and in that I believe he sowed the seeds that would bear painful fruit in our young lives. 

The Bible says:  “The sins of the parents will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations.”  Think on that any young parents reading this, that may be considering raising more than a loving hand to a child!

As the post war depression spread across the Atlantic to Europe and the United Kingdom, so businesses started to fall by the wayside and my step-grandfather’s was certainly one of them.  His answer was to turn to drink and gambling, a combination which no doubt hastened his ruin and on his deathbed he was penniless.  My grandmother continued to bring up her now teenage son in their London apartment, living off the interest from shares bequeathed to her by members of her own family. 

I remember one day seeing her looking very unhappy and asked her what was the matter.  She told me that her shares had crashed and that she had lost everything.  As a 10 year old I understood sadness, but knew nothing of stocks and shares and as everything else in my life appeared normal, I concluded that it was not a too terrible thing to have happened.

I also remember at around the same age having to show my buttocks to a policeman, who my grandmother had called to the house having been outraged by what she perceived as a cruel and vicious assault on my rear end, by a garden cane held in my father’s protesting hand.  I know it was a protesting hand because he always said that the punishments he meted out to me were going to hurt him more than they were going to hurt me. 

Funny thing though; I never saw him crying with the pain of it even once.  Perhaps he cried alone in the privacy of his study?  Who knows?  It was not all tears though, as I remember laughing on at least 3 occasions when punishments ‘went wrong’.

As I said earlier, I don’t believe my father was a cruel man; in fact I cannot recall any time in his life when I saw him doing anything cruel, nasty or spiteful to any creature or anyone apart from to his own children.  Even this, he himself did not consider to be in any way cruel or abusive but simply chastisement necessary as a means of bringing out the best in his children. 

One of my earliest recollections is from around the age of 4 when he locked my two sisters, 2 and 6 years old respectively, and myself in a bedroom until one of us confessed to treading on a snail.  Now it is quite possible that one or the other of us could have inadvertently stepped on it although neither of us had any recollection of so doing.  Equally possible was the answer that either my grandmother (on my mothers side), with whom we lived, could have done the dark and foul deed or even that a Thrush who had been in the process of taking lunch, had been frightened away by us playing.  What I do know is that after what seemed to be an interminable age, probably about an hour to a 4 year old, realizing that the day was slipping away, I confessed to, and took the punishment for, a crime that I hadn’t committed, rather than blaming it on one of my sisters.

There are two things apparent to me now; and one is that I knew that in confessing I would be subject to pain, so physical punishment was already known to me.  The second was that even at that age, I was willing to take punishment to spare another from pain or suffering.  In later life I reflected on this and wondered if some of us are born into this world with a caring disposition while others are not.  I also wondered if some of us are born with bad streaks in us while others have good streaks in them. 

Perhaps that is what makes some people seem to be intrinsically good while others intrinsically bad.  And if so; can that streak in us be enhanced or quashed through love, education or punishment during our formative years?   Perhaps later in life, having had our faults pointed out to us; can we in some way correct them ourselves?  Whichever is correct, if indeed either of them is, it is true that some of us will always see the worst in a situation while others in the same situation will see the good.

As the day dragged on, so the trepidation turned slowly to fear for what lay ahead.  As evening came and I was made to carry my bedding up the ladder, with tears in my eyes I begged and pleaded with my mother not to make me sleep in the attic.  There are two occasions that I know of where my mother intervened on behalf of her children.  I must have touched a nerve or soft spot on that day because she left me on the landing and went to speak to my father.

Despite my mother’s intervention my father's will was unbending so I eventually drifted off to a worried, frightened sleep with my worst nightmares; albeit with the covers drawn tightly around me and my head under the pillow.

My father never believed in chastising us while he was angry; all punishments should be carried out entirely without emotion – and that included those that were on the receiving end.  If you cried or made too much fuss then the punishment continued until you stopped.  You had to ‘take it like a man’, keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ and all this at the age of seven.

On returning home there was always one main job for me and then I was free for homework or reading.  The main job consisted of something like, ‘sweep, dust and polish the landing, stairs and hallway’, or ‘thoroughly clean the shed and outside lavatory’.  The secondary task was to assist my sisters with the washing up and finally at around seven in the evening, my final task was to scrub the kitchen floor.  I didn’t mind that because it gave me free access to the pantry.  My mother may often have wondered how she got through so much bread!

For that reason alone I never felt as if I was being abused!  If an angel had said to me before birth that I would be kept hungry, made to work like a slave and be privileged to be beaten three times a week, I could not have been more prepared for it.  The philosophy that developed within me during my childhood was exactly that: you worked hard, never complained, went hungry, endured pain and stole whatever time you could, to create happiness for yourself.  Of course this led to more punishments, but that was an inescapable fact of life.  Cause and effect; an upwardly spiraling circus of parent vs. child with neither having the wit to realise that keeping things the way they were, would result in things staying exactly the way they were.

So with six strokes to come, my father went in search of his cane, which for some reason was nowhere to be found.  He finally settled for my mother’s feather duster because the feathers were mounted on a cane handle.  At the first stroke the cane split longitudinally and several feathers parted company with the main flock.  At the second stroke the splits doubled, I hardly felt the cane hit me and more feathers flew off.  By the third and final stroke, I felt absolutely nothing, feathers were flying through the air like an out of control pillow fight, and the cane had all but disintegrated.  The overall effect of this caused me to burst out laughing and for once in my life; my father saw the funny side as well.

For every minute that I was late home from school I would receive one stroke of strap, or cane, but for every minute I arrived home early, I could redeem it against one of the late minutes.  Too late in my life I fear, for the dye had been cast. So by the end of the week I had accrued seventy strokes.  On the Friday night my father uncharacteristically decided to send me upstairs to get his belt, intending to punish me between radio shows.  He instructed to me bend over the balustrade and commenced the thrashing.  Unfortunately for him the free space at the foot of our stairs was quite restricted and on his second stroke he brought back his hand for the strike with such force, that on hitting the wall behind him, his finger broke.  Punishment was then suspended for the interim but how I chuckled on learning of his broken finger.

The third amusing event was at the age of fifteen during a cycle ride.  Previously I had made a somewhat glib comment about his map reading skills, which because we were in a public place passed without comment from him.  Later, he stopped his bike and coming towards me said the he was going to deal with me for embarrassing him and with that he threw a punch straight at my face.  Well he had always taught me to stand and take whatever was coming from him but on this occasion, I decided on a compromise; I turned the back of my head towards his approaching fist.  Oh yes, he still hit me but he was expecting a softer target and the consequence of the blow was that he broke three bones in the back of his hand.

Well actually it wasn’t so much a punishment scenario, more of a full frontal assault with fists and knees.  He did not emerge from that confrontation with any glory, but I can honestly say that although the winner of the event, I did not raise a hand to him or strike him.  I even made sure that when he hit the floor it was as gently as possible given the circumstances.

How could I have known?  One thing I haven’t said is that these interrogations had a side effect – they made one very observant.  As I delivered an answer to my father I would be either consciously or unconsciously watching his face and overall attitude.  At the slightest change I learnt how to predict whether I was on the right track with my answer or not and would then adjust my story to suit.  I am sure that I saved myself from much grief by using that ability.  I am equally sure that I have used these skills again and again during my adult life.  So, shame about the pain but thank you dad for sharpening my powers of observation.

The fire was between me and the rest of the house where my two children were sleeping.  With my hand on fire I carried the can of petrol into the garden and dropped it in a spot clear of the doorway.  I then noticed that it was too close to my neighbour’s fence and would without doubt set it ablaze also.  Returning, I once again picked up the flaming can and this time placed it away from anything that could be dangerous. 

Not having a key I went to the front of the house where I broke a window to gain access to the materials to put out the fire.  When all was finished I took time to look at myself.  The skin on my right hand had all but disappeared leaving a grey charred mess, while that on my left was only about half as bad.  I knew that I would need medical assistance and decided to drive the 10 miles or so to the hospital.  I started the journey in thick fog but had driven less than a mile when I realised that I would need some help.  The problem was that driving in the fog required more concentration than driving in normal conditions and I found that the fog and the pain were both fighting equally for my attention. 

I didn’t know it, but I was going into shock and had no previous experience of that.  Fortunately my sister and her husband lived close to and I drove there instead.  By the time we reached the hospital and the receptionist asked me for my personal details, I had a lot of difficulty in remembering them; I remember thinking, “Who cares – just get me into the treatment room." 

So again I find myself saying thanks dad, shame about the pain, but at least I was able to work through it, secure the safety of my children and be able to seek assistance for myself.

I found I had an enhanced sense of empathy helped by my observational abilities.  All in all many would say that I didn’t turn out too badly; but who get the thanks for that.  Perhaps only my father knows for sure whether or not he abused any of his children; maybe in the spirit world he cries all his tears for us.  My friend Glenn, who asked me to write this for anewbelief, has a strong marriage with Jill; who is gifted with exceptional psychic powers. Without knowing any of the details of my childhood, she told me that my father was proud of me and my accomplishments in this life.  I am not sure what to make of that, as it is in conflict with my Christian beliefs; but if true, I am glad.

Some have said that I have a slave mentality and that I see myself as being on earth to serve others rather than myself.  Some take advantage of me because I accept many things as they are and don’t fight enough to win battles.  Is this because I was trained to ‘Stand up and take it like a man – unflinching and unwavering’?  I don’t know!  Not one of us can relive this present life using different criteria and scenarios so I guess the only thing we can do is to continue to live this life as best we can. 

If my father were to see me pouring my heart and soul out to a counselor, telling them how hard done by I was, he would give me such a kick up the rear end that I would remain vertical for a week.  It is only by being vertical that we can look others in the eyes.  Don’t look at peoples shoes as you will only see yourself as beneath them and they will see themselves as 'above you', or better than you. 

When push comes to shove, you may well find that your inner strengths are far and away superior to theirs. You will continue on when others have fallen by the wayside.  Accept sympathy by all means, but don’t advertise for it.  Seek help from true friends and not those who befriend you for the sake of the glory that they themselves will receive.

You are all survivors and have an inner strength and courage that many can only dream of possessing.  Please, please, don’t listen to those who want you to remain a victim.  Boast of your achievements; be proud of yourself always looking for the good in every situation.  I am convinced that you will find your lives to be so much better for it.

Chris Woodruffe