supplicium post mortem

The American Schoolhouse—ah, where to start? Luckily, Graham already has started us off along these delectable lines, noting, among other things, that the one-room schoolhouse of American lore was in some respects gender-neutral. Men and women whacked boys and girls, usually in full view of all (due to constraints of the one room).

Graham mentioned two key examples: Tom Sawyer (in its several forms and adaptations) and Little House on the Prairie (books, but especially the TV series). Little House fashioned the imagination of many, including yours truly, and continues to fashion young minds today if reports out of the Kinky House are to be believed.

illustration by Mercer Mayer

I’d offer a couple more: The Great Brain, in which the title character gets paddled for something he didn’t do, memorably drawn by Mercer Mayer and less memorably portrayed by Jimmy Osmond in the 1978 tv movie (if anyone has a link to this video, please speak up, as I can’t find the scene in the parts of the film uploaded to u-tubby). This paddling is a great scene, even though I personally dislike the paddle as an implement (I find it rather brutish and blunt; unsubtle). It’s enjoyable because a) the victim, Tom, is such an insufferable manipulator most of the time, I don’t mind seeing him whacked unfairly; b) Tom is brave, refusing to give his tormentor, Mr. Standish, the satisfaction of seeing him cry. As narrated by Tom’s brother:

I felt tears come into my eyes as I watched Mr. Standish give Tom ten hard whacks with the paddle. The tears weren’t for the pain I knew Tom was suffering. I knew my brother could stand pain like an Indian without crying. The tears were for the humiliation I knew Tom was enduring (The Great Brain, 121).

c) Tom gets revenge on Mr. Standish, which appealed to me as a young reader, the rebel against unjust authority. But, d) ultimately Tom’s revenge is revealed as cruel and callous, earning a terrific rebuke from Tom’s father:

“I have never laid a hand on you,” Papa said, breathing heavily, “but right at this moment if I had that paddle, I’m afraid I would give you a paddling that would make the one you got from Mr. Standish seem like patty-cakes” (136-7).

I was absorbed for some time in imagining that if-statement.

From the children’s book shelves we find If You Lived in Colonial Times ¹ by Ann McGovern. I would direct the reader to page 24 “What happened if you didn’t behave in school.”

I was lucky enough once to get a first-hand encounter with the one-room schoolhouse. I grew up within field-trip distance of the Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village, which is a gigantic outdoor museum of bygone American life. People are dressed in 19th century garb, and you can make butter like they did back in the day, see men forge horse shoes, etc. There is also a one-room schoolhouse, the Scotch Settlement School. When I was in fourth grade (age 9) my class got to spend a day in it.

At that age I was in a mixed 4th and 5th grade class of about 30 kids taught by a husband/wife team. I’ll call them Mr. & Mrs. Sweet because we all adored them. They were perfectly firm and took no nonsense, but they valued fun and unconventional methods. We got to go on more field trips than any of the other classes; they’d give us long recesses when we got cagey in the winter; they kept all sorts of live animals in the room; they’d tear up your math book and skip you ahead if they thought you could handle it; they read aloud to us regularly; and they had a carpeted claw-foot bathtub, shaded by a rainbow umbrella, where you could go and read books when you’d finished your assignments.

Mr. and Mrs. Sweet also had a paddle on the wall of their classroom. This disconcerted me. As previously discussed, corporal punishment was not used at my school (although it was legal in the state), but most of us got it at home. I just didn’t know how to feel about the fact that my favorite teachers kept a paddle on the wall, and, worse, would jocularly (?) threaten kids with it from time to time. (e.g. kid getting wild would be asked sternly: Do you want a spankin’? To which the only answer was a fervent shaking of the head no.) What’s more, this paddle was covered in signatures, supposedly the signatures of those who’d been whacked with it.  The subject was far too serious for me, at age 9, to have any perspective on the Sweets’ possible tongue-in-cheek threats.

Scotch Settlement School Greenfield Village

Still with me? Right, the schoolhouse: it is winter of fourth grade and we are going to spend a day having school at Greenfield Village. We will have free dress (no uniforms), and period costumes are encouraged. Costumes!?! I wore one of my Little House on the Prairie outfits, and even better, all the other kids made an effort, and Mr. & Mrs. Sweet were wearing costumes, too! OMG!!!!!!

All morning we sat at double desks, wrote on slates, did lessons out the McGuffey Reader, and got to sample the full range of old-fashioned responses to incorrect answers and misbehavior: writing lines on the blackboard, the dunce cap, holding books out in front of you, and—yes—whipping! This is where I got a little confused about how real it all was. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, with the deep thespian instinct of all good teachers, introduced the punishments one by one, beginning with the mildest, and working up to the whipping. They looked for victims, choosing the typically naughty kids in the class, robust kids, kids who would play along. When it came time for the first whipping, Mr. Sweet put on his gravest scowl, selected a long switch from the supply, and wordlessly beckoned the naughty boy to follow him. They exited behind the blackboard wall.

The Scotch Settlement School at Greenfield Village

[When you entered the schoolhouse, there was a row of pegs for hanging your cloaks, and on each side a doorway leading to the schoolroom itself. It was to this "cloakroom" that Mr. Sweet & boy repaired.]

A hush fell over the class and then we heard it: the unmistakable sounds of a switch being applied. Thwick… thwick… “Ow!” the boy cried out plaintively. Thwick-ow! Thwick-ow!! Thwick-thwick-thwick! Sobs.

Can you imagine my uncertainty and fear?

great pic of the hooks by Devonhaupt

Soon Mr. Sweet emerged, conducting the boy by the collar. The class found this risible, but Mr. Sweet merely glared at us and deposited the boy into the corner, where he continued wiping his eyes. The twitters in the class probably communicated to Mr. and Mrs. Sweet that we were with them, but also possibly that not all of us were sure how real the performance was. I, for one, was starting to feel sick to my stomach. My seatmate, Frances (the best friend of my friend) assured me it was just pretend. But wasn’t the boy crying? I asked. His face was red. Frances wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Sweet had to whip someone. They, too, were taken off to the cloakroom and subjected to the same painful treatment. They, too, emerged rubbing their eyes. This was quickly becoming a very anxious field trip for me. I wondered when we’d get to go visit the crafts people, or have recess. As the morning wore on and more punishments were meted out, kids started to vie with one another to get punished, eager for the excitement and attention. Everyone was getting it, bad kids, good kids. You didn’t even have to misbehave for the Sweets to find a reason to include you in the drama. Frances told me not to worry; it wouldn’t be bad if I got in trouble. But I was worrying, and worrying all the more because the Sweets were running out of victims. The majority of the class had got in some kind of trouble or another. I sat very quietly at my desk and worked very hard on my slate.

The whipping reached a climax with the execution of a girl called Beth, who was generally well-behaved and a great favorite of Mr. Sweet. He summoned her to the cloakroom with thespian gravitas, we heard the requisite sounds, but when they emerged, she had her hands over her face—to conceal her passionate tears? or… was it to conceal her laughter? For Mr. Sweet was holding a broken switch aloft for the whole class to see. He wore an expression of disgust and shock, that this girl had been so very bad that she had actually broken the switch! The schoolroom exploded in laughter. If there had been a curtain, it would have fallen.

It was probably then that I began to cotton on, but unfortunately, it was time for recess, lunch, and touring the rest of Greenfield Village. Beth, who was a trustworthy friend, later revealed the stagecraft (whacking the coats, with the kids crying out).

I can’t tell you how much I would like to have a second chance at that day. Or how much I’d like to take some of my former students on such a field trip. Or even, how much I’d like to try it on with various friends who could be relied upon to rustle up authentic costumes, and swot up authentic practices. Wonder what it would take to book a field trip there today…

Norman Rockwell's classic illustration for Tom Sawyer

¹ This book is the antecedent for an in-joke M and I had. Once when we were staying at an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica, I accidentally got smashed before lunchtime on Brandy Alexanders. We retired to our room where I (uncharacteristically) took off all my clothes, sprawled across the bed, and (reportedly) said: Tell me about the colonial days! before passing out. M teased me with this thereafter whenever a drink started to go to my head. Other people took it as an amusing, drunken remark, but he and I knew I had been asking him to tell me about birching of school children in the American colonies. lol.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. This friend, like Abel (as he was forced to confess in his inspiring post on the same topic), was a teenager during the 1980s, and, also like Abel, is kinky today. (Imagine!) This friend of mine was raised by fairly straight-laced, waspy parents. Nudity was unknown beyond toddler-hood, and the facts of life were discussed in a way that tried to communicate neutral acceptance, as was the custom, but could never quite conceal her parents’ embarrassment and shame.  There was an excruciating episode–which I will not recount in detail because if you heard it you would have to pull out all of your teeth with pliers–surrounding her audition for a professional production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. She was auditioning for the part of a pert, over-sophisticated girl whose lines included the words masturbating and cunnilingus. My friend’s parents didn’t really want her to say these words, so they talked the director into allowing her to substitute euphemisms (“Playing with himself” and “uh…..”). However, they also had to explain to her why this change was happening, and this involved explaining what those words meant. This is where I will draw a veil over the episode to save us all the need for Mind Bleach. Needless to say, although she made it to the final call-back, she was not cast in the role.

That was just background for you. I could tell you more stories along similar lines, but we do all need to eat today. Let me tell you instead about my friend’s first sight of a porn magazine. She was sleeping over at her best friend’s house (let us call this best friend Frances). This would have been around 5th grade (age 10-ish). Up at the top of the coat closet, Frances’s dad had a stash of Penthouse. My friend got only a glimpse of this periodical because she reacted pretty much as Poppy described here. (Such a great post, by the way!) This encounter with Frances’s dad’s Penthouse extinguished any interest my friend had in pornography. Thus, my friend looked to mainstream fiction, stage, and film for things to think about while falling asleep at night.

Fast forward to the late 1980’s when my friend was just starting college. Her mother was at this time going through a kind of rebirth, emerging  from a long, debilitating depression occasioned by divorce. As my friend discovered one day whilst poking through her mother’s bedside table, this rebirth apparently included a sexual revolution. Because in this bedside table, my friend found some extraordinary volumes. One, Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Two, a paperback called Venus in the Country, by Anonymous. There were a couple of other books along these lines, but my friend can’t remember the titles.

Now, you may well throw up a little in your mouth at the idea of finding your mother’s secret erotica stash. You might also writhe in agony imagining my friend’s discovery that her erstwhile euphemism-toting mama was a closet tgi enthusiast. But my friend, through some self-protective twist of psychology (or psychosis) managed to close her eyes to the source of these paperbacks and merely borrow them, one at a time, on the sly to peruse in her bedroom with the door locked. When my friend had to put the books back in place, she merely pretended she wasn’t doing what she was doing. Mentally, she went on a little vacation when it came time to borrow or return these volumes, which she did many times at the end of the 1980s. I guess she had a plentiful supply of mind bleach and no qualms about using it.

You may well ask why my friend did not simply jot down the titles and go buy copies for herself. Please understand: this would have been dirty. My friend would never have been able, then, to bring herself to purchase erotica in a store (Amazon.com did not yet exist). And to possess such books, to have them staring at her all the time from inside her own bedside table? Grody! Grody to the Max, in the parlance of the 1980s. My friend could only enjoy these books (thoroughly enjoy them) because they would not be there staring her in the face the next morning. She enjoyed them because they lived elsewhere.

And oh, did she enjoy them. The Sleeping Beauty series took her already wavy imagination and twisted it into tight kinks. And the quasi-Victorian compositions by Anonymous, where to begin? A commentator on Amazon says this of Venus in the Coutry:

I have owned this book for years having stolen it from my father’s dresser when I was a teenager. It is full of non-stop sexual encounters which seem to focus on the need to educate young maidens in the ways of the world.

My friend’s memory was hazy (when I interviewed her for this post) about the plots of these books by Anonymous. She remembers one in epistolary form (possibly the aforementioned Venus). It featured a household where the mistress took delight in corrupting the young girls who came into her service. Their bedrooms were equipped with peepholes, and early on the mistress arranged to catch some young servant pleasuring herself. The poor girl was hauled before the mistress, who threatened to send her back to her parents with a full explanation of her misconduct. The girl begged mercy, and the mistress granted it, but on two conditions: one, that she submit to an exemplary chastisement at the mistress’s hands; and two, that she submit to regular inspection to ensure she never do such a thing again. The poor girl agreed.

The inspection, to save the modesty both of the girl and of the inspector, would be done anonymously. The girl would go into the cellar and bend forward with her head and torso inside the dumb-waiter. The hatch would be lowered and locked across her waist, holding her firmly in place. Shortly, someone would come along, adjust her clothing, and perform the necessary inspection, which more often than not became an opportunity for sensitizing the girl to all of her exposed parts. The girl typically found herself in such a state after the inspections (by she knew not whom) that she was forced to repair to her chamber as quickly as possible to relieve the tension (all of which the mistress observed, delighted, through peepholes).

My friend also recounted a most satisfactory scene in which the mistress permitted her close friend (and governor at a reformatory) to conduct the inspection. This scene involved use of “the school spanking strap” as well as buggery, and afterwords, the girl was taken away, destined for the reformatory or the white-slave markets, my friend could not recall precisely which.

Of course, in later years my friend became more comfortable with erotic literature and acquired a respectable library of her own, but, she told me, she mourns some of those volumes from the unmentionable bedside table, since she cannot recall their titles, and since Venus in the Country, at least, is not readily available.

I told my friend that such lost classics are the spice of life, even more delightful through the confusion of nostalgia and likely improved by the imagination. Upon reflection, she rather agreed.

What about you? What are your Lost Classics?

My first and only encounter with a hostile authority (in scene) came during my first visit to Englandland. I stayed with M for three weeks. It was our third visit, in the sixth month of knowing each other. We played a lot that trip in the voracious way that you do when you are just starting to play. The setting was still “College” (standard issue English Public School, co-ed), and RP was making inroads with his relationship to Casey, as TL was with Mark. There was an exploration of implements, and even, sometime during the visit, experimentation with That Thing (a first for both of us, and a whole other story). M was living in a small, rented flat and working his corporate job during the day. I was mooching around, attempting to write (mostly unsuccessfully), and pretty much waiting for him to get home in the evenings so we could be together.

The scene in question arose out of some joint story-telling about a certain unpleasant prefect in the House by the name of Martin Halstead. Arrogant, sadistic, scornful, he was not to be trifled with. Via some confusion on my part about the way the hot-water storage worked in that flat, Casey managed to get on the wrong side of Halstead by using up all the hot water one morning before he got to have his bath. More out-of-scene storytelling floated the idea of being “sprung” into a scene first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to this, but I wasn’t against trying. I think I didn’t know if he’d actually go through with it.

But he did.

Malcolm McDowell's character in If never beat anyone, but he looks like Halstead here.

Early morning, I found myself awakened by a very nasty specimen in College school uniform. Martin Halstead demanded that I report to the Houseroom in full uniform in five minutes. Exit.

I hauled myself from sleep, feeling 1) a combination of scared/excited that this scene was actually happening, and 2) violated, because I’d been descended on when I was asleep, wholly unprotected. At any rate, I put on Casey’s preferred uniform (gray trousers, blazer, tie) and reported to the Houseroom.

There Halstead lit into me.

MH (with profound scorn): Just what do you imagine you’re wearing, girl?

cdm: My uniform.

MH (with even greater scorn): Girls at this school wear skirts.

cdm: We’re allowed to wear the boys’ uniform, too!

MH (witheringly): Go and change. Now. And be quick about it unless you want more than you’re already getting.

I/she went off and changed, feeling uneasy and slightly gross. Not only did a skirt afford only one layer of protection, but it also made it much easier for a creep like Martin Halstead to… I wasn’t sure what. I/she was also incensed at the injustice of it. Girls were allowed to wear the boys’ uniform. It was perfectly legal, and here he was saying I couldn’t do it! I have a tendency to get overwrought about injustice I am powerless to affect. This is why torture films, like the spate of political dramas that came out in the 1980s about South Africa and South America, squicked me. Here was Martin Halstead already demonstrating his unjust authority, and the scene had not even properly begun. I felt desperate.

I returned to the Houseroom, feeling under-dressed in skirt and gray knee-socks. Halstead delivered a searingly condescending ticking-off about my insolence at having used his bath water (as if water were reserved). I needed taking down a peg, he declared. And, he informed me, that was precisely what he intended to do.

from "The Moral Reformers"

I should say that this was in most respects an authentic prefectorial scene. School literature was full of these kinds of despots, as was M’s actual Public School. By Kipling’s standards, Martin Halstead was a pussycat. Up until this moment, I had loved reading stories like this, chapters like “The Moral Reformers” in Stalky, or even the war with Flashman in Tom Brown. Now that it was happening, however, it was having a very different effect. It was pushing my powerless/injustice buttons and winding me up dangerously.

Then the sentence: Halstead announced I would be receiving 18 strokes of the cane. I can’t remember the arithmetic, but this chilled me to the bone. I had never before taken that much in one go. The most I’d ever taken was nine (I think, though possibly 12). But what really filled me with dread was the character I was facing. Martin Halstead was going to hit as hard as he could. He cared nothing for my feelings. Nothing would make him back off. He hated me and wanted to see me suffer. He intended to break me.

I removed my jacket as instructed and stood before the Houseroom table. I don’t remember now whether he announced the protection then or half-way through, but I was to get nine over underpants and nine unprotected. It was unheard-of in severity. Also, the lack of protection struck me as obscene. Here I was a 5th form girl with this Upper 6th form boy, and he proposed to cane me unprotected, without witnesses? There was no arguing with him, however; and perhaps I was beyond arguing. I was moving rapidly into survival mode.

I bent over, and the first stroke confirmed my suspicion that there would be no holds barred. It was uncompromisingly hard, and it was delivered with complete hostility. It was by far the hardest whacking I had ever received.

I don’t remember the stroke-by-stroke details (this was almost 15 years ago now), but I remember that I stayed in place; and I remember that my body was yelping involuntarily through most of the second half. What I remember most is what happened to me mentally. Pushed to my limit, I found myself very calm, and very cold. I was a million miles away from crying, breaking, or even actually caring. Under attack, I retreated into a concentration-camp-like deadness. I could never win in this situation; I could only hope to survive it intact. And the only way to keep myself intact was to hide that self very far away. My body might have been yelling, but the real me—the real Casey—was not there. This was happening to someone else, someone not-us. Martin Halstead got his licks, but he didn’t get us. He would never touch  us.

When it was over and I stood up, I think he was disappointed. I was utterly dry-eyed, neutral, and stony faced. Robotically, I gave the replies he wanted. I only pretended to look him in the eye when he demanded it. He did his best at a devastating after-jaw, but eventually he dismissed me.

Unperturbed, I left the Houseroom. And Casey, wearing her entire uniform—blazer, shoes, and all—got back into bed and crawled under the covers, where she stayed most of the morning in a kind of suspended animation.

I think M kissed me goodbye before leaving for work, and I think I faked it enough to reassure him. I can’t remember very well.

Later in the morning, Casey got up, and I say Casey because the adult me was nowhere to be found. She had taken charge and no amount of pulling myself together could have ejected her. Casey, still stony, got up and wrote a long and measured letter to Dr. Malcolm (the Headmaster) registering a formal complaint about what had happened that morning. She was well aware that complaining wasn’t Done. She did not care. At this point, she took a perverse pleasure in violating School Practice.

The thrust of her complaint was that it had been unseemly for Halstead to have caned her unprotected without any witnesses. She also argued that, while she may have deserved punishment, the punishment given was out of proportion to the crime, and that a common understanding of uniform had been contradicted. She appealed to Dr. Malcolm to uphold justice.

She and I went out later, around the time M was due home, so that he could find her letter and figure out what to do about it. I seem to remember later that evening (right after we got back, or later?) Casey being summoned to see Mr. Prior. She went, still dead-in-heart, figuring he, too, could do whatever he wanted to her. She was beyond caring.

But Mr. Prior was no Martin Halstead. He was distressed to have learned what had happened. In fact, he informed her, Martin Halstead had been stripped of his prefect status. He would not be tormenting anyone else. Casey, gobsmacked. Furthermore, Mr. Prior wanted to apologize personally to Casey, for having failed to keep a sufficient eye on her. It shouldn’t have happened, he told her. It wouldn’t again.

This was not the end of the trip, and we played many more scenes, though none that hostile or that severe—not then, and not, that I recall, ever (at least with me bottoming). There wasn’t any blame on either side for this scene, but we both learned something about me, and about the ice-cold survival instinct I appeared to possess.

I have read a lot, then and today, from people who achieve a kind of release or catharsis from very hard scenes, from being taken beyond their limits. It always sounds appealing in theory, but M and I both learned in that early scene that it would never work that way with me. He, as a bottom, had cravings to be pushed like that, but as a top, he concluded that a) I would never respond that way; I would merely go dead; and b) if by some extraordinary action I ever was pushed that far, the results would be utterly destructive.

I know many people are different from me in this regard, but knowing this about myself has saved me from thinking I might enjoy playing with hostile authority. Despite having organized myself around it as a child, it was, and still is, a place with nothing but damage to offer me.

And connected with this—in my retrospective mind—is RP’s instinct, sharpened over time, generally to give Casey less than she asked for. She had, and has, an enormously provocative streak, and in the beginning he sometimes mistook it for a request for lots of whacking. As previously discussed, there were times in that first year when she would bring home a pile of dockets from an absolute train-wreck of a day. Pretty soon, he cottoned on to the fact that this was an expression of anger, a self-destructive impulse, like her impulse to break things or tear up her punishment book. Pretty soon he got to the point where he would leaf through her pile of dockets, chuck them aside, and proceed to deal moderately but non-legalistically with her, giving her just enough to stop the downward spiral and not a touch more. Sometimes he refused altogether to whack her and would simply grab her and hug her against her angry will.

Where, dear Lord, is another man like this?

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

When you live like a hermit as I do, you occasionally fall into correspondences. Since I met M via just such a correspondence, I’m always hopeful that one of them might prove interesting long term.  Today while slogging through the woods in the snow, dogs in tow, I recalled an autobiographical essay I sent to a correspondent earlier this year. It struck me, particularly in light of Emma Jane’s Christmas present, as suitable subject for a post. So, slightly adapted, here it is. I don’t think the correspondent in question actually read the whole thing in the first place, and who can blame them, it being rather long. Note to self not to overwhelm skittish correspondents with lengthy self-revelation.

In previous exegeses I have written about the growth of my tgi imagination from its unlikely beginnings in the Waspy, industrial Midwest. Besides sharing photos of my dolls, I haven’t written much about the girl I was before adolescence, a girl who bears slight relation to casey, but is far more anxious and goodie-goodie. This is her story, my story:

Despite  feeling very peculiar when reading or watching stories about tgi, I was terrified of and squicked by the reality. Part of this was a negative response to having received it in the way that I did (more on which another time). Part of it, though, has to be the gargantuan dependence on the idea of myself as a Good Girl (read: compliant, accommodating, approval-worthy, Nice). I’ve met several people into tgi who have said they didn’t misbehave while growing up. Neither did I. My parents employed a bit of light hand spanking with my brother and me for what I think of as “getting out of hand” moments. Never were there rules understood in advance, broken deliberately, and punished. The idea of deliberate punishment (whether physical or not) was enough to send me into a meltdown–because being punished would have meant that I was Bad, not Good, not me, and not lovable. I was anxious enough with my parents’ un-articulated boundaries. I was addicted at a young age to the crack of their approval. I lived in fear of losing it.

When I was six, just after joining children’s theater, I went to try outs for The Three Little Pigs. The deal at children’s theater was that our director, Mrs. R, would try a bunch of people in a bunch of roles, and you could say what your preferences were, but you had to accept whatever role you were ultimately given, with good grace. Be a Trouper. She had me try out for all the pigs and even the wolf. I was burning with shame and anxiety because I was terrified of being cast as the wolf. That would mean I was Bad. I knew I wasn’t my character, but I was young enough that I felt that their…moral state?…connected itself to me, that people would judge me as they judged the character. If I was forced to play the Big Bad Wolf, then I might not only be Bad, but it would mean I was the kind of girl who deserved to be punished, maybe even spanked! Even the first or second pigs caused me anxiety; they, too, were Bad because they lazily built their houses of inferior material. They deserved their tragedies, and worse. The third pig was the only role that would allow me to sleep at night. By massive luck, or by type casting, I got the third pig. You really cannot imagine my relief.

A little later, I was cast as a village girl in a play called The Little Juggler. It was only my third or fourth show, and I had only a few lines. We village children were mean and bratty and teased the vegetable sellers and little juggler boy. Mrs. R came up with a bit where the vegetable seller gave me a swat with a carrot after a snarky comment my character made. I froze with embarrassment, shame, confusion, horror. I almost cried during rehearsal. I was sick to my stomach for days over it and eventually was forced, through sheer desperation, to assert myself enough to talk another girl into trading lines with me. I couldn’t explain why, just that I really really really wanted to trade lines. She agreed. Later Mrs. R asked what had happened with the lines. I think I blushed beet red and near-tears blurted that we had just wanted to swap lines. She let it go, though I’d no idea why. As an adult, I now suspect she recognized one of those awkward and inexplicable childhood embarrassments, and had mercy on me.

So, spanking as a real life topic was not the slightest bit funny for me. Everyone I knew got it growing up. It was a standard punishment along with grounding and having your allowance taken away. At school there were playground games that included the “rickets” or the “spanking machine”, i.e. having to crawl through the legs of your playmates and be swatted by them as you passed. Other kids found this raucous fun. When in 3rd grade [age 8] we had “moving up day” and visited the big 4th grade classes, they played a ball game called SPUD at recess. When you lost a round, you got an S, then a P, etc. If you got up to SPUD, you had to go through the spanking machine. I felt sick to my stomach and insisted on watching only. It made me so very frightened of 4th grade.

When you misbehaved at my school, you got Sent To The Bench (which Mark hijacked in the first story he wrote for me, The Benefit of the Doubt). The Bench was a pew-like bench outside the Assistant Headmaster’s office, just inside the main entryway. Everyone could see you there. Astoundingly (or depressingly) I was never sent to the bench in all my time there, surely one of the few if only students for whom this was true. In reality, you got told off, or in middle school got a detention with the telling off. Before middle school, I had the idea that you might get spanked. Some other kids wound me up (or fanned the flames of rumor) by telling me they heard that was true. (Reality: not!)

Perhaps you are beginning to understand the little nervous wreck I was underneath that perky, A-student, nice girl in the Lilly Pultizer dresses and school uniform? She’s still here a little bit, but M (and RP) effected a lot of rehabilitation over the years (for instance, RP’s institution of Casey’s four rules).

I wore underpants at all times except when in bath or swimming costume, another habit that was whacked out of me (Casey) by RP, who forbade it under nightwear as unhygienic and perversely over-modest.

Once when I was 8 or 9, I asked my dad if French kissing was dirty. I asked it rather boldly, expecting him to 1) be impressed that I’d talk about French kissing and 2) say Right you are, it sure is. He looked at me for a second, probably surprised, and said: Of course not. It’s wonderful. I didn’t really believe him, and on some semi-conscious level thought he was giving me a party line.

I felt enormously conflicted and peculiar when my mom would read me a book called The Lonely Doll [discussed by EJ and earlier by Adele] which featured a father teddy bear taking his son across his knee, as well as  his quasi-ward, the lonely doll. It’s a terrifically twisted book–I mean, teddy bears spanking dolls?–but then a good deal of my tgi play involved my dolls spanking each other. See, I never spanked them because that would be Mean, and I wasn’t Mean, I was Nice! However, they were not all nice, and some of them were quite strict school teachers or even orphanage matrons/masters, so I was able to identify with some of my poor Holly Hobbie dolls who suffered under such wonderfully mean grown-ups. The Lonely Doll might actually be a bit of a metaphor for meeting M (if you overlook the nauseating layers of twee). Whatever her name was, this doll lived alone. Then Mr. Bear and his son came along, and she had friends. But then she and bear jr. let their hair down and played a little wild and made a mess; and Mr. Bear spanked them! She was so upset because she was sure they would leave her (because she was Bad! Not lovable!), but actually they stayed. And she wasn’t lonely, and Mr. Bear presumably dealt matter-of-factly with her and bear jr. when they misbehaved as they should like little animals exploring a wide world.

I say there is not much of this girl left in me. I say she bears only slight resemblance to casey. Is it true, though? Casey might be more willing to be naughty. She might not shatter under the shame of being punished. But she is still a recovering good girl. She is, I am. There is still work, we think, for someone to do.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will be sick to the back teeth by now of hearing about the great bookcase cleaning-and-reorganization of 2009. I was so physically exhausted yesterday that my legs and arms were trembling. Some of this was the exertion of assembling, moving, and improvisationally securing to wall of the newest overflow bookcase. But otherwise it was a day filled with lifting, reaching, humping, etc. The rule for the day was to finish everything I started, on the spot. I have a deep-seated habit of leaving things almost-done. I’m trying to retrain myself.

I never listen to the radio except in the car, but yesterday I put on WCBS FM and was treated to great music from “the sixties, seventies, and eighties.” The music plus the work took me back to all the move-packing I did in high-school and college, as well as memories of moving into my current home at age 24. I made myself throw away M’s scratched plastic sunglasses (which resided on the bookcase), and this only enhanced the sensation of living some past identity. I really do not want to go back to my 20’s, to that person whose “family” was my mom, brother & sister, dad & stepmother. You could not pay me enough money to relive ages 15-25. Yet here I am, as aimless as I was then, but with more responsibilities. Actually, I had more aim then. I was going to be a famous theater director. Then I was going to be a famous writer. The fact that these are no longer my aims does not translate to failure in my mind, but success – in escaping the grip of my childhood worship of Accomplishment. Today what I want is the Real Deal in my personal life, a family of my own, a vibrant spiritual life, and the space and permission to write all the books that are in me. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind being a famous writer, but the best kind of famous for me would be 1) making sufficient money from it; 2) being known and respected enough to be asked to read and speak places; 3) being known and respected enough not to have to shop my  projects around. I would not want to be famous like, say, Neil Gaimon and have a frantic, celebrity life that required an assistant. I would never want to be famous enough to have the media pry into my personal life.

The bookcase reorg. project had begun months ago, but yesterday I woke up to find that TL had written on the board, “Wednesday is Procrastination Busting Day.” Oh, brother. To hear her tell it, if you quit procrastinating, things take a lot less time than you feared. In reality, the bookcases took a lot longer than I feared, which – Newsflash TL! – is why I procrastinate in the first place. But here’s the kicker: I’m in the shower at 9.30 pm after 13 hours of work, hardly able to stand up (pity party!), and there’s this voice saying, Ok but you still haven’t made any progress with the book project (a typesetting job that has nothing to do with the bookcase reorg). And as much as cdm would like to whine and say this voice belongs to TL, it really doesn’t. In reality TL was saying: Well done, Casey. Things look great. You worked so hard today and I’m very impressed with your determination. Ice-cream tomorrow! Casey did not hear this, however. Casey only heard: You’re still not doing enough. It was this same, sinister voice, I suspect, that panicked us as we tried to fall asleep with worries about what on earth we will do when one day we have to pack up this whole house and move somewhere else.

RP and M were onto this demon, and managed Casey with it in mind. Hence rules #2 and #3. Casey’s four rules, by the way:

1. Be honest about feelings and needs.
2. Be kind to yourself.
3. Do what you want, not what you should.
4. Ask other people what they feel, don’t decide things for them.

Yesterday, I was capable of identifying that demon, intellectually rejecting the way it wanted to poison a day’s hard work, but I wasn’t able to dispute with it vigorously, as RP could. I had no sword, no chariot, no bow. I had no one valiant on my side.

I did come across some very old dockets. I think these were something M produced before we got the docket book. They date from the first autumn of his residence here in Gotham, my first as a full-time teacher. What they were doing tucked away in the memoir of a neurosurgeon, I have no idea. Seeing his handwriting, even only his initials, is worse even than seeing his photograph. Why should his writing persist when he can’t? Clearly, I am nowhere near being ready to tackle the Basement Reorg. or the Man-closet Cleanout.

The last docket appears to have been issued by a choleric and muddled member of staff at St. Mary’s. Click to see the back. I don’t remember the story behind this one, but I think RP ended the escalating drama by informing Casey he’d called Miss K, sorted her out, and would now be sorting Casey out, ha ha. I like his little “as discussed” on the back.  November 6, 1996 looks to have been a train-wreck of a day. Eventually, RP stopped biting at things like a pile of dockets and just did what was required to stop the downward spiral. Sigh.

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

Riding, the English Public School novel I wrote about before, has turned up on Google Books (limited preview). Both volume one and volume two appear to be live now. In volume one, I quite like this scene. In volume two, you might as well go for the chapter called “Crime and Punishment“, though to be fair there’s a lot to choose from in both volumes. If your limited preview gets exhausted, you can always buy it.

Tell England, continued…

One thing that enthralls me (and also depresses me) about the relationship in Tell England between Radley and his students, and that’s how acceptable it is for him to be alone with the boys. He can take Ray’s hand and hold it while he talks intimately with him; he can work his psychology and let Ray know that he has strong opinions of his conduct and character. Today that’s all been perverted – and that’s the part that depresses me.

First, a teacher (especially a man) would never be allowed to be alone behind closed doors with a boy (or girl). In all schools where I’ve taught, there are windows in the classroom doors specifically to prevent this kind of intimacy, to “protect” both adult and child from such an intimacy, or the suggestion of one.

Second, it is generally frowned upon to express a strong, direct opinion of a student’s conduct or character. That’s considered judgmental (a negative thing now); we are expected to take a more morally neutral approach in which we hope to reveal to the student that such-and-such an action isn’t really in their best interests. Children are rather left to work out right and wrong for themselves, except in matters of political correctness in which they are subtly manipulated into self-censorship under the guise of tolerance. All this I find ultimately cruel.

Third, Radley’s love of boys – as un-sexual and unexploitative as it is – would be branded pedophilia today, and how much poorer they all would be! Without the intimacy, those personal lessons cannot be taught, or learnt. Viz:

I know now that the feeling for all the boys, as he gazed down upon them from his splendid height, was love – a strong, active love. We were young, human things of soft features gradually becoming firmer as of shallow characters gradually deepening. And he longed to be in it all – at work in the deepening. We were his hobby. I have met many such lovers of youth. Indeed, I think this is a book about them (105 in Google books).

Fourth, Radley’s show of strength in the corridor scene would be subject of a suit. Today, everyone’s minds (adult minds, at least) are turned ever outwards, away from the crucial task of teaching, and occupied with the possibility of criticism –  from parents, administration, law, the EU/government, students themselves. All that self-censorship drains men and women of the energy required to give fully of themselves towards the formation of decent human beings. Today, the essential task this novel presents, that of forging a young man to just behavior, would be impossible. Today we have less, so much less, passionately, energetically less – a brutal indifference in the name of progress.

I’ve been reading parts of Tell England by Ernest Raymond, which I suspect I read in college as part of my unofficial research of English Public Schools, but which I saw discussed on mmsa. It’s really quite something, and an edgy portrait of he pre-1914 world of school. Innocent and homoerotic, passionate, sensual. The boys are complicated and the hero-master, Radley, utterly charismatic. He loves the boys, has favorites, and makes hobbies of them, and is very hard with his favorites in the best possible way. He’s rewarded by their devotion. I love this early scene in which he canes Ray (the narrator) and his friend Doe for the first time.

I bent over, resting my hands on my knees. Radley was a cricketer with a big reputation for cutting and driving; and three drives, right in the middle of the cane, convinced me what a first-class hitter he was. At the fourth, an especially resounding one, Penny whistled a soft and prolonged whistle of amazement, and murmured: “Well, that’s a boundary, anyway.” …

When my performance was over, the second victim, Edgar Doe, with the steel calm of a French aristocrat, which he affected under punishment, walked to the spot where I had been operated on. He bent over (again without being told to do so), and only spoiled his proud submission by telegraphing to Radley one uncontrolled look of pathetic appeal like the glance of a faithful dog. Radley, not noticing these unnerving actions, or possibly a little annoyed by them, administered justice severely enough for Doe, proud as he was, to wince slightly at every cut. Then he put his cane away, and issued, as before, his little ration of gentleness.

“You’re two plucky boys,” he said (28).

Later in the dormitory, Doe confides to an astonished Ray:

“Do you know, I really think I like Radley better than anyone else in the world. I simply loved being whacked by him.”

I pulled the clothes off my head that I might see the extraordinary creature that was talking to me. A dim light always burned near our beds, and by it was I able to see that Doe was very red and clearly wishing he had not made his last remark.

Ray’s line of thought carries on:

Doe’s remark, I reflected, was like that of a school-girl who adored her mistress. Perhaps Doe was a girl. After all, I had no certain knowledge that he wasn’t a girl with his hair cut short. I pictured him, then, with his hair, paler than straw, reaching down beneath his shoulders, and with his brown eyes and parted lips wearing a feminine appearance. As I produced this strange figure, I began to feel, somewhere in the region of my waist [ha! ed.] motions of calf-love for the girl Doe that I had created (29).

Extraordinary!

Radley is known as one who “never lets anyone off, especially his pets.” He’s wry. At one point Ray overheards Radley and the school doctor (Chappy) discussing Doe. Chappy admits of Doe:

“I’ve a great liking for him.”

“So have I.”

“Good. Now, what first attracted you – his good looks or his virtues?”

“Neither. His vices” (38).

I love 1) that it’s perfectly acceptable for these men to admit their attraction to these boys without the onerous film of pedophilia over everything; and 2) that he’s attracted to a boy by his vices.

Radley goes famously for the swift alternation of severity and gentleness. He canes without apology, as in the scene where he rapidly changes from confidant to disciplinarian, commanding Ray to follow him to his study after Ray has complained to him about his housemaster unfairly giving him a thousand lines.

There was little change in my countenance when he placed himself opposite me with his cane in his hand.

“You have been very rude to me in speaking defiantly of your house-master. Do you understand?”

There was no alternative but for me to say “Yes, sir.” The answer came huskily. I was annoyed that my voice sounded hoarse.

“Put out your hand.”

I obeyed, stretching out my right hand as far as I could and displaying no perturbation, though I was wondering what it would be like to be caned on the hand. This was one of Radley’s surprises, and he followed it with one of his brutal remarks:

“Put that right hand down. You’ll need it to be in good condition for writing your lines. Put up your left.”

I held out my left hand. The cane sang in the air and whistled on to my open palm. A spasm of pain passed up my arm, my hand closed convulsively, my elbow drooped, and that vast array of tears made a tremendous effort to carry everything before them. But with all the strength at my command I got the better of them. Angry at having closed my hand, I extended the scorching palm again, and, very pale and trembling perceptibly, looked with set features straight at Radley.

He threw the cane away and, sitting on the edge of his table, took hold of the hand that he had struck and drew me towards him.

“Don’t you think, Ray, that you, who can take a licking so pluckily, ought to face bad luck in a less cowardly fashion than you have this afternoon? You’ll meet worse things than lines before you’re ten years older; and, Ray, I want you always to face your fate, whatever it may be, as you faced my cane – teeth set, no wincing.”

It was a stroke of master play. His gentleness, following immediately upon his severity, burst the dam. His words were an “Open Sesame” to the leaky floodgates I had held so tightly closed (45-46).

I also loved the moment when he yanks Ray into his study by the wrist, intending to show him his strength. He’s unflinching. He boldly tells Ray that unless he takes the wrath of his peers and leads them away from their rottenness, that he’ll lose his (Radley’s) esteem.

“Which would you rather have, their contempt or mine?”

“Theirs, sir” (102).

Awesome!

The book itself is an odd sort of hybrid. The first half is all about school, the second about Ray and his companions at Gallipoli (where they perish). So all of this character building in part one stands within the context of the slaughter and waste of the Great War. – Never mind, though. Bring on Radley, I say. *sigh!*

quotes from Tell England: a study in a generation by Ernest Raymondm (re)published by Echo Library 2006. (originally published 1922?). Also on Google books.