Free Wheels Within Wheels by Dervla Murphy Page B

did me very little good. My classmates, instead of forcing me into the sort of rough and tumble I needed to remove my corners, generally deferred to me and expected me to be their leader – an expectation which was disappointed , for it was not in my nature either to lead or be led. Also, most of the nuns were too lenient towards me and too openly appreciative of intellectual attainments which would not have seemed at all remarkable in another academic setting.
    Fortunately there was one exception to this, whose class I joined when I was eight. Sister Andrew was a tall twenty-year-old with a pale long face, straight black brows and eyes that seemed to give off blue forked lightning during her rages. Verbally she flayed me and physically she battered me – often across the back, with a stout wooden pointer. If it is true that corporal punishment is inflicted only by the insecure, then Sister Andrew repeatedly betrayed her own uncertainty and inexperience. We were in fact using each other at this stage: she to prove that she could control even such a resolutely self-willed and obliquely insolent child as myself, and I to prove that I could and would withstand the adult world, however painful the consequences.
    I remember sitting upright at my heavy wooden desk, with its cracked, brass-lidded inkwell and countless carved initials and the splinter under the left side of the seat on which I was wont unobtrusively to clean my finger-nails. Sister Andrew was bending over me, whitely angry, ordering me to write the letter ‘h’ in the approved manner. I knew quite well how to write a standard ‘h’ but I was determined not to do it according to the specifications; I had my own method, which I naturally preferred. And so, under Sister Andrew’s flashing gaze, I deliberately rewrote ‘h’ as I thought fit. Meanwhile the rest of the class, who always relished our duels, watched with bated breath. Several emotions simultaneously possessed me in that instant: a spiteful sense of triumph, regret that our duel could not take place in dignified seclusion instead of in the middle of a classroom, fear of the physical pain that I knew was imminent and a sharp stab of shame because I could not but recognise the futility and stupidity of my own behaviour. This was one of the occasions when the pointer left bruises on my back. Since I was able to write a perfectly legible ‘h’ it might be argued that Sister Andrew should have ignored my method of achieving it; but then it might also be argued that I did not mean my defiant originality to be ignored.
    For a year or so we were sporadically at war. Many were the afternoons when I hurried home, trembling with resentful fury, affronted, humiliated and longing for the balm of maternal sympathy. But these rages usually cooled on the way and I rarely mentioned Sister Andrew. The verbal flayings hurt me far more than the beatings, but I was shrewd enough to realise that if I repeated those criticisms verbatim my mother would simply add, ‘Hear! Hear!’ Besides, complaints about the school authorities were discouraged at home and many years passed before I discovered how much worry my bruised back had caused on one particular occasion. From the ’70s such violence looks primitive and uncouth. But in the ’30s even doting parents, themselves too sensitive to hurt a fly, did not really object to having the hell beaten out of their wicked brats by somebody else. ( N.B. – for the past thirty-five years Sister Andrew and I have been very good friends.)
     
    An interesting aspect of childhood is the democracy of those who have not yet been trained to think or feel undemocratically. And one of the oddest functions of middle-class parents – which seems inconsistent with the civilising parental mission – is to destroy this democratic instinct for the sake of maintaining standards often of far less value to society than the attitude being sacrificed. At the age of seven or eight my classmates