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A real inspiration
I've been reading the inspiring story of David Tait - successful banker, mountaineer, abused child and the NSPCC's most successful fund raiser. Powerful stuff. And the reason he is so driven and can't stop climbing Everest, is a direct result of the awful abuse he suffered as a child.
They were... different times
For most of us, this kind of story is just mind-boggling. How can parents do this to their children? I like to think my parents did a pretty good job and my brothers and I have ended up as half decent, happy members of society.
But they did decide to send us to the most dreadful prep school in the north of England. I hated that place. It was cold, the food was disgusting, and it was staffed by a pretty weird bunch of oddball teachers. I don't remember any abuse as such although there was a freaky art teacher who couldn't stop filming boys in the shower.
Being cocky and boisterous probably didn't do me any favours. I managed to convince three different teachers to slap me round the face in the space of a year, I got slippered 19 times in one term, and the headmaster thought it was a good lesson to cane me in my first week. Really?
But memories don't change
I should add that the school in question has apparently become a bastion of great early education. I have friends who sit on the Board of Governors and send their own children there. But as for me, sending my children away at the age of 8 is as incomprehensible as Latin was all those years ago. I ask my parents how they could have done that to us? What on earth possessed them to think that sending an 8 year old off into that hellhole was character forming?
Ignorance isn't quite bliss
There's no easy answer and we've had some pretty long and intense conversations about it. The conclusion seems to be that it was the done thing and they didn't know better... That worries me!
Parenting is a big job. Some of us are doing it better than others. I can't help looking at my own little gang and thinking about what I should be doing better. Divorce, iPads, using the Tube - sorry guys, "it was just the done thing".
At least when they question my parenting in future years I can hold the prep school story up. "At least I didn't send you there!"
Ben Black
