The gardening season is upon us with spring flowers gaily
adorning the borders and even the cheerful sound of mowers at work on the grass
in this unexpectedly mild spell of late February. But what else would we expect
on the South Devon coast at Budleigh Salterton?
My gardening pleasures and the return of Spring's fresh
innocence ought to combine, or so you'd think, to blow away the bad memories of
nearly 60 years ago.
Maybe it's my recent correspondence with ex-Cricklade victim
Gerard Lidgey, mentioned at http://millstonesblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/bother-those-brothers.html
that's preventing me from putting them
all behind me. Or perhaps it's seeing the growing folder of 'Assignments
waiting' on my computer which convinces me that the job of recording the
unsavoury history of the Irish Christian Brothers is not yet over.
Whatever...
Here's a paragraph from a recent email sent by one of our
contemporaries at Prior
Park Prep
School who's happy for me to post his account on
Millstones. I'll call him George because he'd rather not be identified.
"I do recall receiving 26 of the strap in one term from
a Brother Hegarty for not knowing my homework, that in later years seemed
excessive," he writes.
And here's his account of another of those occasions akin to
public executions favoured by the Islamic Republic of Iran and other dark
places on this planet.
"I also recall the whole school being called to witness
the giving of six of the best of the strap on bare buttocks of some poor soul
in the basement, that shocked me."
And then we have George's memory of the gastronomic peculiarities
introduced by the Prep School's sadistic headmaster Br B.
"I was also one of those on the table by the servery in
the dining hall made to eat one spoon of porridge each day, and being on that
table made to feel inferior to the rest of the school."
Not particularly unpleasant, I thought, as a daily
porridge-eater. But George's point is the psychological damage inflicted on
small children by some of those Christian Brothers, more long-lasting in its
way than the weals left on hands and occasionally buttocks by physical
punishments.
Fear, a crippling sense of inferiority, a lifelong mistrust
of one's parents, a permanent dislike of religion... these are some of the less
obvious aspects of the legacy left by the teaching orders of the Catholic
Church, still not fully recognised by the ecclesiastical authorities and, above
all, the Vatican.
Pictured above is the Irish Christian Brothers' best friend,
a strap made up of several thicknesses of leather. These implements were
supposedly weighted with pieces of metal. There seems to be plenty of other evidence
in support of this view. See for example http://ezinearticles.com/?Christian-Brothers,-My-Story.&id=2450603
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