Nuts & Mutton

I have taken my title from a wonderful book by an Irish writer, Michael Farrell, which was released in 1963. It was his one and only book, his master work, which he toiled over for years, never satisfied, even after it had been accepted by a publisher. I read it when I was living in Germany, and I have never forgotten the chapters that detail the physical and mental abuse the hero suffered at the hands of the Christian Brothers.

I was reminded of Farrell’s book, when I read some of the horrors contained in the report from the Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which was released earlier this week. I’m not going to go into the details here. Wise Web Woman has written about the report, far more movingly than I ever could, in this heart-rending post on her blog. Commenters there, and on other blogs I have visited this week, all ask the same question—how could something like this happen, right under the noses of so-called responsible adults, to the most vulnerable children? I think the answer to that lies in the kind of world we lived in, those of us who were brought up in Ireland during the 1950s and 60s.

Beatings by teachers, parents, even neighbours were commonplace. There was a general acceptance, promulgated by the Catholic Church which ruled the country with an iron fist, that children were basically evil little bastards who, if they were not severely chastised at every opportunity, would run amok. Although I had many a slap from my mother, that was just because she didn’t like me very much. None of my siblings were ever hit or beaten, by either of my parents, so we were luckier than most. Every kid I knew was routinely beaten by one or both of their parents. I had one friend whose father used to beat her with the flat of a cricket bat, well into her teens. A cricket bat! I can hardly lift one with both hands, they’re so heavy.

The teachers in the national school I attended for the first six years of my education were vicious. We called it “getting biffed,” when a teacher called you out to the front of the class, made you roll up your sleeve, and delivered sharp, stinging blows to the palm of your hand, if you were a girl, or to your backside, if you were a boy. The number of slaps depended on the enormity of your misdeed, and the level of pain depended on the favoured method of the teacher. I remember one nun who used a bamboo cane, which had been carefully shredded on the business end, to deliver the maximum amount of damage. Another teacher, a lay teacher this time, was renowned for using a chair leg to beat the boys in her class. She lived in our village and was much admired by all the parents for her control of said boys. Nobody ever thought to complain to their parents about these beatings. If you were one of the lucky ones, like me, the response was invariably “you probably asked for it.” Most kids lived in terror of their parents finding out they’d been punished by the teacher, as it would earn them another beating at home. Winter beatings were the hardest, as we all suffered from chilblains on our hands, that would bleed after a biffing. Along with the beatings, there were the casual cruelties—being lifted out of your seat by your plaits, as I was on many occasions; having heavy rulers or blackboard dusters thrown at you; getting smacked on the back of your head, just for the heck of it, as a teacher passed by your desk.

My family lived on a square—a private park maintained by the residents. I spent my childhood playing in the square, along with all the other children in the area. If anything got out of hand, a fight broke out, or something was broken, any adult who happened to be passing by would wade in, box every kid’s ears and go on his or her way, confident that the kids’ parents would not mind in the slightest that their offspring had been slapped around by a neighbour. “I’ll box your ears” was a favourite euphemism of the time. Sounds so cute, what was in fact a sharp slap to the side of the head that would leave your ears ringing. Any adult could hand one out to any kid, no matter how young, with impunity.

My cousin, Peter, was educated by the Christian Brothers, a religious teaching order that plays a starring role in the Child Abuse report. They were renowned for their brutality. Peter was a harmless kid, sweet-natured, not a mischievous bone in his body. He was beaten so badly by one of his teachers that he permanently lost the hearing in one ear. So we were all shocked when Peter up and joined the Christian Brothers after leaving school. The Brothers paid for him to go to university, and then on to teacher training school. The day after he graduated as a fully-accredited teacher, he left the order. As one of seven kids, he could never have afforded to go to university any other way. Revenge is, indeed, a dish best eaten cold.

Unlike Peter, my only brother was a fiend in human form. My mother once told me that, from the moment “Paddy” was old enough to go and play in the square, the doorbell started ringing as neighbours lined up to complain about him. The nuns and brothers lathered the hell out of him, but they could not beat the mischief out of Paddy. Even my father put on boxing gloves and went a few rounds with him once, but to no avail. When he was about 12 years old, after several visits from the police, Paddy was sent away to boarding school. Or at least that was the story we were told. Many years later, I learned that he had been sent to Daingean Reformatory, one of the institutions described in the Child Abuse report, after an incident involving a stolen car, a midnight joyride and a court appearance. He spent two years there, after which he was banished to an expensive, very tough boarding school in England, that had a reputation for turning around problem kids. But Paddy remained the black sheep of the family for the rest of his life. Although he made and lost several fortunes in England, eventually retiring at age 40 to become a “gentleman farmer” in Ireland, he was always a lost soul. Over the years, we got used to reading about his latest escapade in the tabloids, until he died suddenly, after a massive heart attack when he was only 44. Reading about the abusive atmosphere in Daingean, I wonder if my brother might have eventually found his path had he not been sent there.

In the Ireland I grew up in, I have no doubt that many adults were aware of the physical abuse meted out to orphans and reformatory kids. And I am equally sure that they would not have objected. If the Church said these kids were evil and needed to be punished, for their own good, well that was just how it had to be. The sexual abuse is another matter. Although there were certain priests in our Parish that all the kids knew to stay away from, if only because there was something icky about them, I don’t ever remember any gossip or rumours about teachers and kids. And I have to believe, if there were, then somebody would have intervened. I have to believe that.

During one of my regular Sunday phone calls, a few years before she died, my mother bemoaned her rapidly fading grasp on reality. “I know I was never very bright,” she laughed, but with a slightly sarcastic edge to her voice. “Still, you’d think the good Lord would see fit to leave me a few brain cells.” She painstakingly wrote down, in her child-like hand, the things she felt she had to remember, and then spent hours trying to find the scraps of paper on which they were scribbled. After she died, some of them were found, tucked into drawers and books.

“Tell Anne about Auntie May,” was one of them. Auntie May had died twenty years before and my sister Anne had been living in Sweden since the 1960s. “Get cigarettes from Jim Byrne,” said another. He was the greengrocer in the Dublin suburb where we grew up. He, too, had long been dead, and my mother had not smoked for decades.

It was always understood between us that I was her least favourite child, and I returned the favour with knobs on. In a community where appearances counted for everything, I got great pleasure from driving her crazy by scandalizing the neighbours. We rarely spoke to each other for twenty years after I grew up and left home, and it wasn’t until I became a mother myself, that I began to understand her. I’m not sure she ever learned to understand me; but she was such a terrific grandmother, I eventually came to love the woman reflected in my son’s eyes.

She’d had a harsh childhood. Although my grandfather was an alcoholic, he was a gentle and loving man, not at all the drunken father of legend. My grandmother was another matter. Embittered by her husband’s alcoholism, which caused him to lose his business and end up as a jobbing mechanic, she was a ruthless taskmaster to their five children, flogging them for every transgression, however minor. And, in one of those Moebius loops of heredity, my mother was her least favourite child. Mainly to get away from her mother’s anger, she married an army officer from the city. But she was to find herself a prisoner still, tied down by the babies who came along all too soon after the wedding, and the narrow social constraints of army life. Like her father before her, she developed a fondness for drink, as a means of coping.

I flew back to Ireland to see her when she was dying. Her mind was completely gone, and the morphine was no match for the cancer that was killing her. I sat by her hospital bed for a week, burying myself in the Irish Times crossword, while she carried on an intermittent and garbled conversation with someone she could see standing behind my chair. I had tried to talk to her at first, but gave up when I realised that she had no idea who I was, or why I was there.

Before leaving for the airport to fly home to Canada, I went to see her for the last time. As I bent to kiss her goodbye, she opened her eyes very wide, smiled beatifically, and said “I know who you are! Safe home, love.” Then she closed her eyes and slipped into sleep. My husband came to meet me when I landed in Toronto. He told me she had died while I was flying over the Atlantic, safely on my way home.

I’ve been off grid for a few weeks, as some of you have been kind enough to notice. No real reason, the hamster just fell off the wheel. Spending all day, as I do, slaving over a hot lap-top drafting speeches, sometimes the very last thing I want is to settle down after dinner and start writing again. Especially when my DVR is chock-a-block with whole television series (Friday Night Lights!) that I’ve been dying to catch up on.

Anyhoo, the spring is sprung, the grass is riz, the birdy is on the wing, and the urge to settle down every evening with a hot cup of cocoa glass of wine and a mindless bit of telly has melted with the snows. Ontario, as is its wont, has hurtled in one mighty overnight leap, from omigod I’m freezing my arse off to temperatures in the high 20s and pass the air conditioning control. It still boggles my mind, after more than 20 years here, that I can drive down the hill into Dundas Valley, as I did last Sunday morning, and see a few buds shyly peeping forth from the trees, only to drive back up same hill a scant five hours later under a canopy of green. Spring is almost non-existent in these parts, although our magnificent Fall more than makes up for it.

While I was absent, two of my favourite bloggers, Kate and Smart Mouth Broad, were nice enough to bestow awards on this little corner of self-indulgent drivel, for which I am duly grateful, if more than a little surprised. Which, I hasten to add, will not stop me from keeping said awards in a glass case and throwing sugar at them, as they say in Ireland.

First off, Kate chose my blog to receive the Noblesse Oblige award—some irony there, as it did remind me that I had been neglecting my obligations to the blog and its few readers, who, I might add, make up for your lack of quantity by the sublime quality of your comments. (Somebody once said that, when it comes to Royalty and flattery, you should lay it on with a trowel. Same applies to blog readers, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so flabbergasted that anybody would bother reading this stuff, nothing is too good for you.)

The wording of Noblesse Oblige goes like this:

The recipient of this award is recognised for the following:

1) The Blogger manifests exemplary attitude, respecting the nuances that pervade amongst different cultures and beliefs.
2) The Blog contents inspire; strive to encourage and offer solutions.
3) There is a clear purpose to the Blog; one that fosters a better understanding of Social, Political, Economic, Arts, Culture and Sciences and Beliefs.
4) The Blog is refreshing and creative.
5) The Blogger promotes friendship and positive thinking.

The Blogger who receives this award will need to perform the following steps:

1) Create a Post with a mention and link to the person who presented the Noblesse Oblige Award.
2) The Award Conditions must be displayed at the Post.
3) Write a short article about what the Blog has thus far achieved – preferably citing one or more older post to support.
4) The Blogger must present the Noblesse Oblige Award in concurrence with the Award conditions.
5) Blogger must display the Award at any location at the Blog.

Items 1), 2) and 5) are easily taken care of. What the blog has thus far achieved? That’s a bit tougher. I’m not at all sure that I had anything specific in mind when I started out in November 2006. Whatever it might have been, as my first post indicates, it wasn’t very high-minded. Probably just a place to bitch, if I’m to be honest. No. 1 Son had been blogging since he was in diapers, and I’d envied him his vast audience (Seriously, he had hundreds of readers, from all over hell’s half acre!), but I knew that he had all the tricks of the trade at his fingertips, including how to drive traffic his way. As for me, he had enough patience to set the blog up for me, after I registered Nuts and Mutton as a domain name, and to show me a few simple HTML functions, and then he abandoned me to my fate.

It’s a funny thing, by the way, how much he reminds me of my father sometimes. My dad was a brilliant man, an engineer with more degrees than a thermometer, and, although I was a pretty smart kid myself, he could make me feel really stupid sometimes. No. 1 Son can do that to me too, especially when it comes to anything related to technology and computers. To him, as to most of his generation, the interwebz and all its component parts are an open book, whereas I’m a complete plonker, stumbling my way through, frequently bleating for help, which he doles out as though to a mentally defective kid he has to humour.

But I digress. Here I am, back to first principles—the blog as a place to bitch.

In between the bitchings, I used the blog as a storehouse for anything that caught my eye or piqued my interest as I moved around the web. Over the first year or so, I posted short items like this, this, this, and this—which, by the way, is one of my all-time favourites. Bitching as an art form!

Then, after this post, I ran out of steam. Besides, after a whole year, I’d only had about three comments, and they were not of the sort to make blogging seems like one’s mission in life. Then, a few months later, I began looking around the blogosphere, and finding people whose writing and opinions I relished, even when I disagreed with them. Slowly, shyly—I really am shy. And it’s not short for Cheyenne! (Very, very old, joke!)—I began to comment on some that particularly intrigued or amused me, and suddenly I found I had been welcomed into a community. And so, it is my pleasure and privilege to pass this Noblesse Oblige award along to some members of that community.

To Ruth, at Fabulous Geezersisters for her wit, engagement, and grace.

To Wise Web Woman, at The Other Side of Sixty for her wisdom and fellowship (womanship?)

To Anne, at 20th Century Woman, for sharing her incredible, rich life with us.

The second plaudit to come winging (sorry, weak pun!) my way was the Zombie Chicken award, presented by my good bloggie friend, Smart Mouth Broad.

The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken - excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least 5 other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all…

I fear that, just by stepping off the blogging cycle for the past several weeks, I have given the lie to the terms of this award, but I shall accept it in the spirit in which it is proffered, and pass it along, in the same spirit, to the following:

Thistle at Thistles and Maple Leaves for her unquenchable spirit.

Jack, at Slightly Off Center for her gorgeous photographs.

And, although SMB has already been there before me, I would also like to pass the Zombie Chicken along one more time to Janie at Midlife Slices, Jan at Jan’s Sushi Bar, and Linda, at her new site, Crap on a Crutch. And that’s because even an old cowardy-custard like me would fight my way through a flock of zombie vultures, never mind chickens, to read anything they have to say.

I wanted to throw up, watching this. What the hell has happened to Elizabeth Edwards, who used to be a woman of admirable spunk and intelligence? In this Oprah video, she is but a ghost of her former self. In fact, Oprah and Edwards’ rat of a husband don’t even bother to include her in their conversation, referring to her in the third person throughout. On the one occasion he used her name, the rat seems to have a problem remembering it, while she just smirks and gazes at him adoringly.

I remember watching them, during the rat’s Vice-presidential campaign of 2004 and thinking, “There’s a smart, intelligent woman, no great beauty perhaps, who still can’t believe her luck in landing the best-looking guy in college.” (Best-looking to some people, maybe, but not me. As I believe I have said elsewhere on this site, if you look up the phrase “shit-eating grin” in Wikipedia, you should find his picture.)

H/T to Marylou

This PSA, starring Kiera Knightly, was produced by Women’s Aid in the UK and has been shown in UK cinemas. But it has not yet been seen on television, because the company that censors tv advertising for the British government wants the shots showing Knightly being kicked and beaten to be removed.

I fail to see the point, myself, if the violence is removed. After all, it is the point, right?

Put the gun down, Smart Mouth Broad!

I have finally reached the point where the light I can see at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming express. The last few weeks have been just one damn’ thing after another—none of them major or life-threatening, all of them just gumming up the works, to the point where I haven’t even had time to read a book for weeks, never mind blog. And, as anybody who knows me will tell you, for me, not reading is like not breathing—unthinkable.

But the log-jam is finally coming unstuck and I have a ton of things I want to blog about, not least of which are two wonderful, very different, awards that have come my way in recent days, courtesy of Kate and Smart Mouth Broad. (Please Note, SMB, that I do not “hate it.” I never look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when said nag is saying such nice things about me and my blog!)

Like Ah-nuld, I’ll be back, and soon. In the meantime, here are some interesting tit-bits to discuss among yourselves:

The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, asks the question, Did Clement Freud tell the funniest joke ever told? What do you think?

PBS, bless its woolly little heart, has just launched a most amazing website, on which you can view all kinds of wonderful full-length PBS programs. Best of all, they are available outside the US.

And, last but not least, just in time for Earth Day, Disney Nature Films has released an extraordinary movie about the creatures who are unfortunate enough to share this planet with us. Here is the trailer. Enjoy.

In the meantime, for your edification and entertainment, a little amuse bouche