The Price of Success is Often Too High

My headmaster at primary school was a terror to behold. His mode of punishment by today’s standards and CRB would have landed him huge penal sentences and deregistration from his profession and ever working with children, and not the least the chance to enter the list of sex offenders (read child molesters). According to his work ethics, failing to score a mark set way ahead of the exam was translated to the number of canes equal to the marks in default. His other pastime correction was pinching the inner thighs, and since those were the days of shorts, his hands often went a bit high up and ended up wet. His spanks to the bottom were far worse than canes- I bet that could have been an accusation of rough petting, and especially as he did not distinguish boys and girls when “roughing up” the delinquents.

However, he was not the worst when it came to dishing out punishments. There was one teacher reputed “man-eater” for attacking his victims with his teeth. Yet, another had a way of converting offences to man-hours of child labour. These were expected, as those before us had gone through the same and survived to be model citizens.

However, today, my daughter even questions my role in correcting her offences, leave out the far removed teachers. “Telling her off” can delete our friendship until I have apologised and bribed her with a trip to McDonalds. Not even the Super-nanny US Special that I enforce we watch together so that some manners can percolate to her mind helps; for soon after, she says that even children have their rights too, including to call social services or the police to report their parents for threatening them. Granted, NSPCC is very much on track as many children too face huge traumas in the hands of their very protector parents and guardians, and their close siblings, uncles, aunts and grandparents. True, many are those who ascribe more love and devotion to hobbies, pets and cars than to their children.

For that is often the mark of success to many- a good business, career, or physique.

Having grown up on a farm neighbouring a small village market, I witnessed the stark reality of deprivation from early. The competitions for food oft left me aghast that anyone should result to crime to gain a morsel. At the local slaughter yard, it would be a free-for-all man, stork and beast scrambling for offals and hooves. And the butcher would be blandishing his knifes since those were part of his stock to use for broth. Even when a cow died mysteriously, the butcher would still haggle for the carcase when he came for the skin. I had heard that the carcase secretly ended up in his stall. As expert veterinary/health inspections, quarantines and rigorous EU restrictions did not apply there and then, the test for the potency of the diseased carcase was the “explosive sound” of the chunk of meat buried in hot ash. The butcher could tell by the sound if the animal had died of rinderpest, ECF, foot-and-mouth, black quarter, red water, anaplasmosis, digana, bloat, hunger, poison, strangulation, natural causes, old age, or any other hitherto unbeknown disease. He could tell. And with his wisdom, he would go about discarding certain organs- liver, bladder, testes, brains, heart or the unredeemable steak when abscess had gone too far.