PAPER DARTS HAS RECIEVED THE FOLLOWING COMMUNIQUE, WHICH WE REPRODUCE FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY

(Submiter’s note: This is an extract from George Orwell’s autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”. I do not wish to be misinterpreted in submitting this: it is obviously a period that has passed at least in the uk (although not in the majority of the world), and a practice that has been replaced by methods in which the threat of physichal violence is more abstractified and insidious (which is possibly worse in that it is more effectively controlling – Brave New World instead of 1984).  It is also in my view pointless to focus too much on the specifics of repression, and even the individual tragedy before the greater human distortion. However, as a guide to the formation of the institutions – often literally the same buildings – to which we are sent to daily, as well as being a guide to the monumentalisation of authority enforcers by the child and hidden nature of the stuff planted in our brains in school, it works pretty well. It’s also just very nicely written.”)

I cannot remember whether it was that very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it again
quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my
prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets!
There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque
matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my
bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded
words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder:

‘REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!’

I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at
Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The
words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the
words of the death sentence.

When I arrived to report myself, Bingo was doing something or other at
the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes
searched me as I went past. In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was
waiting. Sim was a round-shouldered curiously oafish-looking man, not
large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an
overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humor. He knew, of course,
why I had been sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding
crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting
yourself that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I
had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me
by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the
riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged
you, and I remember the words ‘you dirty little boy’ keeping time with
the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time, he
was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much better.
The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and
partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious
enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were hanging about in
the passage outside the door of the ante-room.

‘D’you get the cane?’

‘It didn’t hurt,’ I said proudly.

Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:

‘Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?’

‘I said it didn’t hurt,’ I faltered out.

‘How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing
to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!’

This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time
that frightened and astonished me–about five minutes, it seemed–
ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across
the room.

‘Look what you’ve made me do!’ he said furiously, holding up the broken
crop.

I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the
only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to
tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the
pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame
seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that
this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also
because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to
convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked
up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the
rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The
second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question.
It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you
committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to
avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be
something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea
flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the
blows of Sim’s cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left
home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any
rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a
world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating
was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the
harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more
terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I
sat on the edge of a chair in Sim’s study, with not even the
self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of
sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.

…Here are two things which in a
sense I remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting
until quite recently. One is that the second beating seemed to me a just
and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another
and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the
first had not hurt–that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and
when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I
accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my
feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet–the feeling of having
done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had
broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt
lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.

The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on
Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind
of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is
still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors
and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great
difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which
appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it
cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world
which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is
the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to
forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for
instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending
a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to
see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes
utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of
simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to
be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection
that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a
cause of misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply
than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child
feels any love in return. Looking back on my own childhood, after the
infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any
mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the
sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her.
Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could
only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old–and
remember that ‘old’ to a child means over thirty, or even over
twenty-five–I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction,
but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up
with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child’s
physical shrinking from the adult

…But it would be very difficult for me to see with
the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which
might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in
different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any
rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an
experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class
distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery
and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen
that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or
probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and
to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is
not enough to say that I was ‘silly’ and ‘ought to have known better.’
Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to
believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my
own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of
countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a
blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it
lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it,
infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending
against mysterious, terrible laws…