At Home - Bill Bryson [230]
And ere they dream what he’s about
He takes his great sharp scissors out.
And cuts their thumbs clean off—and then
You know, they never grow again.
Alas, Little Suck-a-Thumb ignores the advice and discovers that punishment in Hoffmann’s world is swift and irreversible:
The door flew open, in he ran,
The great red-legged scissor-man
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out—Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;
That both his thumbs are off at last.
Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,
And looks quite sad, and shows his hands.
“Ah!” said Mamma, “I knew he’d come
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.”
For older children such poems may have been amusing, but for smaller children they must often have been—as they were intended to be—terrifying, particularly as they were always accompanied by graphic illustrations showing dismayed youngsters irreversibly in flame or spouting blood where useful parts of their body used to be.
Wealthier children were also often left to the mercy of servants and their private, peculiar whims. The future Lord Curzon, growing up as the son of a rector in Derbyshire, was terrorized for years by a semipsychotic governess who tied him in a chair or locked him in a cupboard for hours at a time, ate the desserts from his dinner tray, compelled him to write letters confessing to crimes that he hadn’t committed, and paraded him through the local village wearing a ridiculous smock and a placard around his neck announcing him as a “LIAR,” “THIEF,” or some other shameful condition that he had usually done nothing to merit. The experiences left him so traumatized that he couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone about them until he had grown up. Rather milder, but nonetheless dismaying, was the experience of the future sixth Earl Beauchamp, who was left in the clutches of a governess who was a religious fanatic; she required him to attend seven church services every Sunday and to fill the time between by writing essays about the goodness of God.
For many the ordeals of early childhood were a modest warm-up for the stress of life in private schools. Rarely can hardship have been embraced with greater enthusiasm than in the English private school in the nineteenth century. From the moment of arrival pupils were treated to harsh regimens involving cold baths, frequent canings, and the withholding from the diet of anything that could be remotely described as appetizing. Boys at Radley College, near Oxford, were so systematically starved that they were reduced to digging up flowerbulbs from the school gardens and toasting them over candles in their rooms. At schools where bulbs were not available, the boys simply ate the candles. The novelist Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, attended a prep school called Fernden that seemed to be singularly devoted to the ideals of sadism. On his first day there, his fingers were thrust into a pot of sulphuric acid to discourage him from biting his nails, and soon afterward he was required to eat the contents of a bowl of semolina pudding into which he had just vomited, an experience that understandably dimmed his enthusiasm for semolina for the rest of his life.
Living conditions at private schools were always grim. Illustrations of school dormitories from the nineteenth century show them as being all but indistinguishable from the equivalent spaces in prisons and workhouses. Dormitories were often so cold that water froze overnight in jugs and bowls. Beds were little more than wooden platforms, often with nothing more for warmth and padding than a couple of rough blankets. Every night at Westminster and Eton some fifty boys were locked in together in vast halls and left without supervision till morning so that the weakest were at the mercy of the strongest. Junior boys sometimes had to rise in the middle of the night to begin polishing boots, drawing water, and engaging in all the other