Children of their universe

BY BOB IRVINE

I was smacked as a child, and it never did me any harm. Can't recall what the first time was for. We were living in a house and it contained power points, so quite feasibly I was stabbing a knitting needle into one of them. Good parental discipline was called for. And it worked. I have never taken up knitting.

This was by no means the only exercise of good parental discipline. We were old-school. I remember when I built a proton accelerator for my Standard Two science project. Mum was livid when she recognised parts from her eggbeater. I was about to fire up the beast when I felt the sting of good parental discipline across my buttocks. Except we were poor and couldn't afford buttocks. We made do with bums.

Mine was smarting, which made my hand fall away from the switch. It did me no harm.

I suppose liberal types would say Mum should have sent me to my room for time out, but it was during time out in my room that I built the beast. She always knew best.

Then there was the day my brother tossed a grenade into my sister's bedroom after a contretemps over a sixpenny bag of sweets.

You put that pin back in this instant or I will reason with you in a mature fashion, Mum barked.

He just sneered with the insouciance of an eight-year-old.

Don't make me resort to sarcasm, a form of mental cruelty, she added.

He lit a cigarette. One of hers.

So Mum let fly with a backhander, and boy did he move.

I copped a posterial paddling again when I constructed a thermo-nuclear device out of Meccano pieces. In that case, though, the smack was not enough. Just wait till your father gets home, quipped Mum, who was not above tormenting us with working class cliches.

It was a hollow threat since we knew Dad was at the pub, drowning the pain of a childhood bereft of good parental discipline. It did him no harm apart from the alcoholism.

He expended the last of his mental energy driving the car home half-cut. Those were the days. The pub was walking distance, but only communists and cripples walked. And he had recently been promoted to foreman.

Once in the door, all he wanted to do was tuck into his mashed potato, carrot, beetroot and chops, kept warm on a steamer. It did him no harm.

With dinner over, he had no stomach for physical discipline, and made a token gesture by withdrawing television rights.

My favourite show starred a handsome cowboy who dressed in skin-tight shirt and pants, wore a neckerchief and a mask and had a faithful companion garbed in what can only be described as Village People chic. Where might such role-modelling have led?

I no longer watch television at all, so it did me no harm.

Only once did Dad take his belt off, when big brother and I dug a series of tunnels in the empty section next door for underground nuclear testing. Dad, in a flashback of socialist sentimentality, had walked to the pub that night.

On the way home he fell through the roof of our labyrinth.

Vengeance was surely warranted. Instead he dispensed good parental discipline. After that incident, he never walked if he could help it, and none of us kids became a miner, wore a cloth cap and sang The Red Flag while bathing in a tin tub in front of the fire.

So it did us no harm. I have also not toyed with weapons of mass destruction from that day to this. Imagine the low-lifes you associate with trying to buy a tinnie of enriched uranium.

The boundaries were pushed again when I started wearing a gang patch. Quite a few of them, in fact, all up my sleeves. I was especially proud of the campcraft one earned for building a bivouac. Perhaps it was the woggle that pushed Dad over the edge.

No son of mine will belong to an animal-worshipping paramilitary organisation, he railed. Remove those or I will enact a bylaw, with the complicity of Parliament.

The Cubs were great, and I was about to debate the fragility of civil rights when he biffed me round the earhole. It did me no harm.

I never laid a finger on my own kids, and they've turned out fine (largely thanks to their mother). Also, I didn't grow up to become a thug.

Those Black Power members in Wanganui, though, chances are they copped their first smack before they could walk and later a shove, maybe a punch, the broomstick, the jug cord round the legs, the strap, the cane, the horsewhip and all the other support acts to the good old bash.

But it did them no harm.

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