Newspaper Columnist recalls
boarding school spankings
The Independant, January 19 2000
by Sue Arnold
As one who was regularly beaten
with the back of a wooden hairbrush at boarding school by a nun
with a moustache, I feel reasonably qualified to comment on the
Government`s new consultative paper about smacking. The funny
thing about the nun with the moustache, Sister Mary Luke, is that
I remember her with nostalgia bordering on affection. And I`m not
alone. On the one and only occasion I attended an old girls`
reunion at the convent of St Francis de Sales we all joked about
those hairbrush beatings. They always followed the same pattern.
We would be talking after lights-out. The dormitory door would
burst open, the light snap on and Sister Mary Luke, tall, gaunt
and moustachiod, would rasp: "Silence." Followed by the
five fatal words, "Pyjama bottoms in the middle". That
meant only one thing, a walloping. Sister Mary Luke did not do
things by halves. What I mainly remeber was not the beating but
the cold. The dormitories were unheated and in winter there was
ice on the inside of the window panes. Now here`s the curious
thing. On the nights that Sister Mary Luke was off duty, Reverend
Mother patrolled the dorms and instead of beating the culprits
she ordered us to rise at four o`clock and spend three hours on
our knees in chapel before breakfast by way of punishment. If the
anti smacking lobby reckons this was a better deal, let me
disabuse them of the notion. Three hours of penance on your knees
in a cold, dark chapel on an empty stomach was far, far worse
than six of the best. There is something to be said for the short,
sharp shock.
