When I was growing up, my year was always dominated by summer adventures. In late August, my mother’s sister and her husband and two boys would come for a visit. These visits were always awaited with great anticipation, since their oldest boy, Peter, was six months younger than I, while the youngest, Paul, was six months younger than my brother Jay. I could never figure out how Mom and her sister had managed this arrangement.
We had built-in playmates for a week or two: Paul and Jay roomed together in my bedroom, while Peter and I were housed in the old servant’s quarters on our old house’s third floor, in a bedroom with twin beds under the eaves.
After the first couple of days of the cousin invasion, the bloom was off the rose. Peter and I or Paul and Jay were either getting into trouble or fighting. Which raises the subject of punishment. Spoiling the child was never an issue for my parents. Mom had a Master’s degree in verbal tongue-lashing, while Dad was in charge of physical discipline. I had a “smart mouth” according to Mom, and trouble found Jay several times daily. Thus the switch, a thin green stick cut from a forsythia bush in the back yard, was frequently applied to our posteriors by Dad, with varying degrees of force and frequency, depending on the infraction. “Wait ’til your father gets home,” was an ominous sign of things to come.
Pain never seemed to be an issue for Jay, who was hyperactive and barely responded to anything that hurt. The only time Mom wielded a whacking instrument to my brother was when in complete frustration she broke a yardstick on Jay’s backside. Part of the frustration was that Jay smiled all the way through its application. I, on the other hand, dreaded the switch, and only managed to avoid encountering it once over the years, when I hid under a bed. While I was hiding, Mom and Dad calmed down considerably, so when I finally dared to emerge, I was assigned to wash all the dishes all by myself, each day for a month. The hiding-under-the-bed tactic didn’t work the next time.
Our uncle was of like mind with our father, only he applied a belt to our cousins. The belt was an old black leather strap that hung in the kitchen closet in their home, but it traveled with them to Plymouth each summer. Each pair of cousins swore that what they experienced was worse, usually at the conclusion of a lengthy recounting of recent times the belt and switch had been used, the infractions that had called for their use, and the virtues of each form of punishment. All this ended during one of the cousin invasions when, exasperated to the limit by our behavior, our respective fathers gave us a choice: switch or belt.
While Paul and Jay were on the receiving end of the belt and switch respectively, Peter and I sat down on the kitchen floor and recommenced our discussion of the merits of each of these instruments of torture. “Well?” my Dad asked, when our turn came.
“I think I’ll take the switch,” I remember answering rather reluctantly.
“I’m okay with the belt,” said Peter.
Later that evening, with our backsides smarting from the latest insult, we collectively decided not to discuss our different forms of punishment again, just in case discussing them somehow elicited their use.
P.S. As a parent, I never used a switch. When my children were little, they infrequently got one swat on their diapered rears for effect, but we mainly used time outs.
Wow, quite the story, Noelle. That’s how it was done in the olden days. I got a couple of spankings, I remember, but no switch or belt.
It didn’t seem to have a negative effect on the four cousins: we all grew up well (no police blotters), went to college, got jobs, got married, had kids. But none of us applied a switch or a belt to our children!
We got the wooden spoon. I don’t think it hurt us and I’m sure it deterred us on many occasions. I think that it is still a punishment I would use, on selected occasions, but I would probably be taken to the Commission for Children’s rights. I’m sure if some kids had been given the “wooden spoon” they would be enjoying a better adult life than they currently are. (Of course when the wooden spoon was/is being given the giver feels more pain than the receiver and no injury was ever received. o_0
Ive never hear of anyone using a wooden spoon, but my husband just told me that a friend of his used to get whacked with one..until it broke!
It was in common usage in the 50s and 60s in Australia. A friend of mine is doing a PHD on dispelling the myth of the kitchen as a warm happy place (its actually a bit more complec than that) and the wooden spoon features.
That was supposed to be o_O
Hi Noelle, this post brought back some memories for me! I generally got in trouble with my younger sister – we shared a bedroom when we were small and we were like oil and water – didn’t mix all that well when we were kids. My poor dad, never a patient man under the best of circumstances, would lose it after yelling up the stairs to us repeatedly to ‘stop the damned fighting!’ Then came the point of no return. The belt! Yep, we would both get a few smart whops across the butt (me an extra one or two because I was ‘older and should have known better!’).
My sister and I turned out fine, and the belt was never cruelly applied. Just a few light whops that hurt our feelings more than our butts. What a trial we were for my poor dad, though. All he wanted was some quiet and rest in the evenings; my sister and I weren’t very giving in that regard! lol
Great post.
Thanks for sharing your memory. I’m glad to hear that someone else subjected to the belt turned out just fine!