A Sin of Fear
“You don’t deserve to be my son.”
“I wish you’d never been born.”
My father was yelling at me and hitting me. I was cowering in the corner, crying.
“Stop crying. Boys don’t cry.”
The more I cried, the more he yelled and hit me. Toxic masculinity, we’d call it now.
I knew I was a bad person, because he told me so. I knew I was a weak person as well because I couldn’t stop crying. But I never had any idea what I’d done wrong.
This is my recollection of my childhood. Not much else. When did it start happening? I don’t know, but probably before I started school. How often? Once a fortnight? Once a month? Again, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s all a false memory and it didn’t happen in the way I remember it.
At school assembly in the morning, and in church on Sundays we sometimes sang a hymn.
Father-like He tends and spares us;
Well our feeble frame He knows.
In His hand He gently bears us,
Rescues us from all our foes.
That verse always brought tears to my eyes. My father didn’t rescue me from my foes. He WAS my foe.
And yet he was, outside the family, a good man.
I was at a bus stop several years ago, on my way home from a school chess club, when a friend of my father (somewhat younger than him) recognised me.
“You were so lucky to have Howard as your father.” I didn’t disabuse him.
Whether it was the local Church of England primary school my brother and I attended, our Scout troop, or, most of all, our parish church, if anyone wanted anything practical doing, they’d ask my father. He’d do it promptly, he’d do it well, and without any expectation of payment or other reward. Service to the community, and to God.
His resentment of me, I suppose, was because there was clearly something not quite right. It was obvious from well before I started school that, while I was highly intelligent, I was unable to do anything practical or physical, and was unable to speak properly. Back in the 1950s it was thought that it was your fault if you couldn’t do something most people took for granted. You just weren’t trying hard enough. The way my father had been brought up, if children didn’t conform or comply you yelled at them and hit them until they did.
Today, my behaviours and inabilities would be considered possible indications of what we now term Autistic Spectrum Disorder, but in my day there was no such understanding, so children like me were subjected to bullying and abuse.
As a result I grew up frightened of everything and everyone. A sin of fear. I’ll tell you more about my schooling another time.
We now know that children who suffer physical and emotional abuse in the way that I did will often develop significant mental health problems in adulthood. It didn’t happen to me, though. I survived to lead what I hope has been a productive as well as a happy life. The Boy who Lived.
I was fortunate to grow up at a time when childhood was very different from today. Children of secondary school age were encouraged to develop hobbies which got them out of the house and gave them the opportunity to meet like-minded people.
For me, one of those hobbies was chess. I’ve always known it saved my life, so supporting chess for children was the least I could do. I gradually came to the realisation that the game had changed a lot from when I was growing up, and that children like me, from my sort of background, no longer played. This is why my views on the nature and purpose of junior chess is very different from what has become conventional wisdom on the subject throughout the world.
You see, everything I’ve done has, on one level, been for The Boy I Was. What happens these days to Boys Like Me? And how can we bring them back into chess?
If you’re interested, please follow me and I’ll tell you more about my family and childhood, and much more about my very different approach to children’s chess.