Short Sharp Shock.

The worst thing I ever forced myself to believe was, "It never did me any harm."

It's taken me nearly fifty years to admit that was a lie.

Not a deliberate lie. More like one of those things kids like me repeated because that's what everybody else said. We wore it like a badge of honour.

"I got a punch in the mouth"

"I got dragged around the floor"

"I got clipped round the ear."

"I got the slipper"

Everybody bangs on about the slipper as though it was the defining punishment of my generation. The slipper? My arse. A bit of rubber on the backside would have been a fucking holiday. I had my left hand stamped on with a pair of heavy boots because I'd answered back. The next day it was black and swollen. I could barely move it. So forgive me if I don't get misty-eyed when someone says, "We all got the slipper." Good for you. I'd have swapped places.

"Never did me any harm."

Bollocks.

It did.

I'm not saying it ruined my life. I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm certainly not interested in rewriting history through twenty-first-century eyes.

I'm saying something much simpler.

Adults who were supposed to protect children spent an extraordinary amount of time humiliating, frightening and hurting us, then congratulated themselves for calling it discipline.

One of my crimes?

Not enough buttons done up on my shirt

Not robbery.

Not violence.

Not setting fire to the chemistry block.

Not enough fucking buttons done up on my school shirt.

For that, I got slapped across the face by a housemaster and dragged across the playground by this fucking monster.

Read that sentence again.

A grown man hit a kid because his shirt wasn't done up right.

Imagine that happening today. It would be on the national news before lunchtime.

Back then?

It barely deserved a mention

I'd been rejected by a system I had no chance of understanding, binned off from mainstream school to a boarding school in Devon for maladjusted or disturbed young boys.

A victim of my times, really they didn't have words or phrases like ADHD back then, and the violence I'm describing wasn't the first time I'd suffered from it. Far from it.

If I answered back, I was "lippy."

If I challenged authority, I was "disrespectful."

If I refused to bend, several adults would happily drag me where they wanted me to go. There was always another punishment. Another detention. Another report. Another lecture about respect from people who never once stopped to consider whether they deserved any.

I just got on with it back then.

I was angry.

There was nowhere left for me to go, I'd already been

Fear makes you keep your head down.

Anger makes you stand it back up again.

That was always my problem.

I never learnt when to shut up.

Authority fascinated me because so much of it rested on one simple principle.

"We're bigger than you."

Not wiser.

Not kinder.

Just bigger.

Children's homes.

Schools.

Institutions.

They all seemed to operate under the same unwritten rule.

If a kid was difficult, make life even more difficult.

If he argued. Punish him. Hit him. Kick him.

If he fought back, punish him harder.

Nobody seemed remotely interested in asking why.

Why was he angry?

Why didn't he trust adults?

Why did he challenge every rule?

Perhaps because every adult I'd met so far had given me another reason not to.

The older I get, the more uncomfortable I become with those memories.

Not because I'm frightened of them.

Because I defended them.

For years I found myself saying exactly what everyone else said.

"It never did me any harm."

Of course it fucking did.

It taught me that authority often mistakes obedience for respect.

It taught me that adults aren't automatically right because they're adults.

It taught me to question people with clipboards, ties and titles.

Perhaps most of all, it taught me that institutions are very good at writing reports about children and remarkably bad at listening to them.

Somewhere, buried in a dusty filing cabinet, there were probably reports about me.

Aggressive.

Difficult.

Disruptive.

Argumentative.

Defiant.

Disgusting how none of them probably said what I actually was.

A kid trying to survive.

Here's the thing that really sticks in my throat.

None of those adults will remember me.

To them I was one more awkward lad.

One more disciplinary problem.

One more name on a report.

But I remember them.

Cunts.

The people with the power usually forget.

The people without it often spend a lifetime remembering.

People ask me why I still think about it.

Fifty years on. A grown man, a whole life lived since, and I'm still turning over the details of a housemaster's hand across my face like it happened last Tuesday.

Because it did happen last Tuesday. That's what nobody understands about this stuff. It doesn't stay in the past where you put it. It sits in a drawer in your chest and every so often, for no reason at all, someone opens it.

A slammed door.

A raised voice.

A man standing too close.

And there I am again. Eleven years old. Flinching before I even know why.

That's the inheritance. Not a story to tell at dinner parties. A nervous system that never quite believed it was safe.

I used to think I was broken. Took me decades to work out I wasn't broken, I was built. Built by people who thought fear was a teaching tool. Built by men who mistook silence for respect and never once considered it might just be terror wearing a school jumper.

They didn't break me. They shaped me. There's a difference, and it took me most of my life to see it.

I look at how children are treated now and some days it makes me want to spit. Everyone falling over themselves to protect kids from a raised voice, a harsh word, a bad grade. Good. Genuinely, good. Nobody deserves what we got. But don't stand there in your safeguarding lanyard and tell me the system's learned its lesson, because half the men who did this to us went on to run other institutions. Got promoted. Got knighthoods, some of them. Died in their beds surrounded by grandchildren, never once asked to account for a single black eye they put on a boy who couldn't do his buttons up fast enough.

That's what really gets me. Not the violence itself, though God knows that was enough. It's the impunity. The absolute certainty they had that nobody would ever ask them to explain themselves. And they were right. Nobody did.

I did nothing wrong and I paid for it anyway. Paid in flinches. Paid in a lifetime of not trusting men in positions of authority, which people call a "personality trait" now, like it's quirky, like it's just how I am, rather than the entirely rational output of what was done to me by men in positions of authority.

So no, it didn't make me stronger. Strength isn't the absence of a wound, it's carrying on despite one. I carried on. That's not the same as being fine.

I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I got on with my life same as everybody else who came through places like that. But I'm no longer pretending the bill never came due. It did. It's still coming, some days, fifty years late, and I still pay it.

They wrote reports about me.

I'm still writing about them.

Funny how that worked out.

This isn't about revenge.

I don't want apologies.

Most of the people involved have probably been dead for years.

Good.

What I do want is honesty.

Let's stop pretending fear builds character.

Let's stop confusing intimidation with discipline.

Let's stop telling children they should be grateful for being humiliated.

And for fuck sake, let's stop telling old men like me that it "never did us any harm."

Because if we're still talking about it half a century later...

Perhaps it fucking  did.

That's the thing about childhood.

Adults think they're writing a report.

Children are writing a memory.

One ends up in a filing cabinet.

The other follows you for the rest of your life.