I WAS intrigued to read about the considerable resources of Police Scotland being directed towards a hunt for a woman who allegedly slapped a boy in her care across the face (“Fears for boy after woman slapped his face”, The Herald, February 21). Had this been the case in 1957, there’s a good chance my late parents could have been on Scotland’s “most wanted” list.
It’s not that they were prone to physically abusing their children but they had this idea that we should do what we were told: it wasn’t open to debate or negotiation. My mother skelped us more often than my father if we’d behaved badly (I often tell people that her “naughty step” was her right hand) but my father once slapped me after I’d run across the road after Sunday school in Howwood and narrowly missed being hit by a passing car. It was in front of a number of adults and other children, most of the former sympathising with my father at the time.
And yes, I cried when either of them slapped me: more in embarrassment and humiliation rather than them ‘causing me to cry.’
Before I left Scotland I once witnessed a neighbour grabbing his young daughter “aggressively by the wrist”’ after she’d run into the road trying to catch her balloon and had nearly gone under the back wheels of a large digger. Did I report him to the police? Three guesses?
No doubt all the do-gooders will be appalled at my sentiments but as my father used to say, “weans would behave better if a wheen mair had a skelp fae time tae time”.
John F Crawford,
4 The Breakers, Victory Boulevard, Lytham.
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