"I know it hurts - it's meant to!"

St Thomas More Roman Catholic Primary School was run by an order of nuns known, I can only assume either tongue in cheek or with somewhat perverse humour, as the Sisters of Mercy. The headmistress, Sister Mary Paul, typified their attitude and outlook.

I have no idea how old Sister Mary Paul was. To me, as a seven or eight year old, she seemed beyond age. The skin on her face was ghost white, with the texture of sandpaper, and she had tiny, pockmark eyes that seemed perpetually focussed on her own inner turmoil. If Aloysius’s mother was afraid of death, Sister Mary Paul was terrified of – and hated – life. The only time she aspired to any kind of observable energy or impetus was when she was inflicting pain. During morning assembly, for instance, she delighted in administering public canings. Her victims – always boys – would have been preselected for her by their respective class teachers, and would often be unaware of what was in store for them. As far as Sister Mary Paul was concerned, this only served to reinforce her feelings of relish and stimulation, because an unwary victim was somehow more vulnerable and helples than one who was mentally prepared, and correspondingly that much more likely to disintegrate into tears.

Once her array of victims had lined up before her, Sister Mary Paul’s slit-like reptilian eyes would actually open wide, and for a brief few seconds her desiccated body would be infused with animation and the re-ignition of long suppressed and unacknowledged sexual yearnings. I used to imagine her lying in her bathtub, crying with despair and rage at her drooping, crease-laden mammaries, and futilely feeling herself in a bid to rekindle some long obliterated vestige of warmth.

Sister Mary Paul’s cane was white with a red tip, like an enormous match. She put so much effort into caning that you thought – indeed hoped – that she might do herself an injury, but if she did she never let on.

“I know it hurts – it’s meant to!” were the trademark words with which she would cajole each of her hapless victims – a wholly redundant assertion that nevertheless somehow had the effect of exacerbating the humiliation being experienced.

One morning during assembly, Sister Mary Paul read out a letter that she had received from the mother of a classmate of mine, Anthony Lindner. In it, Anthony’s mother remarked that she was disappointed with her son’s performance in the recent mid-year exams, and would therefore be grateful if he could be encouraged to “buck up his ideas” by being given “a good hard smack or two”. Consequently, despite having done nothing specifically wrong, Anthony was required to submit himself, in front of the entire school, to the vituperative chastisement of the ostensible hand-maiden of the God of love and mercy, whose weathered face temporarily reflected His glory by contorting into a grin, or leer, implying near orgasmic gratification.

I myself would not have any first hand encounters with God’s ostensible hand-maiden until I was in grade six, and then only briefly However, in grade seven – which was the class that she herself taught – I would have enough encounters to leave me scarred for life.