Member-only story
I Grew Up in the Handmaid’s Tale
The Ireland of my youth was cruel
I didn’t have a stammer when I started school. It was a small school in rural Ireland in the 1960s, and most teachers used corporal punishment. I remember the fear of being summoned to the teacher’s desk if I misspelled something or solved a maths problem incorrectly. I tried so hard not to do anything wrong, but I think some of them just enjoyed inflicting violence on us. One teacher would send me to the ditch outside to find a stick to be beaten with.
I still cry when I think about that school. When my stammer developed, I thought people would start being kinder to me, but they weren’t. Instead it opened me up to horrendous bullying. Stammering can be a genetic thing that gets switched on if we have bad experiences, I later found out. But that doesn’t describe how much it hampered my life, and I still stammer badly when I am stressed.
I didn’t have much protection or support at home. I was an only child, and when I was born, in 1956, my father was 62 and my mother 42. They had been matched in marriage in the ’50s, when matchmaking was still common in Ireland. My father was often unwell and died from cancer when I was in school. My mother also had many health problems, and I became her caretaker after my father’s death. That also left its mark, as I developed intense anxiety about…
