On Growing Up Tough: An Irreverent Memoir

by Taylor Caldwell

  Our lodge met in the basement of the school, behind the smelly coal furnaces, once a week, and with the connivance of the janitor we built ourselves a sort of shed to give us an illusion of a cave and secrecy. We had passwords and secret gestures which we used in school to the bafflement of our teacher, who unfortunately turned out to be too bright for us little criminals. But that was later.

  Every week Walter, our leader, assigned each member of the Purple Lodge to a special project against authority both in school and at home. We all knew each other’s assignment and we were vigilant.

  One week Walter assigned me to start with the fourth floor and work down to the first, scribbling ribald words on every teacher’s door-card, which bore her name and her classroom number. Walter gave me a big list of four-letter words, a list entirely unnecessary; for by the time a child is nine years old he or she knows nearly all of them anyway. Children acquire these things by osmosis, for the healthy and normal child is by nature rude and uncouth.

  The reason this assignment had been given to me was because I was noted for being a fine printer, a fact I brought to Walter’s attention. “They’ll all know I did it,” I said. (A member of the Lodge who was caught was automatically expelled from our wicked brotherhood.) Walter said, “Disguise it, then. Write it out instead of printing it. You have a clear hand.” The assignment was dangerous, which made it all the more fascinating. You had to get to school earlier than the teachers or wait until after school when the teachers had gone, or you had to do it during recess or during a break for the lavatory. It was a ticklish matter. But I rose to the occasion nobly.

  As I was fast on my feet and dexterous, and as sly as the normal child, I was able to complete the fourth floor on the first day. By the end of the week the assignment was done. And the teachers, and the principal, were in an uproar. It was decided, of course, that the crime had been committed by a big boy, and certainly not by a little girl. Walter was pretty shrewd, you will discern, in choosing me.

  The biggest boy in school, Sam, was in the ninth grade, and he had been frequently caught sending suggestive notes to little girls who had inspired his admiration and affection. He was not a member of the Lodge, of course. And he didn’t know half the dirty words I did. But, as he had come under discipline for using the words he did know, suspicion fell on him immediately. The principal put into operation the machinery for expulsion in spite of poor Sam’s despairing denials. Sam was a top student and an expert mathematician and his parents were in a position to send him to college. This black mark on his record, and the expulsion, would work an awful hardship on him, and besides it was unjust.

  We had a conference behind the furnaces. No more than other children did we possess a sense of honor and a love for justice. But for several of us there was Confession, and we knew exactly what our confessors would tell us to do after the grim penances were assigned. All of us would be told to confess the name of the criminal to the authorities, in order to save Sam and to save our souls. This was a dilemma. The Lodge was also in danger. My assignment, it seems, had been the most audacious of them all and the most criminal.

  Walter was a Protestant. He looked at me gloomily and said, “I shouldn’t have picked any Catholics who’ll go blabbering to the priest.” For the benefit of those who don’t know, I will explain that during Confession you hold nothing back nor have any mental reservations. Otherwise you don’t get absolution, and we children firmly believed in Hell.

  I was ready to brave Hell-fire, I assured them. This horrified Walter, a stern Baptist. Loyalty to members of the Lodge was an absolute must, and Walter could not even consider putting my immortal soul in jeopardy. Jail, yes. Punishment, yes. But not Hell-fire. As the leader, Walter made the decision. He would write an anonymous note to the principal saying that poor Sam was not guilty, that he knew the guilty person but would not blab. Walter ended up on a virtuous note, for naughty children know how to move adults’ hearts: “We want only justice for Sam, for we are good children.”

  But it seems that some of my words had been exceptionally fruity and descriptive, so even the sentimentalists among the teachers could not assuage the just wrath of the principal. One of our spies told us gleefully that Dr. Smith had asserted that the criminal was “unusually depraved.” The other members of the Lodge looked at me with added respect.

  Finally, one teacher got wind of the Purple Lodge; we never knew who the betrayer was. She was certain that a member of our criminal brotherhood was guilty. Unfortunately, our own teacher had long had suspicions of Walter. She must have been abnormally shrewd, for Walter was an example of rectitude during school hours. Being intelligent, she suspected the well-behaved and apparently conforming. She came down on Walter. He never confessed. He never was a traitor. But his manner must have convinced the sharp-eyed dragon. She summoned his grim Germanic mother to the school. We all knew about Mrs. Schultz, from Walter’s harrowing descriptions. She believed in discipline. She was similar to my own parents, and bore quite a resemblance to the parents of the others, too. But they never tried to put us out of business for more than a few hours, whereas Walter’s mother believed in so dexterously punishing her offspring that they were hors-de-combat for a week.

  Mrs. Walter Schultz arrived at ten o’clock on one dark winter morning, a little woman as broad as she was tall, and solid muscle. Before all the children in the class she thoroughly beat up poor Walter, and even gave him a bloody nose. But no punishment would induce Walter to betray his fellow criminals. Silently, though tears ran down his cheeks, he incurred his misery and the powerful arm of his mother. We hated her with all our hearts and prayed for her sudden, violent, and painful death. We felt let down by God because she did not drop dead on the floor after preliminary writhings. Poor Walter was out of school for a day or two, but on his return we greeted him as a hero. He had never betrayed us.

  Walter was also a hero during Wilson’s War. He was decorated posthumously for valor on the battlefield, and he was only nineteen. I have never forgotten Walter.

  Naturally, I do not believe in Mrs. Schultz’s method of punishment. But I do believe in stern discipline, and no nonsense. I do believe in remembering that children are naturally infirm so far as acceptable virtue is concerned, and that they are not “delicate” and precious little blossoms as some of the child worshippers assert. Virtue in children, and civic responsibility, is something that must be taught painfully by stern parents and sterner teachers. Children do not come by it naturally, being human. A child starts out, even in these “loving” days, by having no more a sense of decency and kindness and charity and reverence than did his caveman ancestor. These are things which must be taught by strict discipline, example, and the power of a parent’s good right arm.

  The child psychologists, and the sentimental in general, disagree with me. A child, they assert, comes into the world absolutely pure, a saint in fact, uncorrupted, who does not inherit the savage instincts of his forebears. When I have told these silly creatures about the Purple Lodge they have looked shocked or disdainful. Children these days, they passionately affirm, are different. They arrive in an angelic condition, unpolluted and immaculate. They are “naturally” full of eager love, willingness to cooperate and share, anxious for justice and peace, and beatific. Child lovers simply will not be realistic. And so they are deftly used by nasty children—and all children are born nasty and human, and reeking with Original Sin.

  6 The Child-Lovers

  The child-lovers had already arrived when I was an unregenerate kid. The schools began to be invaded by tender sentimentalists under the guidance of the school boards. They set up physical examination clinics in the schools—iodine and aspirin centers, really. Of course, a lot of children, especially the brighter ones, took advantage of this marvelous situation. The child-lovers, who believed that young children are incapable of dissimulation, were easily hoodwinked. The child-lovers severely told our teachers that if a child complained of a headache or a pain he must be sent home or
to the school nurse, and his word invariably accepted. So, a lot of us, including me, had many happy, free days. We didn’t go home, of course, after our compassionate dismissal with a note for our mothers “urging” immediate attention. We raced the streets, had informal picnics with our school lunches, skated, explored. And forged our mothers’ signatures on the notes for the next day, or the next week. In the meantime our mothers remained ignorant of the fact that their kids were loose on the city. And the child-lovers never caught on, happily. We were The Children, and so beyond guile and normal human criminality. We were the Sanctified, and we never disputed it.

  When I arrived in the seventh grade I, as well as the rest of the kids, was joyously aware of the new “loving” situation in school. A few days in September convinced me that Miss Jones was a terrible person. Not herself a child-lover, she used a ruler manfully on us. She also believed in learning and constant study. She would march up and down the aisle with her clever weapon, leaving a smarting wake behind her. This was intolerable. Moreover, as it was now the rule that “slow” children should be accommodated at the expense of the more intelligent, a lot of us were bored to death. We had already, in the first weeks of school, raced through our textbooks while the dumb kids were still painfully on the beginning ten pages. So, we used the child-lovers to escape school, in spite of Miss Jones’ eminently intelligent statements that we were born liars and not to be trusted for a moment. Happily, the child-lovers did not believe her; they regarded her as “reactionary.”

  By the middle of October, I was fed up with Miss Jones and her medieval ideas that children were creatures of sin and needed to be restrained. So I decided on the normal course of action, with the help of the child-lovers. I developed a Heart Condition. I was a great student of Mama’s many medical books and I had the symptoms down pat.

  Mama, of course, was a skeptic. I started with Mama so she would not be unduly suspicious when I was relieved of school. I began to complain of vague pains in the region of my still unbusted chest, and breathlessness. When I approached the house I stopped running and skating. I removed the skates. I wandered into the house listlessly, and sat down, breathing unevenly and gaspingly. I had decided that a rheumatic heart condition was the best; it was quite common among children in those days and it would be regarded with less doubt than, say, a coronary occlusion or a stroke. I told Mama that a few weeks ago I had a “terrible” sore throat. As I had enlarged tonsils anyway—the subject of much anxious flurrying among the child-lovers—the sore throat gambit did not needlessly arouse Mama’s cynicism. I was always having sore throats. Mama was hard to convince, though. She did not relieve me of my household chores though she did buy me iron tonics. I was naturally white of skin and could use this physical characteristic to good advantage with the childlovers who thought all pale children starving or ill or physically abused by “unloving and rejecting parents.”

  Then I had a “heart attack” right in the midst of mathematics lesson, which I naturally detested. It was a fine one, too; I was a wonderful actress. I was immediately sent down to Dr. Smith and the school nurse, though Miss Jones heartlessly refused to accompany me. As no child-lover will ever expect a child to be a liar and a faker, the school nurse threw her arms about me tearfully and knelt before my bony knees, embraced me, and began to question me. The principal, Dr. Smith, was a little harder to convince, he having had too much experience with the children over the years. But I was a match even for him. I had all the authentic symptoms. I knew enough not to exaggerate. I let the story of my symptoms be dragged from me, piteously, and with an air of total childish innocence. I made my eyes big and apprehensive and moved them from face to face, in the meanwhile gulping pathetically. The nurse pointed out to Dr. Smith that I had the fragile bluish appearance of a heart patient. So far so good.

  “Do you get enough to eat, darling?” asked the tearful nurse.

  Mama’s cooking was deplorable, but there were platters of it and all of it had to be devoured at one sitting. As we were British we had meat three times a day, and so I naturally loathed meat.

  I whimpered, “I love fish, but we get it only on Fridays.”

  The nurse was convinced that I was underfed, for I was also tall for my age and skinny. My father, the nurse was sure, could afford proteins for us only on Fridays. She began to make notes, and I carefully and quickly read the notes out of the corner of my wicked eye. “ínsufficent proteins,” she wrote. “Conducive to heart strain, as well as to rheumatic fever?”

  And so it went. By the time the examination was completed I definitely had had rheumatic fever, was starved at home because of insufficient income on the part of my father, and was “severely disciplined by parents and so rendered timid, fearful and insecure.”

  The discipline at home was quite correct, but I was hardly timid, fearful or insecure.

  Tenderly, I was dismissed for the day and roared joyously out into the invigorating October sunshine. I went to a far-off park where I contentedly devoured my huge lunch and drank my milk. I had a wonderful thing going. I contemplated months of complete freedom from Miss Jones, and mathematics, and the dull children. All was ecstasy. I pitied my mates that they did not possess my astuteness and so had to attend school.

  I had overlooked disaster, of course.

  When I arrived home at the usual hour—there was no sense in trying to draw Mama into the conspiracy—I opened the door to discover that the school nurse was seated in the kitchen protesting to Mama, who was not only baffled but furiously angry. On my entry, the nurse held out her protecting arms to me but Mama caught me by the shoulder and exclaimed, “What devilment have you been up to now?” This gesture, I saw with pleasure, horrified the school nurse. Mama followed up the grasp with a smart hand slap in my lying face. I burst into shrieks. The nurse ran to rescue me. “Don’t, don’t!” she sobbed at Mama. Mama was unaccustomed to me shrieking, and she fell back, the very picture of guilt.

  Then Mama pulled herself together. “The little liar is starved, is she?” she demanded. “She needs more proteins, does she? Come here, you,” she said to the nurse and banged open the oven door to show the eight-rib roast beef cooking there, savory in its juices and surrounded by browning onions, carrots and potatoes. “I bet you,” Mama said to the nurse, “you never see such a roast like this more than once or twice a year, and then only on a holiday. And look at this ox-tail soup! Stiff with barley and vegetables, and look at this apple pie! When did you eat such a meal last, and this is what we have all the time!”

  The nurse was stunned. She looked pleadingly at me for denial, but I dared not deny for Mama’s black eyes were sparkling ominously. “She eats like a horse,” Mama went on. “She’ll eat half this pie herself, and ask for more. And she gets at least a quart of milk a day, too. Like a horse.”

  “Maybe fish?” whispered the nurse. “She loves fish.”

  “Does she?” cried Mama. “Who told you that? She’ll eat only smoked herring, and turns up her nose at halibut and trout. So I’ve been getting herring just for her, and all those Norwegian sardines. A pampered brat, that’s all.”

  But the nurse, though shattered, was still convinced that I was Only an Innocent Child. She also had authority. She left Mama a notice that I was not to return to school until I had had a complete physical examination, especially for my heart. The house was tensely silent that night. I tiptoed around and did my homework meekly.

  I had never had a doctor in my life up to then, and neither had my parents. Doctors were a Yankee fetish, and only “encouraged” people to be sick in order to fatten their purses. But Mama marched me off to a doctor the next day, and her hand was painfully clenched on my arm. As I had fearfully expected, the doctor assured Mama that I was not only sound in limb and wind and muscle, but had an excellent heart and no signs of any rheumatic fever. “What an imagination the child has,” said the doctor admiringly. But Mama did not admire me. The visit had cost two dollars.

  Mama took me home and expertly po
unded the hell out of me, and Papa enthusiastically carried on the job. I went back to school the next day, and to rigorous servitude under Miss Jones. She was especially stern with me, for good reason. I had almost deceived her. But she was pleased that the child-loving nurse had been bilked. “Not that that will teach such people a lesson,” said Miss Jones. “Delicate, fragile, innocent children! My eye!”

  My eye, indeed.

  I warned my nefarious pals at school that faking illness to escape school was not the best of ideas, considering skeptical mothers. I was a prime example.

  Children have not changed. And they are still wickedly clever. They fervently agree with the new doctrine that they are innocent flowers, pure and uncorrupted and piteous, the prey of heartless adults. (I know, my own children tried the trick, but remembering my youthful days I was not deceived.) So in concert with the child-lovers they are getting away with wholesale murder in our schools. Discipline is now unknown. The spanking of children is criminal, the child-lovers assert, and so no teacher these days dares even to defend herself against hulking “children” in their teens. The schools are in total chaos. The homes are terrified by monsters whose will is not to be denied lest they acquire some “trauma” of the spirit.

  And society, the courts, the judges, the social workers, are now the hosts and servants of idiot child-psychiatrists. Is there any wonder, then, that such an alarming number of crimes in America are now committed by undisciplined young people under the age of eighteen? Terrible crimes, too, including murder and assaults, drunkenness, and drug-addiction? Is there any wonder that our children are wild, undisciplined, evil and incorrigible, and full of socialistic doctrines? They have been taught that the world is theirs, and theirs only, and that there is no reason for them to restrain themselves, nor to learn to honor authority and to love God and country.