Boy by Dahl

[Emma]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Shaun Hately" <drednort at a...> wrote:

> I made no comment on caning in general - I happen to know a fair bit
about it, as it 
> has come up sometimes in anti-bullying work I do (a fair amount of
the research is 
> British and some people feel the banning of corporal punishment has
an impact in 
> that area), and I was also caned myself at school only a little over
a decade ago 
> here in Australia. I know the cane was used in British schools and
used widely, and 
> if I wanted to take a few minutes to check some books, I could find
real examples of 
> what Dahl included in Boy. My specific comments related however to
what Roald 
> Dahl experienced at his school - and school friends of his have
said, that in *his* 
> specific case, and at that *specific* school, what he describes in
Boy is not a 
> realistic depiction of what actually happened.

I'm disillusioned to hear that Boy wasn't realistic. Or maybe I'm not.
Maybe the fact that I believed it just proves that Roald Dahl was a
very convincing author.

It's interesting though, as working in a school library, Boy and Harry
Potter are the only two books I've ever been under any real pressure
to ban. Harry Potter because some parents had been told they were evil
or satanic or something (fortunately they agreed to read them and
changed their mind) and Boy because it gave a boy nightmares (I'm not
surprised - his parents told him he was going to a boarding school the
following year and some friend of his told him to read it to find out
what boarding schools were like).
I'm interested though - you said some people think corporal punishment
being bad at an impact on bullying - was that supposed to be a good
impact, or a bad impact. Because I'm sort of ashamed to say that I was
a bully when I was at school, and I really wish they'd done something
more than they did to stop me (I went to a "free school" where we got
away with everything) but I don't think hitting me would have done any
good at all.

Emma