Flagellomania and Fatherhood: Roald Dahl, My Father, and Me

As a child, I’d always dreamt my father into the shoes of Danny’s father in “Danny the Champion of the World” — the father Roald Dahl describes as “the most marvellous and exciting father any boy ever had…. Plots and plans and new ideas came flying off him like sparks from a grindstone.” He makes kites and fire-balloons; he builds tree-houses and soap-box cars; he takes Danny poaching. He is “sparky,” as Dahl puts it, fun and loving.

By contrast, Danny’s teacher Captain Lancaster is “a horrid man, … a violent man,” and the schoolchildren are “all terrified of him.” The violence is expressed through caning, and eventually he canes Danny. For me, reading the book as a child close to Danny’s age, the visceral description of his caning seemed as close as writing could come to communicating actual physical pain. I felt I was being caned too. And perhaps so did the author: Dahl himself had considerable first-hand and, indeed, first-bottom experience of corporal punishment during his school years (doled out by various sadists, including one future Archbishop of Canterbury). Hence, at this climactic moment in “Danny the Champion of the World,” it seemed to me that the author’s, narrator’s, and reader’s experiences converged on the page, and we all shared the same pain and outrage:

It was almost impossible to believe that this man was about to injure me physically and in cold blood…. The long white cane went up high in the air and came down on my hand with a crack like a rifle going off. I heard the crack first and about two seconds later I felt the pain. Never had I felt a pain such as that in my whole life. It was as though someone were pressing a red-hot poker against my palm and holding it there…. Oh that fearful searing burning pain across my hand!

The caning leaves a “long ugly mark about half an inch wide running right across the palm,” which is “raised up in the middle and the raised part was pure white, with red on both sides.” Later, Danny’s father spots the mark, and is furious at Captain Lancaster: “I’ll kill him!…. I swear I’ll kill him!” School violence escalates quickly, exponentially: Danny is caned by Captain Lancaster, who might then be killed by Danny’s father.

In the event, Danny talks his father out of murdering his teacher. Once again, homicide remains an unrealized threat, a ghost in the education system. Danny’s father’s rage subsides, and he returns to being a “gentle lovely man” who, instead of murdering Captain Lancaster, arranges a midnight feast and chatters to his son about their poaching plans.

I’d thought of my father as a “gentle lovely man.” I’d dreamt of him as Danny’s father. Okay, he wasn’t always “sparky,” especially as he got older, but he did play with us, did enjoy being with us. Okay, he didn’t build kites or soap-box cars from scratch, but he did take us kite-flying, did buy me a faulty go-cart. Okay, he didn’t poach pheasants, was neurotically terrified of the police, but he did take us on country walks and picnics. So overall, my father had been much more like Danny’s father than not, while I was very young. I know how lucky I was with both my parents.

But then — funnily enough, at the very moment things were teetering on the brink of change, when he was starting to get ill, though we didn’t know it at the time — I came across the cane in his office. Then I glimpsed a different father, one who existed in a different dimension to us, one who might seem more Captain Lancaster to the kids he caned, than Danny’s father. In the years to come, there were other glimpses too. When, many years later, I met my father’s long-lost first son, he said his early memories of my father were of a “stern, mean man, an old-school disciplinarian” — again, more Captain Lancaster than Danny’s father.

Still, no doubt most fathers are part Danny’s father, part Captain Lancaster, to different degrees and in different contexts. I didn’t understand that back then when I found my dad’s cane, or later when I met my half-brother. Since becoming a father myself, though, I see it more clearly. I want to be Danny’s father, but there are moments when an inside-Captain-Lancaster takes over.

It can happen to all of us: I guess we are all guilty of everything, as William Burroughs put it. In hierarchical systems like parenthood or school where there’s a radical power imbalance, it’s all too easy for Captain Lancaster to possess anyone who isn’t right at the bottom of the heap. As Dickens says, “[T]he abuse of irresponsible power [is] … of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted.” The only answer is to try and shape systems which don’t confer irresponsible power, where our inner Captain Lancasters are regulated, controlled, kept within certain disciplinary bounds. Otherwise, however non-violent we think we are, self-control can break down, the temptation of ingrained flagellomania temporarily winning out…

It’s 2010. Our twins, Miranda and Rosie, are two years old. Our living room is a fortress, a toy-filled jail. There are child-proof fences everywhere: a gate at the bottom of the stairs, a gate at the kitchen doorway, a play-pen, two fences awkwardly joined together round the fireplace and TV. There are safety guards on all the electric sockets. Toys are strewn across the carpet like rubble, dead bodies. Everywhere you step, a squealing soft toy, an electronic nursery rhyme, goes off.

My wife Maria is out for the afternoon. The twins are on the rampage with the superhuman energy of toddlers, testing the fences for weaknesses (to paraphrase “Jurassic Park”), setting off all the toys at once. I’m encircled by a polytonal fugue of “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” “Twinkle, Twinkle,” Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers,” steam trains, car horns, mingled with screaming, laughing, crying. Miranda’s thrown one of Rosie’s musical steam engines over the fence by the fireplace. Rosie’s shrieking, squeezing in the gap between two fences to retrieve it.

I pull her back, tell her not to go near the fireplace — the fire isn’t lit, but the fire-surround is jagged concrete, asking for trouble from two-year-old heads. I pick up the steam engine, give it to Rosie, tell Miranda off. Miranda throws it back over the fence. Rosie squeezes between the bars to get it. I scoop her up, pick up the steam engine, hand it to Rosie, tell Miranda off. Miranda throws it back over the fence. Laughs. It’s a circular, never-ending game of fetch, a joke on Daddy: Fetch, Daddy Dog, fetch!

I’m exhausted. I don’t find the joke funny. I tell Miranda off, get the toy, put it out of reach on the mantelpiece: “I’m taking this away.” Rosie cries. I harden my heart and shout: “You’ve got to learn. You MUSTN’T go near the fireplace!” Rosie looks up at me uncomprehendingly, as if I’m a silent movie, and she missed the intertitle. “It’s dangerous and you’ll get hurt.”

I go into the kitchen to make their tea. I hear a crash and a cry. I step back into the living room to find Rosie head-down between the fences, having fallen trying to reach up for the steam engine.

I scoop her up, push the fences together, return to the kitchen. I hear a crash and a cry. I go back into the living room, to find Rosie head-down between the fences, having found another gap between them. I shout: “Don’t go near the fireplace!,” then relent, get the steam engine down, and give it to Rosie: “Please don’t go near the fireplace.”

I seal up the gaps in the so-called “child-proof” fences, step into the kitchen. I hear a crash and a cry. I go back into the living room. Rosie’s prised the fences apart, and is retrieving her steam engine, which, of course, Miranda has thrown onto the fireplace. I shout. Tchaikovsky, Waltzes, Flowers, Mary, Mary, Twinkle, Twinkle all shout with me. I shout louder, as if volume means anything to twins who don’t understand what I’m saying: “Stop it! Stop throwing it, Miranda! Don’t go near the fireplace, Rosie! Please stop it!” “Shtop it, Wosie!” echoes Miranda, giggling. “Shtopitshtopit!”

I ignore the echo, and adjust the useless fences, cursing them under my breath, swearing I’ll buy new ones, or maybe sledgehammer the whole bloody fireplace. I return to the kitchen. There’s a crash, a thud, a cry. I run back into the living room, trip over a Fisher Price telephone. Rosie’s squeezed behind the fences again, to retrieve her steam engine. Miranda’s at the other side of the room, so this time it must have been Rosie herself who threw the toy over. Rosie’s crying and laughing hysterically at the same time, as though blowing raspberries at me: Look at me, I’m behind the fence, I’m doing what you said I shouldn’t do, I’m in charge, and you’re not! Haha! Silly Daddy!

Now Miranda’s laughing hysterically too, and so are Tchaikovsky’s Flowers, Mary, Mary, Twinkle, Twinkle and Little Star, all of them laughing at me — and my head’s ringing, and I’ve had enough, and I scoop Rosie up, and I smack her, hard, on the legs, like my dad used to, and I yell at her, at Miranda, at the toys, at myself: “Stopitstopitstopit! I’ve-told-you-not-to-go-behind-the- fences-for-fuck’s-sake-stop-it!”

Everything — even the toys, it seems, even the Waltzing Flowers and Mary, Mary — everything goes quiet for a moment. Miranda stares up at me, open-mouthed, like I once stared at a cane in my father’s office. Rosie’s shaking, red-faced, holding in her breath. When I put her down on the floor, she finally lets it out in a huge, elongated scream. She cries and cries, backing away when I go near her. There’s a red mark on her leg. I start crying too, as does Miranda.

The front door opens and closes. Maria comes into the living room, finding us all on the floor, in a chaos of sobbing. “What on Earth is going on?” she asks.

“I smacked Rosie,” I manage to say. “I smacked her, and I’m never going to smack her again.”

And I haven’t. But that doesn’t take away the unending guilt I feel for that one terrible time. I still feel that failure, still see Captain Lancaster when I look in the mirror. I want to say sorry to Rosie, if she ever reads this, at some point in the future. In parenthood, there are moments of failure — of temper or disconnection or dismissiveness — we can never take back, however much we want to, and this was one of them.

Above all, the moment makes me feel like a bloody hypocrite. Years of cane-terror, years of detesting corporal punishment at school, yet here I was, doling it out myself, to my own daughter. She and Miranda were only doing the sorts of things all two-year-olds do: winding each other up, winding their parents up, endlessly repeating the same actions, seeking attention, testing parents for weaknesses. All of us did these things when we were two, three, four. Yet, as parents or teachers, we get exasperated, and end up punishing kids for echoing back our own infantile misbehavior.

In that sense, parenthood and teachership are institutionalized hypocrisy, discipline a displaced and belated kind of guilt, self-hatred radiated outwards: I hate what you’re doing because I hate myself for doing it once upon a time to my own parents and/or teachers. And what’s more, this is double hypocrisy: I’ll punish you for doing what I once did in precisely the way I hated as a kid: the smack, the fist, the belt, the cane.

As George Bernard Shaw claims, “We are tainted by flagellomania from our childhood.” According to Shaw, the choice of caning as the dominant form of punishment was determined by a “sensual impulse,” first shaped in childhood, for inflicting and receiving pain. Brutally caned (“tainted”) as children, the English grew up to enjoy inflict­ing that same pain on the next generation, and so on, and so forth. For Shaw, the English were stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of child abuse, of sadomasochistic flagellomania.

The hypocritical circularity of all this, with each generation echoing the last’s behavior and punishment, might bring to mind Philip Larkin’s well-known poem “This Be the Verse”: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad…. / But they were fucked up in their turn.” By all accounts, my dad was belted by his biological father, who in turn had suffered as a soldier in World War I. There’s a sense of inevitability and futility here, whereby “Man hands on misery to man.” Larkin, of course, didn’t have children, and his poem is, in part, absurdly reductive, a virtuosic pot-boiler. Or perhaps, to be more precise, it resembles a distorted playground rhyme, the kind that accompanies hop-scotch or, indeed, certain forms of bullying. As such, for those of us who do have children, it is also deeply frightening, a kind of curse, an invocation of deterministic futility.

I felt that futility at its most intense when I smacked Rosie. It seemed so pointless. All the smack achieved was useless pain on her part, which she didn’t understand, and an overwhelming sense of failure on my own.

Naturally, that’s not how corporal punishment is always seen. There’s a long tradition of representations of physical discipline that might be summed up in the short phrase That’ll teach ’em — in other words, the idea that physical violence is somehow ameliorative, enlightening, a lesson in itself. The cane is the teacher’s magic wand, conjuring up higher-caliber kids. The cane might help teachers “to mould” kids, to “make them better.”

Other teachers have thought along similar lines. In his 1984 memoir, “Boy,” the young Roald Dahl is brutally caned by the headmaster, while another female teacher looks on, “exhorting [him] … to greater and still greater efforts.” “She was bounding up and down with excitement,” writes Dahl: ‘“Lay it into ’im!” she was shrieking. “Let ’im ’ave it! Teach ’im a lesson!”’ This sadism by proxy is pre-echoed in Charles Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” where the stepmother of one of the pupils at Dotheboys Hall “hopes Mr Squeers will flog [her stepson] … into a happier state of mind.” You can be beaten into happiness as well as goodness, it seems.

We’ve come a long way since Dotheboys Hall. And yet, despite the demise of the cane, the idea that harsh quasi-militaristic discipline makes school kids better still persists, in multifarious guises. In place of corporal punishment is corporal control, a discipline that affects the body in different ways (stand up straight, sit up straight, wear the right uniform, don’t chew gum, don’t smoke, don’t vape, smile at teachers, sit down, shut up, go to isolation, go to detention). All of this, we’re told, is beneficial to kids, a good in itself.

But I can’t help feeling that discipline for its own sake has no inherent meaning; that discipline for its own sake is no different to the exercise of power for its own sake; that discipline for its own sake is, at worst, a self-justifying form of sadism; that discipline is not an end, but a means; that discipline only has a point when it’s the same thing as care.

In this, I’m with controversial pediatrician Benjamin Spock, who suggests that “good discipline” should be “based on love,” and its “main source is … being loved.”

Jonathan Taylor is an editor, lecturer and critic, and author of memoirs, fiction, and critical monographs. Jonathan has taught in higher education for over 20 years, and is now director of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. He lives in Leicestershire with his wife and twin daughters. This article is adapted from his memoir “A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline and Other Lessons” (Goldsmiths Press, 2024).