About two years ago, shortly after getting divorced, I decided I was going to establish some kind of family activity with myself and the kids that would just be our little thing. The idea of family story time won the day, and I started by reading the kids Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. That book was a huge success with the kids. So I decided to follow up.
I ended up buying a 16-book box set of Roald Dahl's books, and for a solid year we made reading these books our family activity. We read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, George's Marvelous Medicine, The Witches, Esio Trot, The Twits, The Magic Finger, Billy and the Minpins, and Matilda. Also included in this box set were Roald Dahl's two autobiographical books, Boy and Going Solo.
After reading about 10 books, we decided to read Boy, though I was a little trepidacious reading a non-fiction book to the kids. Fortunately, Boy is filled with many of the same antics found in Dahl's fiction stories. There is the story of how Dahl and his friends took a dead mouse and stuffed it into the gobstopper jar at their local candy store. Or there's the time he took dried goat poop and mixed it into the pipe tobacco of his eldest sister's fiancé. And there are less antical, though nevertheless captivating stories, like how Dahl almost lost his nose in an automobile accident.
When we were approaching the end of the book, I decided to peek ahead at the chapter titles. As I was flipping through, one of the chapter titles jumped out at me. The chapter was entitled "Fagging." How did I not see that earlier? I thought to myself. I didn't panic, because I happened to catch this a couple chapters in advance. However, it definitely felt like the kind of chapter I wanted to read ahead of time to assess. I was vaguely aware of the historical meaning of this term, and after reading ahead, I felt this chapter had some very good lessons in it.
All throughout Boy, Dahl reflects on the ways in which corporal punishment and institutionalized bullying were a part of the world he grew up in. For a boy going to a boarding school in England in the early 1900's, fagging was one of these bullying rituals. Just as hazing is institutionalized bullying by which older students force younger students to perform rituals or rights of passage (often demeaning, grotesque, and dangerous rights of passage), fagging was, in those times, institutionalized bullying by which older students forced younger students into servitude.
Leading up to the chapter on fagging, Dahl had already painted a picture
of the world of corporeal punishment he grew up in and how much he had come to
hate it. Just a few chapters beforehand, he discusses the impact of being caned
as a child:
By now I am sure you are wondering why I lay so much emphasis upon school beatings in these pages. The answer is that I cannot help it. All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn't get over it. I never have got over it. . . . [It left] a lasting impression of horror upon me. It left another more physical impression upon me as well. Even today, whenever I have to sit for any length of time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along the lines that the cane made on my bottom some fifty-five years ago. (pg. 177)
Dahl describes one of his headmasters who had a reputation for drawing blood when he caned the boys in his charge.
This slow and fearsome process went on until ten terrible strokes had been delivered, and all the time, over the pipe-lighting and the match-sticking, the lecture on evil and wrongdoing and sinning and misdeeds and malpractice went on without a stop. It even went on as the strokes were being administered. At the end of it all, a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.
I point to these passages in the book to show that by the time we get the chapter on fagging, Dahl has already made clear that the institutionalized bullying and abuse that he grew up with were abhorrent practices, and he is quite clear about this. There is, to be sure, a strange straightforwardness to the way he talks about these things. His tone may even appear indifferent at times, but this straightforwardness more likely reflects his trauma than his approval.
In addition to the corporeal punishment Dahl experienced at the hands of his teachers and headmasters, he was made a “fag” by the senior students. This meant that he had to serve at the beck and call of the older "boazers" (the terms used for the senior student prefects at his school). For the most part, his servitude came in the form of physical labor. His boazer (every fag had a primary boazer who was his master) assigned him tasks such as cleaning, mopping, dusting, scraping boots, etc. Invariably, no matter how good of a job he did at these tasks, his boazer would always find something to criticize.
In addition to Dahl’s physical labors, one of the boazers made him a "bog seat warmer." The school had outhouse restrooms in those days, and in the winter the seats would freeze over. Dahl would be sent out to sit bare-bottom on the seat for 15 minutes to warm it up for the boazer to then go and use it. Whereas Dahl's work cleaning and dusting was always criticized and ridiculed no matter how well he did, he was given mock praise for being a great "hot-bottomed fag” by the older boy whose toilet seat he would warm up.
To an adult such as myself, I could see the connection between institutionalized bullying and the latent homophobia present in such a term as “hot-bottomed fag.” There's a reason why the term fag would over time go from being a term of institutionalized servitude to being a homophobic slur. This was not lost on me while I was reading this chapter. But, of course, this is not something I expected my kids would pick up on. (Yes, remember, I was trying to decide if this was something I could or should read to my kids.)
Now, any parent who is at all concerned with how they raise their kids needs to ultimately address the fact that there are slurs out there, and at some point their kids will hear them. The way I see it, I have a choice. I can introduce my kids to this term now and control the discussion, or I can skip this chapter and pretend the term doesn't exist. And what are the consequences of that? Who will introduce them to that word? Will they teach them it’s wrong to call other kids that name? Or will they teach my kids to single out other people by slurs and epithets? Will they teach them that it’s ok to bully gays and lesbians because somehow they deserve being bullied?
That is, after all, what a slur is. Slurs are used to excuse an abuser by classifying the victim as somebody who deserves to be abused. Whether that’s older schoolboys abusing younger schoolboys, or straight boys abusing gay boys, the function of the word is the same.
In the end, after thinking about all this, I decided to read my kids the chapter. I omitted the word in as many places as I could because while I wanted to introduce them to it, I was not trying to reinforce it. The fact was that Dahl's book provided a great context for understanding how these words are used and the types of trauma out there that even kids can face. It deals with issues of corporal punishment, unfairness, and institutionalized bullying; and it allowed me to be able to clearly state to my kids that these behaviors are wrong, in no uncertain terms.
Part of my responsibility as a parent is to teach my kids right from wrong, and that includes teaching them the wrongness of the words abusers use to classify their victims. What Dahl is describing as happening to him is something I expect my kids never to inflict on other people. That’s not a lesson I set out to teach my kids when I started reading Dahl's books to them. But that’s the thing about reading; there are unexpected teaching moments waiting just on the next page.
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