I have already gone into some detail here and on other threads @Thomas Stearn. I suppose in broad terms it deprived me a normal childhood and kept me from my mother so soon after losing my father. I was not quite 7 when I went there.
You are comparing a school where Brit royalty attended to my boarding school. Please. We had to pick up cow dung to play footy. If you left the school grounds you lost all privileges.. including the next family day as you would be polishing floors. Even for smoking you received 3 cuts across the bare bum. You had terrible red welts and could not sit comfortably for a week. I compare this school more to a military college such was the adherence to discipline.
Gordonstoun was a very strict disciplinarian Boarding school. Prince Philip attended and loved the roughness of it all.. so sent his eldest son there to ''make a man'' of him. Unfortunately if you read any interviews by Prince Charles you will find, that he hated every minute of it, he was bullied badly (royalty or not) as were others, he cried in letters to his grandmother to go home, but wasn't allowed to by his father. Anyway, at least you were only in school getting that treatment,!!! I was in a childrens' home for part of my childhood, , living that life 24/7 ..beatings regularly from the ''aunties'' for the slightest of reasons...polishing floors. massive landing floors, and dining room floors and 3 flights of stairs at 9 years old, and my brother j8 and sister just 6 years old!!.. if one kid did something wrong, we were all made to lie face down on our beds and everybody got whacked with a belt or a slipper!! This wasn't a home for bad kids this was a children's home for kids whose parents for one reason or another couldn't look after their kids,... a Large foster home in essence ... none of us little ones did anything to deserve being beaten half to death!! Even when I went back home eventually, there was no respite, my fathers belt or boot was always at the ready.. I've had more bruises and belt welts than you can shake a stick at and watched my mother get the same .. and I had my back broken, and my mother took her own life!!!
@Holly Saunders @Craig Swanson ...these places sound more like prison camps to me. But you both screwed them all...by surviving and becoming decent citizens...in spite of them
That's what keeps me going Gloria. Instead of thinking of myself as a Victim, I try always to be more positive and think of myself as a survivor. So many people have undergone so much less horrors than me in their lives yet suffer badly from PTSD... our minds all work differently. and I feel for them, and altho' I would be lying to say some of it hasn't affected me into adulthood in some way.. I won't allow it to take my mind... That makes me a winner compared to the losers whose sorry mental state made them the vicious human beings they were.!!
This makes for comical reading - like who had it harder as kids I dumped my childhood rubbish years ago and have never gone looking for it - leave it where it belongs - in the past or write a book
You just had to be nasty didn't you?...you can't help yourself can you?..you ''left all that childhood rubbish behind you'' did you?... bully for you.!! Further to that how dare you call my mother committing suicide ''childhood rubbish'' because I had the temerity to write it here... who the hell do you actually think you are? You deal with your own childhood the way you want..but don't dare presume to tell anyone else how to deal with theirs. You don't like it...don't read it!!
Calm down, you're over-reacting I wouldn't have stopped by, but thought it was a 'light hearted' thread, yep - bully for me, still have a lot to contend with but as the saying goes - others are a lot worse off and I think of them
Perhaps you feel that you need to do that but not everyone agrees. I believe that my past has a great deal to do with who I am today and that my past experiences, good or bad, helped to form the person I see in the mirror. I think it's important to remember our histories and, while it may or may not be helpful to talk about the past, I don't believe that it's harmful. Perhaps it is painful for some but, of course, they have the option not to participate.
Absolutely agree because the past does shape you as a person. The big problem for me was not letting go, affecting my health, so when I finally did manage to let go my heart soared and finally found peace
I can't remember anything specific, because we did something different every day. It was just the neighbor boy and I, and later, his little brother. There was a railroad track running along our property line in the back, and most of our time was spent around those tracks just exploring things, and hoping a train would go by so we could wave at the guy in the caboose. It didn't take much to entertain us. This direction led 1 mile to my grandmother's house. The other direction led to a highway bridge. The bridge was old, rather spooky underneath, and rumbled when the big trucks went over. That only lasted a few years. When we got older, we mostly stayed at home inside, because you needed a car where we lived to do anything exciting, and no one who could drive was willing to drive younger brothers and sisters around. Payback time!
That sounds terrible Holly. In comparison makes what I went thru seem like a picnic. I at least had parents who cared for me.. that is up until my father died. My mother told me she sent us to the school pretty much out of necessity as she could not afford to rear us on her own. So she preferred paying annual and not inexpensive(I suspect) boarding fees for strangers to bring up her kids rather than do it herself. I never could understand this and was cold to her on the subject for many years. Later she did admit she had made a mistake in sending us way.