Days 269/270 – Writing Exercise – An argument where a personality changes

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You think you know someone, and in the end you do not know them at all.

I had seen it happen with my father, but I had been warned about him, what the war had done to him. And how different he had been when he returned.

I did not know him before the war, but the things my mother’s parents said made him out to be the gentlest, kindest man on God’s green earth.  I believe them. Because when I was very young I had seen it with my own eyes.

He had been that kind and gentle man.

But then, just as I turned thirteen, that unlucky number I dreaded, he changed.  Not instantly, and not with any discernible symptoms.

Little signs, a moment of irritability, having a routine interrupted.  Life in the house was orderly: up at seven, breakfast at eight, he was gone by eight thirty, and we were off to school not long after that.  At three, got out of school, home by three thirty, mother cooking dinner for five pm precisely, our father getting home at four thirty, and reading the paper until five.

Sometimes the timetable slipped; something went wrong, we were delayed at school, he would get home late, but it never warranted more than a comment and an assurance it wouldn’t happen again, and if it did, it wasn’t an insurmountable problem.

Until it did, and that first time, for just an instant, I saw someone I didn’t recognise, and it frightened me.

The following week, my older brother got into trouble at school, and my mother had to front up to the headmaster’s office.  It made her late and put the dinner schedule out.  He raised his voice, and my parents argued.  I may not have been very old, but I knew that circumstances had made it impossible for her, and yet he had blamed her, not for being tardy with dinner, but that she was to blame for my older brother’s mischievous nature.

I could not see how that was possible.

I asked her the next morning, after he left for work, and my older brother had gone to school by himself.  She said there were miscreants in her family, not explaining what miscreants were, or what they did, or how he knew about them.

We had not, as far as I could remember, visited or communicated with any of our uncles and aunts on either side, and rarely saw my mother’s mother, and sometimes went to see my father’s mother.  I had never seen my mother’s father, though I did remember my father saying something very bad about him when they were having a private argument in their room.  I had only vague memories of my father’s father, and that they were of a monster, ten feet tall, scaring the living hell out of me.

He probably wasn’t, but that was all I remembered of him.

…

A week slid past.  Something I didn’t know about myself suddenly presented itself.  I had heard my mother referring to me as her ‘little scamp’.  I mean, I didn’t think I was little, but like any parent, they give you labels.  My brother was gregarious.  My mother liked using big words without explaining them.

Perhaps I could get into what she called ‘mischief’.  Trouble did seem to have a habit of following me around, and playing backyard cricket, as we did sometimes in that half hour between when our father came home, and dinner was served.

It was a small backyard, and he always warned us not to hit the ball hard.  I had to, didn’t I, just that once, and it went over the fence.  It had done so before without much fanfare, but this time, it annoyed him.  He told me to go around, ask the neighbour if I could get the ball, and apologise.

I would not.

That was the first time I received what might be called corporal punishment.  My father smacked me.  Hard.  It hurt.  I cried.  And my mother admonished him, saying, strangely, that punishment might have happened in his house, but it was not going to happen in hers.

He simply said it was not her house; it was his, and he would mete out punishment for ‘unruly’ behaviour, whenever and however he saw fit.  Oddly, it was the first time it had happened.

My opinion of him had slipped from someone I thought was kind to someone mean, as happened when a child is punished.  I had not been punished for what I believed were far worse infractions, another of my mother’s big words, so why this time?

It can be said children can be foolish.  I guess I was about to learn the error of my ways. 

Several days later, my mother called us for dinner.  On rare occasions we were allowed to do homework, or study in our room.  My brother went; I wanted to finish the chapter of my book.  It was not the first time, but the most recent occurrence, my father had given me a warning.  I ignored it because in previous instances there had been warnings, but no punishment.

A child doesn’t understand consequences.  Maybe at school, where if you did misbehave in class there was punishment, and it happened. 

I came into the room, and my father glared at me.  My mother was looking at my father.

“Come here.” 

By this time, I think I was about to find out there were going to be consequences, but I still couldn’t equate it with what had happened in the past.

“You were told not to be late.”  He smacked me.  Hard.  “Now sit down.”

“No.”  I had no idea where that came from.

“What did you say?”

“I’m going to my room.”

“Sit down.”  He said it in such a way that I knew now I had pushed him too far.

He stood, came over and slapped me on the side of the face so hard I fell on the floor.  My mother leapt out of her chair, knocking it over and came over to stand between me and him, a furious expression on her face.

“You promised me that you would not be like your father.  He may have beaten you and your brothers, but I will not have it in this house.”

I stayed on the floor, holding my face.  It really hurt, and I was crying.

“Then discipline your brats.”

“They are your brats too, but this is not the way.  Your father was a monster.  I told you that when he beat both of them for simply moving his newspaper.  You said then that you would never be like your father.  You are.  Right now.”

“And with your family you think you can take the high moral ground?  Your father was a pathetic excuse of a man who killed himself.  What would you know about anything?”

She hit him.

He punched her back; she fell backwards and hit her head on the door of the cabinet and went quiet.  I crawled over to her and shook her shoulder, saying, “Mum, Mum, wake up, please,” and sobbing.

My father looked down on me.  “This is your fault.”

I could see my brother was about to say something but then closed his mouth. 

No remorse, no recognition of what he had done.  He sat down again, as if nothing had happened.  My mother stirred, looked at me, then got up.  He watched her until she was standing.

“Come, Robert, I’ll take you to your room,” she said, while looking at my father. 

He was going to speak, then didn’t.

Whatever I may have thought of my father and my mother in the past, that was gone.  It was replaced by fear, the kind that made me think twice before I did anything that might upset him.

And that wasn’t out of respect, because I knew that the way we had lived our lives up until this moment in time, in a carefree and relaxed environment, was never going to be the same again.  He had changed; my mother had changed in a way I never thought was possible.

…

Many years later I learned from my brother that my father, a few weeks before ‘the incident’, he had a recurrence of the nightmares brought on by his war experiences.  He had never talked about them, not until recently, but the nightmares brought on sleeplessness, which brought on irritability and tiredness, which triggered a complete change of character.

He reverted to what he ‘knew ’, which was the characterisation of his own family life, which had been brutal and unrelenting, the reason why he left home very young and volunteered in the army to get away from his father.

That period in our lives lasted for nearly six months, during which all three of us found ourselves at the end of his tongue and hand, sometimes so bad, we had to skip school lest someone ask questions, questions that could not be explained away.

Until he collapsed and had to be taken to hospital with a recurrence of malaria, which had previously caused him to spend a few months in the hospital after returning from New Guinea.

They eventually called it a nervous breakdown.  He was there for a month.  We didn’t visit him.  When he came home, he apologised and said it would never happen again, but the damage had been done, and my mother was never the same, towards him, or towards us.

The thing is, no matter how hard you try to bury these memories, they stick in your mind, and nothing will ever remove what happened that day.  That first day I was on the floor, too frightened to get up.  Later, I hid under my bed, too frightened to come out.

And whatever my nature had been before the incident, it changed me, turning me into a frightened, unconfident child who preferred to live in any fantasy world other than the reality that was life in that house.  These days, what happened to us was hidden behind closed doors, and few people talked about it.  Not like today, when bullies like my father can go to jail.

At least, in my case, I did not perpetuate the cycle of violence.  It stopped with me.  Perhaps if it could be said anything good came out of it, it was that.

…

©  Charles Heath  2026