THERE tends to be a dogma among some ‘enlightened’ theorists, particularly those of a leftist disposition, that vicious criminals are often ‘victims’ either of some kind of ‘social disadvantage’ or in some cases of childhood trauma or abuse. This argument from deterministic causality tends to imply that people have no choice in what they become, and have no moral responsibility for what they do.
I wonder how they would explain the fact that I did not become a vicious criminal. I was an abused child – not sexually abused, but mentally and physically abused by a mother who was a chronic schizophrenic (though I was not aware of that diagnosis until I was much older – when I was 19 or 20). She was paranoid and delusional. She heard ‘voices’, including voices from the dead, and to my puzzlement and horror would talk to them, and even shout at their non-existent presences. She was paranoiac about my father whom her voices told her was having an affair with a woman called Mary (he wasn’t). She alternated between being kind to me and being physically vicious and emotionally rejecting. I don’t know whether it is a blessing or a curse that I have what is called ‘total recall’ of my childhood. ‘Remembering’, for me, is not an episodic recall of isolated incidents, but I view my life in its wholeness as a long uninterrupted story. But here I shall describe some selected episodes.
Obviously I can’t remember being a tiny baby, but when I was a teenager my (paternal) aunts told me that in their presence when I was a babe in arms my mother threw me right across the room for my father to catch, and said ‘Here, you have him. I don’t want him.’ So perhaps it is not surprising that, at what must have been the age of two, the following happened. My mother had to travel to a dentist to have all her teeth extracted and I was left in the care of one of my aunts, and a few of my aunt’s friends were present. At one point one of them said, ‘Don’t worry, your mother will be back soon,’ and I remember a sea of shocked faces when I replied ‘I hope she never comes back’. My aunt knew, but her friends were not aware of what had been going on. Here are some examples.
I was born in 1945, a time of austerity, and my father, having had his career interrupted by service in the Army, struggled to pay the bills on his wages, so sometimes he earned money by playing in a dance band in the evenings. On one such occasion a few days before Christmas when I was very young, my mother woke me late at night and brought me into the living room. She had a weird and frightening look on her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘Santa’s been early. Let’s open your present.’ She angrily ripped open the parcel and produced a tiny toy piano (which my father had bought for me). She hit her finger on the little keyboard and produced some notes while singing (horribly) the words ‘You may not be an angel’ (from the 1937 song I’ll String Along With You which for obvious reasons now repels me).
She looked out of the window and saw my father returning from his gig, wearing black bow and evening dress, and carrying his instrument cases. Her eyes grew wilder. ‘Let’s keep him out,’ she whispered, locking the front door. I was terrified. He kept knocking and asked what was going on. ‘You’ve not been out playing, you’ve been with Mary again,’ she screamed, as she persisted with her delusion. Eventually she opened the door and he was horrified to see me out of bed at that late hour and looking so frightened. He then noticed the opened present he had been saving for me – the only one for me that he could afford. He put me back to bed and tried to reassure me in my state of fear and bewilderment.
A day or two later, while my father was out at work, the fisherman’s van came to our street (in those days it was common for milk, bread, and other items to be sold from street vans). ‘I’m too ill to go out’ she said, pressing money into my hand, and told me to go and buy three fishcakes from the van. As I didn’t know what fishcakes were, my eyes alighted on brightly coloured yellow smoked haddock which I pointed to and handed over the money. When I returned to the house she fell into a rage, screamed that I was a stupid naughty child for not buying what she asked for, and went berserk, slapping and punching me. I thought her violent rage would never stop, and eventually collapsed on to the sofa, struggling for breath with an asthma attack, and fell asleep, emotionally exhausted and badly bruised on my body (where it didn’t show). Eventually she woke me and said she was sorry, and ordered me not to tell my father. As I was so afraid of her I didn’t tell him, especially as I thought I must have deserved the beating for being a horrible child. In fact it was years before I told him about that, and other forms of mental and physical torture she put me through. He was shocked and had no idea.
Worse than the physical abuse was one particular incident at the age of three when she said she was taking me to town with her, but then suddenly turned on me and locked me in my bedroom. I don’t know how long I was in there but I felt abandoned and trapped, and scared for what seemed ages. Eventually when she let me out I asked her where she had been without me. She replied aggressively that she found a much nicer little boy than me and took him to the shops instead. No doubt she hadn’t done that, but I believed her and the sense of complete rejection was acute.
I could give many more examples, but will have to be selective about which stick in my mind the most. When I was about six my mother told me that she was going to stab my father to death with a carving knife during the night. I lay awake for hours, shaking with terror – a terror which persisted for weeks, so much so that I dreaded going to bed. If I fell asleep I had nightmares, and was easily awoken by the slightest sound. Because my father was not aware of the object of my fear he took me to the doctor (equally unaware) who just advised that I shouldn’t watch frightening things on television. Thursday afternoons (my father’s half-day off) and Sundays were the worst time. My mother was frequently manic or depressed on those days, and if we planned to go anywhere nice, such as a cinema or even just a park, there were numerous times when as we started to leave she said it had to be cancelled because she did not want to go out.
But on one occasion when she tried to cancel an outing to the park my father took me anyway. When we returned, she sounded weird, as if she was drunk. It turned out that she had taken a large overdose in a suicide attempt. She was taken to hospital and I was kept in a children’s ward for the night, and sent next day to stay with my aunt for a week (I was sent there a few times, and it was a haven of sanity). That was the first time my father told me that she was ill in the mind (though schizophrenia wasn’t mentioned, and I would not have then understood the term). That was the start of a number of such attempts and during my childhood she was a number of times ‘certified’ (now called ‘sectioned’) into mental hospital. During those periods my father had to employ a home help to look after me while he was at work. At least I was not thrashed or beaten during those periods of temporary help. Although my mother was quite clever at hiding her manic and delusional behaviour from outsiders, I made sure none of my school friends ever visited my home. I kept the situation a secret from them. My home and school life (and outside activities) were kept totally apart.
That separation of home and the outside world helped me to survive. What were the other survival techniques? A number of things. Instead of looking inwards and navel-gazing about my ‘feelings’, I looked outwards. My tough schooling also helped. Demands were made on pupils and we were made to face and overcome obstacles. At the age of ten I developed an interest in music and took up the clarinet. (If you want to know more about my passionate musical life you can read my 2023 TCW article, ‘Music – the glorious soundtrack of my life’.) In music I found a harmony and transcendental sense of beauty that gave life meaning. I also developed a passion for reading good books. Eventually when I was a bit older I became interested in philosophy, and felt so at home with the questions explored that it was as though I had a predisposition for questioning in a philosophical way, trying to make sense of the world. That is why I ended up studying philosophy at university and taking up writing (not, as some psychologists might assume, as a ‘therapy’ but out of intrinsic interest).
When I was a child and an adolescent my mother always told me I was ugly, so I found it difficult to approach girls for friendship (and in any case my first secondary school was a rough boys’ school). I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was 19. It became a close relationship, so much so that I told her about my mother’s condition. Her parents were fervent Christian Baptists who were so ‘loving’ that they were horrified to find out their daughter was dating a chap with ‘a mad mother’ (who might ‘inherit the condition’), and tried to encourage her to end the relationship. It continued for another year, but their poison eventually put an end to that. I eventually married a young woman who was down-to-earth and independent-minded, and I was determined that when we had children they would be given security and love.
I know full well that there are far worse cases than mine of children who have been abused. So I am not suggesting that there are no cases where childhood abuse can lead to future criminal behaviour. What I question is the almost automatic ‘excuse’ for criminality or violence on the grounds of childhood abuse. I also recognise that in cases like my mother, genuine mental illness, such as psychosis, blame is inappropriate and wrong. I do not blame my mother for what she did to me. In fact I feel sorry for her. She must have suffered. And so did my father. He looked after her, at the expense of his own wellbeing and health, for all his life. He ended up only a shadow of the man he once was. But apart from such dramatic cases it is my strong belief that we have a choice in what we become. The fashionable denial of moral responsibility for appalling behaviour on the grounds of ‘social disadvantage’ (as with Blair’s ‘the causes of crime’) or ‘bad childhood experiences’ needs a bit more scepticism.
