The Sam Uffindell revelations prompted a painful reckoning with my brother’s own school years. Now another news story makes me wonder how much has really changed.
This essay deals with the sexual abuse of children. Please take care.
Last week, I saw a headline “College cancels ‘Wife Beater Wednesday’ at 11th hour” and read the article with increasing anger that these privileged young men had seemingly learned nothing over decades. The school was St Bede’s in Christchurch and the dress-up day was described by senior staff as “bad judgement” from a group of Year 13 students. It seems to me that this bad judgement has been going on for as long as I can remember in these elite boys schools.
When the news about MP Sam Uffindell’s private school bullying broke, I entered my own black room. It was the day I learned more about my brother. I’d had suspicions for years. That day I learned what happened to him at St Bede’s, where he was a boarder for four years. I can’t stop crying. I want to talk to him. He would have been 73. He died when he was 30.
I have always wondered about his time at St Bede’s. There were moments and reactions in his life which struck me as atypical. There were times after he came back from St Bede’s when I would come upon him sitting looking into space, tears in his eyes. Times when the sparkle went out of him. Times when he would be about to speak but shake his head and move onto something else. There had been parts of his life that I knew nothing about because he was younger. He was sent away when he was 13. By the time he refused to return to St Bede’s in 6th form I was working as a nurse receptionist before leaving to train as a nurse at Dunedin Hospital.
The news of Uffindell’s bullying at another boarding school brought these memories back to me. Lingering anxiety about my brother’s life at Catholic boarding school had always troubled me, because of a possible connection between those experiences and his early death. Sometimes I thought I could feel his presence at my shoulder in times of stress and. I would put my hand there and feel his presence. When my younger sister died, her own death unexpected and inexplicable, his presence was there.
He was the fourth child after three girls, the longed-for son – my mother’s “little honey lamb”. She set great store in having a son and heir, as she repeatedly described him. He was adored by all of us, and I remember his arrival home – a little squally thing in a bassinet. Being much older than him, I don’t remember that much about his early life, but that one scene remains a vivid mental picture. He grew into a talented, sunny child, tall and good looking with a mass of blond hair which he kept untidy. He was clever, musical, a good athlete, a cricketer. After his university years he became a probation officer, a helper of others, keen to make life better and easier for the disadvantaged. He became a Buddhist, joining one of the gentlest and kindest of all religions, as far away from the Roman Catholic Marist brothers as he could get. He was married in a Buddhist ceremony. Buddhism was how he chose to live his life. He was a Buddhist lay preacher. His Buddhist name was Padmasiddhi.
My mother was English, with the baggage of a deprived background in the dockyards of Liverpool. That experience never left her and coloured her view of life. She was frightfully snobbish. She fought her upbringing by shedding her accent, learning to speak “proper English”. Her bible was The Queen’s English by Professor Arnold Wall. Her desire to be more than the product of working class parents meant she sent her cherished son to a boarding school because that’s what the upper classes in England did. My father liked an easy life. He went with the flow. He allowed my brother to be sent away, to a boarding school named after an English monk, Bede the Venerable. St Bede is considered to be the greatest scholar of antiquity and is very highly thought of in the Catholic church. Yet the concept of a Catholic boarding school with such as illustrious name would have meant nothing to my father, and was completely alien to his own upbringing. It seems to me that now there was nothing venerable about that school when my brother and his contemporaries were there.
The day that the news broke about Uffindell, I went to my sister-in-law with my anxieties and suspicions about my brother, her husband. No longer was he a reassuring presence on my shoulder, but a heavy cloud of black anger. She told me that my brother was abused at St Bede’s, that students tried to climb into bed with him and other boys in the dormitory. She told me how he referred to a much more disturbing incident that he wouldn’t fully describe that was perpetrated by an adult male on site. His widow assumed this was one of the priests. My brother did not deny this.
His time at university and his early life with his wife were traumatic for both of them. He became depressed. He couldn’t shake the memories. One day he started furiously painting their bedroom black, shouting that he had to get the blackness out of his system. He suffered awful nightmares. He tried to dull the pain with alcohol.
He and his wife eventually sought counselling. He was helped by the Gestalt counselling training he was undertaking. It was a desperate and angry time for him, a troubled time for them both, but with the support of his wife and therapist he eventually got through it. He painted over the black walls.
When he saw TV images of the St Bede’s boarding house being bulldozed, she said he leapt to his feet and began dancing in circles around the sitting room chanting joyous hoorays and shouting “about bloody time!”. A cloud had finally lifted.
Was his final illness, a few years later, related to his trauma at St Bede’s? The evidence is not absolute. He talked about his time at the school as being the turning point in an otherwise happy life. He was always affected by his experience there. Although the nightmares ceased when the building was knocked down, he still carried the weight. He worried about his own son.
He died at home from a brain tumour. His son was six. I was still in England when he died. At the end, his wife held the phone and I talked to him. Although he could no longer move, speak or see, he could still hear. His final words before he lost his speech and lapsed into a coma were don’t send my boy to a boarding school. He looked relieved, nodded when his wife promised she wouldn’t. Then he shut his eyes. His funeral was at home, surrounded by flowers and friends; his Buddhist soulmate led the ceremony.
The Uffindell affair brought back all these memories and anxieties, all the anger and the sadness. I think about how many other boys, now men, still struggle with these kinds of memories. I also wonder if their abusers will ever be held to account.
If you’ve been affected by the subjects raised in this article, these services offer support and information: Auckland specialist service Help, 0800 623 1700; specialist men’s service Male Survivors Aotearoa, 0800 044 334; and Snap (Survivors network of those abused by priests).