FASTEXPERT
Breeuna09
3_paragraphs_and_articles_.docx
July 3, 2017
Articles and 3 paragraphs
Proof sibling rivalry can scar you for life
Listen American Accent Australian Accent British Accent
Section:
Features
- by two sisters riven by such jealousy and loathing it takes your breath away Ursula says I cowered in terror every t Louisa babys Louisa says It felt like Urs had stolen m mother's love from me : time sat s: ula y e
WHEN I look back over my long summer holidays as a child, there's one scene that encapsulates a typical day. I am alone, at the edge of a scrubby, sun bleached field in rural Essex. Somewhere in the distance I can see my older sister Louisa and her friends.
They're laughing and running away and I know I can't catch them, so there's no point in trying. Yet I want to be with them, not for the pleasure of their company — even though heaven knows there is little of that — but because I'm not entirely confident they will come back and find me.
I'm hot, tired and thirsty, but I know if I complain I'll get a good slap. So I sit there staring at a friend's pony I'm not allowed to ride, watching games from which I am excluded and straining to hear gossip I don't quite understand.
I'm lonely and frightened. I could go home, but there is no one there. Our parents are at work and Louisa is supposed to be looking after me. I am six years old.
I think it's fair to say my sister — eight years my senior — loathed me from the moment I was born, and bullied me relentlessly throughout our childhood. She won't dispute either of those facts. Cruel, frequently violent and resentful of my very existence, her bullying has left me damaged to the point that it will forever impinge on my happiness.
She has her own scars too and, like me, she still struggles with depression and feelings of inadequacy caused by the chasm that opened up when I arrived, and the terrible, pernicious rivalry that was actively encouraged and fuelled by our parents.
Nearly four decades later, at last we can both look back on that scene in the field and agree on one thing. It doesn't matter how much time has lapsed, how successful you are, how happy your marriage is, if you've been forced into a bullying relationship by the people who are meant to love you the most, there'll always be a part of you that feels lost.
I wasn't surprised, therefore, to read earlier this month how researchers at Oxford University have established a link between sibling bullying and depression in later life.
When I was born near Southend in 1971, Louisa lost a mother — that's how she tells me it felt. She had been an adored only child and first grandchild. But upon my birth, a cloud blocked out her place in the sun.
Our mother Susan had my sister when TURN TO NEXT PAGE FROM PREVIOUS PAGE she was 17, having met our dad, Alan, at 15 and married him shortly before Louisa was born. Understandably, my mother wasn't ready for parenthood. She was 26 when she had me, and I think she saw this second pregnancy as her chance to do things properly.
I was breastfed on demand and Mum practiced attachment parenting, so I was never off her hip. I don't need to imagine how this made my sister feel: she's told me many times. Wounded. Jealous. Angry.
But as I grew older, we moved to the Essex countryside to a tiny village, where my parents ran an antique-furniture business from outhouses in our garden. The business consumed them but, rather than employ a nanny, they relied on my sister to care for me.
Only now, with the hindsight of an adult and a mother to four boys, can I see how unfair this was on Louisa.
From the age of ten, she was expected to make my breakfast, prepare supper and look after me. This continued throughout her teens, and when I started school, she had to take me there and pick me up later, too. No wonder she saw me as a burden.
What 14 year old wants her six-year-old little sister dragging around after her all the time? Both our parents were harsh disciplinarians and considered a smack the only answer to any misdemeanor — a style my sister copied with zeal. I remember cowering in terror whenever she babysat.
ALTHOUGH I was scared of her, all I wanted, like most little sisters, was to be like her — but this took the form of taking her toys.
Neither of us will forget when, as a two-year-old, I picked up a precious ornament, given to her by our late grandmother, and smashed it in the bath. She will never forget either how she was told off for shouting at me.
I was a constant thorn in her side. When she was 12 or 13 and self-consciously experimenting with make-up, I would break into her room and smear it all over her dressing table. Again, she was forced to forgive me as the baby of the family. On her ninth birthday, I discovered her present of a box of chocolates and ate the lot.
When children's naturally selfish, competitive natures are unchecked and even encouraged, sibling rivalry easily spills over into something far nastier: bullying. Most parents work hard to try to ease the relationships between their offspring. Sadly, mine didn't.
They used each of our shortcomings as a stick to beat the other with. If my sister was good at something, they asked why I wasn't, and vice versa. Perhaps in some warped way they thought the competition would inspire us.
They'd openly take sides in our fights, and discuss who was their favorite child and why. From early in life we were labelled. My sister was the 'wild child'. First, she failed at school — no surprise as she had no time for homework. Then, after she left home, she'd come back broke, heart-broken, jobless or homeless thanks to her latest crisis.
I was the goody-two-shoes destined to make up for Louisa's mistakes. When she didn't get a place at college after failing her A-levels, my mother piled pressure on me to excel in exams.
When my sister was 28, my parents upgraded their car and promised her their old Fiat Uno. Then I got a place at Exeter University and I needed a car to get me there. They promptly gave me the Fiat instead.
To outsiders, I know these incidents will seem petty — the self-pitying laments of an over-privileged woman. But only when you are trapped in a gladiatorial arena presided over by your parents, can you understand how damaging such a situation can be.
I'm sure my parents' open disappointment at my sister's failures in her romantic relationships is what drove me to marry my childhood sweetheart at just 24. I was terrified of their scorn if things were to go wrong.
They pushed me hard into the arms of this aspiring young lawyer. Never mind if he was right for me — he was the catch they dreamed of.
NOT surprisingly, the marriage came unstuck pretty quickly, and we separated when I was 27. By then, my sister was happily settled with a long-term boyfriend, and suddenly became the favorite child.
It was horrible being the let-down, and I began to see how my sister must have felt for all those years. Yet that old rivalry remained.
For years, I thought our situation was unique, but having talked to counsellors and researched the subject, it seems it's not unusual for parents to be complicit in competitive wrangling between their children.
Counsellor Suzie Hayman, from the parenting charity Family Lives, says: 'Sometimes parents get a power trip from seeing their children divided.
'If the children aren't in alliance, you have total power because they can't join forces against you. Parents can deliberately stoke the fire of sibling rivalry, and if this happens it can be profoundly disabling.' Having suffered so much from the effects of rivalry, I was determined it would not tarnish the relationship between our own children when we had our first babies a few months apart: my son Jacob was born in October 2003, and Louisa's son Alex arrived in January 2004.
Our parents, as grandparents, quickly reverted to type and resumed their practice of measuring one child against the other. Alex was messy, Jacob was clean. Jacob was clever, Alex was slower on the uptake.
This brought our own rivalries into stark relief. One day, when our boys were not quite two, a stupid row over timekeeping (I'd accused of her being late for lunch, and she accused me of being a control freak) blew out of control.
Afterwards, we didn't speak for almost five years. But despite all our differences, I missed her and Alex with the full force of bereavement.
Our parents seemed to revel in the divide: reminding me how angry Louisa still was, constantly putting me off approaching her. It was only when their own marriage ran into difficulties that I reached out to my sister. She was the only person who could understand how hard it was trying to support Mum and Dad while they took out their stress on me and my family.
When we finally spoke — I had to steel myself to phone her — it was as if we'd never been apart. We both realised that if it hadn't been for our parents' constant meddling, we would have made up years ago.
family Thirty per have no cent have cent have 4 per We rebuilt our relationship as adults and now have a strong alliance. At 43 and 51, we love one another as fellow survivors. We live ten minutes apart in London, and our children see each other regularly. But we don't see anything of our parents. Indeed, we haven't spoken to them for three years.
We decided the only way to protect ourselves from our painful past is to build our relationship alone. We are fort prob my m to m unate to have salvaged it. And our blems have taught me that one of most important roles as a mother is make sure that my children grow up in a family where life is fair and full of love.
The e LOUISA SAYS: I REMEMBER walking on a beach in the South of France, idly spotting pretty shells in the surf. The memory is so clear I can almost feel the salty air on w cen way nt of us my skin.
s, 40 per , 15 per wo and have siblings one tw cent h three.
So why is it so poignant? Because it is the last time I can remember spending time alone with my mother.
I was seven, and my mother was heavily pregnant. This holiday s to be our last as a family of three, d I recall her telling me how much it would be for me to have a baby play with.
was and fun to p Fa to t ast forward a couple of months he day she came home from hospital.
All the family were crowded around her and the new arrival. I was caught at the back of this adoring throng, standing behind a gaggle of cooing relatives, and could hardly catch a glimpse of my baby sister.
This was to be just one of the many ways I was made to feel excluded once Ursula arrived. My mother was obsessed with her new baby, to the point that she seemed to have forgotten I existed.
Before Ursula was born, bedtime was our special time. Mum would lie on my bed with me and read me stories. After my sister arrived, she'd even forget to tuck me in.
Things might have improved once my mother emerged from the baby haze, but a tragedy occurred that cemented my resentment for my little sister into cold indifference.
When Ursula was almost two, my beloved grandmother died — but instead of comforting me in my grief, my mother continued to focus on Ursula. I couldn't forgive either of them for that.
To say I resented my sister is an understatement. I felt as if Ursula had stolen all of my mother's love from me.
I could never compete. Things got worse as we grew older.
When Ursula was 20 and decided for the first time to spend Christmas with a boyfriend instead of our family, my mother was inconsolable. I told her: 'But I'm here, we can still have a lovely day.' She spat back: 'I don't care. You're not Ursula.' My needs were not just secondary — I felt as if they counted for nothing.
After Ursula started school, Mum seemed bored of motherhood and threw herself into my father's business, travelling all over the Continent with him, importing furniture.
By the time I was 14, she would leave us alone for days on end, while she went away with my dad. I was expected to cook, clean, do the school pick-up and generally all the boring bits of having a child.
Like a harassed parent, I often took out my frustration on my sister.
I felt as if I was missing out on being a teenager. I could never go to parties or see friends — I was always taking care of Ursula.
WHEN I was about 15, a boy I really liked walked me home. He asked me out but I said I had to ask my parents first. They instantly said no as I had to look after my sister.
It was as if my mum got to have the exciting life while I was stuck at home looking after her baby.
I left home as soon as I could, at just 17, to go to secretarial college in Brussels. I lived it up to compensate for my wasted teenage years.
Ursula and I grew closer when we had our first children, but there was still tension when it came to our parents. They were a lot keener to help out with her son Jacob than they were with my son Alex, for example.
Eventually, my mum did begin to spend more time with Alex and I felt as if our relationship was starting to heal.
Then Ursula had her second son, Max, when Alex was 18 months. Once again my mother became obsessed with the new baby, and Alex and I were out in the cold.
This led to a five-year estrangement from my sister. We didn't speak and it was as if our parents were pleased. They would continually tell me how much my sister hated me and didn't want to see me.
Then, in late 2011, my parents' marriage ran into trouble. They were dumping all their problems on both me and my sister, and it was really hard to cope. In the end, Ursula phoned me and we met for coffee.
In that first conversation we began to understand how our parents had manipulated our relationship throughout our lives.
It has been five years since that coffee, and my sister and I are closer than we have ever been.
It has taken us time to work out our issues but we have both had therapy to help us come to terms with the problems created by our childhood. Now it is our parents who have been left out in the cold.
I finally realise how precious it is to have a sibling, and I am determined that our boys will enjoy a bond as cousins that we were denied as sisters growing up.
~~~~~~~~
By Ursula Hirschkorn
Copyright of Daily Mail is the property of Solo Syndication Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
D
Beaten, bullied, betrayed
Listen American Accent Australian Accent British Accent
Section:
News
Their parents sent them away for the best education, but generations of boys left boarding school traumatised for life BOOK OF THE WEEK STIFF UPPER LIP by Alex Renton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £16.99)
UNDETERRED by a well-nigh unbroken litany of sex abuse scandals over the years, the British still pack more children off to boarding schools than any other country on Earth.
Amazon tribesmen who routinely scald their children with hot water, or scratch their skin with shark's teeth in order to prepare them for the rigours of life, wouldn't dream of doing anything as drastic as sending them away from home for up to eight months a year.
As far as Alex Renton is concerned — himself a 'boarding school survivor', as it's rather ludicrously become known — this enforced separation has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health of former pupils.
Time and again in Stiff Upper Lip, there are accounts of middle-aged men who have never been able to form loving relationships, express their feelings, or even experience happiness because at a very early age they effectively walled themselves up for their own protection.
They had learned a terrible lesson — that 'love is not reliable, that trust may be betrayed'.
Emotionally stunted, physically and often sexually brutalised, they've stumbled through life with a nagging sense of being incomplete, of having left some vital part of themselves behind with which they can never be reunited.
BUT the effects of such an education are far more wide-ranging, Renton believes. With so many ex-boarders going on to become pillars of the Establishment, it's no wonder institutions such as Westminster, the BBC and the NHS have traditionally turned blind eyes to sex abuse. When faced with anything embarrassing, anything grubby, their instinct has been to brush it under the carpet.
As a boarding school survivor myself — I was sent to prep school aged eight in the Sixties where, with wearisome predictability, I was sexually abused, not by a master, but by the head boy — I found myself nodding along with many of Renton's points.
I, too, learned to keep secrets as a child. To bottle up my emotions and screw on the top as tightly as possible. Certainly, I never felt I could tell my parents what had happened. And telling any of the masters was unthinkable — even then, I had a pretty good inkling whose side they were likely to be on.
The first person I ever told was my wife, and I was 50 at the time.
Periodically, I still wonder how it has affected me. These things are hard to quantify, of course, but like a lot of the people who Renton interviewed, I've always had a sense that my childhood came shuddering to a premature close — and that nothing has ever been quite the same since.
Even the Victorians recognised that sending their children off to boarding school had a very peculiar effect on them.
Around 1850, many parents noticed their sons had stopped crying. Prior to this, gentlemen — or those aspiring to be gentlemen — had no qualms about bursting into tears.
Prime ministers Pitt, Fox and Wellington wept buckets without feeling remotely embarrassed, while poet laureate Alfred Tennyson would blub uncontrollably as he read out his own verses.
But then, all at once, boys stopped crying. Had their tear ducts suddenly run dry? Renton's explanation is that, sent off in ever-increasing numbers to boarding schools, they learned to bottle up their feelings.
So why did the Victorians start sending their children away to be educated? In part, they wanted them to become upstanding Christian soldiers. But there were other, less exalted motives.
Parents had grown increasingly concerned that if their children stayed at home, little Hector or Augustus might be faced with an irresistible temptation — wanting to have sex with the servants.
The big problem — as we now know — is that a great many of the men who worked in these new boarding schools were mad, bad, or both.
Sadists, pederasts, tinpot tyrants ... all were enthusiastically welcomed aboard. In 1860, a pupil at a 'private school of the highest class in Eastbourne' was beaten to death by the headmaster.
Most of the stories in Stiff Upper Lip are less drastic than that, but still memorably awful: the persistent bed-wetter recalling how the matron at his school would rub his nose into his urine-soaked sheets every morning; the girl with a dairy allergy who was forced, again by the matron, to drink a glass of milk, then to clear up the mess after she vomited.
Renton himself was sent — aged eight — to Ashdown House in Sussex, where on his first day he saw a 'short woman in a checked coat presenting a curly-haired boy even smaller than me to the headmaster'.
This turned out to be Princess Margaret and her son, David.
Renton's mother commented about the headmaster: 'He seems very nice.' In fact, he turned out to be a sadistic drunk who beat boys so severely that they had purple welts for weeks afterwards. But while Renton convincingly argues the case against boarding schools, he has overlooked one key element — its absurdity.
Rightly, he doffs his cap to George Orwell, whose essay about his own prep school days, Such, Such Were The Joys, is 'savage' in its criticisms.
But however savage, Orwell's essay is also extremely funny, and it's the absurdity of boarding school life — most notably its idiotic rituals and traditions — that helped make it so sinister.
THE playwright David Hare remembers how at his public school, Lancing College, boys were ordered to swim naked 'on the unlikely pretext that if we wore trunks, the fibres from our garments would clog up the filters'.
You can huff away with shock and indignation at this, of course, but you'd need to have had a complete sense of humour bypass not to crack a wry smile at the same time.
Ah, but everything has changed now. At least that's what parents tell themselves as they pack their children off to boarding schools.
Certainly, some things have changed. These days, fees have increased so much that schools can afford to be far more selective about who they employ. Partly as a result, the beatings, the bullying, the sexual abuse are largely things of the past.
Nor is there any doubt that a lot of the children who go off to board aged 13 — rather than at eight — find it a rewarding and enjoyable experience. They have their own rooms, can go home at weekends and may call their parents whenever they want.
Yet none of this is enough to persuade me to send my children — aged ten and nine — away to school.
Some things haven't changed. For instance, headmasters have no more legal obligation to report instances of sexual abuse to the police now than they did 50 years ago.
And, as Renton concludes at the end of this grimly depressing, often lumpily written yet enormously valuable book: there's one thing that can never change — 'they are still boarding schools'.
~~~~~~~~
By JOHN PRESTON
Copyright of Daily Mail is the property of Solo Syndication Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
I was bullied at school for being gay — but I would never dream of asking a teacher for help
Listen American Accent Australian Accent British Accent
Section:
Features
After two years away from theatre to film Benedict Cumberbatch's Richard III, director Dominic Cooke is back on the stage with a new play about LGBT suicide, he tells Fiona Mountford
WHEN I last interviewed Dominic Cooke, three years ago this month, he was exhausted and looking forward to an extended period of actual gardening leave. After six highly stressful but hugely successful years as artistic director of the Royal Court — Jerusalem, Enron and Clybourne Park were just three of the triumphs — he was preparing to step down from the post and was eagerly anticipating time spent pottering in his Acton garden.
So it seems only right to start by asking: Dominic, how does your garden grow? "It's actually in terrible disarray," he laughs, "because we're doing some work on the house. I also just stopped and reconnected with the rest of my life for a bit, which was very, very welcome. It was like a period of decompression."
After a two-and-a-half-year hiatus from stage directing, Cooke, 49, is about to return with a new play at the Donmar Warehouse. Teddy Ferrara, by New York playwright Christopher Shinn, is a bracing examination of the pitfalls of progressive politics, centring on an opinionated group of gay students on an American university campus. "I'm excited to be back directing again," says Cooke. "I've really got my appetite back." This play represents another step in Cooke's long and fruitful working relationship with Shinn; he has directed two other dramas of his previously at the Royal Court — Other People, in 2000, and Now or Later, in 2008. "He's really good on the way people deny their unconscious dimensions, particularly in relation to the effect of information technology on our psyches," says Cooke. What was the appeal of this particular script? "One of the areas he's talking about is that we're in an age where introspection is being rejected in favour of projections of versions of the self. The obvious example is social media, where people put out a version of themselves and put a lot of energy into creating and reshaping that version, but meanwhile not ever going inward." He pauses, affable and thoughtful as ever. "Those values of depth and understanding of the self are not really applauded or rewarded in our time."
The other attraction of the play, Cooke continues, was its light-shining focus on LGBT mental illness and suicide. "Forty per cent of young LGBT people, according to a recent study, consider suicide. Which given the shift in legislation and the massive change in values in my lifetime is pretty incredible. The play gets into who is responsible." As a gay man himself — his long-term partner is playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell — he has experienced some of the darker issues covered by Teddy Ferrara. "At school I was mercilessly bullied," he says, "but you would never dream of going to a teacher for help, and if you did you might be told, 'too bad'." He's delighted by the increasing numbers of people coming out, especially sports stars. "In the Seventies when I was growing up, the only idea you had of gay people was Quentin Crisp or John Inman. There was no notion that you could be all sorts of different types of people and also be gay."
Teddy Ferrara is the first of three plays that Cooke will direct almost back-to-back. The next two, a short new one by long-term collaborator Caryl Churchill and August Wilson's modern American classic Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, mark the start of his remit as one of Rufus Norris's associate directors at the National Theatre. Cooke was thought by many to be the obvious choice to succeed Nicholas Hytner on the South Bank but he had no desire to go from the frying pan of the Royal Court into the fire of the National, undoubtedly one of the most gruelling jobs in British arts. Norris, for one, is certainly glad to have him on board. "He brings a huge wealth of knowledge about the leadership of arts organisations and, on a personal level, is a terrific mentor on almost every level of my new position," he says of Cooke. Interestingly, Cooke hasn't entirely ruled out the possibility of running for Norris's job next time around. However, he warns that "everything in theatre changes really quickly. You notice that someone suddenly emerges out of leftfield and within a year you've got someone who's a real force." Robert Icke, rising star director at the Almeida, is one such talent, he suggests. What doesn't he miss about running a theatre? "Lots," he says, emphatically; it's clear that workforcestructure "organograms" are not something about which he is likely to wax nostalgic. "I really think theatres now are getting to the stage where they're almost impossible to run because the demands are greater than they've ever been," he says. He lists the daily pressures that result from having to balance budgets and income streams, health and safety and employment laws, with the creative demands of a highly stretched organisation. "I really think the Arts Council needs to be thinking about what it can do to help this situation." Given that all this very visibly wore Cooke out at the Royal Court, his warning should be heeded.
Cooke oversaw a glorious golden era during his time as artistic director, nurturing the careers of numerous young writers, among them Bola Agbaje, Nick Payne, Anya Reiss and Polly Stenham. That dislikeable British trait of carping at a job well done meant he was even criticised for being too successful, both commercially and otherwise. "There were things that were said that did piss me off," he admits. Nonetheless, he goes back often and is full of support for his successor Vicky Featherstone, whose tenure has so far been uneven. "I think she's been unfairly treated by the press. What she's doing is very different from what I did. It's maybe less commercially appealing and more about finding bold theatrical languages and pushing into a territory that I didn't really manage to get into."
Cooke might not have worked in the theatre since spring 2013 but, therapeutic gardening aside, he has been far from idle post-Royal Court. For the BBC's The Hollow Crown he has directed the three films of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses, due next spring, starring Tom Sturridge as Henry VI and a certain Mr Cumberbatch as Richard III. "It's a lot of war," he says, wryly. "Six battles! And four coronations!" His first time behind a film camera was a "huge leap into the unknown" but one he enjoyed. He is hoping to direct a low-budget British picture next year and has other film projects in development.
For now, though, Cooke is revelling in his unaccustomed role as a "jobbing director". He professes himself sceptical of the notion that one can plan for a whole career in the "provisional world, so temporary in its spirit" of the theatre. He's had "some conversations" about following former Donmar boss Michael Grandage into creating a company for a West End residency but is currently enjoying being free from all onerous responsibility. Whether he approves of the idea or not, however, I strongly suspect that Cooke does indeed have a job for life.
Teddy Ferrara is at the Donmar Warehouse, WC2 (0844 871 7624, donmarwarehouse.com) from tomorrow until Dec 5
~~~~~~~~
By Fiona Mountford
Copyright of Evening Standard is the property of Evening Standard Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
