Author's Note 1: George Orwell wet the bed
I want to share something I read by George Orwell which chilled me to the bone. Why? Because, like me, George Orwell wet the bed and was punished for it.
Orwell was sent to a boarding school at the age of eight in 1916. He wrote about it thirty years later in an essay entitled Such, Such Were the Joys. The essay starts with these lines:
Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian’s … I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight … Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers. ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not.
- George Orwell, Such, Such Were the Joys, 1947
In Maudie, the children’s novel I am writing, the first chapter starts with these lines.
Maudie chewed the corner of her sheet and scrunched her feet in Big Ted’s fur. The dorm was quiet. The others were still asleep, but Maudie had been awake for ages. She could hear the rain on the window by her head. Her feet were warm now but when she’d woken in the night, they were freezing. She had wet the bed. Again. And it was only her sixth night at Bock House Juniors.
Like Orwell, I lay in my bed night after night after lights out willing myself not to wet the bed for fear of the humiliation, shame and punishment that I knew would come. I have an enduring memory of being made to wash my urine-soaked sheets in front of the other girls.
This was 50 years after Orwell’s experience, so for this little girl at least, his optimism that by 1947 bed-wetting was considered “a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place” was misplaced. In 1963, for me, and I know many others of my generation, it was still considered to be “a disgusting crime” for which the cure was punishment.
(For my punishment, see Chapter Five - Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die)
In Author’s Note 2: You’re not allowed to cry, I look at the notion of the boarding school split-self