On his deathbed, my father said he was sorry he beat me. But I could not forgive

The House of Lords has forced a compromise on those who want an end to the physical brutality visited upon children by parents. The brat in the supermarket and the tiny jaywalker must be brought to order. The actual bodily harm, not the assault, is to be the crime. Beat, but don't bruise.

I suffered physical violence from my parents and teachers from as far back as I can remember - so much so, that I cultivated friendships of the imagination with fellow sufferers, Philip Pirrip (Pip), David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, boy characters in Charles Dickens's novels.

At home and at school, my life was dominated by fear of physical hurt. I resented it so much that I once put a plan to my brothers and sisters to poison my father. Parents hit children; older children hit their younger brothers and sisters. In the Caribbean, the power originally rested with the white slave master. Fully grown men and women were whipped openly, because my slave ancestors were said to have the mentality of - guess who? Yes, children! So ingrained was this social attitude that my father, once a schoolteacher, and dark as the night himself, would proclaim that "niggers cannot learn without blows".

My father beat me across the back with a leather belt called "Betsy", bought from the local blacksmith. I would get between six and a dozen blows about three times a month. Though I had my shirt on, my father would draw blood and the marks would last from one beating to the next.

The last time he beat me, at the age of 15, it was for a bad school report. I broke every window-pane in our house with an avalanche of missiles. Verbal abuse, unprintable here, flowed easily off my tongue. My father then realised that I would hurt him severely if he continued. But as late as the age of 17, I was still beaten on the bottom at the Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with a "rod of correction" cut from a tamarind tree in the college grounds.

What was the effect on me? I am thrown into an apoplectic fit if ever I am threatened with violence. But I have never raised a hand to any of my children.

And the effect on my parents? I think it weighed heavily on my father. On his deathbed he said to me, in the presence of my daughter and sister: "I am sorry I beat you so much." I replied: "Is that so?" I could not bring myself to forgive him.

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