How I Grew Up in a Saaf House

My mother effectively kept a seaf house, not for people on the run in the war, but for women who would be beaten up by their husbands. Beating children was what parents did as an integral part of rearing them. In the fiftee sixties, a beating your wife was what men did routinely to keep them in their place. We were known in the convent school in cookston as the devilins who couldn't be slapped. And we're known for it. Ours was one of the only houses on the estate i grew up in where children didn't get beaten.