Correction

Miraculous escape that avoided unbearable humiliation. Wasn’t there an episode in some book or film where a furious parent went to their miscreant child’s school and hauled him out front of the teacher and the entire class to deliver a wild thrashing? Oh lord! Saved by the merest chance. A sudden thirst taken hold. Teacher, may I go for a drink of water, please? Bending at the trough there suddenly comes the wild witch tearing around the corner of the building. Freak out! Horrendous fright. Immediate flight was the only answer. Get your ass outta there at any cost, boy, away before anyone could see. At that stage she may possibly have still been wearing her scarf & widows’ weeds. On the school grounds. Once a year or two later, at a morning recess it had been, she had come in that garb to deliver a forgotten lunch packet. Unspeakable! How to explain to Geoff Hester, Kenny and the gang? At least on that occasion she had not been armed with one of her shibas, birches—the thin, supple young sprouts she tore from the fruit trees. The plums that had crossed from the Spiers next door were available close at hand. You well remember the time that they could finally be taken down from the ledges where she kept them and defiantly snapped in pieces before her very eyes. There! There’ll be no more of that now... But that was ahead. Run now! fast as your legs can carry, home outta sight. Over Melbourne Road, down Hudson all the way, beside her riding her bicycle on the roadway, cursing the foul thieving dog you had become. In back, down the hall and into the second bedroom, screaming and howling, hiding between the wardrobes where a proper swing was denied. It was on one of those shelves within where her coin jars had been found, the bound musty notes behind. Fierce lashings across bare arms and legs that would produce the medalje you could show off, let everyone see the shameful, disgusting thief you had become. Tearing cries. Unsparing blows. How the neighbours both sides must have cringed. Thank all the stars in heaven later those liver-spotted hands could be kissed ten hundred times. In the hospital in the last days the childless Croat spinster Rose, who had taken a shine to her—same name as her mother, grandma Ruza—remarked something that had never been noticed before in all those years. Oh! What gigantic hands she had! Most likely a townswoman, Ruza had never seen the like. In her tales there appeared fathers and mothers she cheered on beating miscreant children. Ozlatilese ruke. Zlato was golden; golden hands delivering salutary correction. (No spoiling of the child.) Ailing father had warned in advance, You’ll never be able to manage on your own. Take them back to the old country, where the discipline of the Partizans will fix them. Adding, This boy will never come right without the Popravni Dom. Popravit was fix, correct. The House of Correction. Gravely underestimated his wife did old father Lazar... Skote jedan! Some of her vocab. was particularly strange (the morality unimpeachable). Google Translate rendered “cattle”, in the old sense of bovine presumably. Calf was a more common put-down, shared by the Serbs. Ovca, sheep was for meek dullards. One needed energy and strength up in the hills of karst. The meek and mild were hopelessly lost there.