Right Hand down a bit

I cannot complain, I suppose, for I have managed 60 odd years without breaking anything.
A broken arm now is hardly something to complain too much about now. 'Specially as, if my arm hadn’t hit the concrete first, my head would have broken on a wall.

A nuisance, though. For it is my left arm, and I’m left handed. So now I’m having to discover how hard life is for those of you who have to be right handed all the time. Right arms are so very awkward. I never realised what a disability it must be, to be right handed; how difficult it is for you all. Nor, indeed, had I understood how fortunate I have been all this time to be able to use my Left one.


What I have experienced in the past as prejudice against the left handed now appears in a very different light. At Primary school, the Head teacher and staff at first tried to make me write with my right hand. A visit from my mother, who apparently threatened the Head with unmentionable but excruciatingly painful torture, put a stop to that, and after wards I was permitted to use my preferred left hand when learning to draw and write. It did not stop the jibes, though. Like a joke the Head tried to play when he announced in the hearing of the whole class that he was going to provide me with a special pen for people who were left handed. The joke was really on him, however, for though they were unnecessary devices there really were so-called 'left handed' pen knibs available. Things which curved to the left, invented by right handed folk who believed left handers should be assisted to continue writing as if their arm was broken. And I had one on a fountain pen, provide by a thoughtful mother for me to try out. I took it to school. “Anthony, what is that pen you’re using?” said my tormentor. “Its a left handed pen, Sir” I replied. His face wrinkled into a frown, ready to tell me not to be so silly, there were no such things.... but then he paused, remembering, I am sure, how he had teased me with the offer of that very thing. He could hardly deny them now. Then in a cautious voice, “Anthony, may I see you pen?“ You should have seen his expression as he read the tiny writing on the knib. ‘Osmiroid. 12k gold Left handed......’

It did not end there. I recall the deputy head very well. A fierce, stern disciplinarian woman who taught us to recite poetry as a group, learning it by heart. Somehow one felt that any lapse of memory would be punished by a slow and painful death. When she broke her arm we rejoiced innocently unashamed, but the joy was short-lived. Despite the cast she actually drove herself to school, so there was no respite. I did not know until much later, but she had some very odd ideas about handedness. Policy at the time was to keep siblings together at there same school. Since I was already there my mother naturally went to register my younger sister. No, said the fierce deputy. She was sorry but it could not be. A new Primary school was opening, closer to my home. My sister must go there, for that year’s new entry from our end of the village was being diverted to help fill the new classrooms. “But the policy was to keep...” my mother had remonstrated. Tough. No, was the reply. “And anyway,” mother heard with incredulity as the woman continued, barely under her breath, “we’ve already got enough, having one Devil’s child.” Me, of course.

Thus was my ambidextrous sister doomed out of hand to a quite different, and poorer, standard of education in a ‘modern’ school messing about with one of the clever educationalists’ first unhappy exercises of the post-war years, called teaching children to read by the ITA alphabet. Like many others, she never really caught up the years of lost education which that flawed muddle cost her. I sincerely wish that those responsible for it could be brought to acknowledge the harm they wrought to a generation of children. They probably just got PhDs.

Still, it is done. And folly to expect fairness in this world of injustice, as both my sister and I have discovered through these many years. But it was more, I dare guess, than merely the old superstition raising its ugly head, which caused right handedness to be associated with Dexterity and good things, and left handedness to be related to what is strange, different, Sinister, even evil.

It was only later, of course, that I found another reason for her rejection which of course no one would ever admit. The village divided into two halves, a thing which at the time I did not comprehend. One half was old, established and property owning. English middle class. Our half was new, post war council housing, inhabited by folk like us, of mining families, who had been rehoused as ex-servicemen. That meant working class, and it was a long time before I discovered the depth of feeling, resentment and prejudice which many in the old half felt towards the new. And our deputy head lived where? You guessed. In the old village....

Well-a-day. I did not begin this to complain about prejudice against me. What I had in mind was quite different. I mean to sympathise with you - well, most of you. All but about 500,000,000 of you who are unhappily right-handed. I genuinely never realised how difficult it must be for you, having to use right arms for everything. I know that most manual devices like tin-openers and scissors are designed to help you, but it is still so hard, is it not?
And how frustrating life must be, condemned - not just for the duration of a plaster cast, but for life - to struggle to use your awkward right hands to do everything. If life for you is half so difficult, and all the time at that, as it is only temporarily now for me, then you have my condolences indeed. I used to wonder where all the anger and frustration came from in this wicked world, but now I understand. I cannot imagine how you manage.