Setanta wrote on Oct 11
th, 2015 at 9:49pm:
Grappler Deep State Feller wrote on Oct 11
th, 2015 at 9:22pm:
Ah yes - well my graduating class - the A class and final year matriculation - the one I entered at 14.5 years and finished at 15.5 - had all of seven students. Four were girls, and three boys, all at least a year older than I was.
As a child prodigy I trump you all.
Counting you as one of the boys... How'd you get on?
Well - I had the highest IQ in the group - a cause for a very startled 'teacher's pet' - but my home life was dismal - we were starved, beaten, neglected, and generally put down in every way by bad parenting, so, in direct contrast with primary school where I leaped a class and was school dux alongside my older brother in Year Six (he hated that) - I struggled to stay afloat.
Abuse and emotional deprivation can do a hell of a lot to a very sensitive kid, as my brother's life can testify.
I was supposed to go to THE selective high school, and my aunt and uncle lived just up the road from it and offered to have me there, but my father wouldn't have a bar of it, and instead sent us to the worst school in the city - he had this strange idea that brutality would 'toughen people up' for the life ahead.
There may have been some merit in his position, he grew up in the Depression and then did WWII including being a jumpmaster for the US 187th Airborne Brigade at Nadzab, but I found that the opposite with my own children proved that they can weather the storms of life better from NOT enduring brutality in any way.
I've said it before - I enlisted in the Army at seventeen and got my first good pair of shoes, plus food - more than I could eat.
An absolute disgrace, my family, and some in it should be ashamed for what they did.