Isolation for everyone

I sat in my room straining to hear the voices of other family members for, whenever one us was in serious trouble, those in the rest of the house went from normal shouting, ‘yelling’ and talking to ‘super-hushed’ breathless whispers, which made it even harder to hear through a closed door. At times like that I know our mother must have wondered why normally when she said ‘be quiet’ to one of us, the decibel meter may have fallen by one or two degrees at the most. She must always have been surprised to hear just how quiet we could really be when we had to. Like I said, fear is a great motivator. Our mother also had a standard comment when one of us were in some form of isolation pre punishment, and one of the others wanted to ask something, she would say immediately “do you want to join him?”

This of course must have been rhetorical as well, my parents obviously both had the knack. The question never really worked because, if someone else was sent to the room, given we shared rooms anyway, then you weren’t in isolation anymore and you would quietly talk to each other and eventually we would start playing together with the blocks (nowadays branded ‘Lego®’) or the Meccano® . (I put the registered label in as I think you have to).

As we discovered once, when another of my brothers and I had been sent to our room to ‘think’ and await ‘the return of your father’ for something we had done when we shouldn’t, we discovered that you don’t go to your room and start playing with toys. We were well into our play, about an hour or so, when the door to the room swung open forcefully and the operator, my father, with a massively angry glare on his face looked hard at the space where we were supposed to be sitting in thought on the bunk bed and he only observed blank space. We of course, very surprised by the door flying open, had looked up towards our glaring father with our eyes wide in startled fear like a pair of headlight-caught rabbits, hands frozen in mid construction. We then, like a bad comedy (like most modern bad sitcoms are unfortunately) turned our heads from where we were looking, to where we were supposed to be sitting on the bed. Meanwhile our father, face frozen in angry expression turned his head slowly from where we were supposed to be sitting to where we were. It would have seemed funny to any observer, unfortunately there was only us. Suffice to say, since we weren’t sitting and thinking about what we had done……. the punishment achieved an instant doubling of the eventual penalty and deprivation from the toys involved. School fairs and church rumble sale (garage sales) and other charity collections benefited greatly from our mistakes as kids over the years.