Uncle Paul: Waterstones Thriller of the Month

Rubbish !”, she snapped. “A woman can discipline a boy just as well as a man can. In my day, widows were doing it by the thousand, and with most creditable results. And with no help from the Welfare State, either. Whenever I hear that a child is going to the bad because he hasn’t got a father, I always ask the same question: Why hasn’t he got a father? In nine cases out of ten, it’s not that the father is dead, it’s that he’s gone off somewhere. Gone off because his wife doesn’t know how to hold him. It stands to reason that the kind of woman who doesn’t know how to keep a man contented and under control won’t know how to keep a child contented and under control either. To say that a broken home causes a child to go astray is like saying that a broken teapot causes a broken plate. Really it’s just that the same housemaid has dropped both of them.