ENGLAND
The Sunday Times
December 10, 2017
By Stephen Bleach
Forty years ago, I was just one of the pupils beaten and molested by a teacher at a top Catholic school. Last week I saw him convicted of a litany of abuse — and I wept
Four decades on I can still remember his hand on my backside. It didn’t bother me much at the time: I was too scared of what was coming next. If you haven’t been beaten with a cane by somebody who really enjoys doing it, it’s hard to describe how much it hurts.
Afterwards I straightened up, tearful and shaky. The man stood in his black Benedictine monk’s robes, cane still in hand, a kindly, almost embarrassed expression on his face. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. Whether he meant the caning or his furtive, five-second grope as I bent over his office chair, I couldn’t tell. After all, I was only 13.
That man was Andrew Soper, although I knew him by his Benedictine name of Father Laurence.
He was one of my teachers during the 1970s at St Benedict’s in Ealing, west London — a Catholic school that was recently described as having been “one of Britain’s most notorious dens of paedophilia”.
Last week I looked down at him standing in the dock at the Old Bailey, where he was found guilty on 19 counts of child sexual abuse including buggery, indecency with a child and indecent assault.
Soper taught me maths. Rather well — I got an A at O-level. He also taught me that the world was a dangerous place. He used beating as a sadistic ruse to gain sexual gratification, the court was told. In other words, he got off on it.
Well, obviously. You didn’t need an O-level to know that.
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