If it were not for Facebook, I would not have remembered Aunt Rufa with her children. The other day on FB they posted such a short funny film (I think it was a staging), how a mama feeds her boy porridge, brings a spoon to his mouth, he shakes his head no, and… here mama grabs a rolling pin and hits the toy bear on the head, and the boy at once opens his mouth and swallows the spoon of porridge. This scene seemed amusingly funny to me.
But one Russian woman from Sweden took this plot as, possibly, a “conscious Scandinavian,” noting that if such a thing “happened” in Sweden, the “vigilant” “barnevern” would already have taken the child from the cruel mama.
An analogous plot I observed, being 4 years of age, in the Moscow-region settlement of Bolshevo. It was summer; at that time it was customary to go to neighbours “just like that” at any time of day or night and without warning (there were no telephones!). So mama and I went to Aunt Rufa.
We found her sitting on a wooden porch with an enamel bowl of semolina porridge and two-year-old twins Natashka and Vitka, who also sat next to her on the porch on both sides, with tightly, stubbornly closed mouths. I must note, Aunt Rufa was a large, beautiful woman, as if she had stepped out of a Kustodiev painting. It was clear that the children were not going to eat the porridge voluntarily.
And Aunt Rufa had nothing left but to smack Vitka on the lips. He started yelling, and from the other side Natashka opened her mouth in surprise and at once received a spoon of semolina. Thus the semolina was eaten, and the remains were “finished” by Aunt Rufa herself. Yes. That was long ago. I think in 1958.
And the basis of children’s nutrition in those times was precisely semolina porridge. Living conditions were primitive, they cooked on kerosene stoves, water was taken from a standpipe which was “across the road,” i.e. in order to fetch a bucket of water one had to cross the carriageway of a “noisy” road connecting Bolshevo with Mytishchi, and stand in a queue on the station square for milk. And only after “all that” cook the children semolina….
So at the concluding stage of feeding, I think, Aunt Rufa was already “in no mood for jokes,” so the children received porridge with a “whip.” The children grew up healthy and beautiful.