Sixty-six of the best

From the age of thirteen the slipper is discarded and the cane is introduced.

Many people think canes are made from bamboo, they’re not, they’re made from rattan. Both have those horizontal notches (nodes), so you can see how the mistake is made. But bamboo is a type of grass, whilst rattan is a climbing palm. They have different properties. Bamboo is hollow and rigid, whereas rattan has a dense, strong and flexible inner core. To process the rattan they strip away the outer layer and leave it to soak so that it becomes more pliable. This is important because you need ‘whippiness’ – you want the cane to flex as you use it. With a big enough back swing, and a long enough cane, your arm movement is amplified, so that the end section of the cane, at the point of impact, is travelling many times faster than your hand.

I’m basically caught up in an arms race – the slipper is more powerful than the hand, and the cane is more powerful than the slipper. They’ll probably shoot me next. Unless I get to the armoury first.

One of the masters is either perverse, stupid or penny-pinching, because he uses a bamboo cane. Anyone who has done any gardening will know how easily bamboo splits and breaks under pressure. When caning one boy the brittle cellulose structure gives way as it whacks against his tiny, malnourished buttocks. The tip of the cane flies off and knocks an ornament from a shelf onto the floor, where it breaks. The master charges the boy for the cost of replacement. Sometimes you just can’t win.

During my school career I receive sixty-six strokes of the cane on my arse. I get ‘six of the best’ eleven times. That’s roughly twice a year.

Twice a year! But that’s hardly anything, ya big Jessie! That’s six months between each beating – what are you moaning about?

I can see where you’re coming from. It probably takes less than a minute to deliver six strokes, so that’s two minutes a year, why don’t I just forget about it? It’s over in a flash. Let it lie.

But it isn’t over in a flash. There’s a long, drawn-out ritual. Whenever you’re sentenced to a caning you have to suffer two weeks of waiting before the punishment is delivered. This is deliberate – it’s meant to fill you with fear and foreboding. And it does.

My sister-in-law Judy (an ex-teacher) tells me of an ancient colleague who bemoaned the banning of corporal punishment in state schools in 1986 – it wasn’t banned in independent schools until 1998, ironically just as the Britney Spears single ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ was released – he thought ‘making them wait’ was the most effective part of the punishment, besides which he ‘didn’t like to hit them when he was angry’.

What? He had to wait until he was perfectly calm? Happy? Joyful?

Taking into account the number of weeks I’m at school during a year (forty) and the number of weeks per year waiting (four), I spend 10 per cent of my school life waiting for a sufficiently cheerful adult to hit me with a stick. One more time. Baby.

Over six years I spend twenty-four weeks waiting to get caned, which is ten weeks more than I spend making The Young Ones. This is the kind of thing that confuses the Numskulls.

The canings are mostly given by the headmaster, a former officer in the Royal Artillery, who played cricket for Derbyshire in the 1950s. He scored 8,325 first-class runs, so his hand–eye coordination is pretty damn good. His first name is Guy, and he has bushy eyebrows, so we call him Guybrows. His study is very large but sparsely furnished so that he can get a decent run up.

I expect a summons at any moment towards the end of the second week, but it always comes as a surprise. We’ll be in the common room wearing out the grooves of David Bowie’s LP Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars when a prefect will come in and tell me the headmaster wants to see me in his study.

‘Now!’

A hush will come over the room and they’ll watch me go. The condemned man.

‘. . . He was the nazz, with God-given ass . . .’

I get one last chance to fiddle with my ass as I cross to the main school buildings: I’ve been wearing two pairs of underpants for the last few days – constantly adjusting them so that the two seams are aligned and look like one pair of underpants. It’s no wonder I eventually get into university with thinking like this.

The walk there never gets any easier. The fear of the pain never dims. Why would you willingly walk to a place where you know you will get physically beaten?

I knock on the door to his study. A voice comes from within.

‘Enter!’

Guybrows wears a schoolmaster’s black gown. All the older teachers do. This is the 1970s, we’ve been through the Swinging Sixties and now we’re into glam rock. Slade are top of the charts with ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, and Noddy Holder is wearing cut-off tartan trousers with bright yellow braces, platform boots, and a top hat covered in mirrors, but the teachers are still dressing up like Robert Donat in that overly sentimental 1939 film about an impossibly genial schoolmaster, Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Guybrows solemnly rakes over the details of my heinous crime.

I feign contrition.

He invites me to hold onto the side stretcher of a heavy chair placed at the far end of the room. The stretcher is about four inches from the floor and leaves my arse tilted up into the air, making an inviting target. He gently lifts the flaps of my jacket out of the way so that they won’t cause any impediment. He gives my arse a cursory feel to make sure I’m not wearing any padding. This isn’t the paedophilic groping of the slippery housemaster, and I think he’s even slightly embarrassed at having to touch my bottom. More fool him, because I get away with the two pairs of underpants trick every time. Yes, all right, it’s only a minor victory, but you start clutching at straws when the dice are loaded so heavily against you.

He then walks back to his starting position, which is a good five paces back. I watch his approach – I’m bent double and can see him through the gap between my legs. Like the first-class cricketer he is, he strides forwards with purpose and speed, as if to meet a spinner’s delivery that has pitched short of a length and deserves smashing over the boundary for six. His voluminous gown flies up around him as he raises his cane-wielding arm, his narrow-set eyes are full of righteous fury and vengeance.

In fact he looks like a drawing by Ronald Searle – the man who illustrated the Molesworth and St Trinian’s books, whose art has a humorous cruelty to it, influenced by the three years he spent in Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War.

Whack!

The cane whips against my buttocks.

It hurts like fuck.

The instinct is to rise up instantly and rub the pain away, but you know that will only bring further punishment – additional strokes. You become glad of the heavy chair because you can squeeze it tight: like a cowboy in a western chewing down on a piece of leather as some quack removes a bullet with an impossibly large knife – except that the cowboy gets to drink a bottle of whisky as an anaesthetic. Whisky is possibly why I’m here in the first place.

He calmly walks the five paces back to his starting position, turns, composes himself, then rushes forward once more.

Whack!

Walk back, turn, compose, rush.

Whack!

Walk back, turn, compose, rush.

It would be nice to think that you become numbed to it as the beating continues, but every strike hurts just as much as the one before. Every delicate nerve sings out in new pain with every blow. But hang on, we’re only halfway through the over.

Whack!

Walk back, turn, compose, rush.

Whack!

Walk back, turn, compose, rush.

Whack!

After the last strike he walks back to his desk, lays the cane upon it, and looks purposefully out of the window. This is to allow you a little time to compose yourself. (He’s not a monster!)

Your arse hurts to varying degrees as you rise slowly, the muscles and the skin finding out where the damage has been done. A close grouping, where all the strokes land more or less in one place, hurts less than a wide one. A rogue near miss across the top of your legs can cause severe discomfort. You’re permitted to sniffle for a short while and gingerly rub your bottom. It always feels like you must be bleeding, though you seldom are.

Once your personal damage report has been concluded, you wipe your nose on your sleeve and shuffle round to face him. His study is so quiet that he can hear you turn and he does likewise. He holds out his hand for you to shake. You have to thank him! You move forward, each step a discovery of new areas of pain as your buttocks flex. You shake his hand.

‘Thank you, sir,’ you say.

‘Don’t let it happen again,’ he says.

You leave, walking very oddly.

As you close the door behind you, you might see the next victim waiting. You give him as cheery a smile as you can, trying to hide your desire to blub like a baby. You have to tough it out, grin, give him the thumbs up – there is a camaraderie amongst the convicted – you might whisper:

‘Missed!’

And get a rueful smile in return.

Back in the dormitory you will be expected to drop your pants so that everyone can get a good look at the grouping and check for blood. You’re hoping for a single line – where every strike landed in exactly the same place – but mostly you get something that looks like the British Rail logo. There’s very rarely blood on the actual day, this usually comes later as the welts and weals first form dark black, purple and yellow bruises, then gradually scab over. If you’ve never picked the scabs off your own arse . . . well, lucky you.

We keep a tally of our canings as we progress through the years and a bizarre kind of league table emerges. The longer I stay at the school the higher I climb, and during my last year I’m one of three way out in front vying for top spot. I finish second. European qualification.

I don’t feel significantly more badly behaved than the rest of the inmates, and part of me wonders if I’m singled out, not just for the perceived ‘cheek’, but because I’m a direct grant boy. Maybe they think I shouldn’t really be there, that I’ve somehow cheated. Maybe it’s part of an attempt to make me ‘know my place’?

For some reason the league table is based solely on arse canings, we don’t bother counting canings of the hand. I don’t know why – they hurt a lot too. Possibly because these punishments are meted out summarily. Our housemaster at the ‘big school’, whose nickname is The Führer, patrols the corridors cane in hand, ready to strike. The crime is committed and the punishment given almost in the same moment.

‘What are you doing out in the corridor during study time?’

‘I . . . er . . .’

‘Hold out your hand.’

Whack! Whack! Whack!

‘. . . needed the toilet.’

Hand canings are generally delivered in threes. Again, I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining. And there’s no run up. But there is something completely absurd about standing next to a grown man, the man who is in loco parentis, and holding out your hand at arm’s length to let him hit it with a stick. You can see their eyes. You more or less stare at each other as it happens. No wonder so many public-school boys get into S&M.

They always ask for the hand you don’t write with and the trick is to give them the wrong one, because once your hand swells from the beating you’ll be unable to write with it for a couple of days. No more homework! Result!

‘Sorry, sir, I meant right, not left.’

It only works in the early days – the more you get beaten the more they learn which hand you write with, and to be honest it’s usually fairly obvious from the ink-stained fingers.