I'm trying hard to describe the contours of my backside. Legs becoming wider - calves to thighs - like a pair of adjacent ice-cream cones. Ending in two hemispheres of gluteus maximus like blobs of vanilla. Just the shapes, forget the flavours.
Now focus on that abrupt change of gradient where the straight line of the thigh becomes the outward bulge of the backside, a horizontal groove if you like. Not to be confused with the vertical groove which is for another day.
Are you clear? Have you located that horizontal groove? Please say yes. It was an important part of my anatomy up to age 15.
Boys were punished at my school by being caned on the backside. The aim was to inflict pain. With some skill the degree of pain could be increased. Lay the first slash of the cane along that horizontal groove. Lay the second slash on top of the first and the pain becomes cumulative. All the way up to six slashes. It took a careful eye and a steady hand to keep on hitting that 5 mm wide groove; most teachers were poor at teaching but all were great caners.
Did they practice? Did older teachers pass on their skills? Was caning a teacher's perquisite?
"Caning" suggests a stinging pain but that undersells the experience. The slash includes a heavier component as if the intention was also to bruise and eventually to wound. I have always been a physical coward and I'm astonished I didn't cry out while being caned. Perhaps for fear of additional strokes.
Was caning character-forming? My character is far from perfect so I’d say no. Nick, my late brother, attended a harder school and was caned until he bled.
Beating children is one of the worst things I can think of. The fact that it happened in a school, and they pretended it was "character building" makes it all the more disturbing. I went to a Catholic school in the States in the 1950's. This sort of thing was popular then and there, too. In fact, corporal punishment in schools is still legal in 19 states. I imagine we could list them without even looking them up. They are the ones with the worst school systems and the most conservative (and religious) voters. I happen to live in one. If a Florida teacher hit my grandson, I am afraid I might lose my mind. And then end up in jail. Now this has become a dramatic fantasy whereby I am the Walter Mitty type heroine. I may have to write it down.
ReplyDeleteColette: Your passion - spilling out into the gaps between the words - does you credit. By all means fit yourself into a Walter Mitty story and become famed throughout cyberspace. But no guns; they would put you on the wrong side of the fence.
ReplyDeleteWhat I did not include in the post was that these acts of barbarism were considered routine. Or were they? One teacher seemed to relish inflicting pain, turning it into class entertainment - inviting the other kids to laugh at the humiliation that accompanied the pain. Two overweight boys were regularly caned for being fat.
I have never been an enthusiast for nostalgia. Despite current events the Golden Era is now: I'm still alive at 82 and have my wits about me. Also a well-honed memory. I can feel the pain (and sense the apprehension) now if I concentrate.
Ever seen Lindsay Anderson's movie "If..." It ends with a Walter Mitty moment, well, sort of.
I have not seen that movie. I will see if I can find it. I won't need a gun because in my Walter Mitty fantasy life I have super human strength.
ReplyDeleteColette: I wish you well with super strength. For me it's the un-super bits of Mitty that linger. My favourite bit:
ReplyDeleteThey're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street: they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound round the axles. A man had come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young grinning garagemen. Since then Mrs Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself.
Sen. McCarthy thought it was the Reds that were subverting the US. Whereas Thurber did it effortlessly with every short story and every cartoon. In fact his subversion was international. It was only when I first tried to put my own snowchains on - temperature way down, fingers numb, chain intractable - I realised Thurber had addressed me too. And I was a Brit. A Nobel Prize for that man. And another for disturbing the peace.
Yes, I , too, was caned at school. Only the head caned, the woodwork/metalwork teacher used a three foot metal ruler. Prefects (known as "praefects" - it was that type of traditional grammar school) were allowed to "slipper" - the largest size gym shoe they could find, often containing a golf ball in the toe.
ReplyDeleteWe had only one other master who used calculated beating (the others used a casual cuff round the ear, par for the course in those 1940/50 days). The little man (why are they always little?) would rave at a boy and I have seen him actually beat one to the floor, he also used to throw heavy, wooden backed blackboard rubbers at us and didn't care where they hit. He was our English teacher and we, being literary minded, nicknamed him "Ozzy" after a quote from Shelley's poem, Ozymandias: "a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command..." it fitted him well and it stuck to him throughout his school career. A beast, who would definitely be prosecuted today.
My caning? We had been fooling around with an old billiard cue, resulting in a serious eye injury to a participant. Four of us were called for, early in the day, by the head (an austere individual who always reminded me of the Mekon in the Eagle, "Dan Dare" stories) and told we were to each have 6 strokes of the cane, but he would administer this at the end of the next day (the exquisite torture of continued expectation!). My turn eventually came (he saw each individually) he had me bended over doubled and pushed me down saying, "lower, lower" until my trousers were tight over my backside. I felt then and have remembered since, the almost sexual satisfaction he appeared to be getting from this. It hurt like hell but we were all proudly exhibiting the blue/black wheals in the gym showers next day.
The happiest days of our lives?
Avus: We had one who seized a kid's cheeks - either side between thumb and finger - towed him off his chair, over his desk and on to the floor. Introducing us thereby to an unexpected form (and level) of pain altogether. But then he was Welsh, yclept Iolo.
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