26 JULY 2021

  Note: this entry, like several others being posted now, is out of sequence. It should follow after the scene where Harry lost his temper and nearly beat me with his belt... You may have noticed that memories do not come reliably in chronological order!

Dear Harry,

You may have kept your word about never punishing me in that way again, but you must surely have known that corporal punishment was common practice at both the schools you sent me to. It must have been the practice at Shrewsbury, your own boarding school, in those early years of your life. Were you never subjected to this particular indignity? Perhaps—I can well imagine this—you were such a good citizen, always observant of the rules, that you never earned a caning.

The first time for me was when I was seven years old, at Windlesham, when the school was still evacuated north to the Lake District to be safe from the anticipated Nazi invasion. Because it was not designed as a school, our dormitory rooms were small in the mansion that the school had taken over. There were three or four of us in a bedroom, and we were caught talking during the afternoon nap time, when we were supposed to be silent. That time it was just three across the outstretched hand with a rubber strap.

The next time I don’t even remember what I’d done. This was after the post-war return to our Sussex school buildings. Whatever it was, the offense was obviously a serious one. I was summoned to Mr. Chris’s study, the headmaster, and had to stand outside his big oak door until I was told to enter. It was a big, serious room, looking out over the front lawn, wood-paneled floor to ceiling and furnished with heavy, leather-bound chairs and sofas. And redolent of the rich, sweet-smelling pipe tobacco that Mr. Chris smoked.

Once called inside, trembling with fear and anticipation, I was told to take my trousers down and bend forward over the arm of one of the leather chairs. You had to take your trousers down so you couldn’t even hope to use the blotting paper that was reputed to take the sting out of the blows. Then it was six of the best, right across my bare behind.

Did Mr. Chris get his kicks out of this, I have sometimes wondered? The spectacle of little boys’ bare buttocks exposed for him to lay his cane across? I don’t know. The very thought is perhaps an uncharitable one.

But there was certainly a pre-sexual excitement among us boys around the delivery of corporal punishment. We used to do it to each other late nights, in the dormitory, just for fun. Choose a boy to be punished—it was often me—and have him take his pajama bottoms down and stick his bare bum up in the air, which some other boy would slap fiercely with a slipper. A little precocious sado-masochism?

Then at Lancing, as a teenager, I was beaten twice. Again, bare ass—why did they insist on that? Tiger Halsey, our housemaster, used a leather strap. Was it smoking I was called in for? Then the head prefect caned me in a weirdly ceremonial event, myself bent over, holding my ankles, at the end of a gauntlet of his fellow prefects. I had been caught off-limits with another boy—I was hoping, I’ll admit, to get into his pants; more about this later—smoking and drinking in a billiards parlor.

I feel sure, Harry, that you never got up to such shenanigans. But I wonder if you’d have felt that I deserved it? That ritual punishment of this kind was an appropriate part of a sound education? I hope not. I hope it never happened to you. But to be honest there is some small place in the back of my mind where I nurse some anger that you allowed to happen to your son.

With love, though, as always,

Peter