I attended a middle school in the early 1980s. Corporal punishment was dying out slowly but surely in most UK educational establishments (and would be banned altogether in a few more years) – but sadly for my bottom, this wasn’t the case in my own school.
I remember we were having a French lesson and Mr Cooper, our normally genial teacher, was obviously having a bad morning. Most of the time he enjoyed a bit of banter in class and indeed often had to be steered back to the subject in hand by one of his more conscientious pupils. But this morning, as I say, he was having none of it.