Having a headmaster for a dad was not the easiest of childhoods, particularly when you’re an only child on whom your parents are placing high expectations.
I was brought up in the late 70s/early 80s in the Home Counties of England. Fortunately, my father wasn’t head at the comprehensive secondary school which I attended – which ironically had abolished corporal punishment a few years before I went there. Nevertheless, the regime at home was much stricter, and the instrument in use there was the cane. My father certainly did administer beatings at his own school, so I suspect the one kept for my own correction at home was a ‘spare’ the education authority wouldn’t miss.