This story goes right back to when I was just eight years old, but has been seared into my memory for reasons which will become readily apparent.
I was brought up in a relatively middle class Australian suburb during the 1970s. I was an only child and both my parents were relatively conservative in attitude and strict when it came to my upbringing. I was only a very little boy indeed when I first experienced the agony of a well-smacked bum off my mum. Then, when I was six, my dad bought a cane. That might seem a very harsh punishment indeed these days for a little boy, but such domestic arrangements were by no means unusual in those days.