Punished like a junior

In 1973, when I was eight years old, I started at a new school in Staffordshire – an independent day school for boys. So it was that corporal punishment became part of everyday life for the next eight years of my life.

My first three years were spent in the juniors part of the school – and shorts were a compulsory part of the uniform. Punishments varied from teacher to teacher, but most often would be either the ruler on your bare legs (this was a time when shorts really were short, and thus pretty much the entirety of a boy’s legs was available for smacking) or the slipper on the seat of your shorts, given while bent over the teacher’s desk.

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