A Friday Appointment

I went to a prep school that had a reputation for strictness even in the early 1960s, when corporal punishment was commonplace. But in my memory, worse by far than the corporal punishment itself, was the shameful ritual which led up to that moment when you bent over the chair, and nervously awaited the first stroke. Like many such schools at the time, every classroom had its own 'strap' made from a short strip of thick, but flexible leather. Instances of general misbehaviour in class were rewarded with two or three cuts of the strap, but for anything more serious a boy's name would be added to the list of those unfortunates who had a 'Friday Appointment' with the headmaster and his cane.

As the school week progressed, the list would grow in length. Every evening, an updated edition of the list would be published at suppertime, and boys would gather round the headmaster's noticeboard in prurient fascination, noting new names, and feeling grateful that theirs wasn't among them. The ritual began soon after the Friday supper of fish and chips, which most of us came to dislike for its associations, when the first of the evening's five 'Bedtime Bells' would be rung for the First Form, the most junior seven year old boys, to go to their dormitories. Along with them would go the unfortunate boys with an 'appointment'. They would undress in their respective dormitories and, clad only in a fresh set of regulation woollen underwear, would line up alongside the little boys in the washroom under the baleful eye and sharp tongue of the school matron, who inspected everyone for cleanliness before letting them return to their dormitories.

The unhappy boys with an 'appointment' stood in a silent line just outside the washroom, waiting for matron to finish her inspection of the First Formers. Only when the washroom was empty would she lead the doleful procession of appointees downstairs, past the streams of Second Form boys coming upstairs to bed, and have them stand in line outside the headmaster's study. You had to line up not by age, but by day of report, so that Monday's miscreants would go first, and Friday's last. Tall thirteen or even fourteen year olds would line up alongside little seven or eight year olds as their companions, and when the headmaster was ready, the entire line of boys would be ushered into his study.

We would all stand to attention along the wall of the study. A low-armed chair was positioned in the centre of the room in which the headmaster would be seated, and when your name was called out by matron, you would come to attention before the headmaster for his lecture. First Form boys would go over his knee as matron handed him a white, wooden backed hairbrush with which he inflicted a sound spanking. Older boys were ordered to bend over the back of the chair, at which stage matron stepped forward and straightened the ribbed legs of their woollen trunks, cinching the waistband upwards so that the material was tightly stretched over the buttocks.

The waiting boys would watch in horrified fascination as the headmaster went to his desk and picked up a yellow crook-handled cane. "Baker, you are to receive four strokes of the cane. Let this be a lesson." The terrified offender heard the cane whistle through the air and let out a gasping cry of shock as the first stroke bit into his buttocks. At that tender young age the cane felt incredibly painful and it took all your willpower (and fear of the consequences) not to jump up from the chair and flee. Once a boy had received his ration, he had to stand facing the wall, his hands on his head and tears coursing down his cheeks, listening to the yelps and whimpers as the punishment ritual ground onwards to its conclusion.