The prefect bully

 Original Fiction – for adult eyes only

Was I a typical teenager? I think so. Certainly I was no different from my friends. We couldn’t stand adults; our parents, schoolmasters, the vicar at church. We didn’t think they had much to tell us.

We spent a lot of our time just hanging around in groups “having a laugh.” There was a particular bus stop just outside of town that was our meeting place. Buses didn’t run much after about seven o’clock so we weren’t usually disturbed. We’d buy (or sometimes steal) bottles of cheap cider and get rowdy drunk. If a passer-by complained, we’d soon chase them off: law-abiding citizens are easily cowed by drunken teenagers.

I had just turned eighteen and was close to leaving the local grammar school. I didn’t like school much, but had a knack for passing examinations without doing much work and my parents made me stay on into the sixth form. How I hated them. I didn’t like being bossed around, and if you don’t like being bossed around, you should not be at grammar school.

There are so many useless, pointless, rules. I loathed wearing school uniform; you could see us coming from a mile off in our maroon blazers. We even had to wear short trousers until the end of the third form: fourteen-year-old boys in short trousers, no other school in town humiliated their pupils like that. And, don’t get me started on the stupid school caps they forced us to wear.

I hated the “masters” as we had to call them. Most of them had been at the school since Adam was a lad and had never done a proper day’s work in their lives. They wouldn’t last an hour at dad’s factory. They thought they were proper Christian gentlemen and decided the boys at the school should be too. Nobody ever asked me. I skipped chapel once; I was eighteen and decided I could make my own mind up about God and Jesus and all that. There was Hell to pay.

I was found out of course, I knew I would be. We were always answering to roll calls, having our names taken, masters checking that we hadn’t absconded. It was a caning offence, but I reckoned that sixth-formers were immune from the stick, even at that school.

My headmaster soon corrected me on that idea. I didn’t get thrashed that time, but he told me if I skipped chapel again he would whop me himself. I had to write a two thousand word essay on why Jesus was important in my life. Two thousand words! Believe me I would have preferred the cane to that any day: trousers down; pants down, six strokes, twelve: anything but that essay.

One thing I did like about being in the sixth-form was the power it gave me over the younger boys. They were terrified of me. It was only a few years earlier that the headmaster had taken away the prefect’s power to spank the younger boys. I would have loved to parade around the school, gym plimsoll in hand, able to whack the arse of any boy I fancied.

In my time the best we could do was to hand out ‘punishment slips’ which the boy took to his form master. When the boy collected three slips he was beaten. It wasn’t the same as the plimsoll, but the boys knew I scattered slips like confetti so it came pretty close.

You didn’t have to be in the sixth to be a bully. One thing I loved to do when I was about fifteen or sixteen was to beat up on the sissies; those boys who were a little bit different from the rest of us. They were easy targets, scared of their own shadows most of them. They would never defend themselves. There was one lad (I forget his name now: Kevin? Keith? Karl?) who I loved to push around. You only had to touch him and he would fall to the ground and curl up into a little ball. He was crying before I ever got the first kick in. I took his lunch money most days – it helped to pay for the cider and my smokes.

I was counting the days until I could leave school. The examinations were a little over a month away and then I would be free. I had all but given up on my studies. I still attended school (there were many opportunities to bully the younger boys), but took no interest and did as little homework as possible. 

I was idling around the sixth-form common room one day when the sixth-form form master approached.

“See me in my study immediately after school,” he was a man of few words and he swept away, the tail of his tattered schoolmaster’s gown flapping, before I could ask what it was all about.

It could have been about anything. If there was a rule to break, I was likely to break it. Even as I sat pondering, I knew I had in my pocket a packet of illicit cigarettes, paid for with money I had extorted from an eleven-year-old first-former who was desperate not to get his third punishment slip and the beating that would come with it.

I had more than an hour before I had to obey the summons. I cursed; I had no lessons at this time and was intending to bunk off early. Wearily, I picked up a football magazine that one of the other boys had left behind, sat down and flicked through the pages.

I didn’t want to delay this longer than was absolute necessary. Two minutes after the bell had stopped ringing for end of school my knock on the study door received a haughty response.

“Come!”

It wasn’t so much a schoolmaster’s study as a functioning office. There was a desk and a large padded chair behind, where the form master was seated. A couple of low back chairs were ranged in front of the desk for visitors and apart from that there was a sideboard affair consisting of some cupboards and bookshelves.

I stood facing the desk a foot or two back from the chairs. From this position I could see that they were the ideal height for a boy to bend across. Doubtless, they had been chosen with this purpose in mind.

I still did not know why I had been summoned by the form master. I didn’t have long to wait as he got straight to the point. “Slacking”, he called it: a peculiarly old fashioned word for “lazy.” I had not been working hard enough in his classes. I had not submitted homework on time. My marks were falling. He didn’t ask me to respond, but if he had I could only agree with him. I despised my form master. He taught the sixth form poetry and he was lousy at it. I couldn’t understand the point of it (and to this day still can’t). He could not, as we say these days, “motivate” me.

He was a decaying old man and I scorned him for being so old. His liver spots spread from his neck to his face and it had been many years since he stood erect and his stooped shoulders reminded me of a bird. A shock of untidy white hair stuck out from beneath his mortar board and his moustache and beard were as white as his hair. He was the image of the schoolmaster in that film Goodbye, Mr Chips.

Old though he might be, my Mr Chips could still pack a punch with his right arm as I was about to find out.

Once he had read out my crime sheet, he moved straight to sentencing. I swear I heard his bones creak as he slowly raised himself from the chair and shuffled over to the sideboard. Only then did I notice that one of the cupboards was an unusual shape: tall and thin. He opened it and even though his body obscured my view, I could see inside were a number of crook-handled rattan canes. There must have been six or seven of them in varying thicknesses and lengths. I could hear the canes rattling around the cupboard as he searched for the implement he intended to use on me.

Within seconds he had extracted his preferred model and turned to face me. He flexed the cane between his left and his right hand as he gave a little lecture about the need for me to study hard. If I did not have the self-discipline to do this on my own, then he had the perfect remedy: he would impose discipline on me.

I couldn’t take my eyes of that cane. I still don’t know why I was so transfixed by it. I had seen canes before; indeed I had felt them across my backside a few times. This one was deep yellow in colour and was as thick as one of Mr Chips’ bony fingers. It must have been three feet (maybe more) long and flexed easily in the form master’s hands.

He swished it through the air for effect, if he intended this to intimidate me, he failed. It just made me hate him all the more. This pathetic old man, who couldn’t teach for toffee, was going to beat me because I was not doing well in his class. I was eighteen years old and in a few weeks I would be away from that goddam school forever, but here I was expected to submit myself to Mr Chips so he could whop me with his cane.

I had a choice, of course. Even as I stood watching the cane swish through the air I knew I could refuse to take a beating. I could tell him to stuff it and swagger out of the study. I could do that, but it would be a direct defiance of his authority. The headmaster would be involved and I could rest assured that he wouldn’t be on my side. There would be no two-thousand-word essay (“Why the cane is not an effective punishment for slacking schoolboys”) as an alternative. All I could look forward to was expulsion from the school and the bastards probably wouldn’t let me take my exams.

I only had five more weeks left at this school and I didn’t want to throw away the past two years of misery now.

Mr Chips pointed with his cane to a spot in the middle of the room.

“Bend over and touch your toes.”

I hesitated and he must have read the contempt I had for him in my face because he almost bellowed, “Bend over and touch your toes, this instance!”

I moved to the spot, took a deep breath and placing the palms of my hands on my knees I offered Mr Chips my backside.

Swish!

“Ouch!” I yelled and stood bolt upright, squeezing my hand under my armpit. Mr Chips had lashed his cane across my knuckles.

“When I say touch your toes boy, I mean touch your toes. Now, bend right down.”

I blew on my knuckles, parted my legs a little, bent at the waist, and stretched my fingers so that the tips rested against the toe caps of my shoes. A thick stripe across the back of my left hand was turning blue.

I was quite a fit lad at the time and was able to keep in place without much effort, but there was pressure against the back of my knees.

Looking through my parted legs I saw Mr Chips approach me and then I could feel him take hold of my blazer and push it up my back away from the target area. Then he rolled up my jumper a little, giving him an unobscured view of the grey trousers, now stretched across my buttocks. Still not satisfied, he took hold of my shirt and pulled it so that the tail came away from the waistband, then he did the same thing with my vest. I felt a cool breeze blow across the inch or so of now bare flesh at the base of my back.

Finally, he grabbed the waistband of my trousers and tugged so that any wrinkles were smoothed from the cloth.

Then he took my arse off.

He had the strength of an ox. With no interval between cuts, he lashed down six stingers across the very centre of my buttocks each one landing very close to, and sometimes right on top of, others already delivered.

It took my breath away. Quite literally. I was gasping and stifling yells at the same time. It was all over in about twenty seconds, six whacks crashing down one after the other. I buckled a little, but just about managed to stay in position. No matter the agony I was suffering, I was not going to stand up and give him the pleasure of inflicting extra strokes.

It was over. I stayed looking at my scuffed shoes awaiting his permission to stand. My backside was throbbing. It must have been red raw and I could feel welts had formed across my bum. I had been caned before, but this beating was not like anything I had endured previously. I so much wanted to run away to the bogs, sit down on a lavatory pan and pull the flush so the cold water could soothe my aching buttocks.

Eventually he said, “Stand up, boy. Stand there.” I rose and moved to a spot in front of the form-master’s desk. I could not look him in the eyes. I had despised him when I entered the study and I hated him even more now, but my contempt was mixed with the intense pain in my arse. I did not want him to know he had hurt me.

He wrote some words in the punishment book and handed it to me to sign.

Then to add to my fury, he said, “If you fail to get at least an Alpha-minus in the essay I set the form today, you will be back here for another thrashing. Is that clear?”

It was, and I was. No number of beatings could make me good at poetry.

Picture credit: Sting Pictures

 

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