Memories: Roald Dahl imagines a schoolboy caning machine
Roald
Dahl was a prolific author, famed for a number of children’s stories and
short ‘tales of the unexpected.’ We met him here
when we looked at his short story Galloping Foxley.
He often talked about the beatings he received at
school. In a BBC TV interview for the Bookmark series in 1985 he said he didn’t
object to canings as such but he couldn’t understand how the prefects could do
it: “actually wounding someone.” He thought it would be a very good thing to
eliminate the “beater” from the caning and went on to imagine a machine that
could deliver a caning.
There is a clip of that interview at the end of this
post.
Meanwhile, here’s an extract from Boy. Tales of
Childhood (Penguin,
1984) where Dahl describes the prefects at Repton School.
At Repton, prefects were never called prefects. They were called Boazers,
and they had the power of life and death over us junior boys. They could summon
us down in our pyjamas at night-time and thrash us for leaving just one
football sock on the floor of the changing-room when it should have been hung
up on a peg. A Boazer could thrash us for a hundred and one other piddling
little misdemeanours – for burning his toast at tea-time, for failing to dust
his study properly, for failing to get his study fire burning in spite of
spending half your pocket money on fire-lighters, for being late at roll-call,
for talking in evening Prep, for forgetting to change into house-shoes at six
o'clock. The list was endless.
“Four with the dressing-gown on or three with it off?” the Boazer would say to you in the changing-room late at night.
Others in the dormitory had told you what to answer to this question. “Four
with it on,” you mumbled, trembling.
This Boazer was famous for the speed of his strokes. Most of them paused
between each stroke to prolong the operation, but Williamson, the great footballer,
cricketer and athlete, always delivered his strokes in a series of swift back
and forth movements without any pause between them at all. Four strokes would
rain down upon your bottom so fast that it was all over in four seconds.
A ritual took place in the dormitory after each beating. The victim was
required to stand in the middle of the room and lower his pyjama trousers so
that the damage could be inspected. Half a dozen experts would crowd round you
and express their opinions in highly professional language.
“What a super job.”
“He's got every single one in the same place.”
“Crikey! Nobody could tell you had more than one, except for the mess.”
“Boy, that Williamson’s got a terrific eye!”
“Of course he's got a terrific eye! Why'd you think he’s a Cricket
Teamer?”
“There's no wet blood though! If you had had just one more he’d had got
some blood out!”
“Through a dressing-gown, too! It’s pretty amazing, isn't it?”
“Most Boazers couldn’t get a result like that without a dressing-gown!”
“You must have tremendously thin skin! Even Williamson couldn’t have
done that to ordinary skin!”
“Did he use the long one or the short one?”
“Hang on! Don't pull them up yet! I've got to see this again!”
And I would stand there, slightly bemused by this cool clinical
approach. Once, I was still standing in the middle of the dormitory with my
pyjama trousers round my knees when Williamson came through the door. “What on
earth do you think you're doing?” he said, knowing very well exactly what I was
doing.
“N-nothing.” I stammered. “N-nothing at all.”
“Pull those pyjamas up and get into bed immediately!” he ordered, but I noticed that as he turned away to go out of the door, he craned his head ever so slightly to one side to catch a glimpse of my bare bottom and his own handiwork. I was certain I detected a little glimmer of pride around the edges of his mouth before he closed the door behind him.
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