Memories: Sting, I held the record for being caned

Schooldays for music star Sting – then known as Gordon Sumner – were a sometimes painful experience. In his memoir Broken Music (Simon and Schuster, 2003) he recalls how, after winning a place at St Cuthbert’s Grammar School in Newcastle in 1962, he became the most caned boy in the school.

St CUTHBERT’S is run by a group of priests; the headmaster, the Reverend Canon Cassidy, is as fearsome a man of God as ever walked in a black cloak. A bald head and thick black eyebrows beetling over dark impenetrable eyes and a sunken, cadaverous face give him an expression of permanent, theatrical anger, like a villain in an opera. I know of no one in the school who isn’t deathly afraid of this man. I have absolutely no doubt that he is essentially a good and decent person with our best interests at heart, but the school is controlled by the threat of his demeanour and with an unyielding and harsh discipline.

The headmaster’s deputy is the Reverend Father Walsh. Father Walsh, as far as I know, does not teach, and his only apparent function in the school seems to be the caning of those boys unlucky enough to be sent to his office for offences as minor as turning up late, excessive blotting of an exercise book, or the rare instances of cheek, swearing, smoking or fighting.

In one year, I would hold the record for sustaining 42 strokes of the cane on my rear end, in seven agonising bouts, that for the life of me couldn’t have been justified by my behaviour. I just seem to have put myself in the way of trouble, been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong friends and the wrong look on my face.

“Six of the best” is a quaint euphemism for the ferocity of this excruciating torture. One is normally “sent up” to the main building after lunch. On the left as you enter is the school chapel, where a lingering trace of incense from Wednesday’s Benediction gives the air in the narrow corridor an unmistakable fragrance: it is the sanctified odour of ritual sacrifice. There is usually more than one victim waiting in a sorry line outside the office. The school settles into an eerie silence as afternoon classes begin: the clock in the hall is ticking slowly; we wait like the condemned, not daring to speak. We continue to wait, and wait, and I know from past experience that this is quite deliberate psychological torture.

I project myself into an imagined future, years hence in the urbane security of adult life, where I can look back upon this trial and others like it with a detached and amused nostalgia. “One day, this won't seem so bad,” I tell myself, and this trick will work for me in a number of stressful situations, but only up to a point. The school clock is still ticking and the office door creaks open slowly. Sometimes, I’m called first, sometimes in the middle, sometimes last. Perhaps it’s best to get it over with, or then again, if you delay, there’s always the chance that the good father may be called to a telephone and cancel the whole disciplinary session because his mother has just died, or perhaps an earthquake will shake the school to its foundations, and I imagine rescuing a grateful Father Walsh from the rubble of his office.

But despite my imaginings, it’s a heroism of a different kind that is required here.

“Take your jacket off and put it over the chair.”

The study looks out over the playing fields, where I can see a football being lobbed into the air and a straggling line of cross-country runners. No one seems to have a care in the world out there.

“Bend over, facing the window.”

Sometimes, with some foresight, you can be wearing an extra pair of underpants beneath your grey flannels, but this is as rare as it is unlikely, and an exercise book down your trousers only works in the comics. There is a sudden swish of air in the room behind you and then what feels like a cut from a rapier across the cheeks of your arse. The shocking pain reflexively has you standing bolt upright and winded.

The man on the crucifix by the window averts his eyes from the torture; is this really being done in his name? Whish! Up you go.

That even the threat of this barbarity is effective in keeping us compliant, quiescent and largely obedient is not in question. It is brutally effective. I just wonder whether those who suffered this painful indignity ever turned out the way they were supposed to. My suspicion is that, if we were to evolve into responsible and law-abiding citizens, we would do so despite this treatment, not because of it. Any idea that I would become an unquestioning and uncritical follower of the church's wisdom flew out the office window as the final swipe found its target at the seat of my resentment.

Extracted from Daily Telegraph, 28 October 2003.

Picture (Gordon Sumner as a schoolboy) credit: Unknown.

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