Trick to avoid caning

Here’s a novel way boys found to avoid getting the cane across the palm of the hand. Taken from the novel Border Country, by Raymond Williams (Chatto & Windus: 1960.)

It was normal, in the school, to send a boy out to cut a stick for caning. Sometimes, even, you cut your own, the one you would be hit with. The precise instructions William Evans had found necessary from experience; without them, the merest switch would be brought. ‘Couldn’t reach up to no others sir, my knife’s too blunt.’

But the ruling majority of the boys had a method which had been passed from brother to brother. A thick enough stick would be cut, if ordered, but then they would take a bud about a foot from the thin end, and cut a T, carefully, in the soft skin around it. Lifting the edges of the skin, they would bore in with the point of the knife, cutting across fibres, and then the skin would be smoothed back, and a lick of mud smeared over the T.

As the stick hit the hand it would break. The victim forewarned (a tampered stick was always handed thick end first) would then yell as if he had been hit too hard. Always, when a stick broke, William Evans failed to send for another. He knew his own temper, and was quickly cautious. An obvious trick, such as ducking the hand so that the stick hit the desk, was certain to be punished, but ‘borin’ em’ so far as the boys knew, had never been discovered.

Picture credit: Unknown.

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