School Shorts (1)

 Original Fiction – for adult eyes only

Short stories, written in exactly 100 words.

All illustrations generated by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)

I was caned several times at school in England in the 1960s. It was always six of the best bending over touching your toes. The headmaster would administer three strokes and then pause before delivering the last three. The first time I was caned I started to get up after the first three and was told to get back down. He gave me the next three and they were very hard and stung like anything. He then gave another two good hard ones for getting up before he had finished. Truly, my backside stung for a long time after that.

Matt’s first taste of the cane came on Monday morning when the results were returned for the English class test. His heart sank; the red ink indicated a 54% mark when the pass rate was 60%. Mr Hitchens retrieved a cane from his drawer and called him out to the front. Matt felt sick as he stood up and walked towards the desk; he could feel the other lads looking on intently at what was about to happen, some were smirking others were sympathetic, but all were glad they would not be providing the morning’s entertainment. Humiliated, he bent over.

The new maths master was a rum cove. He told the boys that he was a martinet and believed in dishing out corporal punishment to lazy pupils. And that, he warned, also meant his sixth-form A-level class. He didn’t care if they were eighteen. Perry and John stared in confusion at the heavy rubber gym shoe in front of them. It couldn’t hurt that much, could it? Then, Mr Pring entered the classroom, ordered them to stand and picked up the plimsol, gripping it tightly. ‘Bend over. Touch toes. Both of you,’ he ordered. They were about to find out.

Taylor-Simm was the first called in to the headmaster. We went deathly quiet as the door closed leaving us straining to hear what was said. Less than a minute later we heard a loud swish and a crack followed by a yelp. Five more times we heard the swish and crack of the cane as it collided with Taylor-Simm’s backside then all went quiet, A moment later the door opened and he came out adjusting his trousers with one hand and wiping away tears with the other. It had been six of the best on the bare bottom as promised.

Mr. Beanford, making an impression as new sports master at St. Alban, set about licking the sixth-form footballers into shape. He used a large, old white plimsoll with a well-worn, smooth flat surface, nicknamed ‘white fire’ by the boys. Mr Beanford, a strong man in his late twenties, put his full weight into his right arm, smashing the plimsoll hard across thinly-clad buttocks presented for punishment, causing a sting like sitting on a hornets’ nest. On odd occasions he would grip the back of a boy’s shorts, pulling them down exposing the tender buttocks to the mercy of ‘white fire.’

The most traditional thing about my ‘elite’ grammar school in the 1960s was the discipline. Rules were enforced with a swishy cane across the seat of the trousers: failure to complete homework, four strokes; late for a class, three strokes; caught smoking, six strokes. Compared with what would follow over the next decades, it was barbarous. Compared with what had gone before, over the previous two to three millennia of human history, it was unremarkable. Did it do me any good? Well, I still smoke thirty cigarettes a day and I’m never on time for when I’m meeting my wife.

SOURCE

 

For more Original Fiction, click here

 

Traditional School Discipline

Traditionalschooldiscipline@gmail.com