The New Dawn
Original Fiction – for adult eyes only
Tom Hickson couldn’t believe he was being
made to do this. The teacher was flexing a cane and had ordered him to bend
over the desk. Bend over. For a caning and Hickson was a sixth-former. Not a
kid. Eighteen years old. An adult.
‘Get on with it,’ Mr Twittingham grizzled,
‘I haven’t got all day.’
It had been one heck of a year. It had started
earlier than that when unemployment in the country soared and the youth took to
the streets. People decided they’d had enough. A new political party The New
Democrats quickly formed and swept into Parliament with a manifesto to clean up
the youth.
The first thing they did (as promised) was
to bring back corporal punishment into schools. And not unexpectedly
considering the youth riots it was the older pupils were first to feel the
force of the new regime.
Bevan Comprehensive was what used it be
disparaged as a ‘bog-standard school.’ What people who called it that meant was
that it was just ordinary; the kind of school most children attended. It was
middle of the road, if you prefer. It was exactly the type of school the New
Democrats had in mind when they promised to get the kids back on track. School
uniform was brought back (the basic black blazer and grey trousers) and
discipline was restored. Rules that had always been in place but largely
ignored were dusted down. Rules that had to be obeyed and if they weren’t there
were sanctions. And in the new regime these sanctions were enforced with a
metre long, flexible, old-fashioned curve-handled, rattan cane.
Mr Twittingham was waving such a cane at
Tom Hickson. Hickson, aged eighteen and a member of the Upper Sixth was typical
of his kind. He had never been made to live by boundaries; his parents like so
many others had themselves been brought up with no rules of behaviour. Nor, on
that point, had many of the young teachers responsible for the pupils at Bevan
Comprehensive. But that had changed, as Tom Hickson was now discovering.
Tom Hickson was typical of his kind:
teenagers who thought the world revolved around them, who didn’t understand the
value of hard work and who were bone idle. Mr Twittingham had a class full of
such kids and being a man who believed in duty he knew he would inevitably have
each and every sixth-former bent across a desk before the present school term
was over.
Tom Hickson was lazy, he rarely prepared
for classes (it was a miracle he had passed his GCSE exams) and he liked
nothing better than to interrupt his teachers with little comical asides to his
classmates. He indeed acted like ‘a pain in the arse’ and now by some great
sweep of irony he was soon to experience that very thing for real.
Mr Twittingham had been a teacher for more
than thirty years and his devotion to his pupils was unbounded, but the lack of
respect shown by the kids in recent years had begun to overwhelm him. When the
New Democrats came to power their corporal punishment policy did not go down
well with all schoolteachers and there had been many arguments in the Bevan
Comprehensive staffroom. A compromise was made: teachers would not be forced to
administer canings if their ‘conscience’ did not allow, but all teachers had to
enforce the rules equally. Another compromise was reached, several of them put
themselves forward to be what they quaintly called ‘discipline monitors.’ Mr Twittingham
volunteered with great enthusiasm.
He wasn’t a cruel man (he told himself) but
he was at his wits’ end; how could the youngsters in his charge hope to grow up
into responsible, successful and useful adults if they were never subjected to
discipline (and for ‘discipline’ also read ‘punishment.’)
The local education authority held a
half-day workshop on the use of the cane. It was an eerie afternoon as none of
those conducting the sessions had ever themselves used a cane (not in anger,
against schoolboys anyway) for they were too young and corporal punishment had
been banned more than forty years previously. Mr Twittingham and the other
‘discipline monitors’ discovered there was nothing much to it. Bend the boy
over, take aim, and then strike hard. The workshop ended with the
schoolteachers testing out their new-found skills on one another, which had the
double benefit of letting them ‘get their eye in’ with the cane and also to
experience what a sound caning actually felt like.
Tom Hickson was not the first boy Mr
Twittingham had caned; he wasn’t even the first boy he had caned that day.
He might prove to be the last because the afternoon bell had rung several
minutes previously and as the pupils began to disperse to go home he called on
Tom Hickson to remain behind. It was time, Mr Twittingham, believed to take
young master Hickson down a peg or two (as people no longer said.)
As an experienced caner, Mr Twittingham had
devised a routine. He would tell the boy to be punished what his crimes were,
he’d give the lad a chance to respond and then Mr Twittingham would get on with
it. It was a long list he read to Tom Hickson and bluster though he did the
eighteen-year-old was unable to do anything but conclude that he was guilty as
charged.
Mr Twittingham, a lean man despite his
advancing years, sighed heavily (also part of his routine) before going across
the room to open a door into a walk-in store cupboard. Among the textbooks and
exercise paper and the dust seemingly accumulated over decades of teaching were
a dozen whippy rattan canes. The cane suppliers sold only in bulk and Mr
Twittingham would never expect to get through them all in what remained of his
teaching career (not even with his undoubted enthusiasm to do his duty.) He
picked up the first cane to hand and returned to the classroom. Tom Hickson
stared wide-eyed and in almost comical fashion his jaw dropped leaving his
mouth gaping.
Tom Hickson was no fool, he wasn’t the
first sixth-former to be dealt with by Mr Twittingham, and nor undoubtedly
would he be the last. That did not stop him from staring with astonishment.
‘Stand there,’ Mr Twittingham wobbled his cane at a wooden school desk. Tom
Hickson’s brain was slowing down as the boy shuffled across the room. ‘Bend
over the desk,’ Mr Twittingham directed. On some form of automatic pilot Tom
Hickson rested the palms of his hands on the desk, arching his back slightly.
He stared ahead in near-astonishment at Mr Twittingham who was flexing the cane
between his hands. Tom Hickson knew about canes but he had not seen one close
up. This one was a little over a metre long and was a dark yellow colour, it
appeared to have several notches along its length. It was thicker than a pencil
but it bent easily as Mr Twittingham flexed it.
Tom Hickson was confused. He knew he was to
be caned but he had no idea what he was supposed to do to facilitate that. Mr
Twittingham knew the confusion, most boys displayed it. He looked at Tom
Hickson who was wearing a white school shirt, striped tie and pale-grey trousers.
His present stooped forward position was no good: Mr Twittingham needed a
target to aim at.
‘Bend right over the desk, lad,’ he chided,
and when Tom Hickson’s expression told he still did not understand, the teacher
explained, ‘Right over. Lay your stomach on the desk and take hold of the
legs.’
The desk was low and Tom Hickson was too
tall to fit over it easily. He lay down as instructed and his knees bent as his
shoes slid on the floor tiles beneath them. It was an uncomfortable position to
take but Tom Hickson had no way of seeing that his body now folded over the
desk offered his backside at the perfect angle to receive Mr Twittingham’s
cane. The teenager was thin and wiry and his snug-fitting trousers caressed his
backside so that each cheek was lifted and separated so that they resembled two
delicious peaches.
Mr Twittingham stood by Tom Hickson’s side
and gently placed the cane across the centre of the boy’s buttocks: the term
‘buns of steel’ came to his mind. He had no idea whether the volume of fat in a
boy’s bottom made any difference to the amount of pain he felt when the cane
sank into him and it would be impossible to conduct a scientific experiment on
the matter.
At the touch of cane on trouser, Tom
Hickson’s buttocks clenched. His brain was still on automatic pilot and his
body was simply trying to protect itself from the danger it faced. ‘Relax,
lad,’ Mr Twittingham soothed, but Tom Hickson’s bum remained as hard as rubber.
Undeterred, Mr Twittingham sawed the cane across the highest part of the
teenager’s bottom and after a few tap-tap-taps to get his aim he raised the
cane high, allowed it to wobble in the air for a moment or two before bringing
it down with full force across the tenderest part of Tom Hickson’s anatomy.
If he had been on automatic pilot the sheer
agony of the stripe that ignited across his bottom brought Tom Hickson back to
his senses. He yapped like a puppy and stamped his feet; he gripped the wooden
legs of the desk for dear life. Instinct told him to jump up and rub away the
heat in his bottom and then flee from the room. Any youngster would be tempted
to do so, but Tom Hickson, even in this humiliating position bent across a low
desk offering his bottom to his teacher for punishment, knew he had no choice.
The world had changed. Tom Hickson and his kind had had their own way for too
long. The time for reckoning had arrived. It might be that even Tom Hickson
would agree that this ordeal could do him some good.
The cane tapped again, there was a
swooshing as it flew through the air, followed by an echoing thwack and a
barely-stifled yell. Mr Twittingham was doing his duty and one lad was having
his life changed for the better.
Picture credit: Generated by Artificial Intelligence (A.I.)
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