I’m going to write about my first experience of ‘formal’ corporal punishment which happened a month or so later if I recall it correctly.
This was nineteen eighty-five.
By nineteen eighty-five, where I lived, corporal punishment in schools was getting unusual.
It’d been banned in state-run schools at the start of nineteen eighty-three, and the Catholic system had banned it at the start of nineteen eighty-five.
Together, that was something like 90 per cent of all schools, and a lot of the independent schools had stopped using it even though they weren’t actually banned.
Like a lot of people I thought it was illegal
at least until I got to my new school at the start of Grade 5.