On the other hand, girls were punished only rarely. I once overheard a boy ask if girls got the cane, and one of the girls replied “no, they get the slipper”, in hushed tones as though she had been threatened with it. I think it’s almost certainly true that girls weren’t caned at that school, but it’s also certainly true that the slipper was used occasionally. When I was in the fourth year, we were sitting in assembly at the back if the hall, and the headmistress told us about a girl who had been persistently disobedient: “I was obliged to chastise her”, she said. Now that in itself doesn’t specify details, but an accompanying incident suggests that the girl had been slippered. What happened is that one of the girls in my class, also sitting at the back of the hall, whispered to us “that’s what I got”: and that brought back memories of an event three years earlier, when we were seven-year-olds in the first class of the junior school.