The edition I have is a paperback 203 pages long and 29 pages of that, considerably more than 10% – is a chapter on discipline. I am certainly not going to quote it all, but I definitely commend it to anybody who really wants to look at the reality of corporal punishment at one such school.
What I am going to quote is one small section of that chapter, which describes a style of caning used by the Headmaster of that school, that seems fairly similar to that seen in Kes which is why I looked it out in the first place. Patridge never refers to his school by its real name he calls it ‘Middle School’ throughout his book. I just want to make that clear, in case anybody thinks the term Middle School in the following quote refers to a particular section of a school it doesn’t. It’s a pseudonym of sorts for an entire school.