We weren’t ‘struck with very little provocation’. We had to do something either pretty serious, or we had to do something after repeated warnings before the strap came out – and quite often both.
The only times I was ever scared of getting the strap was when I knew I’d done something wrong, or when I was contemplating doing something wrong (and I wasn’t always scared in the second case). Fear wasn’t hovering constantly for me, and I doubt it was for anyone else. You didn’t need to be afraid of the strap if you hadn’t done anything wrong or weren’t doing anything wrong.
Being strapped didn’t make me happy. It made me disctinctly unhappy, in fact. But unhappy over this for – at most 20 hours out of the 5000 or so hours I was at that school, when I was very happy for at least hundreds of those hours. It was a very small amount of time.