“The discipline at Xavier was not so much violent as all-pervasive. Corporal punishment, however, remained a part of that discipline. The ‘strap’ was a two foot long, sewn leather piece two inches wide and about an inch thick. It was the usual instrument of pain. It was surrounded by mythology and macabre stories. This one was the ‘Brown Bomber’, that one had a key imbedded in it, that other one had been soaked in brine or had come to the right pitch of flexibility and pain-inflicting capability on the sweaty back of some old nag. The instrument of violence created many joking relationships between masters and boys.