Mr P cleared his desk temporarily of homework books and told me to “get across”. As I approached the desk, with a thousand and one things going through my head, I saw that the cane he had in is hand was what looked like the longer, thicker dowel that we had seen him use on the older boy previously. Again, I later found out that on entering the woodwork room, the girl had found no less than three dowel rods lying on his desk and just picked one up without thinking (or so she said). Stretched across the teachers desk with my trousered rear facing the class, I had little time for further pondering as the first of four very hard strokes landed full across.
The Cane and the Double Standard12
