Apologies once again – in future I shall keep my feelings private.

Hi Nagsman I underdrand what you were trying to say and you said it very well.

negasman i hope it is not me that has upset you as i would never set out too do so

if it was me for saying your account read more like bdsm fiction than memoir so be it

Hello dane,

You may I think be unfamiliar with the sort of events which many people, some of them quite well known and in the public eye, have reported as occurring at small private boarding schools for boys in the period when Negasman says that he attended just such a school.

Not for nothing is the first line of L P Hartley’s novel ‘The Go-Between’,

often quoted here.

Thank you A-L, I have often wondered where that quote came from; now I know.

Hello bripuk,

There was a period in the history of this estimable Forum, before the sundering of the Happy Circle and the Great Schism, when all it took to establish one as an authority not to be idly gainsaid  was regular use of two quotations:

The above with regard to anything controversial or disputed claimed to have happened in the past and

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”

should one inadvertently misuse a word or fail to make one’s meaning clear.

To further evince superiority it was customary to demonstrate one’s erudition by attributing the latter, from ‘Through the Looking-Glass’, to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson rather than Lewis Carroll.  A certain prolific former contributor no longer with us also favoured adding the next two sentences of the quotation.

And if both of the above failed then publishing a picture of a tram would always do the trick!  

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”   The key to the deeper meaning is the author’s clever use of the present tense.  And he was right – traumatic memories do not happen in the past tense, but right now. For many years, seeing a well-worn red leather chesterfield sofa, even in illustration like this, triggered flashbacks so vivid that I was at once thirteen years old and standing there, about to have my bare bottom caned yet again.  Seeing the discoloured leather of the arm which had taken the weight of so many young bodies, wondering if the leather would be cold on my bare skin, feeling the fear gnawing in the pit of my stomach, my tongue too dry to speak and my heart trying to climb out of my chest.   I would hear him intoning the list of my wrongdoings, knowing that in a moment I would be over that arm with my head on the seat cushion, being told to spread my legs wider and to present my bottom properly. Then the pause as he took his stance and savoured the moment by stroking my bottom with the tip of the cane. Then, the short sharp hiss of the cane travelling at speed, the smack of rattan on bare skin and an explosion of agony across my bottom.  There the flashback ended – presumably my subconscious did not care to replay what happened next.  It happened at night too – always the same scene in sharp detail, slowly dissolving into the reality of my dark bedroom.  I learned the way to deal with those demons – not to keep them locked away but to bring them out into the light – to talk and write about them. There is no cure for PTSD, but over time it does fade away, albeit very slowly.  Then, out of the blue, some trivial comment, sight or even smell triggers a long-buried memory and it all starts again.  Sorry if it reads like a cheap novel – put it down to my fading writing skills.

negasman so you  where made to spread your legs wider so so certainly did not reserve any dignity.