Corporal punishment never did me any harm – just ask my dominatrix

Schoolboy being held by another boy so he can be birched by the teacher, while the rest of the class watches with enjoyment. Illustrations by George Cruikshank. Published by Charles Tilt, London, in 1838.

Shortly before daylight savings started or ended (can’t remember which it is when the clocks go back), I was walking the dog to the golf course for an evening run (field spaniel Freddie, not me; after decades of canine ownership I’ve finally chanced upon a self-exercising dog who chases a ball and returns it to my feet).

As we passed a neighbour’s house, a young boy was on the footpath emitting a continuous, piercing scream of pain or terror. We looked at him and I said, “Hello, are you all right?”

The screaming stopped instantly, while he considered his response. Then he glanced towards his mother, standing at the front door, and resumed the scream with a renewed energy Chris Bowen could only dream of.

Not pain or terror, then, but pure rage. The woman looked at me, shrugged and gave an embarrassed “What can you do?” smile.

In the office the next day a couple of young women journalists were describing some minor acts of rebellion from their own children: one little fellow had called his mum a “dickhead”; another had started throwing his junior-school weight around by barging into his mother and siblings.

“I would never have dared to speak to my parents like that,” said the first mum. “I know what would have happened.”

“Yes, but you can’t smack them these days,” said the second. “And don’t they know it.”

How very different from my own distant schooldays, I thought, which were punctuated with gentle smacking (infant school, aged 4 to 6); crisp slaps from the nuns for perceived impertinence, a ruler across the knuckles for poor penmanship, and swipes with a bamboo cane for disobedience (primary, 7 to 11); then the jump to first grade with the Christian Brothers.

On my desk at university lay an object I invited visitors to examine so they might make a guess at its function. Two thick, dark strips of leather, about 30cm long and 3cm wide, neatly stitched together around a springy core of whalebone by Scottish craftsmen.

Most thought it a wardrobe accessory or tool, something to do with boots, maybe, or luggage; but once or twice a year the blood would drain from a fellow victim’s face in recognition of the weapon and he would take a step back without touching it, whispering “Where the hell did you get that?”

“From Mr. Slade’s briefcase,” I would say, beaming with pride at my remembered audacity. “Last day of school. Never understood why the art master needed a strap, so I nicked it.”

To be fair to old Bill, I never saw him strap anyone, but to work unarmed among the Brothers and the hard Liverpudlian youths they sought to educate would have been madness.

A few teachers embraced their duty to inflict righteous pain with reformist zeal, but most seemed to regard it as a distasteful part of their role “in loco parentis”. For some of my peers, parents were in short supply, so their anarchic, even villainous, behaviour outside school was understandable, though frequently astounding.

Inside, the strap kept all of us in line (I still remember the agony that tucked your hands tightly into your armpits for an hour afterwards). For the disruptive boys, lessons passed in sullen silence, which permitted the rest of us to study.

Brutal by today’s standards, and occasionally sadistic, but perhaps necessary. Had we not been tamed by violence, we would have learnt little; I doubt any of us would have made it to university.

Besides, as Frau Peitsche, my dominatrix in Berlin’s fabled Klub Schmerz, would confirm, regular beatings never did me any harm.

Last month, as we were discussing naughty kids at work, Thailand became the 68th country in the world to ban all forms of corporal punishment for children – not just at school, but also in the home. Who knows when Australia might follow, but with Germany already on that list, it looks like time’s running out if you’re eager to administer some old-fashioned discipline.

Luckily, if you’re reading the print edition of this newspaper you can roll it up and whack the kids with it right now. Others favour the online version, with its slick audio and video; but as instruments of punishment, I find computers hard to wield and fearfully expensive to replace.