Scarred by the cane? No, I just got on with life
I can’t find much sympathy for Harry Benson, sent to boarding school when he was seven (Mail), nor for the victims of school beatings who moaned in recent reports. things were simply like that in those days. My widowed mother popped me into a Guildford boarding school run by the redoubtable Miss teeling, when I was just four. It did not do me much good, though I did learn to read and write. Mother then moved me to another boarding school in Devon, safely distant from our rented home in chelsea. She said it was for my safety during the Blitz. I was doubtful: she seemed to have a number of admirers when I came home for holidays. My father, an army colonel, had died when I wasn’t quite two. My mother, a prosperous member of a wealthy australian pastoral clan, was still not yet 50. admirers plainly represented more fun than a small boy, and I was parked at the school during the long summer holidays. I was a stubborn child, mulish. I disliked being told what to do. Mr Dix, the headmaster, slippered me on my bare backside, but I didn’t care. It was part of school life. I still didn’t do what I was told. I then went to Beaumont college, run by the Jesuits. I racked up the school punishment record — beaten on my hands by the priests and caned by the captain of the School (head boy). I think I was whacked more than 25 times during one term. Painful, but no one was going to break me. I just made sure not to wear corduroys when being caned. (a cane leaves a clear line on corduroy. the head boy was also a star cricketer.) Mind you, I did gain a measure of revenge on my last night before leaving Beaumont. I got drunk at a nearby pub and chased the master who had beaten me the most along a corridor, brandishing a golf club and yelling that I was going to kill him. But trauma? agony? no way. School was like that. You conformed or the system whacked you. Your choice. I can’t say that I enjoyed it. But that was the way it was.
NICOLAS TRAVERS, Slough, Berks.