After a long lecture we were lined up outside her office with our hands on heads, with me last and my cousin second last.

He crapped his self if it wasn,t for my wife calming me down I would most likely have ended up down Watery Lane,oh well happy days!She pulled back the skirt to reveal my knicker-clad bottom and, knowing the slipper would soon be arriving, I gripped the stool harder.

As an adult, I am never less than amazed at my personal fortitude on the several times i received the school cane in the 1950s; a fortitude which seemed almost universal. A howl left my lips and my eyes flooded with tears, rapidly followed by a succession of stinging blows.

But even though it was all involuntary, the will power required to obey the dreaded instruction to "Bend Over" without pleading or resisting is quite admirable, and as Jenny implies, however many times you may have been caned, the first stroke is so stunningly painful, the tribute to most schoolgirl and schoolboy bravery is the courage to remain bending over and take the subsequent strokes.

That wasn’t the last time I was caned at that school but, oddly enough, I never received another detention in the whole of my time there.

Firstly, I dropped a large number of match heads inside the tin and firmly replaced the lid, then I placed the tin over a burner and ignited it. I can even remember thinking at the time that I needed a thrashing and experiencing the inner conflict of feeling I had ‘gotten away with’ something, and the guilt that went round and round in my head afterwards.