The following Monday we were packed off to school. It had been like a holiday exploring our new homes and the area, but it couldn't go on any longer. Accordingly we presented ourselves at the fair-sized boys' elementary school in the town, and got a nasty shock immediately.
"Is that those three evacuees?" boomed a voice from the open door beyond the secretary's office we were standing in.
"Yes, sir," she called out.
"Send them in here."
We filed into what was obviously the headmaster's office. My trained eye spotted the umbrella stand with about four different canes straight away. He was a young man, barrel-chested and sandy-haired. I wondered why he wasn't off in the army. He glared up at us standing in a line in front of his desk.
"And where have you three been?" he demanded. "We were expecting you four days ago." We didn't know what to say. "Well, come along, speak up. Which of you is the ringleader?"
"Please, sir," I started. "We didn't know we had to come to school. Colonel Hackett –"
"What do you mean? 'You didn't know you had to come to school.' Any fool knows that boys your age have to come to school. You've been playing truant, haven't you?"
"No sir," I protested.
"Don't you dare to contradict me, boy. What's your name?"
"Dormer, sir."
"Well, I've got the measure of you, Dormer. I don't like having guttersnipes like you invading my school, and I won't stand for any of your insolence or filthy ways. I know you city boys and I know the way to deal with you." At this point he stood up, stomped across the room with one leg stiff – which explained why he wasn't in the forces – and pulled a cane out of the umbrella stand. "You may think you're the cat's whisker in London, but in my school boys who play truant and who argue and lie soon learn what's what."
He whipped the cane through the air and we flinched at the THWUP it made. He took a grip of my shirt collar and propelled me towards the large armchair behind us.
"Bend over, Dormer."
"But, sir –"
"Still arguing, Dormer? Do I have to get someone in here to hold you down?"
I bent over. He made me push my head right down into the seat and then he pulled my shirt clear of my trousers.
It was a full six. He was the equal of Mr Evans when it came to making boys' bottoms sting with his cane. All six landed on a really tight line across my buttocks, concentrating the fire into a single two inch ribbon of agony, low down where I would have to sit on it. I didn't yell till the last one, so I was quite proud of that.
Then he caned Mark, followed by Luke. Mark didn't make a sound, but Luke couldn't help yelling as the cane bit into him. We stood in front of his desk once more. Luke was rubbing himself but I wasn't going to give the bastard the satisfaction.
"And you can be very sure," he growled, "that there's plenty more where that came from. Round here boys who get the cane at school have to face a dose of the strap from their fathers. I don't suppose such a thing happens in the slums that you come from." (I ground my teeth together to stop myself protesting and make a bad situation worse). "Because so many fathers are away at the moment I've had to take special measures for the boys who can't receive this extra reminder of how to behave. And since your fathers aren't available I shall have to provide the service myself. The slipper club meets in here straight after school. You will all attend. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir," we muttered.
"My staff all have canes like mine, and instructions to use them on any of you London riff-raff whenever necessary. Step out of line in my school, and your backsides will suffer for it."
He dismissed us and the secretary led us off to our classroom. She sniffed down her nose over us. She didn't know what we had done, but to be caned within five minutes of stepping into the place marked us out as something specially disgusting.
Lessons were all right, though it was hard to concentrate with that band of fire across my bum. I'd always found schoolwork easy and now was no exception. I forget what it was exactly, but it didn't present any difficulty. A couple of times boys were called out and made to hold up their hands for a couple of strokes of the cane – so schools in the country were pretty much like those in London. The teacher was called Mr Newby, an old man about fifty, but the reaction of the kids who were caned showed he still had the beef to make it sting.
Suddenly I felt a sharp dig in my ribs. I looked at the boy next to me. He was looking at me in a fairly hostile way, but it wasn't him who had poked me. From behind came a hissing whisper. "I'm gonna get you, playtime." It was a tough-looking dark-haired boy with a split lip. I thought, well, you can try.
The master had split the three of us up so that we were sitting well apart. Across the room I could see that the boy next to Mark was giving him a hard time as well, and Mark was reacting. I realised that, come playtime, we were going to have to stick up for ourselves and show these country boys that we could fight.
Sure enough, no sooner were we out in the yard than a whole group of lads from our class came for us. We'd had time to get together and choose a fairly open place where we could defend ourselves. But it wasn't going to be a general melee. They had other ideas.
"Which of you bastards is going to fight me?" said the black-haired kid.
"Why do any of us have to?" I demanded.
"'Cos you city boys think you can come in and rule the roost, and I says you can't."
"And why you?" I heard myself say. "You're nothing special." His jaw went tight and his eyes went hard.
It was a fairly even fight, I suppose. He was bigger and stronger than me, but he thought he could wrestle me down and use his weight. So I kept out of his reach and aimed punches for his head. When the mistress on duty stopped it, he had hardly touched me, but he was bleeding from his lip and from his nose. So, as we stood outside the headmaster's office, it was obvious who had done the most damage.
"What's your name?" asked the black-haired boy.
"Jack Dormer."
"I'm Stu Hathaway," he said, holding out his hand. We shook. He meant, I supposed, that I'd won the fight and now he wanted to be friends.
The headmaster led us in, past the secretary at her typewriter, and hooked a cane out of the umbrella stand as he went past it. He swished it through the air menacingly and turned to face us.
"Fighting again, Hathaway." He turned to me. "And as for you, your backside must still be sore from your last visit to my office."
"Yes, sir."
"I knew you boys from London would be trouble as soon as I heard you were coming. And I warned you what would happen if you stepped out of line, didn't I?"
"Yes, sir."
"Who started the fight?"
I didn't know the protocol here. At home, faced with a question like that both boys would keep quiet. I was afraid that in the country Hathaway would try to pass off the blame on me, especially as he must have known that the headmaster was only too keen to find reasons for beating me.
"Me, sir," said Stu, surprising me.
The headmaster looked at him. I couldn't tell whether it was surprise or disappointment that he couldn't give me the extra.
"Very well. Hathaway, go to the chair, please. And I'll have your trousers down before you bend over."
Stu unhooked his belt, unbuttoned his trousers and let them fall to the floor. He'd obviously been caned plenty of times before because he reached right over the chairback and pushed his bottom up like the headmaster wanted. Once his shirt was hitched up out of the way I could see his pants smooth across his solid backside. The cloth was worn thin and there was a rip right in the middle of his left cheek so that his pink flesh showed through.
It was six really hard strokes. Stu yelped a bit on the first one, but then he took the beating in silence till the last two. He yelled then because the cane made another rip in his pants and started landing partly on his bare skin.
"Now you, Dormer." I took Stu's place at the chair, feeling the lines of heat across my skin from the last time he caned me, but pathetically grateful that he hadn't made me drop my trousers. "Since you managed to make Hathaway's face bleed I'm going to give you two extra strokes." Two extra I thought I could manage, but the experience of Mr Evans' cane on my naked bottom had made me very wary of giving up any protection.
He did pull my shirt clear though, and then slowly and very, very hard lashed the cane into me eight times. Every one landed within the bounds of the previous whacking and most of them landed on or very near the earlier weals. I was hoping against hope that I could take it in silence, but in the end it was simply too painful. It felt like it was ripping right into the meat of my bottom and I couldn't help letting rip with a good yell on the last two or three.
We stood there side by side rubbing ourselves like mad things. The headmaster put the cane away in the stand by the door and then sat down behind his desk. "Right, just wait there while I write a note to Hathaway's father explaining why he's been caned and then you can go back to class."
"Please, sir," Stu said. "My dad's been called up. He's gone to the navy."
"Has he? In that case you had better join Dormer and his pals for the slipper club this evening, hadn't you?"
"Yes, sir." I was thinking, he must be soft. If it was me, that letter would be flushed down the bog before anyone knew it. It was only later I learned that the letter to a boy's father had a slip in with it for the father to sign to say that they had seen it, and given the boy another hiding. It was easy to guess what happened if the slip didn't come back the next day.
The rest of the day was uneventful, apart from Luke having a fight with this lad called Spriggs and both of them getting the cane. Unfortunately, Luke got the blame for starting it so he had his dose with his trousers down. And because Spriggs was definitely getting the worst of it, he had the two extras as well.
I seemed to have made a friend in Stu and he kind of let me in on what went on in that school, and it was clear that the slipper club was not going to be a load of fun. From what Stu and then Walter Spriggs said we weren't going to enjoy it at all and if I could have thought of a way out of it I'd have taken it.
When the bell went at the end of the afternoon, the five of us in our class made our way back to the dreaded office. There were three other lads there as well out of another class. This was more than the average day, especially bearing in mind that there some others who had the letter to take home instead; but it was a pretty rare day when no boys at all were caned.
The secretary had gone and the headmaster – whose name I now saw from the plate on his door was Mr Sayer – ushered all eight of us inside. It was a big office so there was plenty of room. Mr Sayer was in his shirt-sleeves now and the armchair where you bent over for the cane had been pushed right up against the bookcase. In its place was a normal upright chair and on the desk I spotted what must be the 'slipper' – an absolutely huge, rubber-soled gymshoe.
"Right, boys. You're here for the whacking that your fathers would have given you if they weren't off fighting for king and country. Some of you know the procedure because I've had to slipper you before, but our visitors from London don't know how we set about this. First, get undressed please, down to your pants."
I was just going to protest when I saw that Stu was pulling his shirt off and Walter and the three kids from other classes were getting their shoes and socks off, and that left us with no option. Luke looked sick: like me, he'd been caned twice that day, once really severely. I still wanted to object, tell this bastard that I wasn't going to strip off for him to whack me, but I was only eleven and I couldn't see how to do it. I even thought of turning tail and running out of the room, but I knew the consequence would be an even more massive beating. So, seething inside, I took off my clothes and then faced him, with the rest, with just my underpants on.
"Oakes, I'll do you first." He was sitting on the chair with a towel draped over his left knee and holding the gymshoe. One of the kids from the other class went to him and was stood between his knees, trembling. "Pants down, Oakes, and over my knee." The small dark-haired boy pushed his pants down and lowered himself on to the man's knee. The muscles of his bottom were round and solid and we could all see that he had received four strokes of the cane, because the weals were dark lines of bruise, still with some swelling in them. Mr Sayer trapped Oakes's legs with his own right leg. Oakes let his top half droop so that his head was nearly down on the carpet and he held on to the leg of the chair for dear life.
"What's the rule about how many of the slipper you get, McCoy?"
"Three times what you got with the cane, sir," answered one of the other lads from his class.
"So how many are you and Oakes going to get?"
The kid had to calculate it and was too slow. "Do you not know your tables, McCoy, eh?"
"Yes, sir," he said quickly.
"Well, then, three times four." And now the poor little sod was panicking. "What happens to boys who do not know their tables, McCoy?" McCoy was incapable of answering. "Would you like my cane to teach you your three times table, McCoy?"
"Oh, no, sir. Please no, sir."
"Then tell me how many whacks of the slipper you and Oakes are going to receive. Quickly."
"Twelve, sir," the kid gasped and his relief was pathetic – but very short-lived.
"I want you waiting outside my office at eight-thirty tomorrow morning, McCoy. I shall test you on your tables – all of them – and we shall see whether you need some special instruction from my cane."
During this the sole of the gymshoe had been resting on Oakes's bum. Now he lifted it high and brought it down hard. The slap resounded round the room and all of us flinched as Oakes squealed. His skin went dark pink where the gymshoe landed and then, as the rest of the slippering was administered, right cheek, left cheek, darker and darker till the whole of his bottom was crimson with patches of blue bruise already. He wriggled quite a lot but he was trapped and could do nothing to avoid the slapping gymshoe until Mr Sayer let him up and he could jump and down clutching at his rear end, completely oblivious to the fact that his hairless little prick was flopping up and down between his thighs.
Then it was McCoy's turn. He pushed his pants down and lay down over Mr Sayer's knee. His bum was practically the twin of Oakes's and he reacted just the same as the gymshoe whacked down on his tight little buttocks. I felt sorry for him, having to face Sayer again in the morning. There was no chance he was going to be perfect in his tables, and it didn't take a genius to work out what would happen to him then.
One by one the other kids stepped up, pushed their pants down and were slippered. The other kid from Oakes and McCoy's class had been given a full six of the cane, so the gymshoe slapped him eighteen times and he was begging for it to stop several whacks before the end. Then it was Walter Spriggs's turn. He had a small round bottom and it was dark red and he was squealing horribly by the finish.
And then it was Mark's turn. I don't know what I was hoping for, but somehow I wanted one of us to object, to refuse to go along with this, but Mark just pushed down his pants like the others had done and lowered himself on to the man's knee. The gymshoe slapped down and the taut skin started to redden – but there was no sound from him. Eighteen times it walloped into him and he took it all in silence. After a dozen, when there had been no reaction from Mark, Mr Sayer started to bring it down harder and harder and I could tell that it was a huge effort, but he took the whole lot without a sound, and suddenly it seemed like a massive victory.
Next was Stu. I knew this was his first time for the slipper and I thought maybe he would refuse, but he didn't. He dropped his pants and lay down over Mr Sayer's knee. His bottom was solid with meat and the six strokes he'd had made a band of purple weals across the white skin. You could trace each weal on both buttocks and in a couple of places the tip of the cane had come close to breaking the skin. Sayer slippered him even harder than he'd done Mark, but Stu never made a sound, even though the last half dozen were laid on with the full force of his arm. The whole of Stu's backside was dark red and purple, but he pulled up his pants when he was allowed up and stood there refusing to rub himself. I had something to live up to now.
"Dormer." It was still in my mind to run away, not to accept this terribly unfair beating, but doing that would mean who knew what humiliation and suffering. Better to go along with it and be better prepared next time: because, of course, there would be plenty more occasions – he had it in for us and our bottoms would pay the penalty.
I stood between his feet and pushed down my pants. I tried to just push them down over my bum so that at least my dick was still covered, but that wasn't good enough. They had to go right down to my ankles. Lowering myself over his knee was embarrassing, but I'd done it often enough over father's so I was inured to this kind of thing. There was no point trying to hold my head and chest up so I let myself go limp and gripped the leg of his chair.
"And how many whacks of the slipper are you going to get, Dormer?"
"Forty-two, sir," I said. I was ready for him with that. As I said it I was thinking, _f_u_c_k_ing hell! Forty-two! But I also knew that father had given me worse whackings with the hairbrush, and if I could take that much of a whacking from him I was bloody certain this headmaster wasn't going to get the better of me.
The first slap of the gymshoe woke up all the pain in the two sets of weals he'd given me during the day, plus the marks from Mr Poole's caning, which were still tender. I felt my head jerk up and there was a yell lurking at the back of my throat but I choked it back and held on tight. That hard stinging rubber visited every inch of my backside and the pain got worse and worse. Each one was like an explosion going off in my muscles, but his determination to hurt me was matched by my determination not to give in. He was slapping me in a steady rhythm, altering where the gymshoe landed so that the pain filled every bit of me. I lost all count of how many slaps I'd had. It was just a continuum of stinging fire and I kept telling myself that it would stop presently.
He did stop, and for a second I thought it was over. But he had other plans. "Are you enjoying this, boy?"
"No, sir," I said.
"Good." He lay the flat of his hand on my burning skin. "I believe I could fry an egg on your bottom, Dormer. I hope it's stinging nicely."
"Yes, sir," I said.
"And how many do you think you are still owed, boy?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Just another dozen. Which I aim to lay on good and hard. Are you looking forward to that, boy?"
"No, sir."
"Good." And the gymshoe slapped down again, right on the worst part, and it kept on slapping me, harder and harder, right on the same spot, and now I was struggling to keep silent. I was being driven to higher and higher limits of pain and I clutched at the chair-leg as though it was my only salvation.
He let me up at last and I struggled upright, hauled up my pants and tried to look as though he hadn't hurt me, though in fact my bottom felt utterly destroyed. He looked at me as though he was going to make another joke about what he'd done to me, but then thought better of it and just called Luke forward for his share of the slipper.
The others who had been done before me were still standing in a line in nothing but their pants, rubbing their bottoms. But I wasn't going to wait for his permission. I went to my little pile of clothes and started pulling them on. I wanted nothing more than to get out of that office and away to somewhere else, anywhere away from him.
The gymshoe started slapping at Luke's bum, which, if anything, had suffered worse than mine that day. I bet he'd never had to face such a sequence of beatings in his life and now, as the gymshoe hammered down on his bare bottom, he howled with the awful pain of it. After a dozen good slaps, Luke was bawling and crying, struggling under the man's restraining leg and his hands. It was obvious that he couldn't take any more punishment.
I didn't think about what I was doing. If I had I would never have done it. "Stop it!" I shouted and lunged at him. My attack from behind took him by surprise. I wrenched the gymshoe out of his hand and pulled Luke upright, kicked at his shins and somehow got Luke out of his clutches. For a second the other boys were shocked into immobility, but then Stu, followed by Mark and the others, joined in and Luke was rescued. I was still the only one dressed, but that didn't hinder the others one bit. Before the headmaster was able to do anything about it, they had grabbed their clothes, Mark grabbed Luke's as well as his own and we all fled.
The school was empty and in the boys' toilets we got dressed and then ran as though the devil himself was after us. The general consensus, once we'd got far enough away to stop running and think about what we had done, was that we were in deep _s_h_i_t_; that, if he didn't have the law on us and get us sent to Borstal, or, maybe worse, get the local copper to birch us (not that uncommon, according to the local lads), there'd be absolute _f_u_c_k_ing hell to pay when we went back to school next day.
And what was worse, none of us had the slightest idea what we could do. We could bunk off school tomorrow, but sooner or later we'd have to go back and Sayer's cane would be there waiting for us. In fact, the local boys told us that if you played truant in this village the chances were that the copper would find you, give you a _f_u_c_k_ing good hiding down in the police station basement, then drag you back to school for the headmaster to give you another dose of the cane. And then he'd come round to tell your dad about it and, if need be, help him with the strapping that everyone concerned agreed was what you needed.