The Epicaricacist

Prologue

The title of this story, The Epicarcacist, will mean nothing to readers. There is a very simple explanation for this; it is a word which I have just coined myself! Someone, I thought, has got to add to the erotic vocabulary of the English language; so why not me; especially when the source of the word in question relates to a subject near to the hearts of readers of this site, which is dedicated: Stories of Corporal Punishment and Gay Sex.

The English language appears to be singularly lacking in single words to describe the people, actively or passively involved in either corporal punishment or gay sex. Other trades, so to speak, have a single word to designate the person actively exercising their profession. Thus we have plumbers, electricians, carpenters and their clients; and doctors and dentists with their patients; all of whom, whether called clients or patients, are identified as the persons, who benefit from the actions of the prime mover.

However, when we move into the realm of corporal punishment, we seem not to have a single word to describe either the prime mover of the action or the passive person suffering from it. Unless I am missing something myself, which I hope I am not, the English language appears to have no single word to accurately describe the man, who wields the cane on an errant schoolboy’s arse, or for the schoolboy receiving the chastisement. What do we call them? Flogger and flogee respectively; or beater and beatee, or even beater and beaten?

And what single word describes a man who indulges in anal copulation with his partner, of either sex: Fucker and fuckee; or perhaps, innocuously, top and bottom? If the sexual liaison is between a man and a woman, then the word lover might accurately describe the action of both parties to the act. But the fact seems to be – and correct me if I am wrong – that the English language has paucity of nouns accurately and succinctly describing the chief protagonists, active or passive, in the acts of corporal punishment or sex. And make no mistake; CP provokes sexual arousal in both parties, active and passive, and, indeed also in observers of the act; so both are, in some manner, related to each other.

Equally, English has apparently, in most people’s eyes, no single word to express the feeling of pleasure at the misfortunes of others and has borrowed a German noun, Schadenfreude, which, in one word, neatly encapsulates that sentiment.

The observant reader will have noticed that in the above quasi-assertion, I have inserted the word: apparently, with good reason: for I recently discovered that in spite of assertions to the contrary, the English language does have one, obscure, ,little-known word which means the same as Schadenfreude; and that word is epicaricacy.

The word is derived from the ancient Greek “epi” (meaning upon); “kharis” (meaning joy) and “kakos” (meaning evil). However for readers interested, just log onto the internet and Google epicaricacy and you will find there is quite a bibliography, on what is generally a word unknown to most people, I have not found the word in any of the dictionaries, which I use; not surprisingly as epicaricacy, according to what I have learned from the internet, counts as a rare and, unusual, infrequently used word. Until I somehow stumbled across it on the internet – I know not how – I confess, I was not familiar with the word myself.

However, not to be deterred by that fact and armed with the one English word with the same meaning as schadenfreude I have coined the word epicaricacist. As purists will note, I have now written the word schadenfreude with its first letter lower case, thereby assimilating it into the English language, as it is so often used in English and everyone who reads this blog must know its meaning. Just for the record, for non German speakers., all German nouns, whether proper or not, are always written with their first letter upper case no matter wherever they come in a sentence; thus Schadenfreude always begins with a capital S, whenever and wherever it is written.

But to come back to the word Epicaricacist, as it is my word, I define it as being a person who not only derives pleasure from the discomfort of others, but also delights in causing that discomfort and enjoys his own sexual arousal resulting from his actions. In other words he exercises his own sadistic bent on others and then goes on to enjoy the suffering he himself has caused. As I am sure readers will appreciate, discomfort, I should point out, does not simply imply the imparting of pain to a schoolboy by beating his arse, as it does in this story; it can imply all forms of act, designed to cause anguish in the target person.

So to be an epicaricacist, you do not have to commit physical violence on your target person. A good example of a consummate, peerless epicaricacist is Lady Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham. a fictional character in the worldwide, wildly successful television, series, Downton Abbey, written by Julian Fellowes, with which most readers will be familiar. Lady Mary is the quintessential, dyed-in-the-wool epicaricacist, in the way in which she regularly abuses her younger sister, Lady Edith Crawley, without any physical violence, but by her words. She relishes thrusting her verbal sword into her sister and then standing back to enjoy the suffering she has caused. Lady Mary is, in my mind, a consummate epicaricacist.

I regret to say that in my researches, I have not been successful in finding a single word to define the man, who indulges in anal sex with another man. I guess that, for the moment, we will have to stick by the legal definitions of bugger or sodomite, both of which sound so brutal, to describe the men and the act, in which many men, both actively and passively indulge and which gives great pleasure to both parties. The alternative is to refer to the active party, who does the fucking, by the innocuously soppy expression as the top and the passive partner, whose anus is being penetrated by the top’s cock, as the bottom; two terms, which could mean anything. At the moment, they are, I am afraid, the best I can do.

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in the discovery of epicaricacy and get down to this story, which concerns a dedicated epicaricacist, the new Headmaster of Churton College for Boys and the pleasure he gets from beating the naked arses of his pupils and subsequent enjoyment he derives from seeing them writhing in agony from strokes of his cane.

Chapter 1

In May 1923, retired Colonel Colquhoun (pronounced Kahoon) Benjamin Hartley the recently appointed, 65 year old Chairman of the ten strong Board of Governors of the prestigious public school, Churton College for Boys, located in the village of Great Churton, a few miles from the cathedral City of Hereford, called to order, what he himself, a self-important man, if ever there was one, considered to be the most significant board meeting of the year.

Prior to his retirement and appointment as Chairman of the Board of Governors of Churton, he had been the Colonel of the Herefordshire Light Infantry for the previous twenty years. He had served in the regiment since he had left public school – Eton, no less – eschewing university at the age of 18; he had joined the Herefordshire regiment as a cadet, with the intention of making his career as a regular-army officer. First as Subaltern and then as Lieutenant, he had progressed to the rank of Major, before being promoted to the rank of Colonel at the age of 45, a post he had held for 20 years until he retired age 65 and assumed the Chairmanship of the Board of Governor of Churton College.

Colonel Hartley was himself a Herefordshire man, bred and born.

He was the only child of a very rich local landowner, a gentleman farmer, and a Scottish mother, which explains his first name, Colquhoun, which was his mother’s maiden name. Usually a family name, he had, quite exceptionally, at the insistence of his mother, who brought with herself a considerable dowry, been baptised with Colquhoun as his first Christian name; but he was always known in the family as Ben.

How he came to be elected to the Chairmanship of the Board of Governors of Churton College, was a question of potential financial gain for the School. His father, an enormously wealthy man, had, on his death, bequeathed a considerable sum to the School, leaving his only son with more than enough to get by; in fact, a considerable fortune and the palatial family home. And as the colonel and his wife had no children, it was hoped that on his death, he would do likewise with his wealth. The Financial Board of the School, thinking, as it must, of the long term potential benefits to the School, had insisted on his appointment, for life, as Chairman of the Board of Governors. Needless to say he was a thorn in the flesh of his fellow directors, for a period of twenty ne he died at the age of 85, still in harness to the school.

Needless to say, replacing the retiring Chairman of Board with an outsider ruffled a number of feathers among the existing board members, who felt that they had been passed over from consideration, which they, of course, had been. His appointment was resented even more so, as he proved to be a bombastic man, who was used to getting his own way, as he had done for the past twenty years as Colonel in Chief of his regiment, There whenever he said jump, everyone jumped.

And so we come back to his calling to order of what the new Chairman himself considered the most significant Board Meeting of the year. Certainly there was a great deal of truth in that assertion, as the future Headmaster of Churton was to be chosen that very day.

He began: “I think I can say that at that at our last meeting two weeks ago, there was majority feeling of the Board members that one candidate was outstandingly better qualified to assume the heavy responsibility of the Headmastership of such a venerable institution such as Churton College. And I hope that the few of you, who were then still hesitant, will in the interim, have resolved your doubts and will feel able to add your voices to the majority when we vote in a few minutes time. I think it would be better if the Board spoke with unanimity of voice on such an important decision.” The fact of the matter was that at the previous meeting, nothing had been agreed. The Chairman, knowing to which candidate he personally wanted to offer the headmastership, had, with that single-mindedness of purpose of someone determined to get his own way, railroaded the majority of the Board into siding with his view.

So now he was intent offering an olive branch, sweet-talking the only two members, who had disagreed with him, to change their minds in in the name of unanimity of purpose. Come what may, with eight votes out of ten in his pocket, he was assured that his candidate would be offered the post of Headmaster of Churton College. However, with an aptitude for self-delusion and a sense of the importance of collective responsibility, he would like to be able to claim that the vote had been unanimous.

He continued: “As unanimously – that all-encompassing word again – agreed at our last meeting. now that we are about to vote on the name of the person, who will assume the headmastership of Churton beginning on Tuesday August 28th 1923, it falls to me, as Chairman of the Board, to inform Mr. Augustus Caesar, the present Headmaster, that the Board has decided that after 38 years of loyal service to Churton, not to grant him his request to extend his contract for another five years, until he reaches the age of 70. He should now retire, with our thanks for job well done over a long period of time, having recently reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and enjoy the rest he so richly merits, as the longest serving Headmaster ever of the School.” The so called, unanimous agreement not to extend the present Headmaster’s tenure five years, had been force-fed by the Colonel to his nine co-members of the Governor’s Board, as he wanted to be seen as that new broom which sweeps clean and make his immediate mark on the running of the School.

As recorded in the minutes of this momentous meeting; on the unanimous decision of the ten member of the Board of Governors, the Chairman was authorised to offer the post of Headmaster of Churton to the 40 year-old candidate, with a name, which in its own way rivalled the name of Augustus Caesar in it extraordinariness, but certainly in its length. And that is how the richly named Sebastian Emmanuel Marmaduke Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh became Headmaster of Churton College for Boys.

Chapter 2

Let us first deal with the new Headmaster’s cumbersome, double-barrelled surname; Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, which in itself contains two stumbling blocks to those disadvantaged in the pronunciation of upper-class English names, which I supposed includes most of us.

Cholmondeley is not pronounced Chol-monde-ley, more or less as it is written, but quite differently, as Chumley. Whilst with a little imagination one could see how the written name, Cholmondeley had come over the the centuries to be pronounced as Chumley today, the same cannot be said for Featherstonehaugh. Its accepted pronunciation is very British and, at the same time, outlandishly grotesque into the bargain. For some inexplicable reason, the accepted pronunciation of Featherstonehaugh is Fanshaw.

Add to this, the then annoying upper-class habit, which, thank God, today has almost disappeared, of pronouncing the letter, A as if it were the letter E; so So Fanshaw becomes FEnshaw; thAn becomes then; and And becomes End And thAt – or should I say: End thEt? – is just the thin end the wedge.

There is no end to the the upper-class transmogrification of English pronunciation; so much so that I have coined a word: pronucification, for the way the upper-classes contort even simple words, like dog (dauwg) or off (aurf) in both of which they pronounce the short letter O as if it were the AW in the word awful. And then to make matters (mEtters!) worse they drag out the already modified vowel sound unnecessarily. What is even worse, is when certain middle- class, social climbers attempt to ape the upper-class pronucification, they tend to get it all so horribly wraung.

Both names, Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh, stretch back in antiquity and are associated with aristocratic families, which are well-documented in history. Quite how the Headmaster’s relatively modest family, several generations of which lived in West Sussex near Chichester, came to have a double barrelled aristocratic name, both halves of which have their roots in the north is a mystery. Cholmondeley comes originally from Cheshire and Featherstonehaugh from even further north, near Haltwhistle in in Northumberland.

However, given that the family enjoyed what was a double-barrelled name with certain aristocratic overtones, the new Headmaster’s mother, a totally pretentious social climber of a woman, with ideas well above her station, milked the aristocratic resonance of the family name to the limit. She it was who had insisted on her only child being baptised with three Christian names: Sebastian Emmanuel Marmaduke none of which, it has to be said, were exactly run-of- the-mill standard. However, when the Headmaster’s name is written out in full: Sebastian Emmanuel Marmaduke Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, it does have a certain majestic appearance to it.

Lumbered with so many names, how to address him formally, which the boys at Churton were required to do, posed a problem. But the form of address on which he insisted, once they learned how to pronounce his double-barrelled surname, was Mr. Chumley-Fanshaw, which he always insisted on being said in full. No one, absolutely no one, ever dared to call him just Mr. Chumley.

The great secret was to avoid addressing him by name, but to content oneself with calling him Headmaster or Sir, pronounced with a capital S, with a slight genuflection of respect implied in one’s voice. Oh, by God, yes! The new Headmaster certainly expected, demanded and got respect. Both his colleagues and pupils quickly realised that their new leader considered himself as God of all he surveyed at Churton College and, accordingly, handled him with kid gloves.

As we shall see, when we examine the character behind that absurd concatenation of names, in addition to being a died-in-the wool epicaricacist, the new Headmaster was a stickler for formality; let any boy of any age put one foot wrong or break even the most minor of rules, and his arse would suffer for his mistake; and I do mean suffer, Even by the most uncharitable of judges, the Headmaster could never be considered an amateur with the cane, When it came to corporal punishment, which it very frequently did, Sir completely espoused the maxim: pain is the name of the game.

Given the cumbersome length of the Headmaster’s name, in the interests of expediency, he will be referred to, in the following narrative as Sebastian, which his parents called him at home, or either Sir or Headmaster. The boys referred to him by his nickname, CF: the initials of his two surnames, which he had acquired whilst at school himself. One might have thought given his three Christian names that his then schoolmates at Frogmore would have found a more convivial nickname for him, such as Seb or Manny, or even Duke. However, since an early age, Sir was, and always had been, a complete loner, eschewing any close friendships and was content to be known by all and sundry of his schoolmates as CF, rather than by a pseudonym more personable. Thus the nickname, CF, pronounced See-eff, stuck with him for the rest of his life.

Much to his annoyance the teachers in his early years at prep school had referred to him as Sebastian; later to be changed to the more formal Chumley-Fanshaw, which was to how he was to be known formally to teachers for the rest of his career at public school and at university.

Chapter 3

Even before he was sent way, aged eight, to the Frogmore prep school in York, the congenital, sadistic character of the future Headmaster of Churton College had manifested itself at the early age of six, One day in the garden of their home in West Sussex, his mother came across him pulling the wings of flying beetles that he had somehow caught in a jam jar, before crushing them to death beneath the sole of his shoe.

However, when his father came home from work – he was a respected solicitor and pillar of the Church in the little town in West Sussex, where they lived – Sebastian, as he was known at home, received his first of what were to prove, many bare-bottom spankings, by his father with the back of his mother’s hairbrush which as it had a handle, was well adapted to this not unusual use,.

His father, as behoved the stern Victorian, Christian gentleman that he was, believed not only in repentance, but also in retribution for one’s sins. Therefore, he had no compunction in teaching his son a painful lesson, which he would not forget in a hurry. He did not hold back on that first onslaught he visited on his six-year-old son’s bare bottom. Sobbing liberally at his discomfort, Sebastian was finally sent to bed with no supper, as was the custom with naughty children in late Victorian times.

If his father had thought that by giving Sebastian a thorough spanking for his minor misdeed, he had nipped his son’s nascent sadistic tendency in the bud, he would have to think again. The leopard cannot change its spots; so his father, in spanking his son, was simply pissing into the wind against an inborn trait: something which he tried in vain to change, with no success at all. Sebastian was a sadistic epicaricacist born; and no amount of beating would deter him from developing that unpleasant side in his character.

There was no end to the young Sebastian’s devilry. Aged just seven, on November 5th, Bonfire Night, when Little Demon Bangers were on sale for a halfpenny – 1/2 d – each, he frightened the life out of the family cat by taping a banger to its tail, which effectively ended the animal’s life. Its tail was irreparably damaged by the detonation of the firework. The following day, the wretched animal had to be put out of it misery by the vet.

Sebastian was not allowed to escape unscathed from this malicious act of cruelty. Next day, his father, appalled by his young son’s callousness towards a dumb animal, arrived back from the office, bearing a rattan punishment cane, at that time a readily available item, carried by every decent hardware-store. That evening, seven year-old Sebastian’s bottom made its first acquaintance of many, with the pain of the cane. In a flood of tears, he was sent early to bed, nursing a very sore bottom. Did that deter Sebastian from his chosen mildly sadistic way of life? Of course not! One just has to accept that some people are born that way and are incapable of being coerced into changing their ways.

But Sebastian had his the great break-through, an epiphany, if you could call it that, when he was 17 years old and became a prefect at Frogmore, a public school near York, to which his social climbing mother, whose father had attended the same School, had insisted he be sent to be educated as gentleman, almost bankrupting the family in the process.

As a prefect, he was not only allowed, but also actively encouraged by the then Headmaster of Frogmore, to beat his schoolmates if they misbehaved. As an epicaricacist in waiting, as Sebastian truly was, and as a prefect mandated to beat, he was in seventh heaven at being able to give rein to the full his hitherto somewhat hidden sadistic bent Sebastian, notwithstanding the fact that he was not Head of his House at Frogmore, which honour was accorded to another prefect, to whom he deferred; thereby, acknowledging and accepting his place in the pecking-order of the strictly observant, hierarchical society of prefects, in which he found himself. The head-boy was deferred to by the the house-captains: the heads-of-house, who, in turn were deferred to by the rank and file prefects. Nevertheless, through his single-mindedness of purpose to impose discipline on his schoolfellows, he rapidly developed the reputation of being the worst prefect ever, in the memory of his then schoolfellows.

The observant reader will have noticed that I have replaced the more normally used term, schoolmate, by the term schoolfellow. Sebastian, as already indicated, was essentially a loner, who as such had no close friends at Frogmore, whom he could, even vaguely, consider as his schoolmates, let alone as school friends.

The prefects at Frogmore were given relatively freedom to beat their schoolfellows, more or less at will; so Sebastian was able immediately to develop the sadistic tendencies of his character and the personal enjoyment that he would subsequently get out of beating a boy’s bare arse and watching him squirm under the pain he was delivering.

Chapter 4

The four house prefects, other than the head-of-house himself, who considered himself above so menial a task, took it in turns, a week at a time, each evening to call lights-out and to do junior dormitory curfew duty. This consisted of patrolling the corridor, along which the four first and second form dormitories, two for each year were located. Each dorm accommodated ten boys, for a total of of 40 first and second year boys.

The duty prefect was there to ensure that boys respected the relatively draconian curfew which began at lights-out, confining them to the dorm and forbidding all further talking and getting out of bed, except to relieve themselves. Both rules were strictly enforced with the cane, which the duty prefect always carried with him as he patrolled the corridor.

What usually happened, was that immediately after lights-out, which for first and second year boys was at 8 p.m. each evening, the duty prefect retired to the house-prefects common-room, where he passed the next hour until 9 p.m. reading or doing his own prep, making occasional sorties, like a policemen on his beat, to see that everything was peaceful and that nothing untoward happening.

Now it just so happened that Sebastian, by the luck of the draw among the four house prefects, was on curfew duty the first week of the autumn term of the new school year: a trying time for the new prefects, as the boys always tested the prefects’ authority to the limit o in order to just how far they could push their luck without incurring painful retribution.

Now Sebastian had never wielded a cane in his life. He had himself been beaten, for his sins, many times during his years at Frogmore; occasionally by the Headmaster; quite frequently by his housemaster, at whose painful altar, his arse was a regular communicant. He had been also been beaten, more often than he probably deserved by the yearly changing spectrum of head-boys, his house-captain and his acolyte prefects, all of whom frequently exceeded their mandate to beat their schoolmates. Sebastian knew, from frequent, past, personal experience, exactly how painful a well-applied cane could be, when applied vigorously and with due diligence to a boy’s bare bum.

But now, as a prefect, the boot was on the other foot. He himself would be beating other boys’ bare arses, rather than having his own arse beaten. He could barely wait to catch some hapless boy putting a foot wrong, to justify his maiden attempt at wielding the cane. He did not have very long to wait. And when the magic moment arrived for him, he felt he had been graced by God himself.

It was on Tuesday evening, the second day of the new school year, which was also only Sebastian’s second day as a prefect. He had, with diligence, patrolled the corridor three times since lights-out at eight o’clock and detected nothing amiss that evening. However, now, on approaching for the fourth and last time that evening, the two first form dorms, he saw that the door to one of the dorms was open and the room void of his occupants. However, judging from the shindig emanating from across the closed door of other first form dorm, a party was in progress there.

With his cane in his right hand, with his left hand he opened the door of the dorm to find a pillow in progress. He stood there for a full five seconds before anyone saw him there and then a shattering, utter silence fell upon the group of twenty boys who had been doing battle there. What had happened was that the boys from the now empty dorm, thinking that after the 8:45 round by the duty prefect, they were safe from further inspection, had taken their pillows from their beds and had invaded their schoolmates in the other dorm and had provoked a friendly pillow fight; innocent fun, or so they had thought, However, Sebastian saw it somewhat differently, as they were all of them shortly to find out.

Inevitably a pillow had burst open and there were feathers everywhere. Sebastian, suppressing a smile, tried, with some difficulty, to put on his sternest face and said authoritatively to his listeners, leaving no doubt in their minds as to what was to be their fate: “Right gentlemen, you have had your fun; it is now time to pay for the error of your ways. I will return here in fifteen minutes, at exactly five past nine, at which time I expect every single feather to have been picked up and the gentlemen from the adjacent dorm to have returned to their room, but not, alas, to their beds.” “Now all of you listen carefully, for this applies to all of you from both dorms. Each of you will place your pillow at the foot of your bed. You will then each remove the bottoms of your pyjamas, kneel on the floor and bend over your pillow, thereby each presenting your bare arses to to the corrective rigours of my cane, which, when I return at five past nine, I shall have great pleasure in applying six times to each of your bums, I trust I have myself clear; in each dorm I expect to see ten bare arses, all eagerly waiting to commune my cane, which I assure you will not disappoint you and you will have been worth the wait.” Needless to say the entire complement of twenty, early-teenage first- formers, who had only arrived at Frogmore two days ago, were practically shitting bricks at the thought of what was about to happen to them. But, as they were powerless to change anything, they just had to grin and bear it. They were about to learn their their first lesson: at Frogmore: precipitate actions could lead immediately to unpleasantly painful consequences. Not for nothing was Frogmore known among the boys as Flogmore. The boys, no matter what their age or position, had to learn to live with the fact that the cane was almost in daily use throughout the School.

Sebastian was overjoyed by the way things had developed in his favour. He had hoped, sooner rather than later, to conduct his maiden beating as a prefect on some boy or other’s bare arse; but on one single arse. Now here he was with the entire year’s intake of new boys of his house, twenty in all, preparing themselves to be beaten, quite justifiably, by him. Not in his wildest dreams could he have ever envisaged, or even thought that on the second day of the new school year, he, a newly appointed prefect, would be shortly thrashing, not one boy, but the entire house intake for the of twenty new boys.

Sebastian knew well that corporal punishment, especially when it involved beating of boys’ bare arses, was intimately related to sexual arousal in both persons, active and passive, involved in the beating. He also knew personally, from the few times he had witnessed a classmate being beaten in front of the entire class he had become sexually arouse himself; his cock had become rock-hard, just watching his classmate being beaten.

During his earlier career at Frogmore, he had, many times, born the indignity himself off baring his arse to the cane, subsequent to which he had frequently experienced slight post-beating emissions of precum from his cock. However, never had he experienced such sexual arousal as now, walking back to the house-prefects’ common room, where he had proposed to stay, for fifteen or so minutes to give the boys whom he intended shortly to beat, time to clear up the mess the they had created by their pillow fight. He suddenly realised that his underpants were soaking wet with his own, generous emission of precum. He, therefore, hurried to his own study-bedroom, where he stripped off the offending undergarment, paused for a brief few moments to assuage the demands of his heavily tumescent cock with its five-fingered lover. Having climaxed almost immediately, he pulled on a fresh pair of underpants and prepared himself to return to the dormitories, where twenty bare arses were awaiting nervously their first kiss of the cane at Frogmore.

The prescient reader will appreciate that Sebastian’s excessive emissions, provoked merely by thinking about what he would do to the twenty first-formers was an indication of the strong link between his own sexuality and corporal punishment, which together conditioned his desire to inflict pain on schoolboys’ arses and enjoy the results of his handiwork. Sebastian’s beating of twenty first-formers on only their second day at Frogmore, and his second day as a prefect, authorised to beat his classmates, was to prove the decisive initial step to his becoming a dedicated, peerless epicaricacist, second to none.

The sight which greeted Sebastian as he entered successively the two first form dormitories, in each of which were kneeling arses naked, at the foot of their beds, was quite extraordinary; and probably never seen before.

Each dorm was an identical, long rectangular room, with the entry door on one of the shorter walls and a large window on the end wall facing the door. Five beds, ten in all, were placed along each of the longer walls, bed-heads to the wall. But the beds faded into insignificance when Sebastian’s eyes fell on the ten boys, who were kneeling at the foot of each bed, their bare arses held high, trembling with totally justifiable anticipation, induced by the very real fear of what was about to happen to them.

If anyone had told Sebastian, a novice duty prefect, aged eighteen years of age, that he could impose his will on, and bring to heel, not just one boy, but two, ten-new-boy dorms, who had collectively thrown the school rules out of the window by engaging in a pillow fight after lights out, he would have considered the person stark raving mad. And yet, by his own steely determination and single-mindedness of purpose, which two qualities he had just discovered he had in spades, that was precisely what he had done. When confronted with the mayhem of the pillow fight, he had not only read the riot act to the boisterous boys, but had, quite literally, reduced them to their knees, by making them kneel, arse naked, at the foot of their beds, and prepare, like Napoleon, to lose their own private Waterloo with his cane.

As Sebastian surveyed the inventory of ten, bare arses, the first of twenty, on which he was to exercise himself on his maiden use of the cane, he suddenly felt that what he was doing was right: bringing boys to book for their misdeed, He recalled the old maxim: give a boy an inch and he’ll take a mile. Reinforced by that thought, he hardened his heart towards the boys, whom he was about to beat. To go soft on them now was to cede that first inch and lose his authority as a prefect over them.

Sebastian recalled one occasion, when he himself was being beaten by the Headmaster, who lying through his teeth, had said to him loftily: “Here at Frogmore, Cholmondeley–Featherstonehaugh, we take beating very seriously and therefore use it only occasionally, as a last resort to correct a boy’s behaviour, when all other methods have been tried and failed. Its primary purpose is to correct a boy, for the error of his ways and ensure that he does not make the same mistake again.” “But we (meaning, he himself alone) also feel that a boy should also face retribution, in the form of sharp physical pain for his sins, which is why the beating I am about to give you will very severely painful. Brace yourself, boy, in the light of what I have just said to you, the next few minutes will be excruciatingly painful for you, which is exactly how all beatings should be if they are to achieve their dual purpose, which I again remind you, are correction, followed by painful retribution.” In the light of the Headmaster’s hypocritical discourse on the purpose of beating schoolboy’s bare arse and the nonsensical claim that the cane was the last resort, when it was in almost daily use at Frogmore, Sebastian decided to subscribe to the philosophy that pain was the name of game, when it came to himself personally beating schoolboys’ bare bottoms. This maxim, to which he was to adhere to for the rest of his working life, during which, although he did not realise it at that precise moment, he was to become famous as one of the strictest of the strict disciplinarian schoolmasters ever. During his future career as a schoolmaster, which was to last until he retired as Headmaster of Churton College for Boys, he was to beat literally thousands of boys.

But first, newly minted as a prefect, he had to shed his caning virginity and make his maiden entry into using the cane himself. From considerable, prior personal experience of being on the receiving end of the cane himself, he knew exactly how the ten first form boys must be feeling; kneeling there, their bare arses trembling with fear and their apprehension mounting, as they waited for the first cut of six, to mate with their naked flesh.

As he advanced into the room, the cane in his right hand and viewed the ten pristine arses he was about to stripe, he felt a slight trepidation himself at the sheer magnitude of the ask he had taken upon himself, in what would be his first ever use of the cane. His heart was palpitating as much as those of the ten boys kneeling there, victims of their own minor, if over-exuberant misdemeanour. His cock was already hardening in anticipation of the pleasure he already knew he would have in becoming fully fledged beater of his schoolfellows. There was great satisfaction in being able to exercise he power over so many of his schoolfellows.

This was payback time, with an unaccepted vengeance, for all the beatings – often unjustified – he had himself endured in his years as a pupil at Frogmore. Without any thought of technique, he automatically positioned himself to the right of the boy kneeling, arse naked, anticipatively at the foot of the first bed on the right, which meant that he would perforce apply the cane with backhanded stroke: a technique, which would be his signature style for the rest of what was later to prove his long career as one of the most tyrannical schoolmasters ever.

Sebastian was suddenly unsure of the sequence of events, which he was now committed to perform. However, this was neither the time for second thoughts nor for hesitation. So he steeled himself to make what would be the first of the 120 strokes, of which, he would deliver six to each of the twenty boys in the two dormitories. He laid the cane across the by now visibly trembling, naked buttocks of the first lad, who reflexively winced at the first gentle touch of the cane on his naked flesh.

Sebastian said to the terrified lad, whose name he did not know: “Brace yourself, boy, for this is going to hurt a lot.” And then he immediately raised the cane high above his left shoulder and brought it down at breakneck speed, with that characteristically ominous, whining sound a slender rod makes when drawn very rapidly through the air.

The cane ended its arching trajectory, when it came to a sudden stop, with a sound like a pistol crack, converting it its kinetic energy of motion into extreme pain as it mated with the mid-point of the bare arse of recipient youth. For a split second the boy felt nothing; then the inimitable, intense pain of a well-seasoned rattan-cane, biting into the his bare arse, made itself searingly manifest and the lad let out an agonised scream of extreme pain.

Any reader, who has himself had the experience of being beaten for the first time at his public school, will know how excruciatingly painful can be that first cut of the cane landing on his bare buttocks.. It transcends all previous painful experiences of the average public schoolboy by miles, which is why that first stroke Sebastian had ever delivered in his life, solicited such a vociferous bellow of – let us call it – appreciation from his victim.

Sebastian noticed, with considerable personal satisfaction, that his first attempt at mass flagellation had reduced the entire dormitory of ten boys to tears. By the time he had completed his first round and given every attendant arse its first stroke of the cane, the initial, violent, vocal outbursts of pain had given way, in all ten boys, to gentle sobbing. But he had now to make good on his promise of giving each and every boy, a six-cut, well-beaten arse to take back to bed with him, as a long-lived reminder that at Frogmore, illicit, nefarious actions inevitably led to painful consequences.

It had been a full two minutes since Sebastian had delivered his first ever stroke to the first boy: an eternity for the lad, who had been left in painfully agonising limbo, waiting for the subsequent strokes of the cane to complete the excruciating, painful task of his six cut beating. It is this wait that gives rise to the oft voiced, nonsensical impression that the wait is worse than the beating itself. Believe me, it is but a load self-delusional nonsense, which disappears, when the harsh reality of the subsequent bites of the cane are felt.

He now went ahead and repeated five times his round of ten boys giving each quivering arse one extremely painful, swingeing stroke of the cane at each round, thereby dragging out interminably the rare drama of a whole-dorm mass-beating. He thus increased the mental agony of the whole complement of boys making up the dorm, making each and every one of them wait almost two minutes between each stroke.

Moreover, although it was Sebastian’s maiden beating as a prefect, as previously noted, in his own preceding career at Frogmore, he had himself been no angel and his own bare buttocks had, therefore, often been subjected to the bite of the cane; and occasionally to the caress of the birch. So the new boys had the doubtful benefit of being beaten by someone, who knew his onions, when it came to being beaten.

It is the received wisdom that a boy’s lower buttocks, towards his upper legs, often referred to, with graphic exactitude; as the sit-spot, are the most sensitive to pain. Sebastian, therefore deliberately concentrated four strokes on this portion of each boy’s nether, rear anatomy, thereby ensuring that he would have a painful souvenir of his beating each time he sat down for the next few days, By the time Sebastian moved on to the second dormitory, the ten lads awaiting his attention with the cane had been kneeling at the foot of their , arse naked in the air, awaiting, for a good half hour, that first, awful bite of the cane. Not surprisingly, all ten boys were extremely tense, due to the long wait; so much so that a number of boys had not been able to control their worst fears and were already crying just at the thought of what they were about to suffer, for what had been no more than school boy over exuberance, leading to a pillow fight.

Some observers might have said that six cuts on the bare with the cane was too harsh a punishment for the offence the new boys had committed. However, be that as it may, Sebastian had promised them six cuts each, delivered by his own fair hand, and there was now no way of going back on that. And so, the ten boys in the second dorm also experienced the indignity of the slow and magisterial process of being beaten by the duty prefect, on only their second day at the School. All twenty first-formers had, in fact, received a rousingly painful foretaste of the severe discipline, to which they would be subjected, during their coming years at Frogmore.

Beatings on the bare were part and parcel of daily life at Frogmore. Barely a day passed but what some boy or other was obliged to submit his bare arse to the not-so-tender-loving-care of the rattan cane, of which there were many authorised users; so danger was everywhere.

The prefects, to which group Sebastian belonged, were, with one or two exceptions, normally the most enthusiastic users of the cane to the backsides of their schoolmates. They were mainly in what might best be described as pay-back mode, taking every opportunity, no matter how small, to thrash their schoolmates arses, in retroactive retribution for the indignities they had themselves suffered under the cane of the prefects, in their earlier years at Frogmore.

If they could find no true reason for which to punish one or other of their schoolmates, it was not at all uncommon for any boy, who took their fancy (NO; not in that way!) to be summoned by his house-prefects and informed that he was to be be beaten, for having the wrong attitude, Presumably, after the corrective therapy of the beating, the victim would emerge, having the right attitude, whatever that might be! In, the interest of keeping the disorder in the School down to a dull roar, even if they did not actually condone or encourage it, the powers that be, the teaching staff, turned a blind on this abusive behaviour. And, as no one ever complained about the brutal treatment, such abuses were allowed to continue unchecked.

By beating all ten boys of not only one entire dorm, but two – twenty boys in all – and this on only the second day of the new school year, Sebastian had established his reputation as a prefect not to be messed with if one valued one’s arse. As the term progressed and more and more boys had the distinctly doubtful privilege of feeling the bite of Sebastian’s cane across their naked buttocks, boys of all ages came to live in fear of being summoned to the prefects’ common room by him, for it was there that prefects’ beatings took place.

At Frogmore, in common with other public schools, prefects’ duties were not restricted to the house to which they personally belonged. By day, when classes were finished, they supervised prep and generally were responsible for keeping order, whilst the boys were still in the teaching building, before they returned to their own houses for the evening.

Prefects’ beatings, which were performed at 5 p.m. in the prefect’s common room, were, more or less, a daily occurrence at Frogmore. Rules, many of which were piffling, were all strictly enforced to the letter, by an over-zealous group of prefects, who, intoxicated with the power that their elevated status gave them over their rank and file schoolfellows, enjoyed nothing more than lavishing the cane on the bare arses of the day’s crop of boys, unfortunate enough to have been caught in flagrante committing some, often minor, nefarious act or other.

Among the prefects, only the head-boy had his own study. Located in the main building, to be summoned to his study and face a beating from the head-boy was considered a fate worse than death: such was the fearsome reputation with the cane of a succession of head-boys. However, the consolidation of Sebastian’s reputation as the most rigidly unbending disciplinarian ever and the hardest caner in living memory of the then pupils at Frogmore, came in the second week of the new term, when he beat two of his contemporaries in the upper sixth form, with whom he himself sat together in class each day.

Sebastian’s disciplinary activities were mainly exercised on the bare arses of the members of his own house, Lancaster House, where he was one of the four prefects. It was one thing for a prefect to beat an entire dorm of new boys, but quite another to pull rank on one’s contemporaries, and particularly those with whom, the prefect in question sat together in class. So most prefects stopped short of calling out their contemporaries to answer for their sins and left the disciplining of members of both lower and upper sixth formers to their housemaster’s cane.

But Sebastian was made of sterner stuff and, as a loner, cared nothing for his popularity among his contemporaries. Moreover his first experiences at wielding the cane had revealed to him that hitherto sadistic streak in his character, of which he had himself been unaware, until on only the second day of term, push had come to shove with a vengeance, when he had brought the new boys of the two first form dorms to heel by beating the lot of them. It was on that occasion, he had suddenly discovered that he had thoroughly enjoyed inflicting pain on the naked arses of his schoolfellows, when he had beaten twenty new boys, without blinking an eyelid; he knew then that he had found his métier, which was to become his vocation in his future career. Moreover, the act of beating the bare arses of his schoolfellows also arouse him sexually, which for a loner, which he was, allowed him to satisfy his personal sexually needs manually, in the privacy of his own study bed-room.

Now the reason public schools annually elevated several senior boys to the rank of prefect and gave them power to beat their schoolfellows if they overstepped the bounds, of what was, at that time, considered good behaviour, was to conserve some semblance of order. Given free rein, boys together, as a group, no matter from which social class they came, would create, if not exactly mayhem, at least, disorder. In the view of most boys, rules were there to be broken and if they could get away in breaking them, then so be it. So the role of the prefects was to preserve order and to punish any boy, whom they found ignoring the rules.

However, it was never intended that prefects, to satisfy their own sadistic urges, should literally search systematically for wrong-doers, who just might be breaking one of the myriad rules governing their behaviour at Frogmore;. But, to satisfy his ever increasing desire to beat arse, that is, in fact, exactly what Sebastian did. Even when he was not duty prefect, he took to patrolling the dormitory corridors of an evening trying to detect if anything untoward, which could be corrected with the cane, was going on behind closed doors. In other words he was looking for an excuse to appease his sadistic appetite for thrashing bare arse.

As you can well imagine, knowing Sebastian’s sadistic bent, his cane had not been idle since he had thrashed the twenty boys of the two new boy dormitories on what had been on only the second day after their arrival at Frogmore and his own as a prefect But I until now, he had not managed to catch any senior boys in flagrante committing a beatable offence. Like a big game hunter in search of some wild animal to kill to justify his African safari, Sebastian desperately wanted to add at least one mature, trophy arse to his rapidly growing list of beatings he had performed Hitherto, the perceived wisdom had been that prefects would do well to leave the beating of sixth-formers to either the Headmaster himself or one of Frogmore’s several housemasters. However, as a matter of pride, Sebastian did not subscribe to this widely held mantra, which, if observed, would severely limit his powers as a prefect. Why should sixth formers, who broke the rules, be treated differently to their younger brethren? And so, to impose his disciplinary powers on the entire age spectrum of boys at Frogmore, he proposed to ignore the widely held view that prefects did not beat sixth-formers at Frogmore. Note that this was just a notion, which had no foundation whatever in fact. However since no prefect had, within living memory of the present complement of boys at Frogmore, ever beaten a sixth former, it had acquired the aura of a rule.

Sebastian was hell-bent on adding at least one senior boy’s arse to his considerable list of junior boys, whom he had already flogged during his first two weeks as a prefect. To hell with popularity; he was a loner who was about to enter a domain where angels, let alone his co-prefects, would have feared to tread.

Now, at Frogmore, every boy in the lower and upper sixth, had his own study bedroom, located on the floor above the dormitories of the younger boys. And so it was that on Saturday evening of his second week as a prefect, Sebastian was trawling the upper corridor, in an effort to detect any illicit activity going on behind the closed doors of any of the study bedrooms. Not to put too fine a point on what he was doing, Sebastian was was indulging in that not very gentlemanly activity of spying on his fellow sixth-formers.

Luck was with him, as behind one firmly closed door he heard voices and smelled cigarette smoke. Now at that time at Frogmore, when almost all male teachers smoked, smoking, along with drinking, by the boys, was considered the most heinous of crimes; and, any boy caught smoking was punished most severely.

With no hesitation and without knocking, Sebastian flung open the door to find three upper sixth-formers huddled over a low table, playing some card game or other. Judging from the coins in front of each of them, they were gambling: playing for money, which was also forbidden. But Sebastian was delighted to see that they were all smoking cigarettes, which judging by the brimming, small ashtray, they had been doing for quite some time. So, they were all equally guilty of breaking one of the cardinal rules of the school, having been caught in the act of smoking, which justified the application of the direst and most painful of penalties. Sebastian, who, mentally, was on a God-given, spying mission on his fellow sixth-formers had hoped to find at least one sixth-former behaving sufficiently badly, to justify a beating; but here he had lighted, by chance, on upon three of his fellow sixth-formers whose behaviour justified a severe session with the cane. This was potential manna from heaven

“Well, well,” with contempt in his voice, said Cunningham, whose room it was, “Just look what the wind has blown in. Can we help you? Perhaps you would care to explain; to what do we owe this unexpected visit, Chummers?”

Chummers was the hated nickname, by which Sebastian was universally known to his schoolfellows. In addition to being a sadistic sod par excellence, since he had become a prefect, Sebastian had adopted a lofty, distinctly hackle-raising manner of addressing his schoolfellows them: a pompous, self-righteous way and would have preferred to have them defer to him, in addressing him by his double-barrelled surname in full, as did the masters whenever they spoke to him. As a loner, he just hated the familiarity and friendliness which being called Chummers implied: feelings which he shared with no one.

To make matters worse, Cunningham went on in an over-familiar tone of voice, ignoring completely the fact that he and his two companions, Hendy and Ridley, by name, were all skating on very thin ice, saying: “You know, Chummers, it really is bad form for you to burst uninvited into a fellow’s private quarters without even having the courtesy to knock before entering.” “Bad form or not,” replied Sebastian, “I am merely following my sworn duty as a prefect, which is to hold any and all of my schoolfellows, whom I find breaking any of the school’s rules, accountable for their misdeeds. I think you must all agree with me, that in playing cards for money and smoking you are all guilty of breaking two of the most stringently enforced rues of this school, and therefore, all three of you have qualified yourselves, for a very sound beating, which I shall shortly give myself the pleasure of inflicting on your bare arses, with the cane, as is the custom at Frogmore. I am afraid that all three of you are going to pay a very painful price for your evening of pleasure.” “Now, the three of you, stop immediately what you are doing. Hand over to me any cigarettes, which you might still have in your pockets and which are, of course, herewith confiscated. Then all of you go and change into your pyjamas and present yourselves to me for punishment in the prefects’ common room, fifteen minutes from now:” The fact that they had been ordered by Sebastian to change into their pyjamas before presenting themselves for punishment, said it all; they were all to be given a beating with the cane, directly on their bare arses. Sebastian noted that Hendy and Ridley, both blanched at the thought of feeling the agonising pain of what would certainly be a senior-cane across their naked backsides. But they both acquiesced to his order, saying nothing, but looked terrified as they left Cunningham’s room and went to their own rooms to change into their pyjamas, which were the standard attire for house beatings in the evenings.

Such beatings were quite frequently administered by the housemaster, normally, just before the boys went to bed, thereafter to spend what was an inevitably uncomfortable night, nursing the excruciating pain of a well-beaten arse. For senior boys to be beaten by prefect, with whom they sat together in class every day, was unheard of. But such was Sebastian’s authoritative manner that Hendy and Ridley did not question the order that he had just given them. They accepted that they had been caught red-handed, breaking one of the most strictly enforced rules of the school and, that they must, therefore, accept responsibility and the traditional painful retribution for their actions.

However, Cunningham was not prepared to allow himself to be beaten, by someone, whom he evidently, and erroneously, as was about to find out, considered as an upstart prefect, who was exceeding his authority.

He adopted a blustering tone as he berated Sebastian: “You know you are really something, Chummers; you burst in here unannounced, without even knocking and pull rank on the three of us, with whom you sit daily in class, as if you think that the silver prefect’s star on your tit gives you right to lord it over us. Well just let me tell you something, you self-important little prick; there is no way that I am going to let you loose with your cane on my bare arse. So, you had better think again, you fucking little nonentity. It is completely unheard of for a prefect to beat any of his classmates; and you are certainly not going to beat me.” On and on, he raged, against Sebastian, calling him all sorts of obscenely insulting names, in which the words shit and fuck and its derivatives, figured pretty frequently.

Sebastian listened in silence to Cunningham’s verbal diarrhoea, until he had exhausted his vocabulary of insulting verbal epithets and then said quietly, with some justification: “Cunningham, I have never cared for you as a classmate, in all the years I have known you. You have, by your foulmouthed diatribe against me just now, confirmed my opinion of you which I have long suspected to be the case. You, sir, are a blustering, cowardly person, who takes no responsibility for his actions. However, you and your two partners in crime are in a hole of your own digging and you personally, by your insulting remarks about me, have just dug yourself in deeper still.” “I would draw your attention to the fact that in calling you out for having broken one of the most strictly enforced rules of this school, I was merely exercising my duty as one of the four prefects of this house, which obliges me to uphold and enforce the rules of this school. I cannot force you to come to the prefects’ common room to be punished for your misdeeds. However, if, you do not present yourself to me, in fifteen minutes time along with your two delinquent partners, for punishment, which, I might add, you all richly deserve, I shall have no alternative but to report you to the Headmaster, with all that that implies for you. I suggest you think seriously before you make your final decision.” “I might add that the Headmaster will take a very dim view of your smoking and gambling activities, plus the fact that, in your scatological, foulmouthed diatribe against me, you have refused to allow a prefect to correct you for your behaviour, which will probably mean the Headmaster’s birch followed by the cane. I would also disabuse you the false impression, which you seem to have, that prefects are not authorised to beat their co-sixth-formers. Prefects have every right to beat any of their schoolfellows, whom they find breaking the rules, which is exactly what I intend to do. Every boy in this school, including me, is subject to the same rules, which you had better believe. That is all I have to say to you Cunningham. The decision is yours.” Needless to say, fifteen minutes later, three doleful looking, pyjama-clad sixth-formers presented themselves for punishment at the prefects’ common room, as Sebastian had ordered. Cunningham had had second thoughts on his rude refusal to obey Sebastian’s order. He had realised that a visit to the Headmaster, who had a formidable reputation with both birch and cane, would be far worse than anything Sebastian could throw at him. However, as he was to learn, Sebastian was not lacking in the ability to make the cane deliver its fearsomely painful message, in twelve fearsomely painful strokes.

In spite of his apparent outwardly calm indifference to Cunningham’s verbal diatribe against him, Sebastian had every intention of making him pay for every single, malicious word he had uttered. Sebastian was no saint himself, but Cunningham was about to learn that words, even those said in a moment of anger, do have consequences, for which he was now about to pay a very painful price.

At Frogmore, all prefect’s beatings in house, were conducted in the prefects’ common room, which in Lancaster House, was equipped with an old armchair, over the back of which, boys to be beaten were invited to present their bare buttocks to receive the bite of the cane. While all prefects at Frogmore, in common with other public schools, were each presented with two canes, one junior and one senior – the key tools of their trade so to speak – for some reason, these were duplicated in the prefects’ common room in Lancaster House. Thus, two additional canes hung, one each side of the door, in menacing view of the unfortunate lads, whose bare backsides were shortly to be subjected to the traditional, public school agony of a vigorously applied, well-seasoned, flexible rattan rod.

Not surprisingly, given the unique reputation which Sebastian had already acquired – bad new travels fast – thanks to his beating of two complete dorms of first-formers on only the second day of term, the three sixth-formers, Cunningham et al, were all very nervous, as they awaited their fate at the hands of Sebastian, who dared to break with the tradition that the beating of sixth-formers should be left to their housemasters and the Headmaster himself.

There was nothing but tradition to stop Sebastian from thrashing his co-sixth-formers himself; it was just that this somewhat, potentially disconcertingly embarrassing task was usually left to the housemasters or the Headmaster himself, as it required a lot of sangfroid, courage and self-confidence on the part of a prefect to call out someone, with whom he regularly sat together in class, and beat the hell out of his bare buttocks. Cunningham had been right when he said that it was unheard of for a prefect to beat an upper-sixth-former at Frogmore. However unheard of did not mean that it was forbidden; and, as the three delinquent upper-sixth-formers were about to find out, their co-classmate, Sebastian, in his role of prefect, was sufficiently sure of himself to be about to turn the received wisdom of years on its head.

Sebastian stared expressionless, unblinkingly at his three classmates, each of whom he was about to take to hell and back, and said: “Well, gentlemen, you have had your pleasure and now is the time to pay for it. You, Hendy and Ridley, will receive twelve parallel cuts with the senior cane on the bare. You, Cunningham, will also receive twelve cuts of the senior cane. However, in view of your unconscionably vile, verbal outburst, vilifying me for simply carrying out my duty as a prefect, you will personally suffer increased painful retribution, as I shall administer your twelve strokes, in the form of six double cuts, four of which will be laid on to the lower part of your buttocks, known, self-explanatorily, as the sit-spot, with which I think you are already intimately familiar.” “Gentlemen, I think we are now ready for you to do penance for your sins. I will beat you first, Ridley, then Hendy, while leaving Cunningham, to contemplate his fate until last. Gentlemen, before we begin, for future reference, I would just remind all of you that words often do have consequences. My counsel to all three of you, but especially to you, Cunningham, is to think before you speak, as your words could make worse, a difficult situation in which you find yourselves, as you, Cunningham, are shortly to find out, alas painfully, to your cost.” Sebastian then said pontifically: “Gentlemen, I now ask you all to divest yourselves of the lower half of your pyjamas and go and stand facing the wall over the with your hands on your heads and prepare yourselves for your encounter with cane, which I assure you I will do my very best for each of you to make your individual beatings as exhilarating as possible. I am personally of the opinion that boys should be severely corrected for straying from the straight and narrow, as dictated by the school rules, in the possible vain hope that they will be deterred from making the same mistake in the future.” “But over and above the corrective function of caning, I believe that miscreants should suffer retribution for their misdeeds in the form of physical pain imparted to them by the cane. For that reason, I must inform you that it is my intention that each of you should leave this room bearing a painful souvenir of your misdeeds, in the form of what is vulgarly referred to by the boys of this school as a well-beaten arse, which will remind you, each time you sit down for several future days, that the wages of sin are indeed very painful.” “Well, gentlemen, that is all I wish to say to you for the moment. So, if you would now be so kind, Ridley, as to move the armchair into the centre of the room, and bend across its back, placing your hands firmly on it arms and holding your buttocks as high as possible, I think we should be ready to begin.” Whilst Ridley, was arranging the armchair in its designated position, Sebastian took down the senior cane from its hook beside the door, swished it down through the air a few time for effect and prepared to address Ridley’s arse with it. He looked down on Ridley’s muscular, as yet unblemished buttocks and realised that he was himself becoming sexually aroused, just at the thought of what he was about to do.

He was about to beat not only one, but three of his contemporaries; to tread the path, which no prefect had dared to tread, in the memory not only of the then complement of boys of Lancaster House, but of the entire school. There was no rule which forbad him to beat a boy, with whom he himself sat together in class, who had broken the rules. But in so doing, he was turning on its head what had become, by it very absence, a tradition: prefects did not beat sixth formers: especially upper-sixth-formers, with whom they sat together with, daily in class.

It required a steely determination, coupled with a total disregard for tradition or for what his contemporaries thought of him, for any prefect to do as Sebastian was preparing to do. But Sebastian was not just any prefect; he was a lonely, young man, who denied his homosexual tendencies even to himself, and was driven by an unfortunate personal sadistic desire to beat bare arse, which would be with him all is future life; but which, at present, served him as substitute for the self-abuse, sexual pastimes, in which his contemporaries regularly indulged together.

Such sexual shenanigans were inevitably rife at Frogmore, as in other public schools, where adolescent young men were denied access to female company. However, Sebastian had sufficient backbone to ignore convention and deny himself the pleasures of sex with his classmates, to resurrect an act, beating three young-men, with whom he personally sat together in class, but which had fallen into disuse, through earlier prefects timidly not daring to fulfil their mandate, rather than by prohibitive edict from above.

In beating three upper-sixth-formers, with all of whom he sat together in class and with whom, even if not close friends, he had social, if not sexual intercourse on a daily basis, Sebastian’s action would open up a new chapter for prefects, present and future across the school. Gone would be the old shibboleth that squeamishly timid prefects did not dare to face up to their responsibilities and preferred to shy away from the admittedly difficult task of beating their schoolfellows some of them older than themselves. They had long preferred to leave the task to the powers that be: the housemasters and the Headmaster himself, to whom they had no qualms in referring the boys, whom they had not the courage to beat themselves. Thanks to Sebastian’s daring initiative, henceforth, all boys, not matter what their age, would feel the pain of a prefect’s cane across their bare arses, if they were caught breaking the rules, as prefects renewed their beating mandate to re-include members of the upper-sixth.

The fatidic moment had arrived. Sebastian was about to achieve his main objective, which was to enlarge his field of action, hitherto restricted to the beating of younger boys, to include beating of the bare arses of three young-men of the same age as himself. Sebastian had found that he was, quite unusually, a natural right-handed, back-handed beater. He therefore positioned himself automatically to the right of Ridley’s visibly trembling buttocks and raised the cane above his left shoulder, before bringing it down in one smooth, arcing stroke to land with a loud crack on Ridley’s bare arse.

He noted, with great satisfaction how quickly the naked flesh of Ridley’s arse reacted to the kiss of the cane; that angry, red furrow, clearly defined by two raised ridges was produced almost immediately. He went on to paint a picture, composed of ten parallel cuts of the cane, from bottom of Ridley’s back to his crease, before finishing off his handiwork with two diagonal crossing, strokes.

He allowed himself to admire his own handiwork for a few seconds, before telling Ridley, who, by then, was in utter agony after twelve, swingeingly painful cuts of the senior cane, to stand up and rejoin his two companions facing the wall; hands on his head, and forbidding him to touch his throbbing arse to ease excruciating pain he was experiencing. He then meted out the same treatment to Hendy, before sending him too, to rejoin his two companions in crime against the wall.

However, coming to Cunningham, who was to receive special treatment, which he deserved in view of his grossly, insulting remarks, Sebastian allow him to reflect on his fate for a full five minutes, before ordering him to assume the position over the back of the armchair: an eternity, when one is waiting to have one’s bare arse shredded with the cane. Cunningham, who had railed so vehemently against Sebastian, had wisely decided that, as he had, by his insulting remarks, positioned himself between a stone and a hard place, being beaten by Sebastian was the best the three bad options open to him. It beat by a large margin, the prospect of being referred to either his housemaster or even, God forbid, the Headmaster, who was reputed to come down like a ton of bricks, using both the birch, followed by the cane, on any boy caught smoking, which along with drinking, lying, cheating and stealing, was considered one of the cardinal sins at Frogmore. So, in fact even though Sebastian was intending to give Cunningham’s bare arse absolute hell, he was probably doing him a favour.

In spite of his earlier protests, even now, after he had tacitly agreed to submit his arse to Sebastian for punishment by turning up with the two others at the prefects’ common room, Cunningham. moved with extreme reluctance to adopt the correct position over the back of the armchair. As he did so, if looks could have killed, Sebastian would have dropped dead on the spot.

Now that Sebastian was gazing down on Cunningham’s eminently beatable arse which was just crying out for a serious encounter with the cane, he suddenly had a momentary queasy thought: “What if he failed to deliver the twelve cuts in the more painful six-on-six combination, as he had promised Cunningham?” As a new prefect, with only two weeks experience of bare bottom whacking under his belt, although he had managed, more or less every day, to find some boy committing some offence or other, no matter how minor, to justify beading his backside beaten, he had always applied twelve strokes of the cane, which was the standard tariff for any offence, no matter how minor, with the cuts parallel to each other, covering the his victim’s entire, rear, nether anatomy from the bottom of his back to his crease.

Notwithstanding this horrifically painful punishment, which was par for the course at Frogmore, what he was now proposing to do to Cunningham – doubling six strokes on six – increased the pain level considerably. He had blithely told Cunningham what he was going to do to him; however now that he was literally faced with delivering on his promise, he was not at all sure that he was capable of the extreme accuracy of technique needed to accomplish what he had promised. Words, as he had said to Cunningham, did have consequences, and now, in a totally different contest, this maxim equally to him.

Not to deliver now on what he had promised, would involve him backing down and losing face to Cunningham, which he would never be able to live down. He could already hear Cunningham branding him, to their mutual classmates in the upper sixth, as a spineless wimp: a man who was all talk and no substance, which would make his life at Frogmore intolerable, for the rest of his final year. Such a verbal assault, robbing him of the dignity of his office, he could never allow to happen.

Such were the thoughts and misgivings, which flashed through Sebastian’s mind as he contemplated the virgin, unmarked flesh of Cunningham’s naked bottom. As there was not any of face-saving way of backing down from his promise, he had no option but to screw up his courage and with a palpitating heart he began to flog Cunningham’s naked butt. He put off confronting the moment of truth, which would test his ability, by first giving him six parallel stroke, all of which he laid on with maximum force, so much so that by the third stroke he had Cunningham pleading for mercy. However mercy was not a word in his vocabulary at that moment, for he was determined to make Cunningham suffer the most agonising pain in retribution for his rudeness. He completed the first six strokes, by placing the final three on the hypersensitive sensitive seat area, towards the top of Cunningham’s legs.

He then held his breath and prayed to a God, in whom he did not really believe that he would succeed in the tour de force which was to follow: the overlaying of the first six strokes, with which he had already reduced Cunningham to tears, thereby doubling every stroke and bringing the grand total up to twelve stroke tariff with the senior cane. He placed the cane gently in the first, by now well-defined, livid, red stripe that he had etched into the lad’s naked flesh, raised the cane above his left shoulder and brought it down, backhand, at maximum speed, to see, to his extreme relief, it land exactly in the same furrow, from which it had just departed.

Sebastian was rewarded for his unerring accuracy, by a loud expression of – let us call it appreciative agony – from Cunningham, who was, by now, realising the painful consequences of what he had said earlier. Buoyed by the success of his first stroke – as ever, success breeds success – Sebastian completely overcame his moment of self-doubt and confidently completed his flagellative tour de force by doubling all the initial strokes on Cunningham’s arse with his remaining five strokes.

By the time the final stroke had released its pent-up energy by coming to an abrupt stop against Cunningham’s arse, in the form of excruciating pain, it is hard for anyone, who has not undergone the same treatment himself, to imagine how Cunningham felt, as he was told by Sebastian to rejoin his two companions standing against the wall. One thing was sure: Cunningham had learned, to his cost that words did have consequences.

It was only after the final stroke had fallen, that it suddenly hit Sebastian, who had been concentrating his entire effort on accomplishing the difficult task he had set himself, that, in beating Cunningham, he had become sexually super-aroused. Whenever he had, in the past two weeks, beaten younger boys, he had always found himself in the hands sexual arousal by what he was doing. But as a relative newcomer – two weeks only in the act of beating the naked arses of essentially junior boys’ – he suddenly realised that this time was completely different. By the time he had finished with Cunningham, he was almost on the point of orgasm himself. Without any manual assistance, his cock, which was now as hard as rock, was exuding precum in quantities sufficient to have already soaked his underwear, had reached the point of no return, as it prepared itself for the explosive violence of a full orgasm.

Realising that his cock, over which he had lost all control had now become so insistent as to its future intentions, giving him only a few moments grace to save himself from potentially the most embarrassing moment of his life to date: an uncontrolled orgasm whilst fully clothed. He hastily told his three classmates that their punishment was now over and that they should go and sooth the pain raging in their arses in the traditional way in the lavatories, where abundant, superficially palliative, cold water was readily accessible to their naked bottoms.

Once they had left the prefects’ common room, Sebastian hastened back to his own study-bedroom, where, locking the door behind himself, he discarded his clothes, to tend manually to the needs of his tumescent cock, which responded immediately to his manual stimulus and promptly erupted into the most intense orgasm he had ever experienced in his life. On and on went his body, shaking violently, ejaculating great gobbets of viscous sperm every which way. It was quite the greatest and longest orgasm Sebastian had ever had; and I would remind readers that as complete loner since the age of fourteen, Sebastian, had been a regular and inveterate expert in the art of self abuse, as it is often referred to, but usually thought of as self-stimulation by the millions of males of all ages, who have regular recourse to the relief it brings.

After this mind-boggling experience, which was unique and, which thankfully, was never again repeated; during the rest of his final year at Frogmore, Sebastian thrashed many of his schoolfellows, who needed it – and several who did not – to such an extent that he was considered by his schoolfellows, as the worst prefect in that year to have wielded the cane. One thing was quite sure: his devotion to the cane was such that he left his mark, both literally and and figuratively on more arses than any other prefect in the then memory of the complement of pupils at Frogmore at that time.

Chapter 5

Sebastian left Frogmore at the end of that school year and completed his education, taking a first class honours degree in mathematics s as member of New College, Cambridge, which despite its name was the second oldest college at Cambridge University; the oldest collegiate foundation, being Peterhouse – never ever referred to as Peterhouse College. He quickly found a group of both undergraduates and PhD students, who indulged in bare arse flagellation prior to anal sex. As a master at wielding the cane, he was welcomed with open arms. Although, as a confirmed loner, sadly for him, he never allowed his co-members access, either with the cane or their cocks to his own arse, preferring as ever, to satisfy his own sexual urges by jerking himself off in private, as he had done as a prefect at Frogmore, His three year undergraduate course was prolonged by a further year of teacher training, as, by the time he graduated, he had decided that his future would be as master at some public school or other, allowing him to indulge in what, by then, had become by passion for beating boys’ bare arses. Not surprisingly, aged but 22 by the time he left Cambridge to take up his first teaching post, he was considered as the grand old-man of the rod by his co-members of the gay-flagellation-fraternity, where he had exercised, with success, his undoubted talents with the cane.

The pity is, that in his time at Cambridge, he never lost his own sexual is virginity to any of his co-members, in spite of being a physically attractive and sexually well-equipped young man. Sadly, he was to remain a lone virgin; a gay man manqué, for the rest of his life. Note I said, lone virgin and not lonely virgin; for he was completely happy with the life he created for himself, as a public school master, whacking boys’ arses and masturbating himself to climax thereafter. It takes all sorts to make up a word and Sebastian was completely content with his lot in life: a life, which was entirely of his own making and which in his old age he never regretted.

Chapter 6

His first teaching post was as junior mathematics master, in a large northern public boarding school, with a complement of 800 boys. Bishop Charles’s College, for that was the name of the establishment, which he joined aged 22, was located in a small village, named Westerham, some fifteen miles north of Manchester, in rural Lancashire, where he was to remain for the next twenty years. Bishop Charles’s was a no nonsense school, of high academic standards, where the cane and, to a lesser extent, the birch were in almost daily use. The then Headmaster was as devoted to the use of the cane as was Sebastian. At his interview for the post for which he had applied, the Headmaster had stressed that the appointee would be expected to exercise the strictest discipline in the classroom and should not be afraid to cane the boys in his charge most severely.

“The normal practice in this school,” the Headmaster had said, “To avoid interrupting the lesson, is to tell the offending boy to present himself at the punishment room, which is in the main corridor of this building, either in the half hour before lunch, for offences committed in the morning classes, or for offences committed during the afternoon, immediately after close of the classes for the day. Strike while the iron is hot, is the maxim I have always adopted myself, and I think the boys appreciate getting their beatings out of the way and forgotten as soon as possible.” “That way you can concentrate your efforts on teaching, without any interruption caused by beating boys in the classroom, even though most boys take pleasure in seeing their classmates punished. It goes without saying that the boys, who are thrashed before lunch each day, spend an uncomfortable lunch hour and that those who are thrashed in the late afternoon, after classes have finished for the day are frequently unable to sit comfortably at table for supper in their houses.” “I would draw your attention to the fact that punishment in this school is taken very seriously. Submitting boys bottoms to the kiss of the cane or the birch is seen by the Board of Governors, and I have to say also by myself, as an integral part – a rite of passage, so to speak – of every boy’s education. Experienced from time to time, a well-beaten bottom is capable of turning the most recalcitrant of disobedient of boys into a young gentleman: an individual, who distinguishes right from wrong and, who, in his later career is not afraid to take decisions which are often unpopular.” “All our boys have to learn that if they commit a misdemeanour or are rude to anyone at all, including the domestic staff, they will not only be corrected their sins, by being severely caned, but will also suffer extra strokes by way of painful retribution for their misdeeds. A beating has to be painful to be effective. Never a truer word was said than manners maketh man; and manners are what we are trying to instil into our boys. So I urge you to come down like a ton of bricks on any boy who commits even the slightest offence. Do not be afraid to cane his bare bottom soundly; do not spare the rod and spoil the boy.” Sebastian was heartened by the fact that in his first post he had obviously found a school, which was after his own heart: a place where corporal punishment was taken seriously and, from the Headmaster’s remarks, clearly ruled the day and was regularly practised.

It was only his second day, when at morning break, he was summoned to a brief meeting by the Headmaster, who purely wanted to enquire how he was getting along in class. It was in coming out from this meeting that he was himself almost bowled over by two obviously second-formers, who came running, of all places, down the corridor outside the Headmaster’s study. That they knew they were breaking one of the most strictly enforced rules of the school – no running anywhere inside any of the school’s buildings – was obvious from that fact that as soon as they saw Sebastian, the new black-gowned, mathematics master, they slowed to a walking pace. They attempted to walk walk directly by him him saying: “Good morning, Sir.” But they were not to be allowed to escape so easily.

Sebastian said: “Perhaps you two young gentlemen would first give me your names and explain to me why you were running down the corridor in such haste until you saw me.”

The sheepish look on both their faces said it all; they knew that they had been caught, in flagrante, breaking one of the strictest rules of the school, which would probably lead to a painful encounter of their bare backsides with the cane. Nevertheless, they tried to save themselves for what they knew was virtually inevitable.

Having ascertained that he was dealing with two second-formers named Blackborough and Mason, Sebastian then listened to their feeble excuse, hopelessly aimed at saving their backsides from the inevitable, as to why they were running in the corridor. Mason acted as spokesman for the two of them and said: “Sir, we were not really running, but just walking very quickly as we did not wish to be late for our next lesson, which, by chance, is applied mathematics with you, Sir.” Had they known Sebastian better, as they would come to do in just a few minutes time, they would have known that they were grasping at a straw, to save themselves from the inevitability of beating and that their fate was already sealed from the moment he had seen them.

“Gentlemen, your explanation does not hold water. You expect me to believe that you were not running but that you were just walking quickly to avoid being late for a class which I myself shall be teaching in ten minutes time after morning break is over. Gentlemen, you had ample time to walk to your next lesson. And as for your claim to have been just walking quickly, with my own eyes, I saw you galloping down the corridor, as if you were training to run in the Grand National horse race yourselves. No, gentlemen, you were running in the corridor for reasons known only to yourselves, until you saw me. I can see from the guilty look on both your faces that in so doing, you knew that you were breaking the rules; rules that are made to be obeyed and not broken, and you must now face the painful consequences for your action.” “Looking at the time, I see that there are at least fifteen minutes before classes are scheduled to resume; ample time for you to repent and do penance for your sins. I see that we are, by chance, near the school’s formal Punishment Room, to which I suggest we now repair, to allow you both to test the veracity of Newton’s Second Law of Motion, which, as you will subsequently learn from my lesson this afternoon in applied mathematics, says that force is equivalent to mass multiplied by acceleration or deceleration. This is, of course, predicated on the supposition that you are able to sit still and pay attention to what I am trying to teach you: a somewhat doubtful proposition, with the pain of what you are about now experience still gnawing at your bottoms.” “When the cane, which I intend shortly to apply soundly to each of your bottoms, comes to an instant stop on contact with your bare buttocks, you will find that the kinetic energy of motion of a moving object, which Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us is equivalent to one half the mass of the object multiplied by the square of the velocity, is converted, according to Newton’s Law, into the searingly excruciating pain, which schoolboys experience on being beaten with a cane. Thus you will see that the pain you are about to experience, in expiation and retribution, for your ignoring a key rule of this school by running in the corridor, is subject to the laws of physics.” Sebastian opened the door of the Punishment Room, into which he ushered the ashen-faced boys, who, by now had realised that there was no escape from the beatings which they were now about to receive for their sins. It is probable that Sebastian’s lofty rhetoric had passed completely over their head, but what they had grasped was that there was no escape from the cane, which was now about to be applied, by Sebastian, in the traditional public school manner to their bare bottoms.

Sebastian looked around at the essentially barely furnished room, which contained only a professionally made, Victorian, adjustable beating-horse, over which boys were obliged to bend and offer their bare bottoms to the venomous kiss of the cane, of which there were many, hanging from hooks on the wall, each with a note above it, giving its exact length and calibre. Other than this frighteningly utilitarian piece of equipment, the only other furniture was desk and a bare wooden chair, On the desk lay what was obviously a punishment register, into which, the Headmaster had impressed on Sebastian, details of every beating must be meticulously entered, signed by the master administering the punishment and countersigned by the individual being punished.

On one wall was a row of several clothes hooks, obviously destined to receive blazer, trousers and undergarments of the boys preparing their naked bottoms to be beaten. From the large number of hooks, it was evident that several boys regularly disrobed, were forced to stand around together, with their nether anatomy naked and were beaten sequentially in each other’s presence. All in all, it was a frighteningly disturbing place in which to be punished.

Sebastian brusquely ordered the two boys to prepare themselves for a beating, which they did by taking off their blazers and stepping out of their trousers and underpants. He then told Blackborough that he would be dealt with first, to bend across the beating stool and told Mason to go and stand, arse naked, facing the wall, with his hands on his head. Mason would thus hear his partner in crime being beaten, whilst not actually witnessing the event with his eye. Sebastian, whose own cock was already stiffening with the pleasure to come, noticed that both boys were exhibiting sexual arousal. Their cocks were already rock-hard, just at the thought of what was about to happen to them; again confirming, if any confirmation was necessary, of the strong link between corporal punishment and sexual arousal.

Sebastian had come a long way since his earlier cane-wielding days as a prefect at Frogmore. Although he was still not able to control his cock from expressing its own desire for sex whenever he prepared to beat a boy; but what man can ever control what is sometimes referred to as his uncontrollable flesh? However, he was now able to control his own sexual urges and his desire for immediate, post-beating self-gratification, so that he did not embarrass himself by cumming in his pants. This was a most important step forward, for as master in a public school, where beatings were, more or less a daily event, he would often be faced with beating boys in a situation where he could not dash off immediately to jerk himself off to satisfy the urgent demands, emanating from his cock, to proceed forthwith to orgasm,.

The present beating of Blackborough and Mason was a case in point. He knew his cock was already psyched up sexually and would be demanding immediate post-beating, sexual fulfilment; but he knew this could not be, as he had a class to teach immediately after the morning break. His cock’s desire for a post-beating orgasm, which he wanted as much for himself, which inevitably accompanied every beating, would have have to be put on-hold until a more convenient moment.

As Sebastian gazed down at Blackborough’s naked buttocks, subject of his maiden beating of what were to prove hundreds of boys’ arses in his career as a schoolmaster, he noticed that the lads buttocks were already trembling with fear at the thought of what was about to happen to him. He then turned the pressure on both boys, by telling them that at this school the standard punishment for any grave misdemeanour – and make no mistake: running, anywhere inside the school buildings, was considered a grave misdemeanour – and was rewarded by twelve cuts of the cane on the bare buttocks.

But that was not the full horror of their punishment, as Sebastian went on to inform them that the twelve cuts would be given in two sets of six each; the first six by ways of a correction for having broken one of the cardinal rules of the school; the second six by way of painful retribution to atone for their sins. However, it got still worse: in view of their age, the first six, corrective cuts would be given with the junior cane. However, no such consideration would be given with the second six cuts, which would be given with the more painful senior cane, the effect of which would be felt by the lads for several days every time they sat down.

The only vaguely good news was when Sebastian informed them that there would be no excruciatingly painful doubling of the strokes; a small consolation when one considers that the lads would each finish up in utter agony, with twelve, frightfully painful, parallel cuts ranging from the bottom of their backs to the tops of their legs. Needless to say the two lads were both figuratively shitting bricks at what a few running paces down the corridor had cost them.

Sebastian swished junior cane, he had selected from the wall, theatrically a few times through the air to alert the unfortunate Blackborough that he was about to experience the effect of Newton’s Second Law of Motion on his arse, before placing it gently across the crown of the lad’s two buttocks. He then raised the cane into the air, warring Blackborough to brace himself, as this was going to hurt, before bringing the rod down with maximum force to land exactly on the spot from which it had just departed. Blackborough, not surprisingly, let out a cry of anguish at the searing pain of that first stroke, which felt to him as if his arse had been cut in half by a red hot knife. Never ever, in the past – and he had been beaten many times at both his prep school and several times by his housemaster in his first year at Bishop Charles’s College – had he experienced such pain, as Sebastian delivered with his first stroke. The pain was unbearably intense; and that was only the first stroke of twelve that he would have to endure.

Sebastian ignored completely Blackborough’s histrionic outburst and proceeded, at a leisurely pace, systemically to place the five remaining corrective strokes, evenly spaced and strictly parallel the one to the other, upwards towards the bottom of the lad’s back. He then told the lad to get up and go and stand facing the wall, with his hands on his head, before subjecting Mason to an identical, six, corrective strokes, after which, Mason too was told to rejoin his partners against the wall.

There was then a brief pause, whilst Sebastian carefully selected a senior cane from the inventory hanging against the wall. He chose a well-seasoned, vicious looking, flexible rod, just over three feet long, which was sure to put the fear of God into the two lads once they saw what was next in store for them. Sebastian was delighted to see from the selection of obviously well-used canes hanging there that in this school corporal punishment was taken very seriously and the boys were made to suffer severely painful retribution for their sins.

He then ordered Blackborough to resume his former position across the beating stool, with which the lad complied, with obvious reluctance, in view of the agonising pain still coursing through his arse, from the first beating he had just experienced. Sebastian was not slow in beginning the retribution step. He applied six swingeing strokes onto Blackborough’s virgin, hitherto untouched lower part of his buttocks, descending, in parallel strokes, from the crown, where he had placed his maiden stroke, to the crease, where his buttocks joined his legs.

This lower part of a boy’s arse is generally called the sit spot and is highly sensitive. So readers can well imagine the intense pain Sebastian, indulging his sadistic streak to the full, was able to deliver with six strokes of the senior cane. Suffice it to say that Blackborough was reduced to a blubbering, tearful mess by the second stroke and had never known such severely painful retribution for his sins as that which the new master had been able to deliver.

When it was all over, and Mason had suffered the same fate as his partner in crime, in view of the professional expertise which Sebastian had shown, both boys left the punishment room sporting bottoms, which were well and truly magnificent examples of well- beaten arses, which in their own way, could and, indeed, would be viewed before lunch by the classmates of the unfortunate pair, as true, albeit temporary, works of art, testifying to the prowess of the master flagellator, which Sebastian was fast becoming..

As Sebastian entered the classroom, followed by Blackborough and Mason, the whole class stood up out of respect for their new mathematics master, whom none of them, other than Blackborough and Mason, had met until now. Not surprisingly, these worthies, looking decidedly worse for wear, thanks to their experiences with the cane only a few minutes ago, For obvious reasons, at that moment known only to themselves and Sebastian, they did not sit down, when he told the class to sit.

Mason, ever the self-appointed spokesman for the two of them, asked:

“If you please, Sir, could Blackborough and I remain standing for this lesson, as our respective bottoms are just too sore to sit down comfortably at the moment?”

He received the following withering response from Sebastian: “No, Mason definitely not! You and your partner in crime, Blackborough, definitely may not remain standing, whilst I endeavour to impart the rudimentary intricacies of Newton’s Laws of Motion to the class, the painful implications of second of which, you two gentlemen, have just now experienced. You have both made your own beds and now you must lie in them, however uncomfortable you might feel.” “However, you have my permission to explain forthwith to your classmates, the circumstances, which compelled you to make this totally unusual request to remain standing during the present lesson. I can see from the surprised look on the faces of most of your classmates, that they are all eager to learn the reason for your most extraordinary request. You would, in the standing position, which I have just denied to you, have found it very difficult to complete the written exercises, which form part of the somewhat difficult lesson that I propose to give this morning. The floor is yours, Mason; come on lad speak up, we are all ears to hear your words of wisdom.” Not surprisingly, Mason remained embarrassingly silent; and so it fell to Sebastian to regale the class with what had just happened to the two lads in question during the recent morning break. He began: “As Mason has evidently been struck dumb for the moment, allow me to enlighten you as to what your two classmates were up to during the morning break today. I am sorry to say that I found them running in the main corridor, outside the Headmaster’s study, of his building. As second year boys of this school you will all know – or should know – that running anywhere inside any of the school buildings is forbidden by one of the most strictly enforced rules of this school and inevitably leads to a bare bottom beating of the guilty party.” “Having caught Mason and Blackborough, red-handed, so to speak, running in the corridor, I had no alternative but to give them both a sound beating, which explains why both delinquents are unable to sit down comfortably right now. They have, by a practical demonstration of the power of the cane on their bare bottoms, inadvertently, rather stolen a march on you, their classmates, in that they have already experienced Newton’s Second Law of Motion in practice, which is why they both now find it painful to sit down, Why, I hear you asking yourselves, did I deny Mason’s request for the two of them remain standing during the lesson which I am about to begin?” “As a young new master here at Bishop Charles’ College, I can tell you that I nevertheless have a great deal of experience of the beneficial effects of corporal punishment on a boy’s behaviour. I never hesitate to cane a boy if I think he deserves it and as you can see from the example of Mason and Blackborough, I believe in striking whilst the iron is hot. I should also tell your that I believe a thorough beating is the best way to correct a boy for the error of his ways and that the punishment should be given shortly after he has committed, let us call it, the crime.” “But I also consider that beating a boy to correct his ways, goes only half way to saving him from his worst tendencies; in my view, he also has to atone for his sins by suffering painful retribution, which is what Mason and Blackborough are now enduring; they are atoning for their sins by suffering the severe pain of a total of twelve strokes of the cane, of which by six were with a senior cane applied to the lower part of their bottoms, usually known by boys as their sit-spot. Acceding to their request to remain standing during the lesson, which I am about to give, would allow them to escape the post-beating pain of atonement, which any boy with a well-beaten bottom feels whenever he is forced to sit down on a hard, unyielding, wooden seat.” “Make no mistake boys; although you are only in your second year and, as such are traditionally beaten only with a junior cane across your bare bottoms, you will automatically qualify for the standard tariff dictated by the Headmaster of twelve cuts of the cane for any and all offences. However, in view of what I have just told you, if I personally am forced to beat for misdeeds in my class, which is more than likely, you have all been warned what to expect from me. Any boy, whom I catch misbehaving, can look forward to receiving six corrective cuts on the bare with the junior cane, followed by six painful retribution cuts with the senior cane; I consider that pain is an essential and integral part of the atonement process: an important part of teaching a boy how to behave. I trust I have made myself clear.” “Let us now turn to this morning’s topic, which as I have already told you concerns Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

At the end of the class, in the half hour before lunch, the boys insisted in the traditional viewing of the damage to the arses of both Mason and Blackborough in the lavatories, which allowed them to confirm, with considerable apprehension, the bleakness their future with their new mathematics master.

One wag summed up Sebastian’s approach to beating in one pithy observation: "You know; his bite really is much worse than his bark.” And not only the boys of the second form mathematics class that day were, in the fullness of time, to sample Sebastian’s largesse with the cane, for he remained at Bishop Charles’s for over twenty years, During that time, countless hundreds of boys were to experience Sebastian’s devotion to, and expertise with the cane, of which he was the absolute master; he regularly had no hesitation in beating the bare arse of any boy, whom he detected deviating from the straight and narrow bath dictated by the rules of the school.

Sebastian soon became the most feared master in the school. Visits to the Punishment Room with him, which were frequent occurrences, were always very painful for the boys concerned. He treated every misdemeanour, however minor, with the same severity: at least twelve cuts of the cane, delivered, with maximum force to the offender’s bare arse, always divided into six corrective cuts delivered to the upper half of the unfortunate boy’s buttocks, followed by a further swingeing six always delivered with a senior cane, whatever the age of the boy being beaten, by way of retribution, to the lad’s crease area: his highly sensitive sit-spot.

Throughout his long career at Bishop Charles’s, no boy ever complained about the thoroughness, verging on brutality, of the beatings he received at the hands of Sebastian. Soon after Sebastian’s arrival at Bishop Charles’s, the boys quickly realised that the new maths master need handling with velvet gloves, if their bare arses were to avoid the bite of his cane. Some classics wag had seized on the then well-known maxim: Caveat emptor: let the buyer beware, and transformed it into the more apposite; Puer a domino caveat: let the boy beware of the master!

But even with greatest awareness and care to avoid Sebastian’s love affair with the cane, generations of boys did not deflect him from regularly beating their bare bottoms. Sebastian rapidly became the school’s most prolific user of the cane ever. Beating arse was, for him, a substitute for sex, which, in spite of his strong homosexual feelings, sex was something he did not practise with any other living person. He was completely content with his lone sex life, which was relegated to masturbating in private after each beating.

Sebastian had joined Bishop Charles’s in 1905 at the age of 22, fresh from teacher training college. The then Headmaster of the school, was pleased with his choice of the new junior maths master. Under the wing of the Headmaster, he made rapid progress, quickly consolidating his as a key player at the school. Much to the chagrin of other young masters, after two years, he was appointed assistant housemaster to one of the older housemasters, who was on the point of retiring, So Sebastian, at the age of 25, became the youngest housemaster ever at Bishop Charles’s, a post he was to hold for the next 18 years until, aged 40, he was appointed Headmaster of Churton College.

However, Sebastian’s long period as housemaster at Bishop Charles’s enable him to forge a reputation as the most dedicated, most frequent and hardest user of the cane ever. The boys in his house, dreaded being summoned to his study, before bed, wearing only their pyjamas and dressing gown – a frequent occurrence during Sebastian’s entire tenure as housemaster – which inevitably presaged an excruciatingly painful, twelve-cut beating on the bare. The Headmaster had decreed that twelve cuts parallel was the standard punishment, throughout the school offence, no matter how trivial. The concept of tailoring the punishment to the seriousness of the crime committed was unknown throughout the school.

The Headmaster, who, like Sebastian beat boys, with considerable pleasure for himself, had, nevertheless, let it be known that he considered twelve cuts of the cane on any one occasion, were sufficient to correct any boy, no matter what the offence for which he was being beaten. Thus the masters, including the eight housemasters, whose word was considered law in their own house, the head-boy and the prefects, all of whom regularly used the cane, had accepted, de facto, that a maximum of twelve parallel cuts were the limit, above which no one ever trod, and had replaced the traditional six of the best. Let us face head on the gruesome facts: twelve cuts parallel applied with maximum force, which they almost always were, constituted an excessively severe punishment for most offences. But painful retribution, as well as physically correcting the boys for their misdeeds, weighed heavily in both the Headmaster’s and Sebastian’s thinking.

Armed with the knowledge that the Headmaster, a dyed in the wool, ardent believer in the benefits of severe and regular physical discipline in the education of every schoolboy, Sebastian realised that he had carte blanche to punish the boys in his house as he wished, as long as he restricted himself to twelve cuts of the cane. Other than this major restriction, as housemaster of Nutting’s, for that was the name of the house, of which he became master at Bishop Charles’s, his word was law and he could do exactly as he wished. The houses at Bishop Charles’s were each named after early benefactors of the school of which, early in the nineteenth century, Edward Nutting, a wealthy Manchester industrialist, had been one. And so his memory was perpetuated in the house name, which was known to its inhabitants as Nutters.

And so, given his devotion to the cane, Sebastian set about devising methods of making the beatings which had become almost a nightly occurrence since he had become housemaster of Nutting’s, more flexible, which, in his sadistic mind, equated with more painful. Twelve cuts the cane applied parallel to a boys arse, from the top to bottom of his buttocks, where they joined his thighs, ensured that no part of the unfortunate boy’s complete, nether, anterior anatomy escaped the venomous scourge of the vigorously applied cane. However, minor his offence, no boy at Bishop Charles’ ever emerged from his ordeal with the cane – and it really was an ordeal, when adminstered by Sebastian – without that characteristic hallmark of a public school punishment: an agonisingly painful, well beaten arse.

Thinking about how he could tailor the intensity of the punishments to fit the crime, and increase the pain for any boy whose offence was considered major, such as bullying, lying, cheating or stealing, and, therefore, deemed to merit a more severe beating, he remembered his own, all too often experiences as a boy at Frogmore, where the Headmaster had not hesitated to deliver certain strokes of the cane to the same spot on the boy’s buttocks, thereby increasing the agony of the pain produced. The maximum number of strokes at Frogmore had not been limited to twelve, as they were at Bishop Charles’s, where the twelve strokes permitted were usually applied parallel; in itself, a formidable punishment. But exactly how the twelve strokes should be laid on was not specified by the Headmaster. So Sebastian set about thinking how he could make the standard, twelve strokes, parallel beating, more severe, for what he thought of as particularly heinous offences, by ensuring that certain strokes fell in exactly the same place as others.

Here is the schedule of increasingly painful methods of delivery of the twelve mandatory strokes, beginning with the least painful, but nevertheless still excruciating delivery of twelve strokes parallel to each other, with no doubling of any strokes on a boy’s buttocks.

1. Twelve strokes applied parallel.

2. Two strokes applied to each of six different positions,

3. Three strokes applied to each of four different positions.

4. Four strokes applied to each of three different positions.

5. Six strokes applied to each of two different positions.

Even with his sadistic dedication to beating arse, Sebastian did not dare to include the ultimate, quintessential painful delivery, that nec plus ultra of pain: the positioning of all twelve strokes on the selfsame spot on a lad’s naked buttocks.

He very wisely exposed his ideas in full to the Headmaster, before implementing them. The Headmaster, who, for quite different reasons, was as keen a devotee of corporal punishment as was Sebastian. There was no sadism in the Headmaster’s approach to corporal punishment; he genuinely believed that all boys benefitted from the repentance and retribution engendered by the pain of a beating. When it came to correcting a boy, his philosophy was summed up by the motto, to which he wholeheartedly subscribed: pain is the name of the game. Sebastian, on the other hand, although he had never admitted, even to himself, beat boys on the bare, because it satisfied his latent sadistic urges, and gave him the only sexual satisfaction in his lonely life.

The Headmaster listened to s Sebastian’s ideas for making the punishment fit the crime, before saying:: “I must congratulate you Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh – he always intoned Sebastian’s surname in full; whereas Sebastian’s colleagues had taken to calling him by his initials, C-F, which they pronounced See-eff, as if they were his name – there is no obligation to give the twelve obligatory cuts parallel and I commend you for having had the ingenuity to make the punishment fit the crime, within the severe restrictions imposed on us by the Board of Governors.” “So, go ahead and implement your plan, which will not be popular among the boys; but then what beating ever is? However, don’t let that deter you from beating any boy if he deserves it, as many always do. Always keep in mind the maxim: give a boy and inch and he’ll take a mile. You are not here to be popular with the boys; although I admit it is better if you can be. Above all you must, as housemaster, gain the respect of the boys, which you will not have if you go soft on them and let them get away with things for which they know that they should be beaten. I never saw a boy, who did not benefit from an occasional well-beaten arse, which is how I understand that they themselves refer to the painful results of their misdeeds.” “As you are now their new housemaster, I suggest that you beat a few boys each evening during the first two weeks of term, to show the boys in your house whose foot the boot is now on. There is nothing like viewing the freshly beaten bottoms of some their classmates to bring the rest of the house to heel.” Sebastian had already a reputation of being an utter bastard among the the boys in general and his readiness to beat boys for the slightest misdeed, rapidly established his reputation as the hardest housemaster in the school.

The First World War broke out during Sebastian’s time at Bishop Charles’s. Like all the other young masters at the school, he promptly applied for a commission, but was turned down for service on medical grounds when he was diagnosed with a heart murmur, which, nevertheless, allowed him to live until the age of 95.

Thus, Sebastian found himself the youngest member of a teaching staff, many of whom were old enough to be his father and were well past retirement age, but who had stayed on, due to a dearth of young men caused by the war. His love of beating boys, soon became known and he found himself obliged to take over the flagellation duties of several older members of staff, who, due to their age, no longer had the energy to beat misbehaving boys themselves. So Sebastian was ensured of a regular flow of naked arses to address, which, given his bent, what had become for the older teachers too much of a chore, was for him a continual source of pleasure.

Chapter 7

Sebastian was happy at his post of housemaster, which he had achieved, with meteoric speed, at the very young age of 25, only three years after leaving university and which which he was to retain for 18 years, as he was satisfied with his life at Bishop Charles’s and the latitude his position as housemaster gave him to exercise his love of beating boys’ bottoms.

However, One day, towards the end of 1922, he was summoned by the Headmaster, who drew his attention to an advertisement in a magazine called The Public School Master, which Sebastian did not regularly read himself. The advert announced that Churton College, near Hereford, wished to appoint a new Headmaster for the school year beginning in September 1923, to replace Mr. Augustus Caesar, who as the longest serving Headmaster ever, was retiring after some 38 years of service.

“I don’t know what your ambitions are, Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh,” said the Headmaster; “But with your long experience as housemaster in this school, and your no nonsense methods of dealing with recalcitrant boys, not to mention your considerable teaching abilities, I think that you might be just the person for this job. I advise you to think about applying; sad as I would be to a lose a man of your assiduity and single-minded of purpose, who is not afraid to use the cane, I would hate to think that I had held a good man back for from achieving fulfilment of his career as Headmaster of a major public school, which Churton surely is. I can assure you of my vigorous support for your application, if you were to be persuaded to apply. Moreover, I think that I can assure you that the Board of Governors of his school will also provide a glowing testimonial as to your abilities and suitability for the post of Headmaster of Churton.” Coming, as it were, like a bolt out of the blue, once the seed of advancing his career and becoming a Headmaster himself had been sown in his mind, Sebastian, who had never thought much about his future at a higher level, as he was content with his life at Bishop Charles’s, started doing some serious thinking. He had never thought, until now, about one day becoming Headmaster of some public school or other; but the more he thought about the more the idea appealed to him. He was housemaster of his own house, where his word was law; but he was still subservient to the present Headmaster of Bishop Charles’s, a man, whom he liked enormously, as they were both singing from the same hymn sheet when it came to disciplining boys. But he suddenly realised that it would be better for him to be completely in charge of his own future. And so, encouraged by his present Headmaster, he applied for the post of Headmaster of Churton College for Boys.

Much to his surprise, within less than a week, he got a reply, by express mail, inviting him for an interview on a specific date in week’s time. He was not asked if the date would be convenient to him and the whole thing smacked of an order, rather than an invitation to a first interview. The letter also contained a first-class travel warrant issued by British Rail, for the journey from Manchester to Hereford. With military precision, which became evident when he saw the signature of the person, who had written the letter, he was given precise instructions, which he interpreted as an order, to take the morning train at eight o’clock from Manchester, Piccadilly – even the station was specified – which would arrive in Hereford shortly after ten o’clock, where he would be met by a chauffeur at the station and driven to Churton College, some nine miles from the centre of Hereford.

The return journey from Hereford was specified with the same military precision. Sebastian would be again be taken by car to Hereford Station, where he would take the six o’clock train for Manchester; ETA eight o’clock. It was also suggested that he take a taxi to and from Manchester Piccadilly to Westerham, where he was presently domiciled as a housemaster at Bishop Charles’s College. The expenses for taxis, would, of course, be reimbursed to him, as would also the cost of his breakfast on the train journey to Hereford and his evening meal, on his return journey to Manchester.

Having mapped out Sebastian’s travel arrangements in minute detail, the letter still maintained the tone of someone, who was accustomed to getting his own way. The letter concluded:

Unless I hear from you by return of post that the appointment I have arranged for you is inconvenient, will assume that my arrangements stand and look, forward to welcoming you to Churton College for Boys.

I remain, yours sincerely

C. B. Hartley

Colonel (retired)

Chairman of the Board of Governors of Churton College

Now that he had seen the signature and credentials of the writer, everything now became clear to Sebastian, He was dealing with an officious ex-army officer, who was used to issuing orders and accustomed to being obeyed. Well, as he wanted the post of Headmaster of one of the most prestigious public schools in the country, his not to argue, but to obey.

On his arrival at Hereford Station, in spite of the first-class travel arrangements, Sebastian was, nevertheless, surprised to see that the liveried chauffeur sent to meet him, was driving a Rolls Royce, which on the short journey to the school, he learned was the private property of Colonel Hartley, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the school. It seemed to him that things were happening the wrong way round. It was as if the Governors, or at least their Chairman, had already made up their minds to offer him the post and were trying to impress him, rather than him impressing them.

However, on arriving at Great Churton he was mightily impressed by the school itself, which dominated the village; in fact, to all intents and purposes, Churton College for Boys, was the village of Great Churton. Arriving from Hereford, the main street of Great Churton, the aptly named, College Road, stretched from the railway station, at one end, to the imposing wrought iron gates of Churton College, at the other. College Road was typically picturesque and lined with village shops and houses and the location of the local hostelry, The King’s Arms: a public house, housed in an impressive period building strictly out of bounds to the boys of the school.

Nevertheless, each year, many senior boys each chanced their luck by drinking there, hoping not to be caught in flagrante, which many often were; always leading to monumental beatings, on the bare. Such flagrant transgressions, were always dealt with by the Headmaster himself, who, wielding the cane, on such occasions always preceded by the birch, spared neither himself nor the boys’ arses.

College Road, although not part of the school, was tantamount to a carriage drive to the school itself, which the core was made up of an imposing group of seven period buildings all built between 1815, the date of the foundation of the school, and 1870, the date of construction of the last of the six, boarding houses. Happily, the buildings, of what Sebastian was to learn, was called The Old School, although having been built over a period of fifty-five years, had all been constructed in the same style as the original college building. As such, they had avoided the excessively exuberant, florid designs beloved by the Victorians. The original seven building of The Old School exuded a timeless feeling of unity of design and purpose. They were serenely agreeable to the eye, exactly as if they had been built at one time. Sebastian, not the greatest of aesthetes, was, however, duly impressed, by what he saw: an ensemble of English institutional architectural at its best.

The chauffeur deposited Sebastian at what was obviously the main building of The Old School group and led him to the second floor, where he was received, by Colonel Hartley, Chairman of the Board of Governors, in what he rightly judged, from its only furnishings, a large table and chairs, to be the Board Room of the school. The Chairman, who rapidly proved to be the self-important, peppery, little man, a trait, which Sebastian had already suspected from the letter, more or less commanding him to attend that day for an interview, got down to business almost immediately, after introductions had been been made and the customary pleasantries exchanged.

“I am delighted, Chomondeley-Featherstonehaugh, that you were able to rearrange your doubtless busy schedule to come today,” began Colonel Hartley, who continued: “I will tell you straight away, that among the numerous applications we have received and already interviewed for the post of future Headmaster of this establishment, your candidature was of special interest to us. Not only did you achieve the not inconsiderable honour of graduating from Oxford University with a first class honours degree in mathematics, which, along with your subsequent teaching diploma, would qualify you for consideration as a teacher in any public school in the land; but you also have almost twenty years experience of teaching and as housemaster at one of the our major northern public schools., which is twice the size of Churton College.” “The reason why we are particularly interested in your application is because, although you may not be aware of the fact, you are long term member of the teaching staff and housemaster at one of the most academically successful and strictest disciplinary schools in the country. Both Bishop Charles’s College for Boys, along with our much smaller establishment here at Churton, are universally considered both academically and from the point of view of discipline, the best two schools in the country. In every respect, they are considered the equivalent of Eton and Winchester, if not exceeding both of them.” “We have our present Headmaster, Mr. Augustus Caesar to thank for the success of Churton. He has been Headmaster of this school for 38 years and is retiring at that end of this school year in July. It is entirely due to him that Churton enjoys today, the academic prestige among its peer schools and is admired for its unwavering system of strictest discipline. He will be a hard act to follow. And I can tell you, from my own personal experience, that after a lifetime of service, in the armed forces, to Queen, two Kings and country, without discipline in the ranks all is lost.” “In replacing the present Headmaster, the person we are looking for, will maintain the academic standards, for which Churton is famous, but at the same time, will not flinch from the sometimes unpleasantly painful task of disciplining the boys both with the birch and the cane,. In my view, as a military officer all my life, strict corporal discipline, which is enforced to the letter, which, under the present Headmaster, it has been for nigh on forty years, is one of the keys to the success of Churton College. Let me pay tribute to the retiring Headmaster, who has devoted his life to honing the system of discipline, here at Churton, to its present, elsewhere, unequalled high level, with the unique exception of the establishment, in which you yourself teach.” “Chomondeley-Featherstonehaugh, I will not hide from you our overwhelming eagerness to see you here for an interview. To be completely frank with you, sight unseen until today, you are, on paper, far away the key applicant for the post to hand. Your brilliant, academic qualifications apart, the fact that you have almost twenty years experience at a school, where the philosophy and ideals of academic distinction and discipline, are virtually identical to those here at Churton, makes you the ideal candidate for the post of Headmaster.” “In terms of the teaching side of Churton, we are well served, as we employ a large, well-paid, teaching staff of graduates, who teach in small classes, so that every boy is followed closely and develops his maximum potential. What we are looking for in the new Headmaster, is someone who himself is a strict disciplinarian and who has no problems in immediately correcting even the slightest fault in a boy as soon as it is detected. As we are told mighty oaks from little acorns grow, so is it also with insignificant little faults,, which can hardly be considered as misdemeanours, if left uncorrected, could become a problem for the boys concerned; and by example to others, risk becoming endemic, on the principle: he gets away with it, so why should I not do the same and emerge, like him, unscathed?” “At Churton, no boy is allowed to escape even the most minor fault scot-free. The vigorous application of the cane to the offending boy’s bare bottom brings home to him the fact that all illicit acts, however inconsequential they might seem at the time, have very painful consequences in this school. Here at Churton, we take the old-fashioned view that a generous dose of the cane, deftly applied to the bare bottom of the offender, is a cure all for every ill; and as we practise what we preach, the rod of justice is in daily use. We, the governors of Churton are acutely aware that the present Headmaster, on his retirement will leave a legacy of a well designed, strict, disciplinary system, which has served the school well or many years, which we as governors of this school, think it is our duty to protect.” “Under the long leadership of Augustus Caesar as Headmaster, no fault, however minor, if detected, is allowed to go unpunished. The boys of Churton all know that misbehaviour of any kind, will inevitably lead to a painful beating on the bare, which I presume, given the reputation of Bishop Charles’s for strict discipline, you personally, as a senior housemaster of long standing, must also practise quite regularly. I would underline the fact that the man we are looking for to succeed Mr Caesar on his retirement, mud t himself be the strictest of s disciplinarians himself I think your position at Bishop Charles’s has taught you the truth of the old maxim: that to spare the rod is to spoil the boy. I can tell you, that here at Churton, the rod is never spared.,” “But before I go on any longer, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Stephen Fogarty, Churton’s Deputy Headmaster, a post he has held for almost twenty years, with whom you will have lunch. As Churton’s senior housemaster, who actively administers discipline on a day-to-day basis, he is much better placed than I, to explain the intricacies of the system. Fogarty is very old school when it comes to teaching and disciplining the boys. He is the only person, other than the Headmaster, still using the birch on the boys of his house, on a regular basis; the other five housemasters use only the cane, which given the general ethos of the strictest, corporal punishment, which reigns throughout this school, is seldom silent for long.” Sebastian could hardly believe his ears. What he had so far heard from Colonel Hartley exceeded even his wildest dreams. If he were to become Headmaster of Churton, he would be able to give full rein to his worst instincts. Churton College for Boys was a place made to measure for an archetypal epicaricacist, of which he was undoubtedly a prime example.

Before he left the Chairman, Colonel Hartley for his meeting with Stephen Fogarty, Sebastian asked him whether any masters already teaching at Churton, had applied the post of Headmaster, to which he received a long reply.

“I was expecting you to ask me that very question, which I imagine is motivated by your concern that bringing in an outsider to fill the post of Headmaster, will undoubtedly ruffle the feathers of some of the older masters, all of whom are excellent teachers of long standing at Churton, who think that they have been passed over, which I suppose they have. However, before placing the advertisement, to which you and many others replied, we had, of course, conducted an exhaustive review of all present staff members to see if any of them measured up to the exigencies of the post. We concluded than only one of them met our fairly stringent requirements: Mr. Fogarty, the Deputy Headmaster and housemaster of Walpole House, whom you are about to meet.” “We accordingly offered Fogarty the promotion to Headmaster; but he turned it down, on the grounds that he was only a few years away from retirement himself and that for the good of the school, to which he had devoted some 35 years of his life – almost as long as the retiring Headmaster himself – he preferred to see a younger man brought in as Headmaster. You will, of course, appreciate that the war robbed us of most of our brightest young teachers, many of whom were killed action and who would now have been of the age when they would have been eligible for promotion. But, yes, whatever outsider becomes Headmaster of Churton he will inevitably have to contend with, and ultimately face down, certain resentment from older, senior, staff members, who feel they have been passed over.” “I should tell you that as a result of the decimation of the war, the majority of our teaching staff are young graduates, chosen mainly from our two most prestigious universities, who are too inexperienced to have aspirations for higher office at present. That having been said, I should point out that our retiring Headmaster, Mr. Augustus Caesar was only 27 year of age when he was appointed to run Churton; and as I have already said, he will be a hard act to follow. But let me now, take you across to Walpole House, to meet Mr. Fogarty, who will explain to you, better than I ever could, the intricacies of how Churton College is run and the disciplinary structure will remain as the legacy of the retiring Headmaster, which, if you are appointed as Headmaster, will be in your hands to conserve., and I dare say to develop further.”

Chapter 8

Mr. Fogarty, in his capacity a Deputy Headmaster and housemaster of Walpole House, received Sebastian warmly, welcoming him to Churton. He said: “Well it is a relief to finally see someone who is both an experienced teacher and housemaster at a school which has the same academic and disciplinary standards as we do here.” Mr. Fogarty was interrupted in his introductory remarks by a knock on the door of his study. Across the closed door, he shouted one word: “Come.” The door opened, to reveal three young men, obviously sixth-formers, standing nervously there, wearing just their gym shorts. Sebastian realised immediately why the boys were dressed in such skimpy clothing; they were, for some reason or other, all about to be beaten on their bare bottoms, easy access, to which vital part of their anatomy, was facilitated by the simple expedient of stepping out of their shorts, beneath which they were wearing nothing.

Sebastian suddenly realised with a jolt that he was today, in the very place, where the retiring Headmaster, for whose succession he was presently being interviewed, had, in an influential article, which had appeared some years ago in the magazine, The Public School Master, successfully promulgated the idea of requiring boys, who were about to be beaten, to wear what had become universally known, in public school talk, as The Appropriate Attire. The ease of access to the naked arse of an offender, wearing just The Appropriate Attire was obvious and it had been, adopted by the majority of public schools, which beat on the bare, as many still did in the 1920s. The Appropriate Attire, consisting of exactly of what the three lads, at present waiting to be invited to their housemaster’s study to meet their evident fate, were wearing: gym shorts and singlet only.

It avoided the time-consuming, laborious task, of removing the often excessively elaborate, traditional, uniform clothing, which most public schools then insisted on the boys wearing, to gain access to a lad’s bare arse. Moreover, once the deed done and the offender was writhing under that excruciating painful hallmark of a public school well-beaten arse, he had but to step back into his shorts and be sent on his way, usually to satisfy the lasciviously prurient curiosity of his classmates in viewing the traditional post-beating damage of an repeated cuts made with a rattan cane.

So universal was the adoption of the expression Appropriate Attire that, in public school talk, it became synonymous with the shorts and singlet for a boy to wear as he presented himself for a bare-arse beating. By adoption Appropriate Attire had became a sort of brand name.

Mr. Fogarty was clearly embarrassed by the sudden, apparently unexpected arrival of three sixth formers, who were obviously, from their dress, presenting themselves to their housemaster for a beating.

He was profuse in his apology to Sebastian: “My dear Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, I am embarrassed to tell you that I had completely forgotten that I had told these three, wretched young men, I would beat them right now for their transgressions of yesterday, which came to light only this morning at breakfast, when I was told of their misdeeds by a junior prefect, who, yesterday afternoon, had himself caught them smoking in the lavatories. If had reported then to me yesterday afternoon, as he should have done, I would have beaten them yesterday evening before bed in the usual way.” “I should point out to you that, in this school, no misdeed, however small, is ever allowed to pass unpunished; I regret to say that the junior prefect will suffer retribution for his momentary lapse in memory, for his tardiness in not bringing to me immediately his discovery of what he knew to be a major violation of one of the most stringently enforced rules. This evening that prefect will go to bed suffering the pain of a well-beaten bottom, for having left it until this morning to inform me of his discovery of what, here at Churton, we consider a violation of one of the most sacrosanct of all the school rules.” “To give you an idea of the importance we place on boys obeying the strictest of the school rules, the Headmaster himself normally insists on personally beating boys caught either smoking or drinking. As he is away for a few days at present, as Senior Housemaster and Deputy Headmaster, and given that the miscreants are members of my house, I feel able to deputise for him in this matter, as I personally believe that painful retribution for one’s sins is good for the soul and should not be delayed. I shall I have no compunction in giving these three young men exactly what they deserve. They all knew full well what they would incur by way of pain of the cane, if they were caught in the act of smoking. And even though they are being punished at midday, I shall do my best to ensure that the three of them they will not sleep comfortably in their beds tonight.” “However, perhaps as you are here, you might find it instructive to see how severely we deal with senior boys at this school, who have been caught smoking, as have the three abject specimens you see in the doorway. We come down particularly hard on boys who are caught smoking or drinking. As I have already told you such major violations of the school’s most stringent rules, are dealt with directly by the Headmaster. However, as he is not here, in my capacity as Deputy Headmaster, with 35 years of beating boys here at Churton, I feel that I can demonstrate adequately to you, just how seriously we use the cane and the birch to extract retribution from offending boys, here at Churton.” For a brief moment, Sebastian was immersed in his own thoughts. He was quietly beside himself at the joyful anticipation of seeing the bare arses of three young men beaten by a man, who clearly enjoyed inflicting pain with the cane, on the bare backsides of the boys in his house,, In addition, feeling the sexual stirring of of his cock in his trousers, induced purely by listening to the sentiments uttered by Fogarty, he recognised immediately that both of them, in spite of their age difference, were cut from the same bolt of cloth. They were both epicaricacists, devoted to the use of the cane and enjoyed seeing the boys, whom they had just thrashed, writhe in the pain they had just delivered.

If Sebastian were not offered the post of Headmaster of Churton, then it would have been worth the effort of the journey just to meet Fogarty, to whom had had taken an immediate liking as a kindred spirit; not to mention the pleasure he would get in watching the older man beating the hell out of the arses of three young men, If he was fortunate enough to be offered the Headmastership, then he saw no difficulty in Fogarty and himself singing in harmony from the same hymn sheet, for a few years.

Sebastian was awakened from his moment of reverie, contemplating the pleasures to come, by the sharp voice of Fogarty, telling the three lads to come into his study and shut the door behind them. Fogarty sat behind his desk, looking like a judge about to pass, what, for the three lads, whose arses were on the line, must have sounded like death sentences.

First addressing just two of the boys by name, he said: “Hesketh and Butterworth, as this is the first time either of you has been caught red-handed in the act of smoking, although I imagine this is not the first time you have ever smoked but have not been caught, based on the facts to hand, you will each receive the standard punishment laid down by the Headmaster, which consists of twelve cuts with a senior cane, applied parallel to each other across your bare buttocks.” Sebastian noted that a look of relief passed between the two boys, who were obviously happy to have got away with what was nevertheless a seriously painful punishment, the effect of which they would notice, each time they sat down for a good week after the event. The in their faces that they were to receive only what they clearly considered a relatively mild caning for the seriousness of their offence. How anyone could seriously consider a twelve cut, arse beating on the bare as a mild punishment, defies the imagination. But all things are relative and there are horses for courses. However, the look of complacency was quickly wiped off their faces as Mr. Fogarty continued, delivering what I suppose might well be called his coup de grace: that final straw, which broke the camel’s back and brought the two lads back to ground.

Mr. Fogarty continued: “However, before you two gentlemen get too complacent, I must inform you that all boys, whatever their age, are prohibited from smoking. The rule prohibiting smoking is viewed as one of the most sacred edicts of this school, which if broken, as you have done, give rise to a punishment much more severe than the standard twelve-cut beating with the cane to I have just sentenced you. Therefore, in view of the gravity of your offence, you will both receive an additional six cuts with the senior cane, which will be placed in symmetrical form, three from the right and three from the left, thereby uniting the twelve parallel cuts into what will, alas, be but a transient picture, which will fade with time, but which you can nevertheless proudly display to your classmates in the traditional post-beating viewing of your bottoms. As your housemaster, I can assure you that I will use my best efforts to ensure that each of you leaves this room sporting, what I think you boys refer to, as a well-beaten arse to be proud of.” As Mr. Fogarty spelled out the full extent of the beating that he proposed to give the two lads, Sebastian watched as the nonchalant look on their faces quickly vanished and gave way to one verging on panic, as the boys realised how painful the impact of those six additional strokes would be ,landing across the twelve, existing parallel cuts.

Mr. Fogarty now turned to the third boy, who stood there, visibly trembling, now that he had heard the dire horror of what was in store for his two partners in crime: “Well, Master Fenton, unlike your two classmates, for whom it is the first time they have been caught red-handed smoking, you always have the odour of a well-smoked kippered-herring about you. I have already had occasion to beat yon for smoking on three separate occasions this very term, which, I draw your attention to the fact, is far from over. You, Fenton, seem to have learned nothing from your previous beatings; you young man, appear to be incorrigibly addicted to the fragrant weed. And moreover, you appear to be encouraging certain of your classmates, who are easily led astray by boys like you, to join you in your addiction.” “I would just remind you, Fenton, of what I said to you on the occasion of your last beating for smoking, which occurred only two weeks ago. I promised you then, that if you were ever caught again smoking, you would first receive a sound birching in an attempt to correct your pernicious habit, followed by a beating with a senior cane, by way of painful retribution for your actions. I have used the word incorrigible to describe your addiction to smoking, which implies that you are incapable of being changed or reformed. Nevertheless as your housemaster, it my duty to look after your wellbeing whenever you are under my roof; so I feel that I must keep my promise to you; although I suspect that in endeavouring, through pain, which you appear to accept with complete indifference, I shall, yet again, be casting pearls before swine.” “You, Fenton, today will today benefit – I use the word hopefully – from the most severe beating that this school presently allows me to inflict on you, which, I might add, in my view, you, as repeat offender, thoroughly deserve: twenty-four cuts in all, made up first of twelve strokes with the Churton maple birch, followed immediately by twelve parallel strokes of the senior cane.” “Count yourself lucky young man that the Headmaster is away for a few days; otherwise I would have been obliged to send you, as repeat offender, to him for punishment. He would not be as lenient as the present school-rules have forced me to be with you today. Just last week, I witnessed the Headmaster beat an inveterate, repeat-drinking offender (“With great pleasure,” thought Sebastian, somewhat cynically; as he had, by now, sized up Mr Fogarty as an epicaricacist, par excellence;, much as he himself was.), who, this term, had already been thrashed several times by his housemaster in a regrettably unsuccessful attempt to break the boy of his habit. The young man in question was given a 36 stroke beating by the Headmaster: 18 strokes each of the birch and the cane.” “Hesketh and Butterworth; what you have just heard, addressed specifically to Fenton, applies equally to you. Both of you be warned that if you do not wish to find yourselves facing a very severe beating, given by the Headmaster, I strongly recommend that you stop smoking now.”

Sebastian was astounded by the equivocation of what Mr. Fogarty now said, revealing a hitherto, hidden, human side to his character: “Knowing how addictive smoking is, as I am addicted to tobacco myself, which habit I would find very difficult to break today, I realise that it would be counsel of perfection to tell you to stop smoking from one day to the next, if any of you are surreptitiously smoking regularly already, which I suspect that at least one of you may be doing.” He paused for a moment and looked knowingly at Fenton, before continuing: “Then I suggest that all three of you, if you feel the urge to smoke, be very circumspect about where you break the school rules to avoid being caught red-handed, or you will inevitably find yourselves facing the Headmaster, who being a non- smoker himself, may not be as understanding as I have tried to be today.” For a moment, Sebastian did not know where the housemaster was heading with this. In view of his latest remarks, which represented a remarkable volte face on his previous position, was he intending to let the three lads off the hook scot-free and escape the beatings he had just promised them, thereby robbing him, a visitor, of the pleasure of seeing the three sixth-formers suffer the bite of the cane.

Sebastian was reassured, when Mr. Fogarty said to the three boys, who in view of their housemaster’s apparent change of heart, were reading more than was evidently intended into his remarks, and were, therefore all looking more hopeful about the immediate future prospects for their arses: “But that is advice for the future and the three of you have been caught smoking, for which it is my duty to beat each of you. Fenton, I would ask you to remain in this room, whilst I deal with Hesketh and Butterworth in the adjoining punishment room, which as two of you already know, from previous experience, is where I administer all canings and birchings. Hesketh, in view of the fact that during your entire career in this school, you have somehow, managed to escape ever having been beaten by me, your housemaster, I will endeavour to make your maiden encounter with my cane so memorable that you will never wish to experience the like again.” The four of them, including Sebastian, went into the punishment room leaving Fenton looking increasingly nervous at being left without the moral support of his two classmates, to contemplate alone, what, by any standards, was a very severe and painful punishment, consisting, as it did, of a twelve stroke birching followed by twelve strokes of the cane. The excruciating pain he would shortly suffer did not bear thinking about; but then, neither did the eighteen cut parallel canings, which Hesketh and Butterworth were to receive. In Sebastian’s vie, there was not much to choose between them.

The punishment room itself was meagrely furnished with a desk and chair, on the top of which the punishment book and pen and ink stood ready to record, in minute detail, the events which took place there. A number of straight-handled canes were hanging from hooks on the wall. An obviously freshly cut Churton birch, uniquely made of maple twigs, was sitting in a pail of water, patiently awaiting the next bare arse on which it could exercise its venomous, multi-fanged bite. In the centre of the room, stood the traditional, ubiquitous armchair, over the back of which, hundreds of boys had, over the years, doubtlessly been invited to bend, to offer their naked buttocks to sample the somewhat specious delights of the cane and the birch. Other than that, apart from a number of rather low-backed, utilitarian looking, wooden chairs, lined-up against one wall, the bleak-looking room, was devoid of any floor covering or curtain and furniture, other than a number low-backed wooden chairs., aligned against one wall.

The Punishment Room of Walpole House, truly was a place which engendered a feeling of fear in all boys who entered it; worthy of the famous quotation from The Inferno in the Divine Comedy, by the Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, who early in the fourteenth century imagined the following words emblazoned over the entrance to Hell: “All hope abandon ye who enter here.” At that time, to be obliged to offer one’s naked arse to the cane or the birch, as many boys were, on a regular basis, was a recurrent theme in many public schools. But to be forced to submit one’s bare flesh to the scourge of the cane, in such a dismally depressing and foreboding place as the Punishment Room of Walpole House, added a whole new dimension of horror to the act of corporal punishment, which, on a daily basis, at Churton, as in many other public schools, was then, a painful fact of life: an inevitable cross, which the pupils had to bear.

Mr. Fogarty wasted no time in telling the two boys that he intended to thrash them together; to which end they were told to push armchair to one side of the room, and replace it centre stage, so to speak, with two of the wooden chairs. Mr. Fogarty personally then arranged the chairs to suit his purpose, placing them a yard apart with their backs facing in opposite directions. He then ordered Hesketh and Butterworth to step out of their shorts and present their bare buttocks to him for caning by each bending over the back of one of the chairs, with their left sides facing one another across the space between the chairs. Thus their right sides were facing outwards towards the two opposing walls, whilst the two young men were bent over facing each other.

Sebastian, watching all this preparation, was duly impressed by efficiency of a man, who clearly knew what he was doing. Mr. Fogarty then selected a cane from the wall, and without hesitation positioned himself slightly to the back of Hesketh on his right side, rained the cane over his left shoulder and said to the visibly trembling boy: “The moment of truth has finally arrived for you, Hesketh. Brace yourself, lad, for this is really going to hurt.” Then without any further warning or preparation, with the cane in his right hand, he raised it far above his left shoulder and brought it hissing down at great speed, in one smooth, backhanded movement, to land with that characteristic crack of a well-seasoned length of flexible rattan mating with the naked flesh of a boy’s muscular buttocks. The painful effect of each stroke of the cane is immediate. On impact with its target, each cut of the cane concentrates all its agonisingly excruciating, painful energy, reminiscent of being cut with red-hot knife, thereby creating one individual, viciously painful stripe or furrow, stretching across both buttocks. In the right hands – and Mr Fogarty did have the right hands, gained from years of experience – the cane is capable of reducing even the most obdurate, recalcitrant of boys to tears, within four strokes.

Having given Hesketh the first cut of his eighteen, Mr. Fogarty then leisurely walked around to position himself in the same place with respect to the to the waiting Butterworth and proceeded to address his arse with his first stroke of the cane. Then, having given each lad just one stroke, he returned to Hesketh, paused for ten seconds to allow both boys to appreciate the full effect of what was happening to them, before giving him the second stroke. Then systematically, allowing a ten second pause between each stroke, he made haste slowly and went to and forth between Hesketh to Butterworth and completed their punishment of eighteen cuts of the cane.

Sebastian was mightily impressed by the accuracy of Mr. Fogarty as he applied each stroke backhand and without any preparation. Each boy finished up with a picture-postcard arse, into which the twelve livid furrows etched by the cane, all strictly parallel to each other ranged from the bottom of each lad’s back to his crease, were united by the six, supplementary, crossed-diagonal, gating strokes. Back at Bishop Charles’s Sebastian, arch-flagellator that he was, never hesitant himself to apply the cane for even the slightest misdemeanour, nonetheless felt a twinge of sympathy for Hesketh and Butterworth, both of whom were in absolute agony after the beating they had just received. However, admiring Mr. Fogarty’s masterly handiwork, he figuratively took off his hat to the old housemaster, who clearly knew a thing or two, when it came to the traditional public school way, of teaching members of his flock how to behave. He clearly subscribed wholeheartedly to the maxim: pain is the name of the game when it comes to correcting errant schoolboys.

But there still remained Fenton to be dealt with. Waiting in the housemaster’s study, he had been able to hear, if not actually to see the cane mating repeatedly with the bare arses of his two accomplices in crime, which made him increasingly nervous as to his own fate. He was, as we have already learned, a boy, whose acquaintance with the cane for smoking was all too frequent. This term alone, he had already been caned three times for smoking by Mr. Fogarty. In spite of the pain of the beatings, which he had regularly been forced to endure, he had he found himself, like many young men, who have become addicted to nicotine, unable to refrain for smoking, even though, he knew what would happen to him if he were caught.

One look at the well-beaten, striped, bare arses of Hesketh and Butterworth as they limped back into the study, carrying their shorts in their hands, filled him with great fear. He had been promised 24 cuts in all, of which twelve with the legendary Churton birch, with the reputation of being the most formidably painful of all instruments of flagellation, he had never experienced before. Not surprisingly, seeing the damage Mr. Fogarty had wreaked on the backsides of Hesketh and Butterworth, as he was told to go into the punishment room to face his own private Waterloo, he was almost shitting bricks, as the expression has it. That he was not looking forward to the next few minutes was the understatement of the year.

Once Fenton was inside the punishment room, Mr. Fogarty wasted no time in telling him to move the armchair back into the centre of the room, remove his shorts and present his bare bottom for punishment by bending over the back of the chair and placing his hands firmly on its arms, Sebastian now noticed that the chair arms were equipped with leather straps, which Mr. Fogarty now attached to Fenton’s wrist. Seeing the enquiring look which Sebastian gave him, he said: “I find it better, when birching a boy, to restrain him; on several occasions in my earlier years as housemaster, I have seen several boys, unable to stand the intense pain delivered by the Churton birch, stand up and run out of my study before their punishment was completed.” “I should perhaps tell you that the Churton maple birch, as its rather contradictory name implies, is made from the very flexible, year old twigs of a pollarded form of maple tree, which the now head-gardener, James Prior, discovered almost forty years ago, when he was just an apprentice. The twigs have been been regularly bound together by him, into what we casually refer to as the Churton maple birch, that scourge, which every boy in this school fears will one day impart its uniquely cutting pain to his bare bottom.” “What distinguishes the Churton maple birch from other so-called birches, which are normally made of hazel twigs, and are widely used in the public schools throughout this country, is that the straightness and great flexibility of the maple twigs impart unequalled pain on impact with the bottom of any boy unfortunate enough to be subjected to it. Just look at Fenton, who is regular habitué of the cane, but who has never been birched before; he is trembling with fear of the unknown, as he thinks of the reputation of the Churton Birch.” “Well, I think we are about ready to begin to teach Master Fenton, the most stringently painful lesson of retribution of his life.”

On these words, Mr. Fogarty picked the birch out of the pail of water in which it was standing,, shook off the surplus water from the twigs and proceeded to give to give the unfortunate Fenton’s bare bottom twelve powerful cuts with the Churton maple birch. The Churton birch lived up to its reputation; by the fourth stroke Fenton was begging his housemaster to stop; and by the time the twelfth stroke had fallen and the birching was over, Fenton was, in excruciating agony, sporting an arse, which is graphically described in the phrase: superbly well-birched. The lad was in such agony that he could not control his tears, which flowed profusely and uncontrollably down his cheeks.

However, his punishment was still not over, as there remained twelve painful cuts of the cane still to deliver to Fenton’s smouldering arse. Mr. Fogarty, waited a seemingly interminable half minute – 30 seconds of grace – which to Fenton, still bent over the back of the armchair, with his blistered arse feeling that it was already on fire, must have seemed like am eternity – before delivering the first of the twelve strokes of the cane to what, by any standards, was an already agonisingly well-birched arse.

Mr. Fogarty kept his word to Fenton, and did not hold back in his delivery making him suffer to the maximum for his sins. He placed six swingeing cuts of the very flexible senior cane, which he had chosen with care for his purpose, neatly parallel, ranging from the top to bottom of the boy’s already blistered, birched arse, before pausing and saying to Sebastian: “My dear Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, I really must apologise to you, for having had the bad manners to relegate you to a position of observer to this little drama which is being enacted before your very eyes today.” “As a housemaster of longstanding at Bishop Charles’s you must be accustomed to beating boys in your house as often as I find myself obliged to do here. I presume that boys in your care are much the as boys here at Churton and take every opportunity to break the rules if it suits their purposes. As someone, whom I imagine wields the cane on boys’ bare bottoms on a regular basis, as I do here at Churton, you must be somewhat irritated to have not been able to exercise your skill with the cane on the bare bottoms three miscreants today, who all well merit the severe punishment they have received, or I should say in Fenton’s case, which he is still receiving./ This allows me, in my role as Deputy Headmaster of Churton to correct my unpardonable oversight of leaving you out in the cold, so to speak and invite you to conclude Fenton’s punishment, by giving him the six remaining cuts of the cane to complete his punishment.” Mr, Fogarty then handed the cane to Sebastian, who, truth to tell, had never imagined for a moment that he would be invited actively to participate in beating of boys, who were at another school and therefore, completely outside of his jurisdiction.. Nevertheless, he was delighted to be invited to display his undoubted expertise with the cane, to a man, who had no hesitation himself, when it came to dishing out the most severe of punishments to a group of disobedient boys.

He felt that in Mr. Fogarty he had met his flagellation soul mate. They were both clearly on the same wavelength when it came beating boys; Mr. Fogarty, like Sebastian, did not hesitate to lay on the cane with maximum force. Sebastian was delighted to be handed the cane had no qualms whatsoever, in giving Fenton, whom he did not know, the final six cuts of his punishment, which he had already decided he would etch on the lad’s memory as the most painful six he had ever received. He had already become sexually aroused, just by watching the boys being beaten by their housemaster, as his cock, by now hard and leaking pre-cum, testified. At a school he was just visiting as an interviewee, albeit for the post of Headmaster, he had not expected to witness the impromptu beating of three boys. Then it really was the icing on the cake to be unexpectedly asked to beat a boy in a school, where he was just a visitor.

He had noticed that Mr. Fogarty had applied the cane to all three boys discretely; that is to say he had not doubled any of his strokes, laying successive strokes on the same spot, thereby intensifying the pain, all three boys had been treated identically. There had been no attempt by Mr. Fogarty to increase the severity of the pain delivered by the cane, by the not so simple expedient of doubling some of his strokes. Sebastian was aware how difficult it was to place two strokes of the cane in exactly the same place on a boy’s arse.

That was not to say that a twelve-cuts-parallel, bare-buttock beating was not a hideously painful punishment in itself for the boy concerned. But by dint of hard and regular practise on the arses of his charges back at Bishop Charles’s, coupled with a single-mindedness of purpose, Sebastian had refined his technique to such unprecedented levels of sophistication that he felt confident that he could give Fenton his six, residual strokes of the cane exactly in the same places as his first six, delivered by Mr, Fogarty, thereby inducing such an level of pain so excruciating that boy would remember it for the rest of his life and never ever wish to repeat.

As he surveyed Fenton’s blood-specked flesh, created by the Churton birch, he could see clearly overlaid on the lad’s raw, birched arse, the six obviously painful cuts of the cane just delivered by Mr Fogarty, which were already showing the red bruising; that prelude to the hallmark of a public school punishment: a black and blue well-beaten arse. Fenton was in agony with what he had suffered so far and this was intensified mentally by the thought of what was still to come. He had, perforce, heard his housemaster offer the cane to his visitor, whom Fenton did not know. He knew he had still six strokes of the cane to suffer, but which would be delivered by stranger, whom he did not know. The suspense of the unknown was killing, as he was waiting to see what would happen to him; surely the stranger, to whom had not been introduced, could not be as bad as his housemaster.

Fenton, did not have very long to wait to have is question to himself answered. He was already been in utter agony, before Sebastian commenced his sophisticated contribution to his misery. And Sebastian, as we already know was one of those schoolmasters, who, when they beat a boy, subscribe wholeheartedly to the maxim: pain is the name of the game. Sebastian laid on his strokes exactly on top of the six existing cuts thereby increasing several fold the degree of pain which Fenton had to endure. Unmoved by Fenton’s, let us call them, howls of appreciation, which became ever louder at each stroke, indicating that Sebastian’s technique was getting through to the lad, who had never before endured such pain. Mr. Fogerty stood looking on with amazement at the unerring accuracy, with which Sebastian doubled each of the existing welts, increasing the pain felt by Fenton to unprecedented, almost unbearable heights., which the lad had, nevertheless, to endure .

Finally Fenton’s punishment was over and he was allowed to stagger to his feet, aided by his two classmates, both of whom, by any standards, had been thoroughly beaten; eighteen, well-applied cuts of the senior cane across the naked buttocks, which each of the two lads had received, was not anything to be shrugged off as being a mere fleabite. As Fogarty and Sebastian, watched the dispirited trio depart, all three of whom had been seriously cut down to size, Fenton, his arms over the shoulders of his two classmates, could not have supported himself on his legs, without their help. Watching them hobble away down the corridor, presumably towards the lavatories, where they would try, alas in vain, to calm the fire, raging in all of their arses, with cold water, Mr Fogarty made a surprisingly pertinent observation to Sebastian.

“I doubt, in spite of the excessively severe beating, which we have just given Fenton, that we have broken him from his habit of smoking, as he is certainly already addicted to nicotine. Look today look no further than me; like most men in this country, I smoke, and like Fenton, I acquired the habit, in my final year at public school, when I was eighteen years of age, which has given me constant pleasure in my adult life ever since. So why do I correct him, when he is doing exactly the same as I did in my youth?” “Well, let me tell you why; because the school rules of Churton, dictated by the Board of Governors and the present Headmaster, all of whom, to a man, smoke themselves, oblige me as Deputy Headmaster to, beat any boy, whom I find breaking any rule whatsoever. And so I find myself in the invidious position of being a smoker myself, but as housemaster and Deputy Headmaster, obliged to beat boys at Churton, who are over legal age for smoking, which is 16 at the present time, simply because the school rules forbid it. And so, from the age of 16 boys can buy cigarettes quite legally, which many of them, including Fenton do.” “In the case of smoking at Churton, it is very much for the boys: do as I, your master, say and not as I myself do. I’ll lay you a pound to a penny that Fenton is easing his nerves and the pain he must still be suffering from the beating we have just given him, by smoking a cigarette in the lavatories right now; and good luck to the lad, for I do not wish to know. Look here; I have already beaten him three times for smoking before today. Fenton is, in my view, already addicted to tobacco; he cannot stop himself smoking; as neither could I, if ordered to do so right now. It is pie in the sky to think that anyone can beat the habit out of him.” Author’ Note: In the 1920s, in the UK, most men and many women smoked, as the dangers of smoking to one’s health were not then known. Many upper-class houses, from which most of the boys at Churton then came, had smoking rooms, to avoid having the entire house reeking of tobacco smoke, where the men of the house retired to indulge in their noxious habit in private from their womenfolk. Surrounded by a culture of tobacco, so to speak, it is not surprising that the sons of the house, at an early age, emulated their fathers; and so the culture of tobacco was nurtured.

Chapter 9

Over lunch, which followed what he been, at least for Sebastian, given his own devotion to all forms of corporal punishment, an unexpected and exhilarating morning, during which he had not only witnessed but had also participated in, the beating of three sixth formers,. Mr. Fogarty, explained, in graphic detail the punishment system, which was in place at Churton and which Sebastian, if he were successful in his quest for the Headmastership of the school, would have at his disposition immediately.

Mr, Fogerty had observed that Sebastian, much like himself, did not flinch laying on the cane, with maximum force, to a boy’s bare backside, although it had already been well-birched. He had also noticed and admired the diligent assiduity with which Sebastian, without any hesitation, had doubled every one of his own, six, clearly-visible stripes on Fenton’s bare arse, thereby raising to a well-nigh, unbearable level the excruciating which the boy was already experiencing.

Mr. Fogarty, as senior master at Churton both in terms of age and length of service – over 35 years – had taken a liking to Sebastian. He had recognised in him a kindred spirit: someone poured in the same mould as himself: that of a strict disciplinarian, with whom he could work well together in his twilight years as Deputy Headmaster of Churton. He sensed that in Sebastian, if he were lucky enough to be offered the post of Headmaster, the school would have a new head, who was not the new broom, which swept everything clean before it, but someone who would see that the system, which had been in place for over thirty years, did have certain merits which were worth preserving. Certainly any new Headmaster would wish to make certain changes. However, in Sebastian, Mr Fogarty saw someone, whom he thought would proceed cautiously, before instituting any changes whatsoever.

Over luncheon – his word – Mr. Fogarty explained how the system of discipline instituted almost 40 years ago, by the retiring Headmaster, Mr, Augustus Caesar, had weathered the test of time until the present day, in 1923:

“On his appointment in 1885 the Headmaster, then only 27 years old, inherited a sclerotic system of discipline, where every member of the teaching staff exercised what they thought of as their God-given right, to beat any boy in front of his class, thereby disrupting the lesson. The new youthful Headmaster, firmly believed that if a boy misbehaved badly enough in class to justify a beating, as many boys did, and, indeed, today still do, then it was the Headmaster’s job to administer it.” “He therefore obliged all members of teaching staff to issue a punishment note to any boy who misbehaved sufficiently badly in class to justify a beating, Any boy receiving a punishment not in class – and there were usually several each day, of all ages – was then honour bound to present himself to the Headmaster, at 4:30 in the afternoon, after classes had finished for the day, to have his bare bottom beaten. By the way, at Churton, all beatings are applied to bare buttocks of the unfortunate boy involved, no matter who wields the cane. I myself did not arrive at Churton until three years after the present Headmaster, but I can tell you that several older members were still disgruntled the way they had been treated by their young superior, who had effectively disenfranchised them of the right of every self-respecting, public schoolmaster to use the cane in class, on the boys, whom he was teaching,.” “The only members of the teaching staff, apart from the Headmaster himself, still allowed to use the cane, after what I came to think of as the purge, were the six housemasters, of which I became one in my third year at Churton. The Headmaster, wisely in my view, never interfered in the running of the six, individual boarding houses, which was left to the individual housemasters, whose word was law in their own house. So beating continued in each house, given by the housemaster or the three house-prefects, who were allowed to beat their housemates for their misdeeds committed in their own house. I can tell you as housemaster of long-standing myself, without my three prefects, I would have difficulty in controlling mischievousness of the 100 or so boys in my care, who delight in flouting every rule in the book, if they think they can get away with it.” “Via the introduction of punishment notes and abolishing beatings by the teachers in the classroom, the Headmaster had ensured himself of a regular, almost daily flow of boys to beat, who had, that very day, misbehaved in class. He then turned his attention to the control of the boys when they were neither in class nor in their own houses, where they were watched over by their housemaster and his three prefects. The total school complement of 18 prefects, three from each house, was allotted the task of maintaining order among the boys outside the classroom during the day. They were delighted to be allowed beat boys who misbehaved, a task, which they have always done and, indeed, still do today, with the alacrity and single-mindedness of purpose, which often occur when young men are suddenly promoted to police the brethren, to which they once counted themselves. Prefects’ beatings are, thus, very frequent and occur almost daily; they are performed in the library at 4:30 in the afternoon, to coincide with the Headmaster’s beatings.” Mr. Fogarty paused in his description of the disciplinary system at Churton, which allowed Sebastian a moment to reflect on what he had just heard. Then he said to his host: “You seem to have a most comprehensive disciplinary system in place already at Churton.”

Mr. Fogarty then said: “Hold your horses, for a few minutes longer, as that is not the total system, of which there is good deal more to tell. I have not yet mentioned the Head-Boy of Churton, who is nominated for this most important office in his final year. What happens is that the head-boy is chosen by the Headmaster, in consultation with the six housemasters, all of whom submit their recommendations. Normally the choice is easy, as there is one outstanding candidate, who outstrips all the rest. However, in case of a dispute, the Headmaster’s has the last word; and in this, as in all things,. his decision is final.” “The importance of the post of head-boy of Churton cannot be underestimated, as in his final year; the head-boy has the power to punish his schoolmates, equivalent to that enjoyed only by the Headmaster and the six housemasters. What happens is that the head-boy is given a set of rooms, comprising a study, a bathroom and a bedroom, located at the other end of the corridor to the Headmaster himself although he takes his meals in the house from which he was catapulted into the position of head-boy.” “This corridor has come to be referred to by the boys as the Via Dolorosa, in view of the fact that at the fatidic hour of 4:30 on most afternoons, two groups of nervous looking boys, dressed in what is known as the appropriate attire for the occasion; gym shorts and singlets only, are waiting at opposite ends of the corridor, all to face a beating on the bare, given by either the Headmaster or the head-boy. The latter usually makes up for his lack of experience, by the unbridled enthusiasm and force with which he applies the cane to the bare arses of his schoolmates. Thus at end of the day, there is little to choose between a beating by the Headmaster or by the head-boy.” “Faced with such enthusiasm, one is forced to conclude that most head-boys, and, indeed, most prefects, who are authorised to use the cane on the bare backsides of their classmates, as they all are, here at Churton, gain a great deal of personal satisfaction not only from the act of inflicting pain, but also from seeing the recipients of their handiwork, writhe under the agony of a well-beaten arse. It is well-known that the thoughts of 18-19 year olds quite naturally turn to sex, which, at that age, .becomes, in many cases their principal preoccupation. I am sure I do not have to tell a schoolmaster of your experience, who must personally have beaten hundreds of boys over the years, of the sexual arousal which accompanies the act of beating a boy’s bare buttocks, especially for the performer of the act, which may, in some degree, explain the enthusiasm for the prefects’ caning of boys.” Mr. Fogarty gave Sebastian a knowing look, before continuing: “But the extent, to which successive head-boys of Churton have firmly adopted the cane as a sure method of curbing the excesses of the more disobedient of their schoolmates, does not end here. About ten years ago the Headmaster decided to introduce a demerit system. He decided that boys should not be allowed to get away scot-free all the little faux pas they regularly made, but that they should be quantified and noted down in what became known as The Demerit Diary, a small note book, which every boy carried in his waistcoat pocket. Once ten demerits had been reached, the boy in question was honour bound to present himself, appropriately attired, to the head-boy for the inevitable twelve-cut beating on the bare, on the Friday afternoon afternoon in the week in which the his total demerit count reached the fatal total of ten.” “The demerit system, introduced some ten years ago, is still hated by the hoys, with some justification, as they are obliged to do their own accounting. One wag is reputed to have said that he felt like a turkey voting for Christmas. Two years ago demerit beatings had become so numerous, that they were moved to 8:30 a.m. immediately after breakfast, each Saturday morning, in the head-boy’s study. No one knew beforehand how many boys would present themselves to the head-boy for a demerit beating on any one day. The great advantage of the system, was that no one, including the head-boy, whose function is relegated to that of executioner, wielding a cane, rather than an axe. He is not, therefore, emotionally involved with the boys offering themselves to be punished. Demerit beatings are thus completely dispassionate, which removes personal animosity from the equation, to which there is, alas, only ever one solution: the traditional, well-beaten arse.” So what did Sebastian make of this long account of the disciplinary system already in place at Churton. Well, it had resolved one worry, which had bothered him ever since he had applied for the post of Headmaster of Churton. The system of punishment notes, which, putting it mildly, he could well believe had been received with dismay, coupled with fury, by the then teaching staff. Its introduction, prohibiting the teaching staff from using the cane in the classroom, transferring the entire correctional load for misdeeds committed by the boys in the classroom to what he imagined was, in all probability, the-not-so-tender-loving–care of the Headmaster, ensure that if he were successful in his application and appointed Headmaster of Churton, he would be assured of a regular flow of boys to beat; a very satisfying thought!

He had never met the present Headmaster, Mr Augustus Caesar, whom he was hoping to succeed. However, reading between the lines of what Mr. Fogarty had told him about the all-encompassing disciplinary measures at Churton, all of which had all been conceived and put in place by the present Headmaster, he realised when it came to punishing boys that Mr. Augustus Caesar and he were both singing in harmony from the same hymn sheet, when it came to punishing disobedient schoolboys. Sebastian realised that beating boys’ arses was much like an addiction to a drug, both to Mr. Caesar and to himself. He was honest enough to acknowledge to himself that he would find it very difficult permanently to break the habit of more than twenty years. Each year, the long, summer vacation was trial for him, deprived, as he was, for weeks on end, of boys to beat. Sebastian, in addition to being a peerless epicaricacist, was additionally a non-practising and completely unfulfilled homosexual and did not even have a sex partner to help him thought the worst of what were, in fact, his withdrawal symptoms.

Lunch was over and Mr. Fogarty showed Sebastian around the school premises, which was somewhat of an anti-climax, in view of what he had learned about the Churton disciplinary system, which was all a person of his orientation with a pronounced predilection for regular use of the cane could desire. In addition to the school’s seven main, period buildings, which, as a group, rivalled in their visual impressiveness, the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge, a chapel, which had been added towards the end of the nineteenth century in the High-Gothic style, so beloved by the Victorians, was capable of accommodating the entire complement of boys and which it did, each Sunday during term time, the only day of the week on which the whole school assembled under the aegis of the Headmaster.

But there the harmonious visual face of Churton’s traditional architecture ended. As Mr. Fogarty pointed out to Sebastian, the school, at which the curriculum had been essentially based on the classics, history and the protestant religion, had, by the beginning of the twentieth century had to acknowledge the increasing importance of scientific subjects and had, accordingly built a number of utilitarian laboratories and the like, which along with the service buildings, such as the school gymnasium, laundry and boiler room, were judiciously hidden from immediate view in the huge grounds of the school.

The formal daily gathering, the morning assembly, traditional to all English schools at the time, was presided over by the housemasters in each of the six houses. Only on Sunday, did the the entire school gather in the chapel, for an assembly, conducted by the Headmaster himself. But, as Mr Fogarty explained to Sebastian, there was a sting in the tail of the Sunday gathering, which always set the whole school on edge. After the customary announcements, the then Headmaster, Mr. Augustus Caesar, enumerated, in a voice, which implied a regret it was hard to think he felt for anyone who had experienced his expertise with the cane, the names of the boys, whom he wished to see – a euphemism for beat – appropriately attired, in his study prior to Sunday lunch.

The words appropriately attired, said it all. Innocuous in themselves, they had only one meaning in Churton speak; the lads unlucky enough to find themselves on the Headmaster’s pre-prandial Sunday list, would have to present themselves at his study, wearing only their gym shorts and singlets, where their backsides would be thoroughly beaten, for reasons which would be made evident, only after each boy’s arrival in the Headmaster’s study. Thoroughness was a concept the Headmaster embraced totally when it came to beating boys: a philosophy based on that well known maxim: pain is the name of the game; and when it came to these Sunday morning gatherings in his study, he certainly knew how to impart it; as generations of boys, who had benefitted from his undoubted expertise with the cane, could testify.

The boys were all too painfully aware that the invitation, which could never be refused, was not to take a glass of pre-lunch sherry with their Headmaster, but to offer their bare arses to him to cane. One wag jokingly said that such, pre-lunch, Sunday beatings, were by way of being an ersatz substitute for the pre-lunch, alcoholic aperitif, which the Headmaster was generously foregoing, in the interest of correcting his pupils. You could almost hear the sigh of relief heaved by the entire school, when the Headmaster concluded naming the boys, whom he wished to see that particular Sunday, putting off the fear of uncertainty for the rest of the boys for another week, No one ever knew who was to be called to face a pre-Sunday lunch beating. However, the Headmaster always made it clear to every boy concerned, why he had been picked, seemingly out of the blue, to be the unlucky recipient of an unexpected beating, before the cane commenced to deliver its painful message to the bare arse of the unfortunate recipient of the moment,.

Mr Fogarty made a valiant attempt to explain the Headmaster’s obsession with the pre-prandial Sunday morning canings, and gave Sebastian a number of possible reasons, which the Headmaster used to justify his quasi-impromptu Sunday beatings. He cited among others:

- Unheeded warnings for inadequate and sloppy prep work.

- Bullying by older boys of younger boys.

- Reports of being rude to people in the street, especially to ladies.

- Reports of laziness in class.

- Persistent cheekiness to teaching staff.

- Repeated disruption of lessons by persistent chattering,

The list of reasons, why a boy could find himself, usually quite unexpectedly, on the Headmaster’s Sunday list, was endless. If the Headmaster thought that a boy would benefit by being beaten, then he did so. The cane, and to a lesser extent the birch, were seen by the Headmaster– and, as Sebastian correctly divined, reading between the lines of what Mr. Fogarty had said to him during their time together, by him also – as being the cure-alls for all minor ills, which beset normal, healthy schoolboys.

All in all, by the time the Chairman of the Board’s, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce arrived to take Sebastian back to the station, he had formed the strong impression that discipline, enforced on a daily basis by the cane and the birch and not the actual teaching process was possibly the most important thing in the life of those boys lucky enough – or some might say unlucky enough – to be sent by their parents to Churton to receive a rigorous English public school education.

The philosophy at Churton, summed up neatly by a combination of two well-known idioms: let not the grass grow under your feet and strike while the iron is hot, chimed well with Sebastian’s own attitude of dealing with schoolboys. The Board of Governors could not have chosen better candidate than Sebastian to take over and conserve, but also to build upon, a disciplinary structure, developed and put in place over an almost forty year period by Mr Augustus Caesar, the acknowledged doyen purveyor of the benefits of corporal punishment in the education of boys.

Two more interviews followed in quick succession, supported by testimonials from his present Headmaster at Bishop Charles’s that Sebastian was an ardent supporter and practitioner of painful retribution , as the best means of persuading rebellious schoolboys of the need to do some serious work at school. Eventually the hoped for letter arrived, offering Sebastian the post of Headmaster of Churton College for boys, with effect from the new school year commencing at the beginning of September 1923.

Chapter 10

It was Monday September 3rd 1923: the first day of the new school year at Churton: the first day of the reign of Sebastian Emmanuel Marmaduke Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, as Headmaster It was the morning break and already five upper-sixth-formers, two of them prefects, indicated by the silver star on the lapel of their jackets, stood nervously before their Headmaster, whom none of those present knew even by sight. The same was true for the new Headmaster too; he did not know the names of any of the three sixth formers or the identity of either of the two prefects, or, for that matter, of the younger boy who had been bullied, who now stood meekly to attention alongside his older schoolfellows.

Sebastian had considered himself blessed with manna from heaven, when he had looked out of his study window, at the the beginning of the morning break period, on his very first day of tenure as Headmaster of Churton, to see, in the yard beneath him, a boy, or rather a muscular young man, evidently an upper-sixth-former, physically attacking a boy half his size, probably a second-former. The smaller boy was trying to ward of the blows about his head of his attacker with his arms.

Now all forms of physical violence between boys were strictly forbidden at Churton. But boys being boys, there was inevitably the odd outbreak of fisticuffs, for which the participants, if caught in the act, were obligatorily sent to the Headmaster for a mandatory beating. On seeing this act of obvious bullying, Sebastian’s hackles immediately began to rise in anger; anger compounded by the fact that the young man’s actions against his much younger and smaller schoolfellow, were being cheered on by four other older boys, probably also from the upper sixth. He had, accordingly, opened the window and ordered the boys below to stop what they were doing and report to him in his study on the double.

This was an opportunity, not to be missed, for Sebastian, as ever the arch-epicaricacist, to make his mark, quite literally, on the bare arses of the five older boys. Once he had finished beating the five of them, which, quite justifiably, he fully intended to do, they would act as his ambassadors and spread the glad tidings that the new Headmaster was at least as capable with the cane – if not worse – than his predecessor.

What Sebastian alone knew, to which he himself was looking forward to with considerable pleasure but which was shortly to come as a rude shock to the five sixth-formers, was that all five of them, including the four, who had been just onlookers to the spectacle of bullying enacted by their schoolfellow, were destined to leave his study some half hour later, with excruciatingly painful, well-beaten arses, provided by courtesy of the previous incumbent’s well-seasoned, senior rattan-cane. This cane, which, in spite of its age, was still very supple and extremely painful, when wielded by the right experienced hand, which Sebastian , thanks to long years of practice, had developed on the bare backsides of literally hundreds of boys, whom he had beaten.

Sebastian’s predecessor, Augustus Caesar, with extraordinary prescience, verging on the prophetic, had generously bequeathed his senior rattan cane to his successor. This was possibly the the most cherished of his possessions, with which he had personally thrashed the naked arses of literally hundreds of boys over the years. Ever the traditionalist, he was anxious that his successor, from moment he assumed his place as Headmaster, should not be deprived of an adequate rod of justice, with which to to be able immediately to thrash any wrongdoer. He wanted his legacy of one of the most frighteningly stringent, disciplinary systems in any public school in England, which he had put in place at Churton, to survive intact after he had left. It was, in a manner of speaking, a living monument to his life’s work: in fact to himself!

Sebastian donned his black as thunder face as he glared at the six boys lined up in front of him, none of whose names he knew. He said:

“Gentlemen – and I use the term grudgingly, as the behaviour, which I have just witnessed, is hardly that of true gentlemen, which, giving you all five of you the benefit of the doubt, I imagine you all aspire, one day to become – first allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, your new, freshly-minted-this-morning Headmaster, whom, if you know what is good for you, you will always address as Sir, when you speak to me. I think we should begin by all six of you giving me your names and the houses, here at Churton, to which you each belong.” Then, pointing a finger at the young man, who had been pummelling the second former, Sebastian said: “As you. sir, are the key active figure in the deplorable exhibition I have just witnessed from the window, let’s begin with you, young man.”

The lad, already suitably cowed by Sebastian’s brusquely intimidating manner, replied immediately in a halting tone of voice, which indicated that he already knew he was in for the high jump: “My name is Temple-Morton, Sir, and I am in Nelson House. And, if you would allow me to say so, Sir, I now deeply regret that I lost my temper with young Smithers here and was hitting him about the head, which I know, Sir, I should not have done. He too, Sir, is also from Nelson House.” Sebastian passed over what had been an attempt at an apology from Temple-Morton in a futile attempt to save his arse from the rigours of the cane and pointed at the two prefects, saying: “Before you start making excuses that you were both just bystanders, as prefects, or rather., as I should say, as erstwhile prefects, as you are herewith now reduced to the ranks, I would remind you that it was your duty as prefects, to intervene and stop any form of fisticuffs, which are strictly forbidden. Instead, what did you both do? You stood idly by, apparently enjoying the spectacle of an older boy, a sixth former, bullying one of his schoolfellows half his size.” Then, looking towards the two remaining sixth formers, both of whom were now trembling like leaves, he paused for a moment before continuing in a bluntly hectoring tone of voice: “And that applies equally to to the two of you. As members of the upper sixth, you are both senior pupils of this school and as such you have a responsibility to break up any fracas involving physical violence that you see occurring. On my first morning as Headmaster, I am most disappointed that I have to correct (Churton talk for to beat) four members of the upper-sixth for their apparent ignorance of their duty to uphold order and the dignity of this school. Now, before we go any further, give me your names the houses to which you each belong, for I suspect that your respective housemasters will possibly want to add their correction to mine.” How Sebastian he could have said, with a straight face, what he had just said did to the five lads, was masterpiece of prevaricating hypocrisy; he knew that he was lying through his teeth, as he was looking forward, as ever, with relish, to taking all five sixth-formers to hell and back with the cane,. The five lads already knew that their arses were irrevocably doomed. As Sebastian’s cock was telling him, in no uncertain terms, in its own uncontrollable, inimitably insistent way, it was looking forward to it lord and master thrashing the five young men, as it knew that later it would have its own five fingered reward.

The four remaining sixth formers haltingly gave Sebastian their names and to which house they belonged.

The two prefects, Campbell and Sinclair by name, were both from Walpole House, of which Mr. Fogarty was housemaster. Sebastian realised that Fogarty, a much older man, who was now, not only his colleague, but his de facto deputy, would be sore displeased that two of his three prefects had been stripped of their office and reduced back to the ranks because of dereliction of duty, during the morning break of their very first day in office. On the occasion of his first visit to Churton as an interviewee for the post of Headmaster, Sebastian had not only witnessed, for himself, Fogarty’s expertise with the cane, as he had thrashed three sixth formers, on the bare, for smoking, On that occasion, at Fogarty’s request, he had even participated –willingly, it might be added – in the caning of one of the three lads concerned in the smoking incident.

As a result of that incident, he had already appreciated that in Fogarty he now had a close colleague, who was as dedicated user of the cane as he was himself. In view of this fact, he was as sure as anyone could be, that Fogarty would have no hesitation that evening of exacting his pound of flesh from the already well-beaten arses of the two now, former prefects. It would be a bitter pill for him to swallow that two the three sixth formers, whom he had personally elevated to the rank of prefect, had, in the eyes of the new Headmaster, by mid-morning of their very first day office, proved unfit for the exigencies of the task. But he would be obliged to swallow it, most probably in an orgy of severe caning, destined to alleviate the rage he felt within himself for his bad judgment in selecting the boys for high office, in the first place.

At that very moment, Campbell and Sinclair had no idea of the very painful ramifications their respective arses could suffer as a result of their inactivity to stop Temple-Morton bullying Smithers. Their arses risked being caned, not once, but twice, literally, for doing nothing. In a few minutes, they were certainly about to feel the cane, wielded by their new Headmaster, biting into the flesh of their bare arses, leaving traces of its passage in the form of excruciatingly painful, but highly decorative, corrugated, blood-flecked furrows in their buttocks. But they would also most probably feel the wrath of their housemaster later the same day, as he assuaged his bad judgment for having chosen them as prefects in the first place, by adding his own painful mark to their already well-beaten arse, for standing-by as observers to the bullying being committed by Temple-Morton.

The two sixth-formers, completely intimidated by what they had just heard, were barely able to articulate their names and their house affiliations to Sebastian. Cromarty and Skelton by name, they were both from School House, of which the housemaster was Mr Goodson, a man to whom Sebastian had only been introduced, and whose proclivity for regular use of the cane to correct members of his flock was therefore unknown. Sebastian assumed that with the reputation of Churton for strict discipline enforced to the letter, the bare backsides of Cromarty and Skelton might, this evening, suffer the same fate as those of Campbell and Sinclair, at the hands of Mr. Goodson, their housemaster.

The time for talking was now over; Sebastian ushered the five senior lads, all of whose arses he intended to make painfully red hot before they got much older, into the austere Birching Room, adjacent to his study. For the moment, he left the young lad, Smithers, standing alone in his study. Unusually for the headmaster of a public school, the Headmaster of Churton did not actually beat boys in his study proper, but in an adjacent, small room, known as the Birching Room, which was specially equipped for the purpose of addressing errant boys, bare arses with the birch or cane; or in case of extremely flagrant disobedience, with both! Accessible from his study and also from from the corridor, aptly known to the boys , who were forced to tread it boards, as the Via Dolorosa, the austere Birching Room of Churton College, was guaranteed to fill the heart of any boy who was forced to enter it, with fearful apprehension.

It was not as if the five sixth-formers, were unfamiliar with the room into which they had just been ushered., Their arses had all felt the wrath of the old Headmaster there, at least once– in the case of Temple-Morton,, who was a serial offender, some four times – during their school careers. But somehow, this time it was the fear of the unknown which heighted the feeling of dread which had seized them all, as they waited, ashen-faced to hear what the new Headmaster had in store for them.

The worst fears of the two ex-prefects, Campbell and Sinclair, and and of Temple-Morton himself, were realised after they had heard what the new Headmaster had to say. Their initial relief, when they heard him announce that the two sixth formers, Cromarty and Skelton would each receive the standard tariff of twelve parallel cuts, applied with the senior cane, to their bare bottoms, were short lived as they were mistakenly counting the chickens before they were hatched. They had had automatically assumed that they would received the same punishment as Cromarty and Skelton. Even though bad enough – not to be brushed off as a flea-bite – twelve cuts were what generations of Churton schoolboys had come to accept as the painful norm for any beating. However, what the new Headmaster said next, sent a chill racing down the spines of Campbell, Sinclair ad Temple-Newton.

Sebastian continued: “Whilst I think it is right and proper that any sixth-former, who stands-by observing any physical altercation between two of his schoolfellows without trying to stop them, should be punished for his lack of responsibility as a senior, I think, without a shadow of doubt that the main onus in this particular case, for stopping the bullying of Smithers by Temple-Morton, resides principally with the two prefects, Campbell and Sinclair.” Then fixing the two ex-prefects with a gaze mixing disappointment with contempt, he continued: “I think it right and proper that you two young gentlemen, having already been stripped of your rank of prefect, should, nevertheless, suffer the pain of a more exemplary punishment. You will also, therefore, each receive the standard tariff of twelve cuts of the senior cane. However, in your case they will be applied in the form of six cuts parallel ranging from the bottom of your backs to your creases. Each of the six original cuts will be exactly overlaid by a second cut. Thus is known as the six on six technique, which increases the pain of twelve parallel cut considerably. After all the point of beating a boy, is to inflict sufficient pain as will lead him from his nefarious ways. Allow me to assure you that, I am personally an excellent technician with a prefect aim, when it comes to the exact overlaying of one cut on another. I think that when I have finished with you, you will both leave this room wishing never again to repeat the experience.” Temple-Morton, the arch-villain in this affair, listening to what Sebastian proposed to inflict on the now ex-prefects, was practically pissing himself at the thought of what the new Headmaster proposed to do to him. He was not be disappointed.

Sebastian fixed Temple-Morton with a gaze of utter disgust, filled with loathing and contempt, and said: “Temple-Morton, words cannot express the utter contempt I feel for you at this moment. You a senior boy of this school, in your final year, chose to bully physically a junior boy half your size. Have you no shame, young man?” Temple-Morton replied: “Sir, I have already expressed my deep regret for my actions, which I promise you I will never repeat. However, in my own defence, I would just like to say, Sir, that my actions against young Smithers were not unprovoked; however, in the heat of the moment, needled by him, I lost my temper and hit him. I know now that I should have controlled y temper; but such things happen. I cannot make what I did go away.” “Temple-Morton, provoked or not, as senior boy, beginning your final year at Churton should not have allowed your temper to get the better of you. You must suffer the consequences of your weakness, which, in your case, allow me to assure you, will be extremely painful. Along with your four schoolfellows, whose faults fade into insignificance when compared with yours, you will also receive a twelve stroke beating on the bare, with the senior cane. However, in your case, to emphasise the seriousness with which I view your bullying action on a junior boy, the twelve strokes will be given four on three, which I think you know what that implies in terms of excruciating pain for you. And., if you wish to avoid, what is commonly called, a fate worse than death, from which you will undoubtedly recover, I suggest you keep your nose clean for the rest of your final year. Temple-Morton if, in your final year, you are brought before me again, for whatever reason, I will have no hesitation in giving you a twelve cut beating on the bare, in the form of six on two, with all the supreme agony which that implies.” “Now, all five of you, take off your shorts, place your hands on your heads and go and stand against that wall over there, where each of you will have the pleasure of seeing four of your schoolfellows beaten by me.”

Sebastian was not joking when he mentioned pleasure in watching somebody being beaten, even when the observer knows that he is next in line to receive the same treatment himself. It does seem to confirm that, watching someone being beaten often brings out the worst in many people: the hidden epicaricacy, better known as schadenfreude, from the throes of which, they are powerless to escape; but which, if questioned upon, they would all vehemently deny. There was no getting away from the fact that the five young men, all of whose cocks – well named: a man’s uncontrollable flesh – were standing embarrassingly rigid to attention, indicating the strong, well-recognised link between corporal punishment and sexual arousal, were all looking forward to seeing their schoolfellows thrashed; even though they knew that they would all shortly suffer the same fate themselves.

The moment for action had finally arrived and Sebastian ordered a trembling Skelton to step forward, place one of the low backed wooden chairs in the centre of the room, to bend over it, to place his hands firmly on its seat and to keep perfectly still, until his beating was complete.

Sebastian said to the justifiably nervous Skelton: “Young man, brace yourself to receive twelve cuts of the senior cane across your bare buttocks. I would be lying if I told you that this was not going to hurt, for the purpose of any beating is to extract retribution through the excruciating pain you are about to suffer. When the four of you stood idly around ogling your schoolfellow, Temple-Newton, while he was physically assaulting Smithers, in your case, John Milton, the seventeenth century poet, may have got is sadly wrong when he said in the last line of the poem entitled On His Blindness: They also serve who only stand and wait. The line would be more apposite in its following modified form: They DO NOT serve who only stand and wait, as all four of you did. Your inactivity to intervene and try to stop Temple-Morton attacking Smithers, has earned all four of you a severe a beating, on my very first day as Headmaster of this school.” “It is unusual for a Headmaster to have to beat even one upper-sixth former each year. But your performance, this morning, has left me no alternative but to beat all five of you involved in this utterly disgraceful affair. If any man had told me that I would find myself obliged to beat not one, but five members of the upper sixth, during the morning break of my very first day as Headmaster of Churton, I would have told him that he was stark, raving mad. But that is exactly what has happened. Truly, in the words of the final phrase from verse five of the 23rd Psalm; My cup runneth over.” “However this is a somewhat historic occasion, not only as I shall be beating five senior boys on my first morning as Headmaster, but also as I shall have the pleasure of using, for the first time, the old senior cane, which my predecessor has kindly bequeathed to me, thereby continuing the tradition of discipline which he both conceived and promulgated during his long tenure as Headmaster of Churton. I understand that it has seen many years of use in this very room and I suspect, therefore, that some of you, who may have been beaten by my predecessor, will already be acquainted with this particular rod of justice. Each cane has its own peculiarities and I expect that this is true of the one I have inherited.” He then closed by saying, tongue in cheek: “I imagine, for those of you who already know this cane, as I expect some of you, if not all of you do, I guess it might be comforting for you to know that you will be beaten with a cane, which you already know as an old acquaintance, if not as an actual friend.” Sebastian gazed down on Skelton’s smooth, muscular buttocks, shortly to be deeply marked by the depredations of the cane, which he now laid gently across middle of the mound of inviting, young flesh, in preparation for the coming onslaught. The standard punishment for all misdemeanours at Churton, of twelve cuts – and let us be clear, the word cut, rather than stroke, is more exact, as the cane bites deeply into the buttocks of whomever is being beaten, leaving him with that picture-post-card hallmark of a public school beating: an excruciatingly painful, well-beaten arse.

As he prepared to raise the cane and bring it down on the unfortunate Skelton’s slightly quivering buttocks, he thanked his good fortune that his predecessor, Mr Augustus Caesar, whom he had never met, had considered that at a beating, comprising a classic six of the best, was inadequate. Thus, some twelve years ago, in the face of much opposition from all sides, he had stuck to his guns and had upped the standard tariff for all misdemeanours from six to twelve cuts of the cane, thereby enabling the beater to leave his victim with an arse, every square inch of which was as agonisingly painful as if it had been birched.

Clearly, Sebastian and his predecessor were clearly on the same page, when it came to punishing boys; he could not have landed more firmly on his feet than he had done in becoming Headmaster of Churton. Sebastian had inherited a severely strict, disciplinary system, which suited his temperament to perfection; it had been in place for several years and was now accepted as the norm, by the teaching staff and the boys, the main beneficiaries, let us call them, of this change.

Moreover his senior colleague, Mr. Fogarty, a housemaster and Deputy Headmaster, had shown himself, by way of a live demonstration, in which he had thrashed three senior boys of his own house, to be wedded to the disciplinary system at Churton. This was indicated by the vigour, with which he had applied the cane to the bare backsides of the three smokers, during Sebastian’s first visit to the school, for an interview for the very post, which he now held. To Sebastian, although very much a loner, it was nevertheless comforting to know that he had the moral support of his most senior colleague.

Sebastian brought down the cane, at great speed, implying maximum force on its impact with its target: poor Skelton’s bare buttocks, before going on to beat the other four young men. For Sebastian, it was a groundbreaking, seminal moment in his career that would be with him forever.

It was to provide the occasion for the first of thousands of strokes of the cane, which Sebastian would lay onto the bare buttocks of countless boys, during what was to prove a 25 year career as Headmaster of Churton. Colonel Hartley, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of Churton at the time of Sebastian’s appointment, had said that the Board wanted the successor to Augustus Caesar to be a strict disciplinarian. Well, in Sebastian Emmanuel Marmaduke Cholmondeley-Featherstonehaugh, they certainly got what they wanted.

THE END