The Portrait of a Strict Disciplinarian

Below is Chapter 1 of a total of 36 chapters of a full length homo-erotic novel. If, after reading this first chapter, you would like to receive the full-length novel, then kindly send me an email address to [email protected] and I will send you a  PDF file containing the entire novel, which you can read at your leisure.. Please note that this is a 152,000 word novel, with a story-line and not just a collection of disconnected, homo-erotic incidents. To appreciate it, readers must read every chapter in numerical order. The chapters themselves are not stand-alone incidents.

After three years of dithering, Britain finally left the European Union on January 31st 2020.  Of course, endless, inconclusive negotiations followed in which the UK tried to get itself a better free-trade deal with the EU, its largest single customer, which it had decided to leave for what the British population was assured were “greener pastures elsewhere”. But then the Covid Pandemic had unexpectedly reared its ugly head, which allowed the then British Government to display its utter incompetence in an orgy of collective, naval-gazing tergiversation, with regular U turns not only on its edicts concerning the pandemic, but also on the governance of the country in general. The only positive thing that could be said about the then governing party, was that had it not beaten the opposing party, with its then Marxist leanings, things would probably have been much worse. So putting these glorious years behind us, we now fast forward to the year, 2040,  twenty years after Brexit, which event is now generally referred to by most people as TGM – The Great Mistake.

The pound sterling had fallen disastrously and was in process of emulating the currencies of those perennially unstable Latin American countries, derisively referred to as Banana Republics, with daily, if not indeed, hourly, increasing numbers of zeros on their banknotes. Unemployment had reached a level of 25% of the overall workforce, but youth unemployment of people under twenty years old was at a staggering 40%. Youth crime, particularly street, knife crime, had been on the increase at the time the country left the EU; but now with the burgeoning unemployment, youth crime had exploded out of control.  And so, faced with the increasing impossibility of exercising control of youth violence, the beleaguered national Government of the day – yes, at one point, things had come to that – had decided to contract out to private enterprise, the task of providing penal institutions for young offenders aged sixteen to twenty, where the staff would be employees of the contracting companies’ providing the services.

At first sight, to allow such independent institutions to look after young criminals, seemed rather strange; but viewed objectively it was not so very different to the traditional British public school system.  Such schools were all independent and certainly did not run at a loss. They provided what was usually thought of as a superior education for pupils with parents of means. The main difference was that parents voluntarily paid to send their offspring to such places, whereas in the case of this new generation of independent penal institutions for young offenders, the courts decided on the intake, which was anything but voluntary and the state picked up the bill. Of course, the level of education – if one could even call it that – in such places could not be compared with that achieved in public schools. As the general climate of opinion had long been for a return of corporal punishment, the Government of the day, as usual, looking no further than the end of its collective nose, had decided to side with the vast majority of the electorate and allow the use of the cane and the birch again in schools in general and also in such independent penal institutions.

Thinking back to the great tradition of English public schools, where the cane and the birch were in regular use, together with their working class equivalents, the state-run grammar schools, where the cane, if not the birch, was still alive and well, looking at the high quality of young men they collectively turned out, you could see why the greater public was in favour of bringing back corporal punishment. The abolition of the corporal punishment, of any kind, in the second half of the twentieth century, which had been brought about by an articulate minority of do-gooders, was generally considered a mistake by the great majority of the all-too-often, apathetic public, who, as ever, reacted only after the event. But, with the dramatic increase in juvenile crime, you could easily see how most people now thought a good dose of the stick applied to the naked backsides of young tearaways might do them a power of good. And that, in a nutshell, is how a series of for-profit-junior-penal institutions came to be set up: institutions where corporal punishment again became part and parcel of the daily life of the inmates; in a word, in such places, the cane and the birch again reigned supreme. Discipline was very strict and immediate retribution for even the most minor of misdeeds was exacted in the form of severe corporal punishment usually applied without mercy to the bare buttocks of the offenders.

One of the leading lights in this new area of business was a publicly quoted company, Public Custodial Services, known as PCS to investors.  Its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange had been ten times oversubscribed, as the public had metaphorically trampled itself to death in an attempt to get what it clearly saw as a piece of what promised to be a profitable new venture. And now, some five years later, nudging its way onto the list of Footsie’s top 100 companies, PCS’s success had justified the faith in which the public had put into it.  In a word, punishment and painful retribution for crime and had become, if not one of the UK’s biggest business sectors, certainly one of the most profitable. So by some bizarrely contorted reasoning, the great British Public felt that the government must finally have got something right! And as punishing crime had become a highly profitable business, the feeling of the general public, if not exactly in favour of promoting crime as a profitable venture, came to regard crime as one of the things which people had to learn to live with as important part of the overall economy of the country.

PCS invested in, owned and successfully ran penal institutions of all kinds  for profit: including the sector which is of interest to our story today: Juvenile Correctional Facilities, or JCFs for short, which were specialised units set up to deal with young offenders aged sixteen to twenty-one years old. Its income came entirely from that bottomless pit, the Government, which it billed on a cost-plus basis, which included a sizeable profit margin, thereby assuring a secure return for its investors. So, successive governments conveniently washed their hands of all convicted juvenile criminals, who were handed over lock, stock and barrel to the tender loving care of one of several companies like PCS, all of which overcharged the government for their services in order to pay dividends to their shareholders. The JCF scheme was another of those bottomless pits, like the National Health Service, into which the government of the day was obliged to pour money in an attempt to satisfy the electorate, a large oar tof which had investe din companies like PCS.

Often located in ex-industrial parts of the country, in rehabilitated old manufacturing buildings, the Junior Correctional Facilities were usually staffed by a team of no-nonsense warders under a hardnosed warden, where the inmates were punished severely for even the slightest act of disobedience. In fact as we shall see, they were often punished– not to mention subjected to other forms of undignified abuse – for little or no reason at all, by a staff that often seemed to have been selected for its sadistic qualities, which, quite frankly, was often the case. But as we all know, in such institutional places, at all levels, where unsuspecting inmates are under supervision by a staff which is itself uncontrolled by an absent, higher, legal authority, abuse of all kinds, proliferates.

One such place was the JCF called Highgate Mill School, installed in a converted long abandoned old cotton mill located on the outskirts of one of those old Lancashire cotton towns near Manchester. The mill was well placed for conversion into a school as it stood in not unpleasant countryside on the edge of the somewhat bleak mass of the Pennines between Lancashire and Yorkshire. So it had ample grounds for playing fields etc. Highgate Mill had been designated as a school, as it attempted – usually unsuccessfully – to rehabilitate its 250 or so inmates, by teaching them a trade in which they could find gainful, legal employment when, aged eighteen, they were either discharged from the school or if they had been given a longer initial sentence for their crime, were sent to a male prison for adults.

At Highgate Mill, in contradistinction to other such institutions, the detainees were exceptionally favoured and referred to as pupils rather than inmates, in deference to the designation of their place of confinement as a school. But whatever they were called, inmates, internees or pupils, Highgate Mill, like most similar institutions, housed a dangerous set of young tearaways, the majority of whom had no regard whatsoever for the law or for other people in general. They were, in the main, died-in-the-wool, repeat offenders, who were not interested at all in being redeemed for their sins. Most of them, once their sentence was over and done with would to revert to their previous nefarious ways. In a word, the majority of them were, sad to say, what might best be described as future old-lags in waiting,

As director of Highgate, with the title of Warden, PCS had recruited a super-hardnosed character with the most unfortunate, but, as we shall see later, given his personal proclivities, somewhat apposite, onomatopoeiacal name of Caine: Bradley Caine to be precise. He was known to his friends as Brad and addressed by his underlings and inmates – sorry, I mean pupils – as Warden, with all remarks addressed to him by his staff or pupils, richly larded with the word, Sir. Of course given the way he ran Highgate, with utter and absolute devotion (not too strong a word as we shall see) to that homonym of his own name, that long abandoned, but now successfully rehabilitated, public school, disciplinary, maid-of-all-work, the rattan cane, every pupil lived in constant fear of a very sore arse coming his way. And. it has to be said that for many of them their worst fears were often realised with a vengeance.

As newcomers soon found out, the Warden was a devotee of corporal punishment, which he dispensed with a largess and vigour, considered by most of the young men in his charge to be excessive. In fact, the post of Warden in such an establishment suited Bradley Caine to a tee as he was an enthusiastic beater of late teenage boys’ arses; and, as he was himself a practising homosexual, he also overlooked the warders’ illicit use of their own private rods, which they generously shared with many of the pupils. So very rapidly schools like Highgate became hotbeds of excessive beatings coupled with buggery. I say buggery rather than homosexuality as at Highgate, as in many all-male institutions where females were as rare as hens’ teeth, sex was rife at all levels: staff-staff, staff-pupils, pupils-staff and pupils-pupils. To sum it up, Highgate was tantamount to a closed-circuit, government-sponsored, male-male, knocking shop, where buggery – male anal sex – was common, as there were no females available on which the all male denizens could exercise their quite normal sexual urges.

The British Government, in what it would as ever have the electorate believe, was its infinite wisdom, had been very lax in setting any limits on what could be inflicted in the name of corporal chastisement on young offenders and had left it to the discretion of the companies running the detention facilities. They, in turn, interested only in the cash they were paid by the Government, left it to the Warden of each establishment to set his own rules. So it goes without saying, given the personal bent of Bradley Caine and with what amounted to a blank cheque to do exactly as he wanted, Highgate rapidly became a hell-hole of a place for its inmates. (We may as well drop the pretence that they were pupils in a school and call them inmates, for that is, in fact, what they were).

As God made man in his own image, or so we are led to believe, so Bradley Caine recruited his key warders in his.. So his four senior staff members were all arch flagellators. They were all cut from the same cloth as the Warden himself and seized upon any excuse to shred the inmates’ arses. And just as Bradley Caine himself was a practising homosexual, so also were his four key staff members. So beatings, followed by anal sex, with the warders first caning or belting the inmates before going on to fuck them, became a feature of the daily life of the school. Sex is dangerously addictive once one has tasted its pleasures; so, even under duress, what started as sexual abuse of the inmates by the staff, rapidly became accepted by many inmates as an enjoyable part of life. This is totally understandable as most of the inmates, whether hetero- or homosexual had the normal sexual urges of young men of their age, and given the total lack of access to any female company they took sex wherever and in whatever form they could get it, including from one or other of the warders who had just shredded their arses. In fact, one of the surest ways of getting one’s arse fucked was to rub one of the warders the wrong way and goad him into an arse-warming beating, after which he would oblige his erstwhile victim by fucking his arse for him.

Continued in Chapter 2