Thurs­day 31 Decem­ber 1952

And so anoth­er year comes to an end. Itís been a strange twelve months. Look­ing at the offi­cial school pun­ish­ment book, I see that I have admin­is­tered 118 strap­pings, 33 on the bare, 48 can­ings, 18 on the bare, and assort­ed oth­er pun­ish­ments, all of which left their mark. The slip­per would nor­mal­ly be at the milder end of cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment spec­trum, but I shall not quick­ly for­get young Knox, after a mere eight swipes with slip­per, beg­ging, beg­ging me to stop. Who did he think he was fool­ing? I had promised him twelve swipes with the slip­per, and that was what he going to get, how­ev­er sore his bot­tom. I laid on the last four like an aveng­ing fury. Result? Knox has been a paragon of good behav­iour ever since. If I have learnt any­thing this year, it is that it is bet­ter to thrash some­one too hard than not hard enough ñ itís the best deterrent.
The oth­er curi­ous fea­ture of 1952 has been the way my daffy sec­re­tary Celia has TWICE had to be remind­ed, through the rat-a-tat of my cane on her back­side, that I donít put up with non­sense from any­one. Fin­gers crossed, I will nev­er have to deal with her in that way again.

Mon­day 21 Decem­ber 1952

…the last full day of term and noth­ing more oner­ous to deal with than the school car­ol ser­vice. I wore my aca­d­e­m­ic gown for the occa­sion, the boy scrubbed up nice­ly, there was a Christ­mas tree in the school hall and the whole atmos­phere was serene and stress-free, until… I could hard­ly believe my ears!!! Two fifth-for­m­ers, Cook and Atkin­son, were singing a ver­sion of Good King Wences­las that was so coarse and smut­ty and gen­er­al­ly obscene that I could see Matron blush­ing ñ and sheís a hard woman to shock. I wait­ed until the ser­vice was over, made a lit­tle end-of-term speech thank­ing the boys for their efforts dur­ing the term, then added, with men­ace in my voice: ëI am afraid Cook and Atkin­son are dis­hon­ourable excep­tions. Could they please present them­selves in my study immediately?í I donít like thrash­ing boys with the strap in Christ­mas week, trousers down, but needs must. My strap was warm to the touch after­wards ñ and I dare say their back­sides were, too.