In the summer before we moved up from Timothy Hackworth (pictured) in Shildon, the bigger boys already at the grammar school in Bishop Auckland filled our hearts with terror.
The 11-plus safely passed, our places at King James I secured, we sat in the recreation ground between games of cricket and listened open-mouthed to tales of ferocious school fights that were broken up by prowling staff or prefects and led to equally ferocious canings.
Fighting was by no means the only offence that would steer hapless pupils towards an excruciating session in old Neddy Deans's study. But that's how things were in those days.
Years later, I reflected on this when my newspaper sent me to Ireland to interview women who had also been beaten, in their cases while incarcerated in bleak orphanages run by nuns. Decades on, they were demanding - and eventually won - some recognition from the Roman Catholic Church of the harsh treatment meted out to them.
My guess was that in the era in question, the early 1950s, you didn't need to be in such an institution to be clattered; a similar fate awaited most children wherever they went to school in the British Isles.
By the end of the decade, girls were much more likely to be spared. Even so, it depended entirely on which schools they attended.
Tin Tacks, as Timothy Hackworth (pictured left) was known, was a mixed school and everyone risked the cane, although oddly enough it was the prospect of having the event recorded in the Punishment Book that worried us most. The same was true at most local secondary modern schools. Did it really help, incidentally, to rub your hands in advance?
Our sisters faced nothing worse than detentions at the girls' grammar school across the playing fields from King James I. But for the boys, corporal punishment was part of daily life and it was applied by various teachers with escalating levels of severity.
The methods included slipperings - which actually meant being whacked with a size 10 plimsoll or bigger by the senior gym master, Les Rawe, or a younger colleague - and an improvisation favoured by one teacher who was nicknamed "Cosher" because he wielded a Bunsen burner tube.
If these were bad enough, being sent to the head was what we all dreaded. "The first two hurt like hell but then your arse is numb and you don't feel the rest," said one of the older lads marking our cards, and his words offered not the least reassurance.
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