The Cane

As an adult I have been caned on 90 occasions receiving over two thousand strokes but during my schooldays it was a very different story.

my secondary school was a strict grammar school where the cane was used to punish boys who’d broken the rules. However, it was only used sparingly and that made it all the more terrifying for me. Other boys had been caned at primary school and on a couple of occasions I feared I was going to get it but I managed to avoid it. I can clearly remember a few weeks into my secondary school life, standing in a group of boys crowding round the first two lads in our year to get the cane. It held a great fascination as well as a threat and I listened agog as they related their punishment to an excited audience.

For me, the cane was both a terrible threat hanging over me for the duration of my time at the school and perversely, something I longed to experience. I began hitting my own bottom at home with garden canes but obviously I was unable to generate the required force to get anywhere near the actual feeling of being caned. And it wasn’t just the pain that I feared, although as an out and out coward, the thought of getting hurt was quite terrifying. It was the associated rituals of being caned that held me in trepidation with the humiliation I’d feel probably the strongest emotion. The thought that everyone would know about it filled me with horror. I was a shy, introverted boy, not one of the lads who’d show off their stripes to an admiring audience. People would know I’d been caned, they would have seen me waiting outside the headmaster’s office, they would have heard the swish and thwack of discipline being delivered. Heaven forbid, they would have seen the red weals across my bare buttocks when we showered after PE lessons. Worst of all was the thought that my parents might find out and the shame that I’d feel.

Another aspect of a caning that worried me was having to give up all control of the situation, a sense of helplessness and inevitability that would have culminated in me bending over,presenting my backside as a target and waiting for the first stroke. All these fears kept me on the straight and narrow. The closest I came to a meeting with the headmaster’s senior cane was on a couple of occasions when I was sent out of class for disruptive behaviour. This happened to one lad who returned to the classroom 15 minutes later and had been told by the headmaster to ask the teacher if he could come back in now because the headmaster had caned him. That sent one mighty shiver down me. I also,to gain her attention, pulled up the skirt of a student teacher when I was 12. There was nothing sexual about it and she didn’t report me because that would definitely have resulted in a caning.

Despite my total fear, I was obsessed with wanting to know what the cane felt like and so I’d beg my friends to cane my bottom as part of messing about play. Only one did, a girl who gave me one stroke and not that hard so my desires were not satisfied. I left school, my bottom intact and then spent several years trying to devise contraptions that would recreate a caning but with little success. Eventually I found tv aerial flex gave a good thwack when swung round and would leave approximations for stripes. It was only when the internet allowed me to chat with masters who were happy to beat my bottom that I felt the cane for the first time. Bending over a chair naked in a high rise flat in Birmingham, I waited for my first ever stroke and felt empathy with those boys at school who’d awaiting their first caning. And it was amazing, wonderful, painful, arousing, but also frustrating because the humiliation, the sense of helplessness, the shame that I’d so feared, they were missing and it turns out that I really crave those things too.