Unlike the two recent school memories, my all-girls grammar school in Somerset didn’t have the cane, or at least I never heard it even mentioned, but we did have the strap. Even that was something of a mystery because although it was sometimes mentioned, no one I knew had ever had it.

Girls would sometimes say, “Do that and you’ll get the strap,” but it was always this cryptic sanction that precluded most naughty behaviour, apart from the typical school punishments like detention, writing lines, picking up litter from the school grounds and similar tedious but not painful penalties. That was, until I reached the lower sixth form and I became a prefect.

One day, during a period when I didn’t have a lesson, I was in the school library doing some private study when the headmistress walked in. I stood up immediately, as we did, and then she looked around the library, saw I was the only girl there, and asked me to accompany her to her study.

Strange though it may seem, after being at the school for over five years, I had never ever been inside the headmistress’s study, so as I walked with her I was feeling rather nervous. I kept telling myself I had done nothing wrong, and anyway she had looked around the library before asking me to go with her, so surely she might have picked someone else if they’d also been in the library, wouldn’t she?

We reached her study and she went in, holding the door open long enough for me to pass through. She went straight across to her desk and I followed, but she didn’t go behind her desk to sit down. Something made me look round and then I saw a fifth year girl standing facing the wall. When I looked back, I noticed a length of leather, about eighteen inches long and two inches wide, sitting on top of the desk. It could only be the strap I’d occasionally heard mentioned.

The headmistress called for this girl to join us and explained for my benefit that she had been very rude to a teacher and was going to receive four strokes. I looked at the girl, I forget her name now, and she looked very tense. The headmistress told her to take her blazer off and hand it to me, which she did. She was told to unbutton the cuffs of her blouse and fold them back.

I watched as the girl slowly and carefully complied. Somehow, it was quite fascinating to observe even though I didn’t really understand why she had to lay bare her wrists. Despite my complete lack of experience, I somehow assumed she would be strapped across the palms of her hands, and folding back the cuffs would not have been necessary to achieve that.

The headmistress picked up the strap and stood to one side of the girl, while I stood on the other side. After being told, the girl held one hand out, palm uppermost, at a little higher than waist height, while the headmistress held the strap over her right shoulder. Almost as soon as the girl positioned her hand, the strap whipped down and hit the girl’s palm. The sound seemed to echo around the study, and the girl’s face screwed up in pain. She kept her hand more or less in position, though, and the headmistress applied the second stroke similar to the first. I was still looking at the girl’s face and I saw she closed her eyes when the strap was poised to strike her again. After the strap hit her palm she thrust her hand under her opposite armpit.

The headmistress told her to change hands. I could see tears starting to roll down the girl’s cheeks, but again she complied obediently. She watched as the headmistress swung the strap over her shoulder in preparation for the next stroke, but again closed her eyes when she was about to be hit. The sound of the strap hitting the girl’s hand was enough to make me jump even though I was expecting it.

As the girl held her hand steady for the strap to be applied for the second time, I wondered whether I would have been able to do the same had I been in her situation. The crack of the strap hitting her palm soon awakened me back to the situation.

The girl’s punishment now complete, the headmistress sat down behind her desk and put the strap away in a top drawer. I was told to take the girl along to the toilets, get her cleaned up and take her to the library with me for the hour or so remaining of the school day. The girl was openly crying now, so I could see she might need help getting sorted out, but even then she would be in no fit state to go back to lessons.

The following day, the headmistress stopped me in the corridor and thanked me for my assistance in dealing with the girl. I had questions I wanted to ask, like why the need for the girl to fold her cuffs back, but I didn’t. Does anyone know?

Maggie D