Chapter Twentyfive
CASUAL CRUELTY
One morning he came back from the bathroom and reached as usual for the strap hung over the bedhead to give me my morning beating, but suddenly checked himself, as if on impulse, and said "No. Let's use something different for a change." He untethered me and told me to go up to the punishment room and bring him "something to thrash you with."
I was aghast, knowing the huge variety of equipment up there, and asked him what he wanted. He shrugged as if it were a matter of no great consequence and told me to choose.
It was a winter morning and still dark so I switched on the stair light and went up. The landing light shone through the doorway into that grim attic, illuminating the rack of implements on the opposite wall. It was if they were waiting for me. It was freezing cold in the big, bare space under the rafters and my naked body was soon shuddering, so a quick decision was needed. Just grab the first thing and get back, was the obvious strategy. Well no, not the first thing because that was a length of heavy chain - obviously unsuitable. The next was a light whip with three tails of soft, thin leather. Ideal! But was it? That would be lighter than the regular strap. Would he accept it, and even if he did, would he not despise me for taking such an easy option?
Next came two canes; the heavy "Big Bruiser" and the lighter but much longer "Slasher". I had experience of both and had no wish to renew the acquaintance. Then, on the next two nails, hung the thin flex which stung like hell and the three core, rubber-sheathed electric cable. No, not that! Then what? The plaited quirt?, the knotted sash-cord?, the dog-whip?, the fireman's belt?, "Upper School" cane?, "Lower School"?, the paddle?, the tawse?, the webbing strap?, come on, choose for God's sake! He's waiting and I'm freezing. I stood there in an agony of indecision, dithering and teeth chattering. I felt angry with him that he should have put me in this impossible position of having to choose a rod for my own back - and suddenly I realised that his apparently spontaneous and casual decision was very probably neither spontaneous nor casual but a carefully devised ploy to humiliate me by making me choose my own scourge.
In a rage at his manipulative cruelty, I thrust out my hand, grabbed at random and turned out into the light on the landing. There I stopped dead as I saw what was in my hand. It was a tawse and I hated tawses, but this was no ordinary tawse. Basically it was the standard design, a straight, broad blade, slit into four fingers and shaped at one end for grip, but that was the only thing that was standard. For a start it was not leather but a very dense, very heavy rubber-like material. Neoprene perhaps? It was also slightly wider and slightly longer than the traditional Scottish schoolroom model - only slightly, but with material of this weight, an extra half inch of width and one inch of length made an enormous difference. But worst of all was that each of the four fingers was fitted near the tip with a "fingernail" of a steel rivet hammered out flat to nearly half an inch in diameter for extra weight, extra impact! This was a sick device designed not just to inflict punishment but to inflict injury! My mind flashed back to my very first visit when I had been court-martialled and sentenced to be tied to a bed blinfold, with my legs splayed, to have my inner thighs flogged with three different implements. I remembered so vividly my master instructing the Corporal to start with the tawse and then saying "No, not that one. I don't think he's ready for that yet." This thing I now held in my hands must have been that very one, rejected as too cruel even for formal punishment, so there was no way it could be used for a casual morning beating.
Iturned back to the attic to select some more suitable implement - any other implement, but even as I did so, I heard the Brig bellow up the stairs "What the hell are you doing up there, boy?" In a panic that I had displeased him, I ran immediately down to the bedroom and sheepishly held out the appalling instrument of torture to him. "Jesus!" he exclaimed when he saw it. He took it from me and threw it down on the bed, saying he didn't think that was suitable for morning use. He reached again for the bed-head strap, and I felt crushed by failure to do his bidding and find him a new toy to play with, but I need not have worried for he had a different solution.
He gripped the strap at either end and snapped it out tight and horizontal in front of my face in a gesture clearly meant to say "Watch this, scum." Then, holding one end still, he slowly twisted the other end round and round till it would twist no more. He brought the two ends smartly together so that they spun round on themselves in a twist. He now had a thrash implement only half the length of the strap and therefore less painful, but twice the thickness, twice the weight and therefore more brutal. These two factors probably cancelled each other out, but of course there was a third factor which over-rode the others - the twist. In normal use the strap tended to impact flat, but this short, thick, twisted version could only deliver a mixture of flat and edge impacts. And to be hit edge-on by that double thickness of leather would be no joke.
Normally, as I have said, a morning beating was a fairly token affair of two or three lashes. That morning though, he gave me eight! Six on my arse, two across my shoulders. All of them hard. I mean really hard! And Christ they hurt! The bruising was so bad it still showed five weeks later when I returned for my next visit and he even photographed the marks for his records, clearly rather pleased with his handiwork, the bastard.
But again, I had learned another lesson - when he sent me on an errand, he expected it to be carried out at the double! It didn't pay to keep The Humiliator waiting!