I’ve taken some stick from the toughest caners on Tyneside.
Clicking through those rarely used circuits of the memory, where the late 1940s lie with dust on the synapses, I realise that from all except one of those caning teachers in the groves of Academe at Hebburn-on-Tyne I learned nothing, except how to suffer physical pain without bursting into tears. I suppose they had simply been conditioned by a backward society to believe in the cane the way cowboys believed in the Colt 45. But the teachers who got best results from us could quell incipient disorder with a baleful look or a waspish insult.
Some of the worse caners were terrifying enough without their weapon, but they used it just as enthusiastically as their weaker colleagues. We had a respectful awe for “Caner Connor” because of his wooden leg from the war, his cold stare and his posh accent. But we were as chaff to his bamboo sword.
Once I saw Connor give the toughest boy in the class three on each hand and then, enraged by his Bogart-like saunter back to his desk, call him for six more, and apply himself to the task with such violence that his wooden leg lifted clean off the floor each time the cane swished down.
He was the only teacher I ever heard threatened with a sorting-out from a boy’s father, but nothing came of it. Connor knew that unless he drew blood or broke bones we wouldn’t get much support from home. School, in those days, was an awesome place to most working-class parents. It wasn’t until a relatively enlightened headmaster took over that Connor’s reign of terror came to an end – significantly coinciding with the formation of a Parent Teachers’ Association.
The only caner I admired was the Duke, our music teacher. A slender, elegant man given to lightweight sports jackets, we liked him because he called us by our first names. If we sang well he smiled ecstatically, but he suffered the most shattering depressions, caused by shell-shock from his war days in Burma.
We learned to look for the signs as we filed into the room past his piano. If he was sitting there tinkling away, we were safe. If he was leaning on the top and staring vacantly across the room, it would be a black day for somebody.
The blackest day was when somebody sang a bum note. “There is a grunter in this class and I want him to own up and leave his group,” said the Duke, showing signs of going berserk. The cane was sent for and we went through the song again while the Duke prowled up and down the aisles, like a leopard listening for the hoofs of its prey.
The grunter plagued his ear only when he was in a depression; he never did discover who it was!
This is an edited extract
