THERE is one sure way to gain the attention of my two daughters, to tell them school horror stories.
Tales of being ''whacked'' at the age of eight or nine by a slipper-wielding headmaster, emerging from his study with a smarting backside and even smarter snigger on my face are guaranteed to keep them in raptures.
For corporal punishment has always been the nasty but often humorous core to English schoolboy culture echoed in everything from Tom Brown's Schooldays through the Just William books of Richmal Compton, to Jimmy Edwards the cane wielding, handlebar moustachioed horror of the 60s television series Whacko.
This obsession that the only way boys can be made to behave is through pain is supposed to be the stuff men are made of - it also probably explains the continuing penchant for the practice so loved by the loopier members of parliament.
When I graduated to the upper school it was dominated by an austere giant of a man called Poskitt. He kept a strap in a locker in his study and corporal punishment at his hands seemed to bring on all the fears Michael Fay is currently going through in Singapore.
Poskitt retired to be replaced by a much more diminutive figure and one could once again risk the wrath of the senior teachers - it wouldn't hurt that much anyway.
I recall this now because of the English fascination with corporal punishment and the retrospective analysis of the life and times of a former Eton headmaster Anthony Chevenix-Trench, who took over that venerable institution in 1963. According to a new book he has been revealed as a barbaric whacker who enjoyed nothing more than wielding the birch followed by the odd tipple afterwards, no doubt to steady his nerves.