One of the most striking memories comes from a girl who was eleven years old in 1985.
By then, the slipper was rarely used at her school. The usual punishment was a ruler across the hand, generally administered by a female teacher. The slipper was something altogether more serious — the punishment everyone feared.
Only two boys in her class had received it.
No girl had.
Then, one day, she was caught chewing gum during a lesson.
Her teacher gave her a note and sent her to the headmistress.
She knew she was in trouble. She expected a severe telling-off and perhaps the ruler, a punishment she had experienced once before when she was eight.
What she did not expect was the slipper.
She was quiet, shy and normally well behaved. In her own words, she was probably the last girl anyone would have expected to receive such a punishment.
The headmistress read the note and reprimanded her.
Then, quite calmly, she opened a drawer.
Inside was a large black PE plimsoll.
At that moment, the girl realised what was about to happen.
The headmistress told her that she would receive four strokes and positioned a chair in the middle of the office. She instructed the girl to bend over it and remain there until she was told to stand.
Four strokes followed.
She remembered the shock and stinging sensation vividly, as well as crying afterwards before being sent back to class.
Looking back many years later, she still believed the punishment had been excessive. Chewing gum hardly seems the most serious offence imaginable, particularly when the slipper was so rarely used at the school.
There was another reason the experience affected her so strongly.
She was frightened of the headmistress.
When later asked whether she could simply have refused the punishment, she explained that refusing never really entered her mind.
She was an intimidated eleven-year-old standing in the office of a headmistress she greatly feared. She had unexpectedly been told that she was about to receive what pupils regarded as the school’s ultimate punishment.
And she was a girl receiving a punishment normally associated with boys.
That made the experience even more embarrassing.
Yet the story has an unexpected ending.
She admitted that although she continued to regard the punishment as excessive, it certainly affected her behaviour.
She never misbehaved again.
More surprisingly, once news spread around the school about what had happened, her experience gave this previously quiet girl a certain notoriety among the other pupils.
“It also made me rather popular,” she remembered.
The punishment intended to shame her had accidentally achieved almost the opposite. The quiet, well-behaved girl whom few would ever have expected to be sent to the headmistress for the slipper suddenly found herself the subject of considerable playground interest.
For a while, at least, she had acquired something approaching playground celebrity status.
