It's Not What You Think Read Online Free PDF Page B

before ceremoniously lifting the flap of your school blazer up and over your buttocks and giving you a good few thrashes across your pert young arse.
    Some of the tougher boys would not let him see their pain; for them it was a game, a game that often made ‘the master’ cry before they did. This was most humorous for the rest of us as he would continue to hit them bleating, ‘Why are you making me do this, this is wrong, I don’t want to hit you [now sobbing but still of course thrashing away] I don’t…want…to…hit…you.’
    Needless to say, he was a confirmed bachelor.
    The sports teacher hit us with a plimsoll, the maths teacher with a yardstick. There was one teacher who ran the chess team, so he decided to bring an extra-curricular theme into his choice of weapon of mini destruction; he used to thrash us with a folded-up chessboard. Thisguy was seriously warped: he used to suck in the air on the back swing of his stroke and exhale triumphantly on the follow through. He was a truly evil man.
    He was also king of the board-duster throwers. This was a sport several masters indulged in and one rumoured to have its own league table pasted on the wall of the staff room. The basic premise was: if you weren’t paying attention in class, i.e. you were looking out of the window and wondering why most of your teachers weren’t in jail, you were considered fair game to have a great heavy wooden blackboard duster hurled at your head. Not only would this scare the shit out of you but it could also cause serious injury—blood and concussion, to name just two.
    The really unfair thing was when a master missed their intended target and hit someone else who was innocent instead. This used to happen all the time, especially if they went for someone at the back of the class.
    To overcompensate for their obvious embarrassment and evident lack of skill, with the kid who’d done nothing wrong now on the floor screaming in agony, the master would often call out the original offender and give him an almighty whack, much harder than they would have normally, as if it was his fault somehow that they had missed in the first place.
    Meanwhile, ‘Get yourself off to the nurse lad, it’s only a bump on the head,’ would be the only sympathy offered to the half-dead boy still writhing around on the floor.
    Absolute wankers, the lot of them.
    I think I experienced almost all these various methods of sadism during my days at the grammar school—with maybe the exception of the yardstick and the strap, both of which looked too menacing to risk any misbehaviour. No thank you. Another reason I escaped their wrath perhaps was simply because I didn’t stick around at the school long enough—we ended up parting company before my fourth year.
    One afternoon we were attempting to survive a physics lesson. It was a sunny pleasant day outside and we were stuck in a classroom which looked out over the school playing fields, past the cricket pavilion and on to the railway line in the distance.
    I hated school generally but I really hated physics, I was sure I would have absolutely no use for it at any point ever again in my life. I was permanently angry that my time was being wasted learning something Iwould have no use for. I also thought my physics teacher was a serious nut job.
    He was an old, wizened, twisted and bitter man who had forgotten how to smile; all he could do nowadays was contort. I often wondered what might have happened to him in the past to cause him to turn out this way. It was almost impossible to imagine he’d ever been young at all and somewhere along the line he’d turned into the kind of person who gives old people a bad name.
    I had long since drifted off far away from whatever it was we were supposed to be studying that day and had taken instead to writing on my desk. I know this is wrong and I shouldn’t have been doing it, but as wrong as it was I didn’t deserve what was about to happen next.
    Unbeknownst to me,