Earlier in the week, on a short family holiday with my parents, we wandered past the local Youth Hostel, housed in an austere Victorian building:
A banner outside advertised residential camps. My mind drifted to the 1950s – with such events comprising summer-long stays in a spartan regime. One girl had run away, and after being found had been brought before the local bench for absconding and wasting police time. The magistrate decided that the matter should be dealt with privately, to keep paperwork to a minimum and avoid any embarrassing publicity for the hostel and village. Twelve strokes of the cane were the result, administered with gusto by the local policeman as she bent forward, stripped naked, over the back of a chair in one of the cells beneath the courtroom.
Back in the hostel, it was the manager’s turn to punish her for the trouble she’d caused – and to make an example of her lest any of the other youngsters present were tempted to try the same trick. She was beaten before dinner, in front of the other camp residents, with two of the boys being made to hold her down over a table as she received another dozen on the bare, on top of her earlier judicial stripes.
Needless to say, I didn’t explain to my parents quite why I was so lost in thought!
‘The local bench’ is an evocative phrase, don’t you think?
Hmmm… seeing as it was a summer camp type place, then I think the punishment there should have been by birch, collected by volunteers from among her comrades….