I think I got away with a fair bit in school because I was considered a “good boy” - I was far from the worst behaved, but definitely not among the best. The irony is that I was blameless when I was caned for the only time.

It was on the day England played Romania in the 1970 World Cup and a group of about six of us were having a kick about during the lunch break. We were using a full size plastic ball and one of my mates miskicked it on to the window of the headmaster’s room.

Cantonian’s headmaster was “Motho” Davies who had been there for years and had a fearsome reputation, so we feared the worst when he opened the window and told us to come to his room - it was a measure of how much he was feared that none of us thought to run away as soon as the ball hit the window or that we would take a “wrong turn” on the way to his office.

We were quaking in our boots while we waited outside his room, but when we called in, he surprised us by asking if we were going to watch the game later on and we proceeded to talk about football for a few minutes (that was a surprise as well because he was thought of very much as a rugby man). We thought we were going to get away with it, but then reached for his cane and asked us who had kicked the ball against the window, none of us answered and so he proceeded to whack all of us on the backside once.

It didn’t hurt anywhere as much as I expected it to and down the years, I wondered if Motho’s heart was in it - he retired a couple of years later and maybe he was tired of doling out the canings (he certainly had administered plenty of them down the years).