Was there just one place at home where you had to go to receive your punishment like a barn, woodshed, basement, garage, study, bedroom or another room in the house?
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I knew that oubliettes tended to be small, but did they mean you had to use microscopic type to write in them? ?
I have seen them in old castle ruins – definitely not a place to go by choice, and to be avoided at any cost.
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An impulsive post which I regretted as soon as I clicked the ‘Submit’ button. I would rather have been able to contribute usefully to the thread but as CP was not used in my home I am unable to do so.
I have noted here in the past that in my youth my mother did briefly acquire a cane. Not, I hasten to add, to imply the possibility of use on me, I was far to well behaved. A younger sibling however was not, and the cane hung in the kitchen for a time as a threat to him before he ‘disposed’ of it. Whether it would have been used in the kitchen if deployed I cannot however say with certainty.
And back to the small text. It is size 15, which I think is about the minimum which can be used in Tapatalk BBCode to retain legibility after magnification. It is ⅛ the size of this text, which is size 120.
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An easy way to get incredibly tiny text is to to choose “smaller” text from the Font Size button, preview it, and then highlight everything and choose “smaller” again. But that’s it, as far as I can see; you can’t get “smaller cubed” by doing it a third time.
Returning to the topic of this thread: I imagine that if you were punished with an implement then the the storage place might have an impact on the location of the punishment. (Take that whichever way you choose!)
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As regards storage/deployment of punitive implements, it seems not uncommon in schools for the cane (and sometimes the accompanying punishment book) to be stored in one place, for instance secretary’s office, and deployed in another, for instance head’s office. In a domestic environment though I suspect more variability.
For instance I seem to recall two of our lady contributors mentioning mothers who whacked with a wooden spoon or cooking spatula, and in the kitchen as might be expected from the likely storage location of such implements. However quite often in a domestic situation whackings seem to have been preceded by the ominous “go to your bedroom, I’ll be along to deal with you later”.
In that event if the implement was a cane, switch, paddle, belt or slipper one might expect that the parent would collect it from its storage place en-route to the child’s bedroom to administer the punishment.
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After a little ramble around incredibly small typefaces where Another_Lurker managed to get down to 2pt we seem to have return to subbylondon’s original question. I think that we first have to recognise that home discipline generally fell in two categories; the instant reaction, on the spot punishments almost anywhere in the house and the more formal punishments. Of course there were many variations of either type, some families used both types whilst others used none.
I remember being out playing with a friend and two brothers that that I didn’t know much about. As the evening began to close the younger of the two brothers started to panic about getting home. Then to my surprise he said to his brother something like ‘If we are late home we’ll get the cane’ almost like he was urging his brother to quickly go home.
Once they had rushed off I suggested to my friend that it seemed a bit much that they might get the cane at home. My friend just said that else could their dad do if they were late home a lot. I was a bit surprised at his comment but said nothing. I found soon afterwards that my friend’s own father used a strap at home. This was around 1960 when I was about 13 and two brothers were probably about 10 and 12. Very different times to nowadays, almost another world!
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I had a very similar experience to that of Six of the Best, three years later in 1963 but also aged 13. A schoolmate and I had been sentenced to carry out various tedious chores as a punishment for the dreadful crime of talking during Assembly. The other boy was particularly aggrieved by the punishment and exclaimed to me and another schoolmate that he would have preferred to get it over with quickly with a caning. The other lad and I asked him if he was serious and whether he realised how much it might hurt.
When he replied that he was perfectly serious because he was used to being caned by his father, we both initially experienced the sort of incredulity felt by Six of the Best. Most boys we knew were occasionally spanked; a few talked about “getting the belt” but this was the first time either of us had heard of boys being actually caned at home.
On cross examination we discovered that his father, a very respectable professional man by the way, not only had a proper school cane but had used it quite frequently to beat his son from when he was about 10. He told us this in a quite unabashed way which astonished me at the time, being myself a very shy boy. Pressed for further details, in particular as to whether he had to take down his trousers (the thought of which excited me even then), he became more evasive and eventually, to my eternal regret, the conversation fizzled out.
As an adult I have encountered at least two other men of roughly my own age who were caned by their fathers so, although rare, home canings were not unknown in the 50s and 60s!
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