Life changing punishment

Jul 18 2008 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

WHEN I was a lad of 15 years and at school in Huddersfield, I had chronic toothache and was sent to my dentist in Trinity Street by my form master and told not to return to school.

The offending tooth was extracted and I walked back into town to catch my bus home via Greenhead Park and sat on a park bench until the effects of the cocaine injection wore off. An “old man” (probably no more than 50) was walking up through the park and sat on the seat beside me and we began chatting.

He asked me if I had ever been in trouble with the police – I told him never. He then began to tell me that when he was about my age he was a thoroughly bad lad and ended up being arrested and taken to court, where he was tried and sentenced to be given several strokes of the birch.

He told me that when you have been birched, if you have any sense, you make sure that you don’t continue in your old ways – so he became a reformed character and from then on stuck to the straight and narrow. He was proud enough to tell me that he had never done anything wrong for the rest of his life!

The present day problems with the knife culture would quickly be cured by the application of the birch and not by the idiotic idea of trying to make the culprits face their stabbed victims (if they survive) to attempt to make then see the error of their ways! “Spare the rod and spoil the child” (or youth) springs to mind.

Reader

Marsh