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Ye olde ways...yes...reminds me of my school detentions. We had an amazing Deputy Head. He wore a cloak and looked really out of place in our little Sarf Landan school. He had a cane in the corner of his office and he used it on the boys. They'd come back into class after a trip to his office, showing off the redness on their hands and defiantly saying, ''Dint urt''. I can't quite remember if he ever bent anyone over his desk, but he was solely responsible for teaching me my times tables. Without that man humiliating me into learning all things maths-related, I wouldn't be the person I am now...oh dear...imagine that. I think the rules changed half-way through my time at the school and he was stopped from beating the children. Nice man though.
Anyway...yes, the detentions. We would be ushered into his classroom to write our lines and given the amount necessary, according to the crime in question. I usually had to write quite a lot...sigh. Nothing difficult I hear you say. No, not difficult...I could write very quickly with a ballpoint pen and, with five bics sellotaped together, I was like lightning! So, did he allow us to use our initiative in order to whack our lines out quickly so he could get home to his wife and family? NO chance! He had a large collection of cylindrical ink wells on the top of one of his cupboards, in full view of everyone. I remember them having little curved indents around the tops...like tall miniature ashtrays. Also on display were the seriously primitive pens that fitted so perfectly across these indents. In our usual lessons, if someone forgot their pen, they would be made to use one of these...no reservoir, just a piece of wood with a nib...you had to keep dipping...a pointed twig would have worked just as well. He would tap a little black ink well on the person's desk and rest one of these pens across it...no words, just smugness. None of us dared snigger or stare. If we did, we'd get the same punishment. It was quite common for most of the class to be sitting there, writing ye olde way, by the end of the lesson.
So, back to the lines. You get the idea now. We would be sitting at our desks, all ready to start writing our lines on unlined paper...to make it more difficult to keep our lines straight. If they were really sloped, spaced too far apart, or smudged, we'd have to sit back down with a fresh piece of paper and do it all again. He really knew his stuff. So what? So what if we had to keep dipping our pens you ask. Indeed...so what? Well, yes, we did have a dipping pen on our desks, but no ink well! We had to walk all the way to the front of the classroom....and it was a big room...to dip our pens in the ink well on HIS desk. Then, we had to rush as fast as we could back to our desks to write as much as we could with the ink we had collected. We were caught between trying to rush back to our seats with as much ink still left as possible...and walking slow enough so we didn't cause the pen to dry as we pushed it desperately through the air towards our desks. Of course, he made sure the ink well was nearly empty so we couldn't collect more than half an inch of ink each time.
What a guy? He had us walking back and forth to his desk with our hands cupped around our pens as if it was a precious flame. The clever ones realized very quickly that it was essential to be early to detention to get a front seat. It was the only time any of us were so eager to sit right in front of the teacher in a class. Unfortunately, he would move me to the back as soon as he saw me. I guess he thought it would deter me from being naughty again...which it didn't. I hated it...but I was always there! Now THAT'S determination.
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