Rules rule...

Like nearly all young boys, I am sometimes naughty. And when I am naughty, I have to be punished. Unlike a number of adult schoolboys, I do not derive my pleasure from being naughty: unusual though it may be among boys, I actually love obedience. So when I am, unfortunately, guilty of some degree of naughtiness, it is nearly always just the result of a little slackness – either a moment of carelessness or sheer forgetfulness.

Since I am being brought up and educated along traditional lines, with high standards imposed on me, it is only to be expected that any degree of naughtiness – however slight – will result in punishment. And since I genuinely love obedience, and my great ambition is to be disciplined into becoming a perfectly obedient boy, I naturally do not resent in the least being punished quite hard (though always reasonably) for the slightest disobedience to school rules – even when the cause is no more than momentary forgetfulness or inattention. It is no more than a properly disciplined boy expects. And I love – truly love – both the thought and the experience of being a properly disciplined boy.

My behaviour first thing this morning was a typical example of the way I can be naughty. I failed to concentrate properly on the passing time and so was just one minute late in obeying the dormitory rising bell. The result (a perfectly natural result according to the culture in which I'm living) is that I am now sitting on a thoroughly reddened bottom, inside my short grey school trousers.

Have I really (the sceptic might ask) just taken a very old-fashioned schoolboy punishment, although I am legally and physically a long way into adulthood? Yes, I truly have, and I found it every bit as natural and right as I would have done when I was physically a boy of eleven a very long time ago - simply because, psychologically, the real inner me is still that boy.

But do I really live in a boarding school? Yes and no. I do not live a fantasy life, and I am committed to writing the truth in this blog. The truth is that my house does not - except in some important respects very deliberately arranged - physically resemble a boys’ boarding school. But I regard my otherwise fairly ordinary house as the 'House' of a boarding school, and I live as far and as well as I can according to the rules and routines of such a house as it would have operated decades ago.

And no, I do not have a physical school bell being clanged by a monitor or prefect every morning. (I truly wish I did, but that is not a detail that my life can accommodate.) But I am indeed required to obey the mental 'rising bell', which is the important thing: the bell may not be physical, but I am physically required to rise smartly from my bed at precisely the stipulated time. This morning I was very slightly behind the bell, and so I've been punished for it.

A fairly hard punishment for a fairly small piece of very partial disobedience may seem pretty strict. But then boys’ boarding schools in the middle of the last century were generally speaking pretty strict, and that is the life I have embraced, because it is the life that I need.

I did not resent my punishment in the least: I was grateful for it, and I'm glad I had it. I did not laugh it off as a joke: it was serious. I felt it all right, and I felt it to be a punishment. It was unpleasant to some extent, but perfectly tolerable - exactly as a punishment for a boy under strict discipline should be.

I mean, of course, that that is how things should be for a boy like me, whose adult half allows it, because his boy half wants it. As always, I am not suggesting that a similar regime would be profitable or acceptable for child boys today. Nor, indeed, am I suggesting that it was always profitable for boys then: common sense and historical experience suggest that things were by no means that simple. But such punishment is morally beneficial, as well as psychologically necessary, for a boy like me now – partly because it comes as a vital part of a school life that is somewhat idealised as well as somewhat authentic, and partly because I naturally take a far more positive attitude to punishment now than I did when I was fully and physically a young boy.

Relentless but reasonable discipline is essential for the sort of boy I truly wish to be.

Late, after all, is late - even if it is only the lateness of a minute. Partial disobedience to a rule is still disobedience and must always be met with punishment. That is the way that I am treated and the way that I truly wish to be treated, because I truly love obedience. Obedience to rules, as well as obedience to superiors, makes life better for a boy. I wish to become – I wish to be made to become – as near to a perfectly obedient boy as possible, and I am naturally willing to be strictly disciplined to that end.