The sailors swarmed up the rigging, spread themselves out on the crossbars like slivers of marmalade along a thin slice of toast, dropped the sails and watched them fill with wind. There was surge. There was heft and swell. There were creaking timbers and sailors doing baffling things with ropes. But things soon took a turn for the worse at deck level.
Seaman Mills, played by Robert Harris, the devil-may-care Irish troublemaker among the roistering matelots, was accused of stealing some ship’s cheeses.
Fletcher Christian listened to the complainant with a superior smile and dismissed the whinger condescendingly. ‘Was there something further you wished to discuss? Early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?’
Below stairs, surrounded by his mates, Mills blamed the captain, who, he said, had asked him take the cheeses to his home. Suddenly we were involved in a hurricane-lamp-lit subversion, as Harris recklessly urged his fellow rank-and-file scum to believe their captain guilty of pilfering. Unluckily, Bligh chose just that moment to descend the gangway, where he stopped to listen to Mills’s accusations. The thuggish sailors fell silent, but Mills was unstoppable: ‘It was the captain helping himself to the ship’s stores,’ he shouted into a mortified silence. ‘The captain’s the thief, not me!’
Behind him, Bligh and Mr Christian took stock of what had been said. For us schoolboys, it was a terribly familiar scene, familiar from a dozen classroom encounters when we’d performed a hilarious impersonation of the Maths master while the Maths master watched unnoticed, from the doorway.
A nasty smile twitched across Bligh’s razor mouth.
Christian recommended cancelling the mouthy Irishman’s grog for a month.
‘Two dozen of the lash will teach him better still,’ grated Trevor Howard. ‘All hands on deck to witness punishment, Mr Christian, if you please.’
Along the row of seats, Mr Breen leaned forward, looked to right and left, and said, ‘Boys? This man is going to be flogged. It may get rather nasty. If any boy wants to sit on my lap, now is the time …’
Film and reality suddenly merged. We were all, choir and altar servers and teachers and actors alike, suddenly complicit in an act of collective sadism. We schoolboys were suddenly hands on deck, forced to gaze at a punishment ritual, whether we liked it or not. Nobody took Mr Breen up on his kind offer, for fear of seeming a wimp. We sat there, entranced by our first exposure to the delights of sadomasochistic teasing.
For minutes that were like hours, the hapless Mills was filmed sitting on a bunk, wondering how savage his punishment was going to be. We were obliged to look very closely at Richard Harris’s handsome, sunburnt face. He appeared half in love with his distress, while a dangling rope behind him suggested a death that might soon overwhelm him. One of the sailors offered him a cup of grog, but he waved it away. All his brave buddies fell silent. And then Quintal, the second mate, dragged something out of a storage cupboard and brought it down to the floor, there to ferret out, from its rummagy depths, a long red crimson sock with a draw-string neck. We watched its retrieval with collective foreboding, as if we were all, individually, the miscreant sailor looking at the thing that was about to lacerate his flesh.
But of course, we knew all about this stuff already. In the early Sixties, it was a matter of no great consequence that schoolboys could be flogged with a ferule, a short rod made from a whalebone encased in leather. If you forgot your sports kit twice in a row, or were caught fighting in class or throwing paper darts or cheeking the bovine Geography master, you might be sentenced to four or six ferulas, or (if you were really evil) nine or (for unimaginable depravity) twelve. At 4 p.m., when the lessons were over, you presented yourself outside the headmaster’s study, where pipe tobacco smells mingled with the sweat from your fear. You joined the queue of chastened youths, who all, in those days, simply accepted that they were about to be whacked and brutalised as a normal part of the school routine.
When it was your turn, you knocked on the door and, at the words ‘Come in!’, turned the handle. Inside the room, everything looked posh and stately, the living room of a successful gentleman-scholar, with a humidor smelling of cigars on the antique desk and a gramophone softly playing some sobbing Italian operatic tenor.
You had to say, ‘Six ferulas, please, sir,’ in a polite, Oliver-Twist-asking-for-more voice that was the second-worst thing about the experience.
The head would write something in a little book (‘Walsh – 22 May 1961 – running in crrdr – 6f’) and stand before you, with one hand behind his back. He would beckon with his fingers for you to extend your arm, palm upwards, and from its hiding place the whalebone would suddenly appear, soaring up then crashing down on your innocent flesh in a vivid trajectory of blurred malevolence, and a noise like ‘Whop!’ that didn’t seem to suit the astounding, metallic pain that shot up your arm. You would put the bruised limb somewhere behind you and extend the other arm, with a kind of stunned fatalism, and that hand would be whopped in turn. Then the first hand again, rising from the depths of wherever it had sunk, like an animal returning to a vicious master out of some sad, vestigial loyalty, then the second, the first, the second …
The headmaster never, ever, looked at you. He stood with eyes cast down at the glum brown carpet, waiting for you to say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ like a good little victim and take yourself off to the lavatories where you anointed your stinging hands with soap and running water.
The worst bit, though, was the waiting. From sentence to execution, hours would pass when nothing entered your mind but the prospect of what was to come. Bluebirds could circle the playing fields, grocer’s boys could whistle on their bicycles in a sonic emblem of the freedom beyond the school gates, but none of it would alleviate the pain of your imminent tryst with The Lash in the headmaster’s study.
So we watched with lively professional interest as Mills, stripped to the waist, was tied to a trellis and Quintal hissed in his ear, ‘Now just remember this, mate, it ain’t me that’s whipping yer.’ I’ve never forgotten those words. The crimson sock from the teak chest yielded up its baleful cargo of a cat-o’-nine-tails, Quintal shook it out and, before the ship’s crew’s incurious gaze, proceeded to lash Mills’s remarkably white flesh.
Counting off the lashes, we took in with our young eyes the blooding and flaying of Mills’s back, the wincing of the more sensitive crew-members, the gloating interventions of Captain Bligh (‘You’re going too soft, Quintal – lay on with a will or you’ll take his place’ – a classic piece of schoolmasterly brinkmanship) and the gradual sinking down of the victim.
Bligh’s mouth twisted in a smile. God I hated him. He reminded me so much of Mr King, the sports master, who always had me in his sadistic sights. Once, when I had weedily underperformed at some football practice, he actually picked me up by the ears and held me dangling in agony. But you didn’t fight back or argue with Mr King. You accepted that he had every right to do horrible things to you, because you were a nasty little boy who was probably in the wrong. All you would say was ‘Flippin’ heck, sir,’ like a Cockney droll, and take your punishment in good heart and not complain. You weren’t allowed to make a fuss, even to answer back, when you were eight, in Wimbledon, in 1962.
When Quintal had delivered the final lash and his shipmates had thrown a bucket of water over the flayed and knackered Mills, we breathed a collective sigh, we innocent choirboys and altar servers – half relief that it was all over and half a perverse satisfaction in cruelty that would live in our impressionable hearts for years. But something more important happened in those five moments, something that was to change us all. It was the first time we’d been confronted en masse by the grotesque unfairness of corporal punishment, a system that had changed little since the days of Tom Brown and Dr Arnold. At school, we sympathised with the boys who were on their way to the punishment room, and afterwards noted their tears, the weals on their flayed hands. But we’d never all witnessed it taking place in front of us before, never watched it as a hostile, wounded, grumbling, collective unit. You could almost hear a mutinous sigh from the fourteen schoolboys in the cinema stalls. We’d all experienced it as individuals. Seeing it portrayed on screen as an example of capricious revenge by an autocratic authority figure was something new.
It