Just what are the answers?

I cannot be sure, of course. There is always the possibility that this document may no longer exist. In fact, in this age of total, universal electronic retrieval systems, it is highly likely that such a record would have been deemed not worthy of preservation and so consigned to the junkyard of history.

Maybe a clerk looked at it and thought: "Corporal punishment book for Lawrence Sheriff School, Rugby, Warwickshire, period 1960-65. Of little interest. Miss Pettigrew, would you kindly take this and place it in the shredder along with the rest."

Physical chastisement is once again in the news.

So, I determined to see if there was some record of my own experience of that great grammar school tradition which, to borrow from cricketing language, might be described as the time-honoured sound of the crack of bamboo on trouser worsted.

Logging into the internet, I typed in the following: Corporal punishment book, Lawrence Sheriff School, Rugby. The results, while not exactly encouraging, did throw up one or two interesting facts - among them the ironic snippet about how the school's Tudor founder was firmly against the notion of sanctioned violence inflicted on adolescent miscreants.

It was a long shot. As you might have guessed, the purpose of the exercise was to find my own name. The entry might well have read:

Phillpott, J F. Form 2b. Reason for punishment - torturing Webster by sellotaping his legs and then slowly removing said sticky materials, causing the hairs on aforementioned limbs to be stressed. Number of strokes: Four.

This is all true. Webster was an informer and had to be dealt with. Just before I received my punishment, the headmaster asked me why I had "tortured" Webster. "Because he was a snitch, sir," I said, before standing to take my punishment like a man.

Webster was certainly the Quisling of 2b. But yes, I had bullied him, was caught, and the result was the cane - something I deserved in all its brutal, bottom-shredding simplicity.

Now, before you go jumping to conclusions, this is not an article extolling the virtues or vices of a form of punishment that has been outlawed in Britain's state schools for more than 10 years.

It is merely Devil's advocacy. For from the comfort of "behind-sight", I can unequivocally state that in the boys' grammar school that I attended, the ultimate sanction did a fine job keeping the problem cases in line.

The reasons were simple. The cane approached your backside with the velocity of a golfer's shot aimed from the rough to the far bunker.

Upon later investigation, a purple bruise one-inch by six would be observed in the target area. That was the reality of the cane. It was to be avoided at all costs. And it scared me more than anything else on earth.

I have no evidence to prove this, but I suspect that the cane kept many a troublesome youth in line. Fear of the consequences is a powerful deterrent. But the problem is that a substantial minority of youths no longer feels that particular emotion when confronting authority.

"Long holidays" jokes apart, I feel quite sorry for teachers these days. The children start to go out of control from primary school onwards, the result of bad parenting from parents who were badly-parented themselves.

By the time many reach the secondary school, they are completely devoid of any concept of civilised behaviour. Just how do you deal with someone who is so out of control?

The Government, addicted to spin, attempts to massage the exclusion figures by discouraging such action. That means yobs stay in the school - consequently, the teachers and the other students must suffer.

Would it be better to give them a short, sharp shock and head the problem off at the pass? Maybe, but that's impossible in an age in which parents are just as likely to be as violent as their revolting offspring. European law wouldn't allow it, anyway.

The other issue that has surfaced again is that of smacking children.

Reading the views of a childless psychologist in a quality broadsheet the other day, the usual old twaddle was once again regurgitated.

You know . . . smacking is child abuse, violence breeds violence, smacking a child says more about the parent than the child and so on. I quite agree, it may well do.

But would this same writer, worn down to a pencil stub of endurance, and presented with an e-numbers-crazed child that is methodically demolishing the house at midnight, come to the conclusion that intelligent reason and debate on the matter in hand might be appropriate action?

I smacked my children on occasions. To be honest, this happened when I had run out of ideas and, in wearied desperation, sought to bring an immediate end to whatever tortures they were aiming in my direction.

I suppose in the world of the new middle-class absentee parent, that which is inhabited by five-days-a-week childminders, nannies and the like, smacking must seem a crime worse than eating your grandmother.

The irony is that these people screw their kids up far more by calculatingly, selfishly pursuing their own career at the expense of their children's sense of security.

Nevertheless, we started with corporal punishment in schools, and this is where we will finish. Suffice to say, the old ways were outlawed, but were not replaced with anything, leaving a void.

Tragically, the results are now all around us, on the streets and public places, the inevitable consequence of our liberal society's moral evasion in providing an alternative.

And I have no idea what is the answer.