"Great!" says I. "They were, were they? Now, how were they great?" "Well," I said, "I got a licking pretty near every day I went to school... . By go'llys," I said, "we had a cross teacher, I'm telling you. He was a redheaded Scotchman, and he was cross." One day at dinner hour I was riding piggyback with my friend through the seats, only about 12 years old or something. And somebody came behind him and gave me a bunt and we went crash! into the seat ahead of us. Broke the seat. The teacher was eating his lunch, sitting behind his desk...so, soon as school went in, he called us up. He said, "How'd you come to break that seat?" "Well," I said, "it was an accident. [No], it wasn't an accident," I said. "I was riding piggyback.... Somebody gave me a bunt on the rear end and we went head-over-heels into the seat and broke the seat." I says, "We'll fix the seat. Just cracked it off you know." "Fix the seat, all right," he says. He put his hand in his pocket. He handed me the pocket knife and told me to go out and get him a switch off that birch tree out behind the old outside toilet.... So I went out and I got up in the birch tree and I got the nicest one you could get; about three feet long and it was just like a whip... . He told us, "Stand up there." Poor Eddie, Eddie Power , he's dead now. "And hold out your hand." We held out our hand, and I whispered to Eddie in a side whisper; I said, "Don't cry. Don't satisfy him. Don't cry." I got a bang! And another bang! Eddie stuck his out. Bang! and bang! And then he come back to me again. And anyway, Eddie cried. I'm not saying I was any braver than he was. I was more stubborn. Irishmen can be stubborn. I used to stutter when I was young; I had a stoppage in my speech. I got over it - well over it, you might say.... But if...I had to read and there was a certain word that I'd be stuttering over, I got a licking for that. Now, that was crazy, wasn't it? He'd hit you a slap in the face. There was one big fella going to school and he used to bother us going home. So [the teacher] gave this big fella orders to take to his own side of the road going home. He wasn't allowed to walk on the road; he had to take off to the side; walk up by the fence. Well, he had no notion of doing that. There was four great, big boys going to school then...and they were going to tackle [the teacher because of this] and beat the hell out of him. But, by gee, they lost courage.... The next day he came back with a cat-o'-nine-tails. You know what that is? That's the leather with nine tails on it. I don't know what the heck it's 144 BELFAST PEOPLE