At a recent school reunion the conversation turned to lack of discipline, then to discipline and then to corporal punishment. “Do you remember Miss Barton?” asked Judy. “She was very fond of giving us the slipper in P.E.” And John and Charlie and Fred joined in and recounted tales of canings in the headmaster’s study, bending over an armchair, and not crying and Catherine shrieked with laughter and said that the headmaster was a pervy old sod who once smacked her over his knee.

Like most of the population, they were interested in corporal punishment, but unlike me they were not into it, and so they could talk and laugh while I just sat and listened and smiled and said nothing but felt myself getting hot. I hated them for being able to discuss quite openly the only thing that roused me sexually. So when Jill said that Miss Barton used to make the girls bend over and touch their toes and their P.E. skirts would ride up so that they got the slipper on their knickers, I excused myself and stood outside in the cold night air for a few minutes.

And the name of the school is... ?

Built in the nineteen fifties in the middle of a large estate in north Birmingham, demolished by the end of the century, they called it King’s School in its last years. The senior mistress was an attractive woman who slippered the bums of naughty girls and when one of the naughty girls told me of this, it lasted as my fantasy in bed long after adolescence had gone.

Thanks for giving the name of the school - all too rare here.

With such a colourful past, you'd think the school would be listed on Friends Reunited, but it isn't.

They list only one King's School in Birmingham and it's not north of the city.

Very strange.

As a Bromford resident, Lotta knows that the postal area given for King’s School on the Friends Reunited site (B33) indicates that the school was situated on the east side of Birmingham in the Stechford area. (Bromford and Stechford are approximately two miles apart being within the Hodge Hill constituency where a by-election is being held this very day.)

The owners of Friends Reunited have made a mistake. King’s School was in B44 which is in the north of the city.

Shiner Bartlett: Bromford Dog-Shaggers Party

Whitevan Bromfordman: A VCR Just Came My Way Party

Oswald Mosley’s Grandson: We Don’t Have Colonials on the Bromford Party

Wee D. Sniffer: Last Bus to Bromford Party

Lesley Gore: It’s My Party

Competing against the candidates above is pro-spanking vicar Reverend James George Hargreaves leader of the Operation Christian Vote Party. He asks the electorate of Hodge Hill to “Put your cross by the Cross!”

On the subject of spanking Jim Boy writes: ‘Operation Christian Vote opposes anti-smacking legislation, believing that such measures are unwise, unscriptural and unnecessary”.

Cast a vote for Jeesurs and spanking by visiting:

http://www.operationchristianvote.org.uk/site/

In fact, Friends Reunited is littered with errors of that kind. Quite a lot of schools are listed twice or more, sometimes in different districts. Meanwhile, other schools that had nothing to do with each other are described as related. I suppose it is very difficult to organise this sort of inherently muddled information centrally without local knowledge, but I think they could have tried a bit harder. They don't even seem to have understood the significance of the 1974 local government reorganisation.