When I was eleven years old, I was once late for school. If I had had a note from home saying I would be late, there would have been no problem. However, I arrived letterless and was sent to the headmaster’s office for a caning.
The building was very old, and the office had a bare, wooden floor. Fortunately for me, there were some older boys who had also been late for school, and one of them hit on the idea of putting the headmaster’s collection of canes, of which he had at least half a dozen, through a gap between the floorboards so that they fell down into the cellar.
When the headmaster arrived to give us our well-deserved punishment, he was surprised - to put it mildly - that his precious canes had gone AWOL and were no longer in the umbrella stand which was their usual abode. Consequently, we were despatched to our classrooms, with the promise (or threat) that the headmaster would come and get us later that day. I was nervous for the rest of the day, but he never turned up.
“Getting caned” can also mean getting high on drugs, apparently, and the comedian Ali G (real name Sacha Baron Cohen) made use of this when interviewing the former education Secretary Sir Rhodes Boyson, who was clearly blissfully unaware of the second meaning of the expression.
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