My name is Kevin Pettifer. I am just twenty-five years old. I am a regular sailor in the Royal Navy, which I joined as a cadet when I was eighteen years old and in which I now hold the non-commissioned rank of Petty Officer: Petty Officer Pettifer! I have just been promoted to this rank and posted to what seems like my dream job: chief physical education instructor and disciplinarian on board the special cadet training ship, H.M.T.S. Great Endeavour. I should tell you that we are in the year 2027, some seven years after the British government, now free of the smothering rules of the European Community, thanks to the 2016 Brexit vote, decided to reintroduce corporal punishment into British schools and the Armed Forces of the U.K.
So as you might imagine, the cane had been immediately and enthusiastically re-adopted as an old and reliable friend by the Royal Navy, where it was considered as quite the best means of disciplining its younger ratings and cadets. In fact, how they had managed without it in those intervening "molly-coddler, do-gooder" years when its use had been forbidden by law, no one could understand. In a word, it really was a return to "the good old days" when cadets and ratings knew their manners and were generally respectful to their senior officers; except, of course, when they weren't and as a result finished up with very sore arses.
By the year 2027, when I received my promotion and joined the non-commissioned officer class, the , and to some extent , the birch, had been in regular use for several years, much to the discomfort of many young cadets, who found themselves, all too frequently in their view, ordered to offer up their naked arses to be beaten. This was an entirely new experience for most lads and a very unpleasant one to boot. As the use of the cane had been abolished from schools well before most of them had been born, they had never known what strict corporal punishment was like; in fact, they had never known what any kind of corporal punishment was like. So joining the Navy as a trainee cadet was, for most of them, like jumping into a bath of ice-cold water. But, as one senior Admiral had remarked at the time, the re-introduction of corporal punishment was one of the few sensible decisions taken by any British Government in years.
So as chief disciplinarian on-board ship, I am the person who, on a regular basis, wields both the cane, and occasionally the birch; and as many recipients of my largesse could tell you, I really am very good at my job. Most lads whose naked arses I have just thrashed go away feeling rather sorry for themselves, vowing to toe the line in future; but, luckily for me, for I really do enjoy thrashing a well rounded naked arse, in spite their good intentions, many of them do come back for more; in fact, to be more accurate, I should have said that they are brought back for more, for no cadet ever volunteers to have his backside beaten.
But first let me backtrack a number of years and tell you how I, a lower working-class lad from Bradford, for long a depressed and depressing industrial city in the North of England, came to be in the Royal Navy.
I was born early in the new century in the year 2001; an only child, I was totally neglected by my parents; I barely knew my mother as she ran off with another man when I was about six or seven, leaving me with a drunken, drug-addict for a father. In fact it was probably his drinking which drove her away. Anyway, my father and I lived - if you can call it living - in one of those dreadful tower blocks, which municipal councils in so many towns around the country had built as "social housing". Viewed in retrospect there was nothing social about it; antisocial would have been a better term. Such vertical constructions, often of more than a hundred, miserable, tiny apartments, came later to be viewed as a misguided attempt to clear what had been considered as slums: often streets and streets of inadequate terraced houses. But in erecting the faceless tower blocks which so dominate everything, they very effectively turned what had been horizontal slums made up of small one-family houses, where at least there had been some human contact with the neighbours, into faceless vertical slums where no one knew anyone and which, after a few years, became so vandalised and run down that no-one wanted to live there.
As the years went by, the block in which we lived became more and more dilapidated as the cheap construction began to show its age. This was not helped by the fact that the walls in the corridors were defaced with graffiti pretty well everywhere; lifts did not work half the time and what with men and youths urinating anywhere and everywhere, the whole place stank to high heaven; it was hard to think of anyone calling their flat a home. And I might add that our block was typical of countless others around the country, in which living conditions became totally untenable; so much so that many blocks were finally demolished.
Not that we ever had much home life, my father and I; he was mainly either drunk or under the influence of some drug or other; so half the time I think that he was totally unaware I was still living there. Communal meals with my father had long become a thing of the past and I was usually left to fend for myself, cobbling together something by way of a meal from whatever food my father had bought; often there was nothing at all to eat in the house after he had been on a blinder; so I just lived on takeaways. it is not surprising that as time passed and I grew older, I became increasingly disgusted not only with the hell-hole in which we lived, but also with my own father who did not lift a finger to try to maintain any reasonable standard of daily living.