The Principal

 If I were asked  to whom who I would assign the title 'The Most Frightening Person in my Childhood!' I have to admit that that question would need no time at all to answer, because first place would have to go to Mr. Waite, principal of the elementary school I attended from grades one through eight. The school itself was an imposing two story red brick structure. It had been built during the first decade of the 20^th century, in the neo-classic style prevalent at the time. Not to distant from my home, it was just a short walk, on a diagonal dirt path, across a large grassed playing field, and up a short, steep hill. Yet, it sometimes seemed a journey of miles through impossible terrain, each difficult step bringing me closer and closer to a prison for children, given over by their parents, into the hands of a malevolent ogre.

Memory has the principal a lurking evil, his eyes everywhere, tracking your every movement, every minute of the school day. Of course you knew that wasn't possible, yet everyone feared that with him it could be, teachers included. It seemed that wherever you went he was there: it was always him you bumped into as you skittered around a corner in the school yard; his, the cold eyes trained on you from some hidden doorway, watching and taking note as you hurried too quickly down the hallway; his sudden appearance, as you were about to head into a washroom, freezing your bladder. His signature was like stale cigarette smoke, a bad odor that lingered over everything.
He was known by all, teachers and students alike, as 'Old Creepy.' A sobriquet whispered only by the bravest, and then only behind his back, or at the bottom of the playground. Heaven help the student who couldn't keep his mouth shut and would foolishly relate some story about Old Creepy doing this, or Old Creepy saying that, and turn to find old 'speak of the devil' standing right behind him, spider ready, eyes as blazing and as terrifying as the entrance to Hell. He had this frightening knack of suddenly materializing next to a startled teacher as she chalked words or sums across the blackboard; never seeming to open doors, just appearing. He could fill a room with the same fear experienced by members of a congregation, when words vividly describing the torments of hell and damnation are blazed forth in some sulfurous sermon, delivered with joyous rapture, by a entranced Evangelical preacher.
With his long, thin, face, and  mouth as pinched as a Great Dane's anus, he gave the appearance of having spent his every breakfast sucking limes. The gray-green tinge to the white of his face emphasizing the truth of that belief. Also gray was his tweed jacket with it's leather patch elbows, which did little to hide the skeletal meagerness of his frame. I imagined his wardrobe holding no clothing of another color, just variations of gray. Pairs of undertaker gray trousers, dozens of gray shirts striped with dark charcoal-gray lines, and scores of gray, humdrum, leather elbowed jackets, the leather incongruously dark muddy brown. And lots of pairs of black shoes and storm cloud gray stockings which, on occasion, when he would perch himself like some carnivorous bird of prey on a stool in front of a class, showed the metal grips of his elastic garters – gray elastic garters.
What we all knew first hand - the grades one to seven fellows, seven being my year - was that his main pleasure in life was applying his beloved ( tornado gray) leather strap across the posteriors of young boys. He had honed his skills by relentlessly lambasting the tender backsides of as many as he could drag into his office - aka The Dungeon - in one day. Girls never faced that particular disciplinary action. For them it was lines; and not too many for the poor delicate things. A day never came to an end without at least one unfortunate boy called into his office, ordered to bend over the large desk that dominated the room and forced to hear his painful sentence proclaimed in a terrifying sepulchral bellow - surprising in such a bony body - so that anyone walking down the hall, playing in the grounds, or standing head cocked outside the door, could hear what degree of punishment was to be meted out to the unfortunate miscreant. A moment later, after the number of lashes to be suffered was announced, the hard brutal strokes of the thick leather strap, slapping against the material covering the victims delicate pink rear, would be heard; the stinging blows almost always followed by a painful cry or a shocked gasp and sharp intake of air. One, uh, two, uh, three, uh, four, uh, five. . . never less than five, almost always eight, more if Mr. Waite were excited enough. The remembered brightness blazing from his eyes more frightening than the actual strapping. There were times, when he really got into it, when we knew the bums would be redder, the welts thicker, the pain more severe and lasting.
It was like being in a fraternity to say you had been belted by Old Creepy. You belonged, you had brothers. At the back of the school, in a stairwell leading into the boy's basement washroom, a gathering of the previous tormented congregated regularly to hear the latest victim tell of his ordeal. Trading degrees of suffering with other unfortunates and working through ideas on how to circumvent the worst of the pain was the order of the day. Sucking in the glutes to tighten the muscles against the descending blows was always deemed the best that could be done. Stuffing your pants with newspaper was the worst. Old Creepy could tell when the first blow struck that something was hidden beneath the cloth, and Jesus help the poor miscreant. Down would come the pants, the last remnant of protection, the paper removed, and at least two brutal swipes across the bared buttocks would be delivered. Lustily, bordering on lecherously, could perfectly describe the motive behind the blows.
He only used this form of exorcism on the younger ones, he shied away from the grade eights, especially the guys who were extra big for their age. Everyone, especially himself, remembered the vicious attack on a teacher a couple of years earlier. The teacher, a Miss Blackwell, had dragged by the ear, a huge, dim witted, aggressive student into the cloakroom behind her desk, to give him a few licks of the strap, her standard punishment for any child who dared disrupt her class, and which this oaf managed to make a daily habit. This time, only a moment after they disappeared from view a horrendous scream burst through the expectant silence of the classroom. A scream that frightened the bjeezus out of everyone within hearing distance. The term 'blood curdling' was a phrase often  used by us kids, especially when a time like Halloween invited its use, but the phrase was now made incarnate by the sounds that tore from the cloakroom, and down the spine of every child, and anyone else within hearing distance. The overgrown birdbrain had pulled the strap out of the teachers hand, turned it against her, beat her senseless, and nearly kicked her to death with his steel-toed boots. Boots worn to impress impressionable children.
Students poured from their desks, running around like decapitated chickens, hysteria suffocating them as the room filled with the stink of fear. Hoping to escape the screams and thuds coming from the cloakroom, they began, in some collective survival decision, a mad rush to escape the classroom, only to wedge themselves in the room's doorway, creating a pile up of bodies as each child attempted to be the first one out. Fortunately two male teachers arrived, forcibly pushed the traumatized swarm back into the room, and rescued the brutalized teacher.
The unfortunate Miss Blackwell was laid up for months from the vicious attack. When she finally returned to her classroom, it was necessary for her, forced by her injuries, to sit with one leg propped up on a small stool. She never again walked without a limp, and Mr. Waite never again meted out woodshed punishment on the big kids.
My first, and only, face to face encounter with Old Creepy came the year a record snow fall fulfilled every child's wish. The school yard was feet deep in that wonderful element and snowmen, igloos and high walled forts popped up all over the playground. Tons of snow just waited to be turned into wonderful objects; battlements and such. A warning edict was delivered from the Headmaster's office and posted in all the classrooms and on corridor walls, cautioning that any child caught throwing snow balls near the school would be punished severely – girls excepted; they would be subjected to a double number of lines. The grade eight boys would be kept in after school, every day for two weeks, and given sums that had to be completed without error, before they would be allowed to leave for home. What would be done to the younger boys was left unsaid. We all knew.
Those of us who reveled in snowball fights, kept ourselves well away from the school building, As far away as possible, that is, but the playground itself was in very close proximity to the front of the main entrance. We tried. but, unfortunately the best laid plans of rambunctious boys are often sabotaged by zeal. Completely wrapped up in a snowball war we had devised, I threw the arresting word 'caution' to the winds whilst chasing one of my friends. Totally without regard as to the direction in which he was headed, I boldly tossed a solidly packed white cannonball at his retreating back. Oh! Boy! It sailed straight at him, a perfect shot! Perfect that is until, at the last moment, he turned, looked back, saw it coming, and ducked. I was gobsmacked, then horrified, as I watched the forbidden object fly uselessly past him to smack solidly into the cement foundation of the school - directly below the principals office. Blood drained from my face, and my lungs emptied, as though a fist had been driven into my gut. Pale with fear I lifted my eyes to the tell-all window above me, to pale even further when I saw a gray-white face, skewed into the cruelest smile I could ever have imagined, staring down at me. A long, thin finger moved into view, and beckoned me.
I sleep walked. I was going to the gallows. I could hardly place one foot in front of the other. Hauling myself up the school stairs I could feel the mesmerized stillness of the students standing around, watching. Frozen faces, a multitude of expressions, followed each lugubrious step. Eyes flicked back and forth, from my tragic figure, to the grinning face of the principal.
It must have looked as though I were truly going to my death. I almost believed I was. I wasn't a particularly brave kid, not yet old enough to have learned what bravery entailed. Though I might have been unable to stop tears in another situation, I held them back now. For as I climbed the stairs, past friends and classmates, an inborn sense that what was to come was some necessary rite of passage. Whatever it was, I felt, somehow, that a milestone had been reached in my life. The child, me, cautiously but boldly, was stepping into the shoes of the man he was to become. At that moment, this frightened, fledgling adult, made a decision: neither Old Creepy, nor my classmates, were going to see tears of fear in my eyes. I was no longer the person who had followed that beckoning finger, he vanished the moment I put my foot on the top stair. How those forbidden tears struggled with my new found strength, their flood held proudly back, but never far below the surface.
As I knocked at the office door, frightened of the pain I would have to endure, I was conscious of a growing stillness taking place inside of me. It seemed as though a safe place were being prepared, a place where I would find the courage to be strong. I prayed it would stay and keep me inviolate in the presence of this terrible man.
A voice, finger nails on a blackboard, called out for me to enter.
Glowering, he stood behind his desk, missing only his executioner's hood to complete the picture he made. His winter gray eyes, like magnets, pulled me to him. As I shuffled to the desk he slapped his hands together as though to begin a prayer, but instead confessed, with his tight assed voice, that he was 'pleased, very pleased', that it was me he had 'captured'. 
I was not a goody-goody, I simply didn't like confrontation. I had decided, even as a small child, that I would do my best not to get into trouble with anyone in authority, would always do my schoolwork, and get it done on time. I never realized until that moment that Old Creepy hated me. I was one of the few boys who had not suffered at his hands, therefore I had in some way outwitted him. And now I was his.
He asked if I had read the notices, notices that had been posted all over the school, and if I so why hadn't I heeded their warning? Everything so plainly stated, so exact, so clear not even an idiot could have misunderstood them. If I had read them why had I done exactly what had been strictly forbidden? I made no answer.
He blazed! Whatever fires of evil fueled him were intensified by my refusal to respond to his questioning. Scurrying around to the front off the desk he spun me around, grabbed both my arms, squeezed them across my stomach, wrapped his arms tightly around me and forcibly pushed me backwards onto the desk. He then pressed his mouth against my ear. I was terrified, it felt as though he were kissing me. Settling himself, he lay motionless along the length of me, the pressure of his body heavy on mine, His lips, brushed along the outer edge of my ear, his breath fetid as old wet socks, sickened me. I tried to pull away but his skinny arms gripped like a vice, the more I struggled the harder he squeezed. After what seemed forever, he whispered that what he was about to do would 'hurt him more than it would me'. I've never forgotten the sound in his voice as he said it, and how my gut tightened at his asinine remark.
Moving quickly, as though anticipating a pleasure that could not be delayed, he pulled me up, forced me forward over the desk, shoved my hands across my stomach and reached for his weapon of choice; the sinister gray strap, with which he had reddened and welted countless soft, young bottoms. Now it was my turn. Though appearing thin and weak his arms possessed the strength to deal blows of amazing force. Like one possessed he flailed me. At one point during the ordeal I wrenched my hands out and attempted to cover my stinging bum, to force a stop, and hold back the beating, but he brutally smacked the strap across the palms, drawing blood and, almost, my struggling tears. I counted each stinging stroke, determined not to cry out, desperate for him to stop. I was sure that when he reached ten he would. But he went past ten. Then eleven, and I began to struggle, for my life. I was now convinced he was planning to kill me. With each blow he struck his body had pushed into mine, my agonized squirming goading him on. Giggling, he pulled back and for a moment I believed him done, but he struck at me again, a twelfth, harder and more vicious than any of the others.
Still holding me down, his stance that of a vanquishing warrior, he continued to swish the strap back and forth through the air as though it were a whip. But the beating was done, the brutal lambasting ended. Yet it was obvious he had to force himself to end the torture, not because he wanted to, but because he had to. He had already gone too far, and he knew it, as did I.
My backside burned like the fires of hell, and my thighs stung as though a colony of hornets had used them for dive bombing practice. The worst pain came from cuts sustained when the edge of the strap missed its mark and landed cruel blows across the backs of my legs, leaving bloody welts. I was thirteen. Boys wore short pants in those days.
Suddenly grabbing my hair, Creepy yanked me up, and pushed his face into mine. The sudden sharp pain that screamed across my scalp blurred my vision for a moment and caused his face to appear, in its nearness, as though it were liquid: one moment a smiling mask of evil pleasure; next a painted face of pain, and always his eyes moved back and forth across my face, searching. For what? Then he was still.
Though no sound had been made by either of us, a silence so complete that even our breathing seemed to be stilled, moved in, and held the two of us. As if it were he who had summoned the silence, Old Creepy closed his eyes, pulled himself up, drew in a quick, sharp breath and looked down at me with such affection that I was filled with a terror that left me shaking. Then, gently, and oh so slowly, he turned me around, and knelt onto the floor behind me. For a moment there was no movement, nothing, then with such softness that for one strange moment I imagined a feather had brushed across my back, he lay his hands on my burning wounds. Impossible, his touch, so unreal in its delicateness, flowing liquid like, over my back.. And his fingers? Caressing drops of gentle rain dancing across my buttocks, and along my welted thighs. Then, with tiny pats, as though he were placing gentle kisses upon my wounds he touched each swollen cheek twelve times. Once for every stroke of the strap? The episode was so bizarre. The soft careful manner in which his ugly hands and crooked fingers touched my body frightened me almost as much as the vicious beating I had endured.
Finally, the moment I began to believe would never come arrived. Pulling me up onto my feet, he again sought in my face that which he could not find. Then, in a flash he was the Headmaster once again, meting out punishment to the transgressor. Spinning me around, he jabbed his fingers into my back and shoved me towards the door.
Opening it, I hobbled painfully into the hall and elbowed my way through the many students crowding outside Old Creepy's office. It was written clearly on their faces what they were thinking. Why - you could sense them wondering - though they had counted each blow, had there been only empty silence before the next one fell? Everyone had expected me to come out weeping, especially as they had all counted the impossible number. Yes, I had survived twelve brutal blows, but to no one would I show a single tear. They would come, oh they would come, but only in the comforting solace of my own room at home.
As I moved through a silent phalanx of students and staff that had congregated in the hall outside the office, I became aware of not having  heard the office door close. I turned, and glanced back. Old Creepy was still there, standing in the doorway, looking out at me, but, I could tell he was not seeing me. What he did see I will never know. But what I remember about his face at that moment were the tears. Yes, tears, I swear I saw them. I had shed none, so why had he? I watched them move slowly down his pallid, sunken cheeks, past lips no longer puckered. And there, another change. The sour-lime scrunch of his mouth had morphed into a flat lifeless line across the bottom of his face. The tragic smile of a heart broken clown - a knife slash, across a gray-white shroud.

                                               A schoolroom from past days
Story Copyright ©2010 by Gordon Wales. All Rights Reserved.