ABSTRACT
Our social behaviour is regulated by rules. Some of these are explicit. The grammar school that I attended as a pupil, for example, had a printed list of rules, rather like the Ten Commandments in tone. The last one of these I still remember as ‘a breach of good manners is a breach of a school rule’. I remember it largely, I suspect, because it was not until the third year that I understood what ‘breach’ meant. I was perplexed, too, by another rule. This stated that if a pupil cut his finger while performing some woodworking task, then he would receive a ‘signature’ in his ‘prep book’. Signatures (the initials of the person awarding them —a member of staff or a prefect) were marks for bad conduct. If you collected three in a week, you lost a ‘merit’ holiday (a free half-day); if you were unfortunate enough to assemble two lots of three, you were caned by the Headmaster. On one occasion I cut my finger rather badly while making creative use of the chisel in fashioning a dove-tailed joint out of a knotty piece of wood. I was hoisted on to the work-bench by the teacher, the finger was displayed to the rest of the class, and a double signature ceremoniously entered into my prep book. As luck would have it, this completed a set of three to add to another set already completed for various ‘breaches’. I was duly caned as the law prescribed.
