In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the sainted Tom Hanks has issued an edict commanding all men to “pipe down” and simply listen to women. At the risk of excommunication, however, I can’t help feeling there ought to be a place for me too in #metoo – the social media movement for women who claim to have been sexually assaulted or harassed. Like the French women who are using Twitter to #BalanceTonPorc, I have an irresistible urge to name my pig.

He was D.J. Coulson, headmaster of Collyer's School, Horsham – the direct-grant grammar school I attended in the 1950s.

Coulson was addicted to thrashing boys’ bottoms with bamboo canes and lashed them so violently that the skin almost broke and the weals and bruises lasted for weeks, gradually fading from black and blue to red, pink and yellow. Out of a school of 600 boys, at least one a week was subjected to these sadistic barbarities which Coulson inflicted irrationally, unjustly and arbitrarily and for which any perpetrator would certainly be imprisoned today. Along with groups of friends, I was twice on the receiving end.