The seven-year-old boy did not look forward to Fridays.

That was the day when the deputy head of his primary school in Edinburgh – "a skeletal-looking man with a Roman nose, a deathly pallor and deep-set eyes" – punished children who had misbehaved during the week.

A queue of boys formed in the corridor, waiting to be beaten. Their punishment consisted of six of the belt on one hand. Really badly behaved boys received six on each hand.

One Friday evening the boy's mother noticed a red weal disappearing right up his sleeve.

"What on earth is that?" she asked.

When told, she was furious. She confronted the school's head. (The boy's punishment, on this particular occasion, had been for him being unable to distinguish between "there" and "their".) The head promised he would tell his deputy to belt less. The mother also complained to the director of education, who apologised and confirmed that if belting went beyond the wrist, the teacher risked prosecution.

At about the same time, I was being regularly belted at my primary school in Aberdeen, though not as viciously. But most of the teachers were women, and their belting was, in truth, quite gentle. There was one male teacher who was reputed to be a sadist. He certainly belted far more than any of his colleagues, and with real ferocity. Looking back, I think that he was a very sick man.

The seven-year-old boy in Edinburgh learned later that his tormentor was not just a teacher; he was famous. He was a celebrated poet. He was also a professed pacifist who had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. His name was Norman MacCaig.

As for the beaten boy, he grew up to be, among many other things, a genuinely intrepid traveller in faraway and dangerous places. His name is Patrick Richardson, and his excellent travel writing has appeared in The Herald from time to time over the past 25 years. The account of his encounters with the violent MacCaig is taken from his forthcoming autobiography, which I've been reading in proof form.

The first point here is the obvious one; people are not always what they seem, particularly people with public profiles. You can be a distinguished, venerated writer and also a most unpleasant human being. We all understand this, in theory, but it can be distressing to come across specific evidence which proves the point.

A more important issue is that corporal punishment, while often abused, sometimes wickedly, did maintain discipline and order in our schools. It was an effective sanction.

When I was working in the early 1970s as an education journalist, the Scottish teaching profession was seriously and bitterly split over the proposed phasing out of corporal punishment. I sometimes tell young teachers now that this was the case, that many thousands of Scottish teachers were deeply reluctant to give up this particular sanction. The response is incredulity.

Many contemporary teachers cannot believe that so many in their profession were determined to keep, and to use, the belt. Yet by far the majority of these teachers were not sadists or hypocrites but humane, civilised and decent people.

The teachers who wanted to retain the belt expected that whatever alternative sanctions were offered would be completely inadequate.

Now that the belt, the tawse, the strap, the scud – and it had even more names which I won't mention – has been well and truly consigned to oblivion, it would be futile to demand its return, and I wouldn't wish that anyway, though I don't believe that it brutalised most of those who came into contact with it, both the punishers and the punished. There were undoubtedly exceptions, too many of them.

The question still remains, however, and I think it is ever more valid: have the teachers of today any meaningful sanctions at all with which to punish children who disrupt, misbehave and indeed make life a misery not just for their teachers but, worse, their fellow pupils?