The Spanking Writers

Most of the time schoolboy humour is lost on me, but I did have a giggle at this correction in the Guardian:

Oh dear. Even by our own exacting standards, managing to spell Penistone as Penistown was a bit of a cock-up.

I can see little blue-haired ladies blushing as they fill in the address on their postcards…

How about this for another Project Gutenberg find? The lack of much-merited spankings in Susan Coolidge’s “What Katy Did At School” is more than compensated for with this one adorable scene involving the new girls:

Katy held her watch up to the dim light. She could just see the hands. Yes: they pointed to six. It was actually morning! She and Clover jumped up, and began to dress as fast as possible.

“We’ve only got half an hour,” said Clover, unhooking the rules, and carrying them to the window,–”Half an hour; and this says that we must turn the mattress, smooth the under-sheet over the bolster, and spend five minutes in silent devotion! We’ll have to be quick to do all that besides dressing ourselves!”

It is never easy to be quick, when one is in a hurry. Every thing sets itself against you. Fingers turn into thumbs; dresses won’t button, nor pins keep their place. With all their haste, Katy and Clover were barely ready when the second bell sounded. As they hastened downstairs, Katy fastening her breast-pin, and Clover her cuffs, they met other girls, some looking half asleep, some half dressed; all yawning, rubbing their eyes, and complaining of the early hour.

No spankings, as I said: the fictional teacher’s strap remained firmly in the desk drawer. Not in my dreams, dear Katy; not in my dreams.

Yesterday I needed a book to last me on a long train journey, and I picked up a fantasy: “Firethorn” by Sarah Micklem.* And what do I find on Page 8?

The girl called Luck is a servant in a manor house:

They gave me simple tasks: sweeping and scouring, combing the fringe on carpets, emptying slops. I was always running off and leaving things half done, always distracted. Na would make me fetch a willow wand for the beating I was due. Afterward she’d soothe me and call me her own little Luck.

Short and sweet, and made so much better by the little things like having to go fetch the rod, and the hugs in the end.

It’s not so hard to make a perv like me happy, really. Just one paragraph usually does it.

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* I don’t know whether I recommend it or not yet: I’m only about 50 pages in. It’s not the greatest work of modern fantasy, but it’s nice enough.