The Spanking Writers

We had a friend staying with us for the first time,* and, being the good hosts that we are, Abel and I decided it would be nice to take her sight-seeing.** After lunch we had planned a cathedral tour, and she and I were approaching it with a spring in our steps and some chewing-gum in our mouths.

I don’t think Abel approves of chewing-gum very much, although he doesn’t ban it, and even indulgently buys it for me.*** And now he discovered that he had not one, but two gum chewers on his hands. As we were approaching the grand cathedral doors, he told us that it wasn’t appropriate to chew gum in a cathedral, and to spit it out immediately.

I, being a wimp, tossed mine in the bin at once. Our friend, being cheeky, made big eyes and asked:

“What’s wrong with gum in a cathedral?”

“The cathedral is the house of God,” Abel explained in a slightly dangerous voice. “God doesn’t like chewing-gum. Spit it out, now.”

For a very frightening moment I thought she was actually going to spit it at Abel, but luckily she’s a polite girl, to an extent. She only said:

“Does it matter that I’m an atheist, sir?”

Feeling bad for my own earlier cowardice,**** I added:

“It’s her own gum, sir. She bought it. It’s her property. Why should she spit it out?”

Quietly getting to the boil (you can tell by the narrowing of his eyes), Abel too our friend by the shoulder and led her to the nearest bin:

“Somebody you don’t believe in disapproves of chewing-gum in his house. Bin, now.”

She made a great show of pretending to take it out, but then finally, encouraged by the squeezing of fingers on her shoulder and by the dangerous squinting of eyes in front of her, she got rid of the gum.

So you see, no spanking happened at that time. Because either we’re very cowardly, or Abel is very scary.

But we are still unclear on this fundamental issue: does God really disapprove of chewing-gum in church? If so, why? If not, how can we claim our gum back?

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* feel free to identify yourself if you want!
** as nice as staring at the carpet all weekend is, we do allow our guests to go outside
*** if you felt like giving me a present, Marks&Spencer’s berry-flavoured is a current favourite
**** or, perhaps, inherent wisdom

The web is littered with discussion boards featuring threads on corporal punishment. Many of the entries are clearly works of fantasy; that said, the entertaining fictional interludes come with the added frisson that they might – just – be genuine.

Take the following, from Scarlett, a poster on The Answer Bank:

My school had a cane, and it was very rarely used – but the fact that it was there acted as a deterrent…. In fact I only remember it being used once, on a girl (!) who set a fire extinguisher off. Everyone in the school was SO shocked that the cane was finally being used, we didn’t dare BREATHE next to a fire extinguisher after that!

I can just imagine Haron breathing on fire extinguishers wherever we go in the next few days, just to show off her bravery…

There are some new blogs in town, and I think you should know about them.

“Ted’s Excellent Adventures” is by, well, by Ted. You might have read his stories on Laura’s Spanking Corner, so he is quite the classic author, you know. Ted is also a long-time poster on the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup, which has long been our Internet home.

Kate’s Spanking Journal is written by Katherine James, also a poster on soc.sexuality.spanking. She hasn’t been there long, but has already shown herself to be an excellent writer and a pleasant human being, which is not a bad thing to be. Oh, and she’s a cheerleader. Cool, huh? I’m looking forward to reading what she has to say.

Lavender from Oklahoma has a MySpace page, on which her friend Theresa recorded an interesting comment on 19 August:

yeah that fun hanging out after school and you eating all of the popsicles..lol..and i do remember when amber got whipped by my mom with the belt..those were good memories and i will always remember them.

Perhaps not so good for Amber? Anyway, Lavender replies on Theresa’s site later the same day:

love you and I am glad we shared those memories too…we need to share more…haaha…Amber getting whipped…just over the water hose…that was so so soooo hillarious…and then once your mom chased you around the house too with the belt…hahaha…love you…

Amber joins the conversation, but strangely, makes no reference to the whipping when she comments the following day, merely complimenting one of the girls on a photo. What a shame!

We were innocently driving through Norwich city centre when I cried: “Spank Student! Oh my god, there, there, look!”

“Pardon?” Abel, conveniently pausing at the lights, gave me a confused look. Our friend who was with us in the car was similarly puzzled. Of course, we had been talking about spanking just moments before, but for once the conversation had nothing to do with students.

“No, you’re not looking!” I stuck a finger at the window. “There, on the left, where I’m pointing!”

Abel looked and cried: “Oh my god!”

Our friend looked and cried: “Oh my god!”

Here’s what we saw. On the wall of the building we were driving past there stretched a great yellow banner, which said (in big, clear letters visible even in winter dusk):

SPANK STUDENT

And underneath, very helpfully: spankstudent.com

There was no hint as to what this was actually advertising – a shop? a newspaper? a bar? a national campaign for the introduction of corporal punishment in universities?

Not that it matters, but it’s a chain of clubs (the dancing and booze kind, not the fetish kind), which appears to run discos in several UK towns. The origins of the name are not at all obvious from their home page, though their logo is unequivocal:

You can get merchandise with that picture, you know. Not the hottest spanking pic on the web, but you can’t be picky about what sort of spanking references you catch in the wild just by driving around.

My ears pricked wandering past a gaggle of gossipers in the office first thing this morning, as one of the ladies commented, “He kept giving me that Headmaster look all day. You know?”

No, I don’t: care to enlighten me? Is that the “I’ve seen what you’re doing” look? The “I’ll deal with you later” look? The “I understand I’ll be seeing you in my office at lunchtime”, or the “Ah, there you are”?

The “Feigned surprise at the severity of your misdeeds”, the “I’m disappointed in you”, the “You’d better not argue with me?” Or the “I’m now going to hurt you” or the “I wonder how you’re going to take this?” or the “Averting my eyes, up to a point” as the girl adjusts her uniform for punishment?

Perhaps it was the unseen look: from behind, the girl bent over, feeling his eyes on her. The concentration as he measured the cane, the smile of satisfaction at the quality of his ever-so-precise handiwork?

Or the “I wonder if that got through to her”, the “I know you’re not really a bad girl” – and the genuine, re-assuring “I hope this is our last such encounter” combined with the “Intrigued as to whether you will ever be back for more”.

Perhaps I should go over and ask her for clarification?

Yesterday afternoon I had the dubious pleasure of returning home by bus at about the time local schools send their pupils home. In the absence of organised transportation for schoolkids in England, at about 4pm every day the local bus effectively turns into a school bus.

I can’t fault the kids’ behaviour, really: they were on the whole a pleasant bunch, it’s just there were so many of them, in their variously coloured school ties, with huge folders pressed to their chests, chatting over the heads of other bus passengers. It was a little cramped.

To distract myself, I imagined I was on a different school bus entirely: as a middle-school girl on an organised field trip to a museum, for example. My best friend had a cold and was forced to stay behind, and nobody wants to sit with me or talk with me, and all the snooty six-formers are behaving as though the whole thing is beneath them… I just know that in a few minutes this cauldron will boil over, at which point the supervising prefect will snap: “That’s it! I’m reporting the lot of you to Dr. Jenkins the moment we’re back!” And we will all get caned – even though I’m doing nothing wrong, I’m telling you, nothing!..

Lost as I was in this fantasy, I didn’t fail to notice one of the girls take her tie off her neck and wrap it around her forehead instead, hippy headband-style. In my school, on my bus, one of my fantasy schoolgirls would know better.

In an exclusive scoop, The Mail reveals that “Liz Hurley was rumoured to have demanded £80,000 just to turn up at the Moet & Chandaon [sic] party in New York”. The paper explained:

‘Moet confirmed that Hurley had been paid but declined to say how much. “As a rule we don’t pay celebrities to attend events,” he said. “However in the US it is an industry norm to contribute towards costs and expenses to the artist when the artist is co-hosting a function.”‘

Now, Ms Hurley has long been rumoured to share tastes not dissimilar to those of readers here – and not just in respect of enjoying the occasional indulgent glass of champagne.

So, I’m thinking that we might organise a spanking party, and invite her along. I’ll chip in the first five pounds: all we now need is another 15,999 readers to do the same.

Why do you think Reverend Mitchinson, the former Headmaster of King’s School in Canterbury, was particularly suited for his following job as the Bishop of Barbados (at least, according to one of his pupils)?

Because there “the canes grow wild and the boys wear no breeches”. Smooth, huh?

This guy was, apparently, so vicious that he caused what has become known in the history of King’s School as The Rebellion, described in “Imps of Promise: A History of the King’s School, Canterbury” by Thomas Hinde:

“Eventually there was rebellion. Mitchinson’s apparently frank account of this claims that it began with ‘a piece of insubordinate rudeness’ by a boy, ‘C’ to a monitor, Kearney. When Kearney next morning licked ‘C,’ several days of anti-monitor rioting followed, in which Mitchinson did not intervene, until he heard that the boys had been singing the Marseillaise and provisioning the hall (their dayroom) against a siege.

Then, to simplify, he ordered the expulsion of four ringleaders and the flogging of thirty more, seven each day during the following week. The first seven had been flogged when Mitchinson received confirmation of his appointment as Bishop of Barbados, and made this the reason for declaring an amnesty.”

(Nicked from the family history page made by a descendant of the boy ‘C’/John Crerar.)

My most recent story imagined circumstances in which a University student had to return to her old school to be caned. I named the school St. Christina’s and – with due thanks to the Vatican – I ought to explain why:

St. Christina was the daughter of a rich and powerful magistrate named Urbain. Her father, who was deep in the practices of heathenism, had a number of golden idols, which our saint destroyed, and distributed the pieces among the poor.

Infuriated by this act, Urbain became the persecutor of his daughter. He had her whipped with rods and then thrown into a dungeon.

It gets gruesome from there on in, as most tales of martyrdom do; her relics now lie in Palermo in Sicily, if you ever happen to be in the area.

By the way, St. Christina’s feast day is on 24 July – put the date in your diary, in case you feel the need to whip anyone in celebration.