In connection to yesterday’s Punishment Book post by Abel, I’m compelled to tell you about a role-play I invented for myself when I was about 10 years old.

My aunt, who was a teacher, often brought “spoiled” forms from her school for me to play with; rather than be tossed in the bin, they were my sketchbooks and notepads. Once she brought an empty class register: a thick book with spaces for names, subjects, contact details in the back, teachers’ notes, the work. A secretary had made a mistake filling it in before the year started, and it was dismissed as unusable.

Unusable by the school, perhaps. But not me. I tore out the offending pages, and began to run a school of my own.

I came up with 35 names, boys and girls, and listed them in my best hand. I invented the subjects they studied, and their teachers names, and their marks. And in the form where the teacher would normally record homework for the following time, I kept a punishment book. The school was set in the future, after corporal punishment had returned.
Don’t ask me where I’d got the idea: at the age of 10, I was inventing the wheel, and adjusting it to my own headspace. As far as I was concerned, this was the most wonderful game in the world: to list names, and offences, and the punishments they suffered.

There were never any particular details; these were in my head, in case anybody found my book and questioned my strict running of the imaginary classroom. I had “Sokol, Anna - tardiness - 10.” (Strokes of the birch, of course.) Detention featured as well, though not much else, I stuck to what I thought would be reasonably used. In my head, though, I had entire stories, with lengthy dialogues (the begging; the scolding), additional punishments (a boy kneels in the corner, holding the birch: I’d read that one in a book), colours and sounds. It was a whole world.

Since then, every time I come across a real punishment book, I can’t help imagining the world behind it, with its own colours, sounds and stories. A simple list of names can send me on a adventure in an imaginary school, with its imaginary rules. If the book is authentic and detailed, all the better, but it doesn’t matter: a world grows around it all on its own, without much help from me.

…I think I destroyed my original punishment book in a fit of horror, when I found out that my spanking addiction could be seen as a sexual perversion. When you’re sixteen, you don’t want to be a pervert. Maybe some other books survived, though; I was never any good in cleaning. I’d love to know for sure what I’d written.

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