The Spanking Writers

“What were you supposed to remind me?” Abel said to Martha. She looked completely blank and slightly flustered. I couldn’t help her: whatever he’d asked her to remember, I wasn’t there when it happened.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I don’t know!” Martha squeaked.

“Fine,” he walked over to the arm-chair, where a couple of canes were hanging by their crooks, left over from our scene the day before. “Bend over the couch, I’m going to cane you until you remember what it was.”

I suppose, I could have been more sympathetic at my friend’s predicament, but I couldn’t help giggling. In a horrified sort of way. Martha, growing more and more flustered, bent over the arm of the sofa. “Hold her hands,” Abel told me – and I did. More to offer her comfort than to hold her down, because she’s a brave girl, and doesn’t leap about during a caning anything as much as I do.

“Can you remember what it was yet?” asked Abel, tapping the cane across the seat of her jeans.

“No!” she moaned. “Was it about… er… No, I can’t remember!”

“Let’s see if I can remind you.” He aimed, drew the cane back and delivered a single, solid whack.

“Oww!” Martha squeezed my hands tight. “Ouch! Binoculars! You wanted to remember to take binoculars when we go out tomorrow!”

“Good girl.” Abel sounded delighted. “See? See how the cane focuses your mind?”

We all laughed, and he departed into the kitchen, while Martha and I shared a commiserating cuddle.

“From now on you could use ‘binoculars’ as the answer to anything,” she said. “Anything you ever forget. ‘Do you have anything to say, young lady?’ ‘Binoculars’!”

I think it’s as good an answer to the main question of life, the universe and everything, as any.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that Abel has now received practical proof that to get the answer to life, the universe and everything is to give somebody a good old whack with the cane.

Diarist Samuel Pepys was not a happy man on this day in 1663. His brother had helped to find him a new servant girl:

“she told my wife her name was Jinny, by which name we shall call her. I think a good likely girl, and a parish child of St. Bride’s, of honest parentage, and recommended by the churchwarden.”

Unfortunately, within the day, his judgement had been shown to be incorrect:

“This evening the girle that was brought to me to-day for so good a one, being cleansed of lice this day by my wife, and good, new clothes put on her back, she run away from Goody Taylour that was shewing her the way to the bakehouse, and we heard no more of her.”

The following day, Pepys dined at his brother’s house and

“told him how my girl has served us which he sent me, and directed him to get my clothes again, and get the girl whipped.”

First, catch your girl. The local parish constable obliged, and:

“at home I find my girl that run away brought by a bedel of St. Bride’s Parish”.

He had obviously decided to be lenient however. Pepys merely:

“stripped her and sent her away.”

I suppose this classes as a happy ending.

In a recent post, I told tale of headmasterial canings at The Victoria Institution, Malaysia’s leading school. Another fascinating episode comes to light in the 1950 edition of the school magazine, touching the heart of one of my recurrent fantasies.

I sat in the headmaster’s office alone, trying to calm myself, when the headmaster came in and said; “You are accepted into the School”.

“Thank you sir.” I replied.

“Well, you will be the only girl among nine-hundred boys here”, he said with a smile.

“I – I don’t mind, sir,” I stammered uncertainly.

…Just then, the bell rang for the interval and immediately, the corridor was filled with the sounds of heavy footsteps, droning voices and laughter. How I wished I could hide in the office then! In spite of my mounting fears, I managed to get myself into the library, where a host of eyes stared at me alarmingly from every direction. Since this was the first time in the history of the V.I. that a girl was enrolled as a student, the news soon spread, like wild fire, through the School.

Oh, how I wonder whether she had to make a return trip to the Headmaster’s office!

The email I got from Abel a few days ago (copied also to our friend Martha, who is coming up for the weekend):

School notice – [Name of our village] Academy

Girls are notified that there will be a full uniform inspection by their housemaster at 4.30pm this coming Saturday.

Any recent misconduct reported by other masters at the school will also be discussed at this time.

Hmm, my bottom is twitching just a bit…

Haron took a pretty hard thrashing from a friend recently.

Actually, strike that. Haron took quite the hardest caning I’ve ever seen her get. Stripped, tied in position, an improbable number of strokes laid on in rapid succession at full strength from a hard, experienced, unforgiving player

Whilst I stood silently to the side, and watched.

Interest experience, that, observing one’s beloved taking such a severe, relentless whacking. The flogging had been long-anticipated: her sentence pronounced by email, the date fixed, the event anticipated with dread curiosity.

My natural instincts, of course, were to rush to protect my girl – especially once she started to struggle. To really struggle.

Yet I didn’t. I just watched. Saw her writhe, heard her cry out. Observed as he took her into a deep, dark, beaten place.

And then – soon, yet an eternity after starting – he finished: the binds came off, and I could comfort her. Tell her how beautiful she’d looked, how brave she’d been. Held her especially tight. Re-assured; soothed; admired her stripes. And before very long she was bouncing around as usual, a quite spectacular set of marks and a wincing reluctance to sit down the only visible evidence of her recent ordeal.

(Abel is away; he has clearly been watching nubile young ladies opening their exam results on hotel television. Here’s what he emailed me this morning.)

“Your father would like to see you in his study now.”

The butler escorts her, knocking politely on the door.

She enters. The heavy door is closed behind her.

He sits at the far end of the room, behind his desk.

There, in front of him, the crisp unopened envelope containing her results.

Next to the envelope, a cane. And a bottle of champagne.

“I do so hope that we will be able to *celebrate*, my dear.”

He takes the antique silver letter-opener, carefully slices open the envelope. He reads the results, raising an eyebrow, then looks up at her…

My desk calendar claims that today is 30 years since the death of Elvis.* A clipping I’ve kept from one of the pile of papers I’ve read recently has this letter:

In 1956, the year when Elvis Presley’s extraordinary talent burst upon the world, I started to teach in a large mixed comprehensive school in north-west London. I shall never forget the elderly senior mistress coming into the staff room one morning and saying sternly:

‘I must speak to a boy called Elvis Presley because he has carved his name on every desk in the school.’

So, I’m guessing, Elvis impersonators wouldn’t be keen to volunteer to be him, when the annoyed schoolmistress was out looking for blood.

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* It obviously doesn’t subscribe to the theory that he was an alien and left Earth for home on this day.

I found myself using the phrase ‘child-bearing hips’ to describe a particularly shapely young lady who was walking along the street in front of us.

Haron hadn’t ever heard the phrase before, and it struck me that neither had I for many years. Yet my parents used to use it pretty regularly.

And then it occured to me: it must have have been their shorthand. So much more subtle than commenting on a girl’s spankability. So much politer than certain cruder modern alternatives (“Nice arse”). So much more politically correct than discussing which implement would be most suited to the backside in question, as Haron and I are wont to do whilst walking down the street.

Continuing the topic of prefects and their canes, A. Davidson writes in “Blazers, Badges and Boaters: a Pictorial History of School Uniform”:

The cane that is strictly symbolic has its place, particularly in the Cathedral schools. The head boy of King’s School, Rochester is the proud bearer of a lordly malacca cane on whose silver bands names of past school heads are inscribed. The vice head and heads of house there bear canes too. Schools such as The King’s School, Canterbury and Harrow sustain similar traditions.

The book was first published in 1990. I wonder if this is still true. Blimey, a symbolic engraved cane as the mark of office in a school – no wonder there are so many spankos in the UK.

Hmm… I also wonder how much one of those canes would fetch on eBay.

The memoirs of Dr. Lewis, Headmaster of the highly-regarded Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur from 1955 – 1962, show him to have been a master tactician when it came to disciplinary matters:

“Soon after my arrival, I discovered that we had a few boys who belonged to gangs associated with Chinese secret societies… I decided to nip matters in the bud and caned six boys who we discovered were members of Gang 21.

…I discovered that our juvenile gangsters belonged almost entirely to Gang 21 and the 08 Gang, so by playing one off against the other I gained much useful information. The procedure I used was the one my own housemaster successfully used when I was at school, and that was to isolate the culprits in a separate room, persuade them to confess, and to suggest that one of them was informing on the other. But in my case I made sure that they all confessed in writing and so could not retract at a later date. I soon found that members of Gang 21 were eager to tell me which of our schoolboys were members of the 08 Gang and of their evil deeds, and vice versa!

So in due course I was able to discover the names of most of our boys who were in gangs… I was loath to expel such boys, but endeavoured to change their ways by the liberal administration of the old-fashioned remedy always kept in a Headmaster’s office.

Of course many claimed that they had been forced to join through fear, so I decided that the only solution was to create a greater fear, and rather rashly warned that in future anybody found to be a member of Gang 21 would be caned 21 times, 08 Gang 8 times and so on. It must have had some effect for the only one caught thereafter was a member of the 08 gang…

There were three canes in the office… a thick one, a medium one and a thin one. I allowed him to choose his cane so that there should be no animosity between us. Unfortunately he chose the thin one, that is, for him it was the worst choice.

I’ve been rummaging around in the school’s archives, and have unearthed other fascinating gems; I’ll post more before very long.