The Spanking Writers

A few days ago I was a witness to a conversation that, although it annoyed me at first, kept getting kinkier and more exciting by the minute.

Picture this: a provincial train platform in a pouring rain. Waiting passengers are all huddled under a too-small shelter. Big “no smoking” signs all around. Suddenly, I - being intensely sensitive to cigarette smoke - realise that some rude, annoying person has lit up within a few feet.

“Daddy, you can’t smoke here!” I hear a female voice plead.

I turn around and see a young woman, maybe late twenties, supporting a man so old and infirm that he looks like he’s held together by nothing but the belt of his coat. His voice, however, has an all-penetrating quality when he rasps:

“Just a few puffs.”

He blows as much smoke as a tank engine. I try to edge away far enough to stop feeling sick, but not so far that I get soaked in the rain.

The man’s voice, amazingly loud for such an slight old guy, follows me as I go, “This is like sneaking smokes behind the cricket pavilion. Jimmy and I used to buy the shortest cigarettes you could get. They used to fit into the palm of your hand, brilliant.”

I don’t really want to know, but can’t help hearing the story about this guy and his best mate Jimmy buying cigs in a corner shop. Then, suddenly, it gets good: “And then they made me a prefect. I was the youngest prefect the school had ever known. Fourteen, I was. I got the gown, and the badge, everything.”

Just like I had been edging away, I find myself subtly inching back towards the pair. You know what I’m waiting for: I need to know whether, among those symbols of power, there was also a cane.

Instead of giving me the juicy details, the man launches into a story of how, when he was appointed, the Headmaster didn’t even know his face, and thought he was playing a prank by showing up at a prefects’ meeting. And how he had to stand his ground at the meetings against boys several years his senior.

This was also pretty interesting, even though the guy tended to go off on long tangents. Finally, just as I saw our train’s headlights in the distance he got to the point: “Jimmy and I, we did get caught once with the cigarettes. There was also alcohol involved; Matron found the empty bottles.”

Oh, go on what happened then? I begged silently as the train rolled into the platform. I had to strain my ears to hear anything now.

“Unfortunately, we got dragged in front of the Headmaster, me in my prefect’s gown and everything.”

The train stopped. I wondered if they would continue the conversation when they got into the carriage, and whether my seat would be anywhere near theirs. I was dying to hear the outcome I was suspecting in the man’s own words.

“And the Headmaster said, ‘What’s your name, boy?’ And I said, ‘You still don’t know? I’m one of your prefects!’ And…”
“You have to get your train, Daddy,” said the girl. “Remember, no smoking.”

“Okay,” said the old man, and from then it was the good-byes, and embraces, and I knew the story was over for me.

If only the train was a minute late… How frustrating can it get?

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The sponsor of the project on which I’m working at the moment has brought his daughter to work today: it’s the start of half term week. She’s sitting at the desk next to mine, beavering away over her textbooks. I’m guessing she’s a sixth-former: history doesn’t get complicated enough at GCSE level to merit the study of tomes that detailed.

But why’s she in the office? She’s certainly well and truly old enough to have been left on her own at home.

My mind drifts… A bad report card at half-term. The serious weekend discussion, the stern warnings: “I’m not prepared to let you throw away your A Level grades.”

The cancellation of a week of planned half-term frivolities: “You’ll come and work in my office instead, where I can keep an eye on you and check you’re working hard.”

“But daddy, that’s not fair…”

“Don’t you ‘but daddy’ me, young lady. Now go upstairs to bed, and count yourself lucky that I’m giving you a second chance rather than putting you over my knee like you deserve.”

And so here she is. Although I’ve just noticed that she’s abandoned her books, and is sending (presumably sulky) text messages to her friends. I happen to know that her father is due back from a meeting any moment: the consequences should he catch her dodging her studies can be readily imagined. I’ll let you know if she’s sitting uncomfortably later in the day.

PS To the lady in the next room at the Heathrow hotel last night: you do realise that everyone passing your door could hear you yelping “Ow, ow, ow” at the top of your voice? I so wanted to knock on the door and invite myself to join in. Sorry, to save her.

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A fascinating anecdote from: “Scottish Education - Schools and University“, discussing the period between 1696 – 1872, adds to my knowledge of spanking accessories:

A school appliance probably known only in Aberdeenshire is perhaps worthy of mention, viz. the “queelin (cooling) stane.” This was a smooth flat stone upon which offenders were made to sit after their unprotected and overheated cuticle had been subjected to the discipline of the birch or tawse. Whether the cooling stone was meant as an additional punishment, or as a grateful alleviation of suffering must be left to conjecture.

Sadly, our house is lacking in any good hard chairs for Haron to sit on post-caning. Perhaps I’ve been missing a trick: I should send her out to the cold paving slabs in the yard, instead.

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A friend recounts a tale of a University lecturer who made the members of his class memorise pi to some ridiculous number of decimal places. From time to time, he’d make the group recite the sequence, one digit each.

I’m picturing this rather differently, as a form of punishment drill. Should the maths class’s test results fall short of expectations, they would each be made to stand. The teacher would point to one student to start.

3

Said student would then sit. Her neighbour would continue:

point 1

She’d sit. The girls at the next desks would progress the sequence: 4, 1, 5…

The rules would be simple. Once all of the girls had recited their number correcty, the whole class would be seated and the lesson could resume. But should any girl fail, then all of those left standing would receive a taste of the tawse on each hand.

So much fairer, don’t you think, for the teacher to give them the chance to redeem themselves, rather than simply whacking them all for their poor performance?

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This hilarious news item has come to my attention via Fireman Chris:

An accidental push of a button Friday had students at Palm Bay High questioning what they’d done wrong and parents plotting punishments.

Parents of all 2,550 students in the school received an automated call Friday reminding them that their student had to report for Saturday morning detention. Problem was, the message only should have gone to 16 homes.

I can’t decide whether I’m mean enough that in my version of the story some students would actually have got into trouble for nothing, or whether it’s just the school secretary who has to submit to a paddling for her carelessness.

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Just as I was searching the web for a suitably kinky Valentine, one arrived in my mailbox. (And it wasn’t from my husband, either. Woohoo, admirers galore!)

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A researcher’s trawl through wartime “Log Books and, where they still exist, the Admissions Registers and Punishment Books” of schools in South Wales turns up a couple of interesting records that deserve a wider audience. Take 16th May 1939:

During the afternoon Mr. Lines, an Eleanor Street teacher, canes ‘two girls…for continued disobedience’.

Some five years later, on 13th October 1944:

An Ely Mixed girl who stole a teacher’s watch receives ‘two strokes of the cane on each hand in front of the whole school’.

One suspects that, in the latter case, the ‘in front of the whole school’ may have been designed to be a more serious feature of the punishment than the ‘two strokes of the cane on each hand’.

Then again, hand-canings can prove most effective. Haron? I feel like administering a little historical re-enactment. In the interests of research, you’ll understand. Dear readers, you will understand if she doesn’t feel like typing any comments for the rest of the day.

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Coming home from a weekend away, I found a letter addressed to me by HM Revenue and Customs. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I quiver when I get these, despite my complete and transparent law-abidingness. Just that “private” stamp makes my stomach go floppity.

This particular letter said something along the lines of “Dear Haron, you’ve paid too much tax, please have some money back, you good girl you.” In fact, I’d expected to get something like it. And still, I had to sit down before reading it.

If the tax man scares me so much, you can imagine how much I sympathise with the girls who get the letters with the official red seal of the Regional Correctional Office, also known as “the whipping man”. Of course, they also know it’s coming - they look out for it since the day they’re sentenced for their petty crimes. And yet, when it’s finally here - that simple, straightforward “Report for your flogging at this hour, at that place” - they can hardly bear to open it.

The flogging is deserved, of course. Still, I sympathise. They are never easy to unseal, those official-looking letters.

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A advert for a hotel spa near Hadrian’s Wall spun me back in time. It was the Roman era, in the bath house on the same site. The beautiful daughter of the legion’s commander walked in, letting her toga slip to the floor, revealing the fresh stripes of a sound whipping.

But was she there of choice, determined to show that she was not ashamed: proud, defiant?

Or, rather, had her father sent her there - refusing to allow her to sob in her room, wanting the word to get out that he was as severe with his own daughter as he expected his officers to be with theirs?

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On a train, bored, gazing out of the window. Set back from the railway line: an old, disused, vandalised factory.

“Ah,” I thought to myself. “That’s where they must take the local girls when they need to teach them a lesson.”

The young lady opposite me, deep in her textbook, would have been wriggling uncomfortably in her seat had she been able to read my mind…

Sometimes kinky thoughts don’t need to be elaborately detailed to work…

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