The Spanking Writers

Last night I dreamed about skipping school; going off to do something else – just to wander around, probably, like I sometimes did in my real school days. I returned to my dream-father (who looked a lot like Abel) waiting in the living room.

Why, he wanted to know, had my classmate just called the house to ask whether I was feeling OK? When I hadn’t turned up at school, she was worried I was sick, apparently, and wanted to cheer me up. And got my father on the phone.

In the dream this went no further than the certain knowledge I was about to get a spanking with an enormous bath brush. After waking up and sharing this with Abel, and took a few swats just to sweeten the disappointing lack of dream-spanking.

And then we figured out that, after that dream-girl went to school the following day, she was certain to get a caning on top of the spanking her father had given her. An interesting reversal on the usual concept of “double trouble”, wherein the parental spanking will be delivered on top of the fresh cane stripes.

P.S. I thought the father might be nice enough to write the girl a note for school, to save her from the caning, but Abel didn’t agree. Typical.

Thanks to our friend Martha for texting us in great glee yesterday to point out the name of the German competitor who was up for the high jump in Beijing yesterday… a certain Herr Spank.

Honestly. He even has a collection of videos on YouTube – but they’re probably not the most interesting you’d ever see if you searched for clips related to our kink!

Much was made in the press last week from the arrival of A-level exam results last weeks into the waiting hands of young men and women of the country. (Congratulations, BTW, to Smudge and Evie for doing so well; we have the cleverest commenters.) With the papers full of celebrating 18-year-olds, I was glad to see that the naughty pupils who hadn’t studied so hard weren’t forgotten, either.

On Radio 1, the DJ spent a good five minutes explaining how, if you didn’t get the marks you wanted, it didn’t really matter in the long run, to finish of with the invitation to please call the BBC helpline if you were at all worried. “I know you still have to break the news to your parents. It’s scary, yeah, but ring the helpline, and we’ll figure out a way to tell them. You don’t have to do it alone.”

I pictured a girl with an envelope half-crumpled in her hand, wipe at her tears with a sleeve. “Yeah, right,” she says bitterly to the radio. “I don’t have to do it alone, sure. You’ll come to my house, tell my parents I’m not getting into Oxford, and bend over the back of the sofa next to me for that belt whipping.”

She doesn’t believe it would help at all, and still she punches in the number of the helpline into her mobile, and waits holding her tearful breath. Maybe they do have a magic word that stops parents from reaching for the belt. Maybe…

I’ve been reading a truly fascinating history of Wentworth, the largest of the English country houses. (When I spotted it on the bookshelves in the ever-so-posh new Terminal 5 at Heathrow the other day, I was interested purely in learning more of English history: that a book on the lives of the governing classes and their staff might have kinky potential wasn’t at all a factor in my purchasing decision. Honest!).The most interesting section comes when they discuss the dining arrangements:

Dinner in the Steward’s Room had been as formal an affair as the one that was about to take place upstairs. “There were six separate dining halls for the servants, depending on your place in the hierarchy,” recalled the son of the manager of the Wentworth estates. “The Steward’s Room was the top dining room, reserved for the Upper Ten. It was terribly smart. They sat on Chippendale chairs.”

The Upper Ten were the most senior servants in the hierarchy. The include the groom of the chambers, the housekeeper, the house steward, the butler, the under-butler, the head housemaid and the valets. They dined in style: a footman served them at a table laid with fine china and glass; the men wore smoking jackets or evening dress, the women, long silk gowns. Precedence was strictly observed.

As dinner concluded, coffee was served, followed by the usual digestifs – the senior staff enjoyed the same choice of port and liquers as their lordships downstairs. And then came the moment that certani of their more junior colleagues had been dreading all evening.

For a maid to misbehave in one of the great country houses was a serious offence, punishable with the utmost severity. For her to misbehave whilst accompanying her master on a visit to one of his peers was a matter of the utmost shame.

A bell would be rung; any girls who had fallen short of the highest standards, had let down their household, would enter the room. A nervous line-up, each girl wringing her hands, shifting from foot to foot, avoiding the eyes of her seniors. Her offence would be read out, discussed around the table, and the presiding servant would pronounce her sentence.

The punishment would vary according to the customs of the house in which they were staying. In some, she might find herself over the steward’s knee for the hardest of hand-spankings. In others, a strap might be fetched, in others a more junior servant would be sent to the stables to procure a riding crop from the grooms. The cane was the most common instrument of discipline, of course – with the birch reserved for the most serious offences. One servant, Mabel Ross, recalls its terrors: “They had the dining table cleared, and used rope to tie me in position. And then Lord Scarborough’s butler lifted my skirt, and parted my underwear, and laid such a thrashing on me as I will never forget. I was a good girl after that, I swear: one birching is one too many for any girl.”

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OK, I confess. I rather digressed from the original text part way through. But one can use one’s imagination, surely?

The final entry in our summer “best of” compilation comes from “My Innervision”, a Japenese blog. Now, neither of us can read Japanese – but the sketches here are what’s important. They’re quirky, very stylised, and often very appealing.

Here are just a couple of favourites from recent months:

One of my team received a note from a client last week, copied to me, which mentioned some “pervious work” he’d completed earlier in the year.

I could have ignored it. Or I could have forwarded the email to the rest of the team informing them that we have a perv in our midst. You can probably guess which option I chose.

Alex Birch is one of the stalwarts of the UK spanking community, and “A taste of the birch” always turns up fascinating pieces of writing.

The last of his recent “Corporal punishment in history” series (which he originally wrote for Februs magazine) featured Catherine the Great. Two incidents in which young ladies incurred her wrath are described, the second of which caught our eye:

An example of what happened when Catherine’s personal trust was betrayed can be illustrated by the experience of one of her most trusted Maids Of Honour. The girl was responsible for the Empress’s intimate dressing and bathing, thus of course found herself privy to some very private secrets including the sight of certain of Catherine’s lovers arriving and departing the boudoir.

The girl was engaged to be married and could not resist passing some juicy tittle-tattle to her fiance who, in turn, repeated it at one of his dining clubs in St Petersburg. Inevitably the gossip got back to the Empress who was livid with rage.

Instead of reacting immediately, Catherine bided her time until the girl’s wedding. After the happy couple had retired to the bedroom to consummate their marriage, the bedroom was forced open by six men of Catherine’s personal bodyguard. Without ceremony, the sheets were stripped from the naked couple and the girl dragged out of bed. She was ‘horsed’ on the back of one of the guards while another birched her bottom mercilessly. The helpless husband was ordered to kneel naked and watch the proceedings on his knees.

When the birching was over and the girl was crying in anguish, the couple was told to enjoy their married life and, as far as Catherine was concerned, the flogging was the end of the matter.

This is one of those posts where the illustration (by Paula Meadows) is a nice addition to fine writing, rather than being the starting point. But it’s a rather delightful image, anyway:

The comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar had this to say in this week’s Observer:

I have an OBE, so I can order Meera [Syal, his wife, also a comedian] about, because she’s only got an MBE. She’s a peasant. In fact I believe I’m entitled to beat her with a stick.

Note to self: earn an OBE or a damehood before Abel does.

Just as with our selection from Pandora’s Blog yesterday, today’s choice of a favourite post from another spanko blog is a story sparked by a drawing (which we believe we’re right in saying is by Paula Meadows).

It’s some months old, but Strange Imagination’s description of “The Platform” is one we’ve re-read several times:

My body was trembling as I stepped out onto the platform and saw the sea of people around me. I heard the roar as the crowd spotted me. The screamed at me, they yelled at me, they waved and pointed at me. They didn’t hate me… They wanted to see me be punished.

I felt powerless, weak and almost fainting as I saw him, the man. He was standing on the platform, waiting for me. The crowd had come for me but he was the king of this dais. He was the ruler.

The guards didn’t waste any time. They started pulling at my clothes, ripping the fabric, yanking my dress from my shoulders, stripping me, baring me before the eyes of the hungry crowd. They stared at me and roared and cried out as my dress was torn from my shoulders, slid from my hips, leaving me naked before their eyes.

‘Embrace your lover!’ was the words I heard from the man. I saw a smile on his face and for a second I was comforted by that smile but soon my heart started pounding again, pounding with fear and anticipation.

My body was trembling as I stretched my arms out. The guards took them, pulled me forward, pressed my body against the dreaded pole, one arm on each side of the pole. My hands were tied, lashed together and then I was hoisted in the air… My feet barely touched the ground. I was ready for my punishment…

He held his whip so that I could see it and my heart stopped beating. I saw the strands of the whip, the knots, the leather that would soon touch me…

The man waited. He wanted this moment. He wanted me to have this moment, the moment of waiting. The moment of fear, the moment of surrender.

Click over to the original if you want to read how the punishment continued!

A high-ceilinged barn, in the middle of nowhere. Straw on the floor. Dark outside, bright artificial light illuminating the gathering inside. No risk of the group being disturbed as they meted out the punishment.

The girl had just been brought in, her eyes widening as her blindfold had been taken off and she’d recognised her captors. Six men, eight maybe? Hardened types, each holding an implement – a crop here, switches there, a doubled belt over there.

She was grasped roughly from behind, her clothes half unbuttoned, half ripped from her body before she was thrust forward over the table, tied in position.

I spoke to my comrades – like me, senior figures in the local mafia. Expressed my disappointment at her behaviour, which had led to one of our brothers being caught and imprisoned. Hoped that they would not hold back in teaching her a lesson. Invited the first of them forward.

We took turns. Whipped her until she begged for mercy, and offered her none. Waited my turn, before administering her final thrashing: slow, calculating, hard.

And then took turns to punish her some more. Intimately, in ways that I couldn’t possible write about for fear of corrupting our more innocent readers…

Sometimes my dreams surprise me…