The Spanking Writers

Two vignettes from the past week. First, the Bank of England responds to the worsening economic situation, and the Evening Standard displays billboards across London proclaiming:

“Interest rate cut means end of free spanking.”

(It was ‘banking’, of course, but my heart genuinely sank for a moment).

Second, watching a superb Kaiser Chiefs gig at Wembley Arena with our friend Martha. We’re getting into the swing of it, clapping along like there’s no tomorrow, and she turns to me and complains, “Owwww…. my hands hurt.”

Funnily enough, my left hand hurt. But my right didn’t – clearly toughened from years of administering spankings to deserving bottoms…

In a comment to my last post Gellert asked whether I wouldn’t be a bit disappointed if my trying to get out of a spanking actually worked.

The question makes perfect sense: after all, if we’re engaged in spanking role-play, it would seem to logically require a spanking in the end. And yet, for me, it doesn’t.

The appeal of great role-play is getting deeply into character, becoming someone who isn’t me, someone for whom spanking is a dreaded outcome. The not-me I become would put a lot of effort into not getting caught, or getting out of trouble if she were threatened with punishment.

Being that other girl, savouring her fears, putting the effort into avoiding retribution, is as pleasurable to me as the physical act of spanking – or even more so, considering I don’t enjoy pain. At times, just the role-play can be enough to satisfy my kinky needs. Getting out of spanking would make my character happy; sometimes that’s enough.

Obviously, life would get very boring if clever excuses worked every time. But most of the time they don’t, so that’s OK.

Autobiographies of gentlemen of a certain age and class can usually be relied upon to describe matters of interest to our readers. John Julius Norwich’s “Trying To Please” doesn’t disappoint – although the staff in Hatchards looked very puzzled as I transcribed the following section from book to Blackberry the other day:

“Up to six strokes of a springy cane can hurt a lot at the time, but the whole thing was over in 20 or 30 seconds and was followed a few minutes later by a rather agreeable warm feeling in the affected area.”

Apparently being caned elicited the sympathy of one’s fellow pupils and was deemed “Infinitely preferable to the possible alternatives – usually staying in all afternoon copying out one of Virgil’s Georgics.”

‘Agreeable warm feelings’, eh? Haron; take down your Georgics!

In his autobiography, the great children’s writer Arthur Ransome recalls an incident where he was in danger of an imminent caning:

A line from [Virgil's Aeneid] was to serve me in good stead at Rugby when a master, enraged by some enormity of forgetfullness or absent-mindedness, said, “You will come to my house at two o’clock when I will give you something to remember.”

“Quicquid id est timeo,” I muttered to myself, “Danaos et dona ferentes.”

“What?” he exclaimed. “Say that again.”

I repeated it and he burst into a roar of laughter.

“All right,” he said. “I see that classics are not wholly wasted on you. I’ll let you off for that.”

Somehow, I don’t see the same method working for me, but I’ll keep it in mind anyway.

I was dressing for a day out when Abel wandered in and stopped to watch.

I picked out a dress (black with a white floral print), stockings (black), shoes (black) – and suddenly noticed that I was wearing incongruous pink knickers.

“I think I’m wearing wrong colour knickers,” I told my watching husband.

“So you are. How dare you wear wrong colour knickers? You need to be caned for that. Bend over.”

Huh? What? I gaped at him as he snatched up a cane that was lying on the floor and moved towards me with a look of menace.

“Go on, bend over! Wrong colour knickers are unacceptable!”

I couldn’t help giggling as I leaned over the bed. Several quick, sharp slashes fell across my bottom. They stung ferociously, and there seemed to be awfully many of them, although I’m sure there were only 5 or 6. Even through the pain, I laughed like a mad thing. Wrong colour knickers! How dare I!

“I hope that taught you a lesson,” said Abel in a savage tone, which was somewhat undermined by a giggle that followed.

“Yessir. Absolutely.”

I stood up, rubbing my bottom. And I moved to the cupboard to pick up some correct knickers: black.

I think he just fancied caning me, though.

Haron posted last month about the tale of Heloise and Abailard (or ‘Abelard’ as he’s perhaps more commonly known). I’ve recently been rather enjoying a wonderfully evocative  account of the early days of their relationship, from “Heloise. A biography” by Enid McLeod, published in 1938.

The author manages to describe emotions that those of us lucky enough to have made deep connections with kinky friends will recognise straight away.

She starts by explaining how Heloise’s family had educated her from an early age, even though “to give a girl such an education as Heloise received, or indeed any at all, was [an] unheard-of thing in the twelfth century.”

She moved to Paris, where she came to the attention of the leading teacher of the day:

Heloise had by then left childhood behind and was a young girl of sixteen or seventeen… Her unusual learning and distinction of mind had gradually made her known, and were soon so much talked about that her fame began to spread…

With such reports of her abroad in the land, it was hardly surprising that Abailard, too, heard at last of this astonishing young girl, who had been living so near of him in recent years, and whom he must surely have often seen, though he had never remarked her, in the streets of the Cloister… There is little doubt that, once his thoughts were set on her, he found that she quickly filled them.

So he hatched a cunning plan, involving her uncle, with whom she was living in Paris:

Fulbert doted on his niece, and was ready to do anything that would enable her to progress further in her studies… In his pride and pleasure at securing for Heloise the greatest master in the kingdom, and knowing Abailard’s reputation for continence, [he] at once entrusted his niece entirely to Abailard’s direction, urging him not only to spend with her every hour he could spare from his own work, whether it were by day or by night, but, if she should be idle or careless, to chastise her into obedience.

And so, from one day to the next, Heloise found that instead of being debarred by her sex… from that public participation in Abailard’s instruction to which the least worthy of his students could aspire, she had attained to such a position as his priveleged private pupil as such as not even the most deserving of them enjoyed.

Their interest was mutual:

Abailard soon succeeded in filling the thoughts of this young girl, in the midst of whose secluded life he had suddenly appeared… It was a passion of the body, most certain, but much more of the soul.

Each day, as soon as his work at the school was over, he hurried back to the house in the Rue des Chantres, where Heloise awaited gim with her books open on the table before her… [but] as Abailard himself admits, “Our books lay open… but we spoke more of our love than our reading, and there were more kisses than explanations. Our hands went to each other’s breast more often than to the books….

Sometimes too, he tells us, in order to disarm any possible suspicion on Fulbert’s part, and to make him believe that Abailard was indeed acting as the stern taskmaster that he had been empowered to be, he would beat Heloise so that the sound could be heard. But the blows thus given were given in love, not anger.

Eight hundred years later and it’s still hot. Perhaps we should all play spanking scenes re-enacting one of their tutorials, and report back in the comments?!

The young woman opposite on the train to London looks incredibly nervous.

We’re late, see. Her mobile phone keeps buzzing; she’s frowning, now, biting her bottom lip, her fingers trembling as she replies to the latest text message.

She’s smartly dressed, but clearly not on a business trip. Her mentor had sent her the ticket; she’d told him that the 08:40 would get her into London in perfect time for their lunch appointment.

Of course, it was always optimistic to assume that twenty minutes would be long enough for her to get from the terminus to the restaurant where they met. She should have booked the earlier train, just in case. But that would have meant getting up earlier, and the extra time in bed had sounded so appealing. Even though she knew that punctuality was expected – nay, required, for their meetings.

She already knew how the afternoon would unfold: he’d summoned her down to see him for a reason, displeased no doubt with the report she had sent of the grades for her most recent assignment. They’d lunch, and then he’d take her back to his townhouse, and show her into the library, and make her touch her toes. She feared the worst: last time had been eight strokes, almost too much to bear. This time must surely be more. And that was before she’d kept him waiting.

The train pulled up in Peterborough. She could get off – escape, return home, avoid the inevitable. But somehow she didn’t want to…

Something popped up on my news feed that made me perk up my ears:

“Sometimes when you get a spanking, you start seeing things more clearly.”

Why yes, I completely agree!

…Hang on. What do you mean, he was talking about his team losing at sports?

Waiting for a meeting the other morning, I spied a small sign behind the reception desk:

Beaustreet House operates a no-spanking policy.

Only it actually read ‘no-smoking’, of course, but the combination of forgetting my glasses and my inate perversity made for far more interesting reading. Especially when I started to think of the neighbouring offices, presumably lacking such enlightened policies. For, there, spankings doubtless continued apace.

Why, at that very moment there was a young lady lifting her smart skirt before bending over her boss’s knee, behind a closed office door on the first floor. The spanking would be long and hard: it would be the last time *she* made a proofreading mistake in a document sent to a client. And her colleagues would *know*, of course: they’d say nothing, but would smile in rueful sympathy as she sat painfully back down at her desk afterwards.

On Friday it was Irelynn’s birthday, and Abel offered to bake her a cake. It was going to be a carrot cake with soft icing and strawberries (and, skipping forward, it turned out very fine indeed).

So he went out to the supermarket and came home with all the ingredients. Which included a bunch of carrots with the longest, fluffiest tops you’ve ever seen.

“I chose these because I wondered if they’d be any good for whipping you with,” he admitted somewhat sheepishly.

I submitted to the carrot-topping, but I was in more danger of dying with giggles than any serious pain.

Note to self, and anybody who fancies trying this in the future: carrot tops do not a good whip make.