Norway’s expensive, right? Everyone knows that. Yet I was still taken aback at the price of dinner in Stavanger earlier this week. Cheese omelette with small green salad, apple pie, small bottle of beer. Guess how much?

Forty pounds.

Forty!

Admittedly, I was staying in a lovely little seaside hotel, carefully restored and filled with antique furniture over which generations of Norwegian daughters and maids had doubtless been bent to be whipped. But forty pounds? (Thank goodness I didn’t go for the cod and chips – that was £38 on its own!)

It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when I discovered that the following morning’s (quite excellent) breakfast buffet was included in the room rate. And my mind started drifting… See, they trusted their guests: I wasn’t even asked for my room number.

Picture, then, four local girls – best friends, traipsing every morning in the wind and the rain along the desolate coastal road. They’d stare in at the hotel guests – warm, well-fed, in the lap of some luxury – as they walked past towards their school.

“What if we went in one morning?”

And so the plot was hatched. They left their homes half an hour early. Wore casual jumpers over their school uniform dresses. Walked into the hotel, treated themselves to breakfast, and left – elated, and completely unchallenged.

The knock on their classroom door came late in the morning: a senior girl entered, bearing a note. Their form master read it, folded it away, then looked up. “It appears that four of you are in rather a lot of trouble. Would the following put their books away, and report to the Headmaster’s study.” Their hearts were pounding by now: they scarcely needed him to read their names to *know*…

The hotel staff would have realised that the four were impostors, and their dresses would have identified them as girls from the local school. Their descriptions would have been written down; that they were the same girls who walked past the manager’s window every morning would not have escaped notice. Identification, once he had been shown in to see the Head, would have been the simplest of tasks.

But I’m far from certain how they’d have been punished. Would they have been brought before the Headmaster en masse and birched in turn? Would he have had them sent in one-by-one, punishing a girl then sending her to stand facing the wall (bare, red bottom on display) whilst he called in the next lass for her thrashing… (And would the hotel manager have been invited to stay to witness their correction?)

Or would the Head’s lecture note the gravity of the offence – a letter home (leading to inevitable excruciating consequences that evening) preceding a public birching before the whole school in the following morning’s assembly?