The Spanking Writers

This week’s been stupidly busy for work – too much going on to start with, even before colleagues start screwing up projects left, right and centre, leaving me to bail them out. So when I headed down into the town centre to post some stuff yesterday afternoon, I’d given myself strict mental instructions not to get diverted and to come straight back to work.

Only, see, I’d read about this lovely second-hand bookshop in the town centre. And I just happened to walk past its front door. And somehow I ended up inside.

The stock, it must be said, was a little disappointing. Their 20,000+ volumes seemed a little light on education, biography, law and history – our usual sources of interesting old books. But as I was browsing, a young lady appeared in neat school uniform, and very politely asked the assistant, “Do you have anything to help with revision?”

I was standing behind her, and very nearly volunteered my services. “Yes, my dear. A firm but fair approach, with the sanction of a sound caning should you fail to adhere to the agreed revision schedule.”

It turned out she was after A-Level study guides. But I rather think my methods would have been even more effective.

A couple of days ago we witnessed an interesting scene at a train station. Two young ladies attempted to go through the ticket barrier using “child” tickets, and were challenged by the ticket inspector.

“We’re 15!” they assured him in chorus.

I shared his obvious mistrust. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see those girls on a university campus; they may have belonged at school, just, but children they were not.

The inspector was sceptical. “What if I called your parents?” he asked. “What would they say?”

The girls assured him that their parents would confirm the story. Although the inspector didn’t look at all convinced, he let them through in the end – they were, perhaps, more trouble than they were worth, and there was a queue building up.

I imagined a different outcome. The inspector would buzz for a colleague to watch the gate, and would take the two girls to the station office. From there, he would call their respective parents. Dejectedly, the girls would listen to his side of the conversation. “I see. Yes, I thought seventeen was a more likely age… The fine is £50. Of course, they can wait here until you bring the money. Hmm, that’s an interesting alternative, sir; I agree, very fitting.”

He would thrust the phone at one of them: “Your father wants a word.”

The negotiations wouldn’t take very long: both fathers would be in agreement that a sound whipping would benefit the two girls, and the ticket inspector would agree to do the deed and to waive the fine.

With the door of the office locked, he would make them take turns bending over the small desk. His uniform belt would make a most effective implement, slicing through the air, cracking against unprotected skin. The girls would do their best to keep their cries from reaching the busy station on the other side of the door.

…Or perhaps, the story would be completely different: upon reaching the girls’ parents on the phone, the inspector would find out that they were, indeed, fifteen years old. He would apologise and let them go. But at home, they would have to face their irate fathers. “Have I not told you before to dress your age? What’s this on your face, make-up? Go to your room, young lady, and wait for me in the corner.”

In last night’s dream I was studying hard for final exams I just had to pass. My family hired a tutor to help me along.

I remember particularly the feeling of utter indignity as I was pulled over his lap at the start of each session, just to keep me focused for the following several hours.

“But I didn’t do anything!” I wailed the first time this happened.

“No, young lady. This is to help you keep from not doing anything,” he had responded.

As usual in dreams, the spanking didn’t hurt, but the embarrassment mobilised me.

Last Tuesday’s Guardian carried a poignant little story about the owner of The Shambles, a small museum of Victorian life in Gloucestershire, which is closing. “The entire collection… has been split into 2,300 lots and is up for grabs.” The auctioneer “was amazed by the number of items in the collection”.

Lot 665, then, ladies and gentlemen. “A collection of school memorabilia, comprising registers, reports, punishment books, desks, uniforms, canes and tawses.”

Or how about this. “Contents of the punishment room in the museum’s police station. Birching frame, birches, cat o’nine tails, handcuffs, register of punishments administered.”

I wish…

The newspaper made the actual list of items sound rather more mundane – stuffed guinea pigs, a double bass, boxes of Victorian soap. But a closer inspection of the auctioneer’s website reveals a few gems that might be worth a bid for those of you not too impoverished by the credit crunch.

I’d like four young ladies to join me on a trip to the auction house this week. I’ll need you to bend over this, next to one another, skirts lifted and knickers down:

I’ll then deal with you in an authentic Victorian manner:

And if any of you dares to misbehave, it’ll be off to the police station with you:

PS as so often, our dear friend Pandora was thinking along similar lines – her lovely post about the same news item is here if you’re interested!

Last night we had the dual pleasure of watching the Eurovision Song Contest and receiving Abel’s parents for the evening.

The night became particularly entertaining when we realised that Germany’s entry involved Dita Von Teese strolling around the stage, laced into a corset and waving a riding crop. For Abel and me this was a nice, but tame sight: we like her, but we’ve seen riding crops and corsets before.

The real entertainment value came from watching Abel’s father slide closer and closer towards the television set, as his jaw dropped ever further. Dita’s appearance lasted for about a minute, but it was clearly the best minute of television my father-in-law had seen for a while.

Thank you, Germany, for providing a non-practising kinky man with his evening’s naughty programming.

Sometimes, I think spanking stories are best cut off early, leaving the subsequent detail to the reader’s imagination. I’ve been playing with the following, for example, for a while now – tweaking words here and there on my laptop in idle moments.

I personally think it works better than if I’d kept writing and described the whole flogging. I wonder if readers agree?

“I am prepared to be lenient”, the Governor explained.

The line of uniformed girls looked at him, looked at the whip in his hand, looked at their friend at the end of the hall – naked, her hands tied above her head, the rope thrown over a beam lifting her to her tiptoes. Lenient?

“Regulation 23.4: ‘any prisoner associated with an attempt to plan an escape shall be flogged’. You were all party to the conversation that Officer Lucas overheard in the refectory: that is more than enough evidence.”

Each girl, contemplating a protest. Thinking better of it; remaining silent.

He continued. “Prisoner 8974 here was sitting at the head of the table. I shall therefore deem her responsible for your plot. And you may trust that I shall not be as lenient with her. Nor with any of you, should you disobey an order at any future point in your sentence.”

The Governor walked behind her, tall and powerful next to her slight, pale frame. “Twenty lashes. The rest of you shall watch carefully, and learn the consequences…”

He drew back the whip, with an expert hand, and cracked it down hard. Its leather tongues fanned out, kissing her like serpents. Her scream filled the chamber, echoing from the rafters.

He took her face in his gloved hand, and lifted her eyes to meet his. “Regretting your conspiracy already, my dear? And I’ve scarcely started…”

So much left unstated. Did he whip her across the buttocks, or the back? Did the lashes stripe her bare breasts? Did she maintain a degree of bravery, or succumb abjectly to the anguish of her whipping?

Did she take the whole punishment on behalf of the group, or (in her anguish) betray the real leader of their escape plan in the hope of mercy? And if she did, how did the Governor react? (I rather suspect he would have completed her twenty lashes, before punishing the other girl too).

And of to those watching? Perhaps the Governor caught one of them looking away: would she too be brought to the front, stripped and flogged in turn?

I read a review recently of an intriguing-sounding book, “The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France”, by Professor Robert Darnton of Princeton University. Sadly, the books concerned seem to have been more political than erotic – but the review still included an interesting line:

It was the public hangman’s duty to destroy forbidden books that had been confiscated, but fortunately for historians he frequently did not, choosing instead to lacerate and burn dummy copies while the magistrates kept the originals.

I’d picture it a little differently. The magistrates would hand the banned books to the hangman for disposal. So they’d be puzzled – and furious – when several of the confiscated tomes were brought before them once again and found, on close inspection, to be the very same copies they’d previously sent for destruction.

The hangman would deny any knowledge of how this might have happened; it was only when a warrant was issued for his arrest that his daughter and maidservant would confess their dastardly scheme. For they were the ones who’d swapped the outlawed volumes for perfectly-innocent novels, and taken handsome sums from the booksellers for their illicit wares.

The magistrates would be unanimous in their sentence: the young women would be taken in chains to the marketplace, where they’d receive the soundest of public floggings, one girl after the other. I rather suspect that the hangman himself might have been the one wielding the birch…

And then my Norwegian hotel experience got even better.

For, tidying the room at the end of the day’s event, I found what the hotel would doubtless claim to be a whiteboard pointer. Only we know better, don’t we?

No wonder the lass who brought in our coffees had tears in her eyes as she entered this particular room – all-too-recent, all-too-painful memories flooding back…

And I understood why the receptionist had so specifically asked for the room key to be given back at the end of the day. After all, the General Manager must have had a girl to deal with in there that evening, bending her over the table and administering six hard stripes on the bare as he dealt with a customer complaint in the most effective of ways.

I was all for liberating the cane and taking it home with me, but Haron (panicking at the end of the phone line?) decreed that that would be theft, and therefore wrong. “I was only thinking of the well-being of the hotel maids. Honestly, your honour…”

The British Library website has an interesting, lovingly compiled page:

This selection of sources shows a range of methods for the punishment and rehabilitation of young offenders in past centuries.

Among the presented documents, there’s this one:

So, if the new rules recommended that the girls not be subject to corporal punishment, would they have been thus punished before? For the sake of the picture I’m drawing of myself in a terrible industrial school uniform, I’ll assume that it would have been the cane for me.

So, my Scandinavian hotel had me thinking kinky thoughts even by breakfast on the first day. By lunchtime, I’d discovered a leaflet in our meeting room describing the hotel’s history: in Norwegian – not a language with which I’m overly familiar.

I could decipher that it had been built in 1914 – but something mysterious had happened between 1952 and 1974.

Ah, yes. Now I had it. The hotel had been converted during that period into a girls’ reformatory, renowned for its strict regime. That wonderful but windswept beach outside? Scene of early-morning punishment runs. Nude.

My hotel room? Formerly home to six girls in bunk beds – in the days when the showers weren’t warm and en suite, but bitterly cold and in the open air, at the back of the accommodation block.

And that small building, set aside from the main building? Dreaded by all the girls: home to the whipping frame. It was said that very few of the inmates ever returned for a second visit, so thoroughly were the punishments administered…

I was growing to rather like the place, and rather wish I hadn’t travelled here alone!