The Spanking Writers

There must be a law that, if you live in a new place, you must fill it with new stuff. That’s what Abel has been doing since we moved: he’s gone on an implement shopping spree.

The latest arrival has been a replica ROSLA* tawse. It’s a handsome artefact: greyish-white, quite short (travel size, Abel said gleefully), and, alas, as thick as three stacked pound coins. Ouch.

The day it arrived we had both been quite busy, so I undressed for bed and slipped under the covers without a single worried thought. A few minutes later, Abel arrived – and he was carrying the new tawse.

“What sort of behaviour do you call this, young lady?” he asked. “Kneel on the bed, you’re going to get punished.”

Right. Apparently, I was a bad girl. Oh, well.

Our bed is also new, and we’re still experimenting with the positions that may or may not work with it. This time, I was on hands and knees across the bed, feet dangling over the edge. It was quite comfortable, and gave Abel plenty of safe swinging room, which I had cause to regret right away.

“I’m really sorry, sir,” I said, despite not having anything to be sorry for. It just seemed like the right thing to say, when there’s a man behind you with a big old tawse.

Not that it worked. Abel swung, and thwacked the tawse across my bottom. He didn’t use very much force, but the pain was disproportionate, both deep and fiery, and I cause to worry that it would only get worse from here. Which was, of course, right: having measured my reaction, he felt comfortable going harder. Not even a lot harder, but I felt it, and howled like a disgruntled ghost.

I had real trouble staying in position, and with each stroke was crawling further and further away from the edge. This didn’t impress Abel, who had to order me to stick my bottom out in an increasingly firm tone of voice. It took an awesome burst of willpower to stay put for the final, sixth stroke, which was, traditionally the hardest, and burned infernally.

I know very well that Abel didn’t use the tawse with anything approaching real strength, and it’s pretty much the only way I would ever play with it again: the thing is evil. A few of our hardier friends may enjoy its full range of pain, though, so I’m glad to have it in our arsenal.

Plus, it’s pretty.

* ROSLA, for those of you not obsessed with British school history, is Raising of School Leaving Age – government acts that extended the length of compulsory schooling. Last time this was done, the teachers worried that the tawses they were using wouldn’t be effective on older pupils, and so a range of thicker, more horrible tawses was introduced to impress them. Personally, I’m still quite impressed with normal tawses at the age of 29, so I think they might not have bothered…

Eliane of New To Spanking has graced us with a lovely account of her first every day of school role-play, and it’s a fine read:

Unfortunately, by the end of the day, I had accumulated enough negative housepoints that I was actually “the worst pupil in the school”, and in detention got eight HARD cane strokes to reinforce why I should try not to find myself in a similar position again. They were a beautiful set of stripes though. Jemima was thoroughly chastened, but Eliane was thrilledl, (so much so that she got someone to take a photo!) I do dispute that I should have lost points for swearing in class, though. After all, I had just laddered my stockings on the desk. Surely that’s extreme provocation?

Honey, anybody would think you haven’t learnt your lesson!

(I observed Jemima’s appalling behaviour from the next desk, and enjoyed it thoroughly. On my part, for some reason I felt like being awfully good, so I ended up with lots of housepoints and hardly any spanking at all. Which was fine with me: sometimes, the role-play is the point.)

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?

I was dining with the king in my dreams the other night – of the royal rather than Elvis variety. It was a rather strange set-up: I was the guest of honour, sitting next to his majesty at a great oak table on a raised platform at the end of a grand hall. Half a dozen courtiers joined us for the feast.

Below us, in the body of the room, were the king’s slaves. Dozens of them: all female, dressed in immaculate white robes. They talked in hushed tones; some danced, some played cards, some read books.

At the end of dinner, the king clapped his hands and bade me choose a girl to take back to my chamber. I picked one, only for his majesty to apologise: the pretty young thing in question had had to be flogged the day before. He called her to stand before us, and made her strip. I inspected her stripes, and announced that I would take her, thrashed or not.

Then – rather than continuing to forceful sex in my bedchamber – my dream rewound. This time, the king told me that the following day was the festival of some important deity. It was traditional for one of the slaves to be tied before the altar and whipped. As the guest of honour, would I care to choose the slave to be used in the ceremony?

Rewind again. I was asked to select a slave for my pleasure; my choice was brought forward. There was but one custom I should follow, the king advised. Lest his slaves became over-familiar, a guest taking one of the girls for the night was required to thrash her before having his way with her. There’d be a whip in my bedchamber: I should be unsparing in its use.

This time, the dream kept rolling. The poor lass pleaded for mercy, but the royal instructions were clear. Mercy, if that’s what you could call what I did to her as I pinned her down on my bed, had to follow her whipping.

Last night in bed we were discussing a possibility of a scene where Abel would be the Headmaster, I would be a prefect, and one of our friends would be a schoolgirl caught doing something very bad. I would get to deal with her first, and then the Headmaster would swoop in, announce the punishment to be too lenient, and swoop out again, bearing the girl in his clutches.

Abel suggested that the prefect, if she were an offended party, could be invited to witness the rest of the punishment.

“Actually,” I said, “I’d be just as happy to sit outside and listen to her cry.”

And here we arrived at a vocabulary deficiency. What do you call somebody who enjoys listening to other people’s spanking activities?

Is is audieur? Auditieur? Audialist?

(Or just a very, very perverted person?)

“Consider the Children – A Plea for Better Physical and Moral Education” was written in 1904, by one Honnor Morten – formerly a member of the London School Board. It makes fascinating reading. Take the incident quoted in the Daily Chronicle of October 13, 1902. Sarah Parker, assistant mistress of St Matthias National Schools, Granby Street, Bethnal Green, sent a young lady called Pierpoint:

“to the headmistress for punishment, and as the girl, for the same fault — talking in class — had been punished only three days before, the headmistress gave the girl three strokes on the hand with a cane.

The girl then hit the mistress with her fists, and the mistress, protecting herself, struck the girl across the arm with the cane. After that the girl’s conduct became so violent and rude that the chairman of the school (the vicar) was sent for. He decided that the girl should not be expelled, but be made to take further punishment — four more strokes on the hands — which were given.”

The author’s anecdotes continue: “In October 1901 I visited the Upton House Truant School… The list of Punishments included:

For less serious offences, flagellation with the school cane, applied to the palm of the hand. For very serious offences (absconding, for instance) flogging on the posterior with a birch rod ; maximum number of strokes, six.

The Industrial Schools come in for outraged condemnation, too:

They birch the girls also in some of the schools — girls in their teens. And what modesty, decency or self-respect can you expect from girls subjected to such punishments ? And is it likely that poor girls turned out on the world without a sense of modesty and self-respect are likely to keep straight ?

A list of punishments meted out to the girls at one such school is provided: V.W. was given the tawse for stealing; for disobedience, C. D. was “caned, and sent to Bed”, whilst the entry for E.F. read: “disobedience ; whipped.”

And the lady visitor of a girls’ school in the North of England in 1901 reported that, “Three girls have been birched during the year, and none of them have improved ; one received twelve strokes.”

Any volunteers to participate in a recreation of turn-of-the-last-century education?

We were peacefully browsing the Saturday papers, when the first sentence of a letter in the Guardian caught our attention:

Why the obsession with British public schoolboys (Ten of the best: floggings, 25 April)…

What? Hang on, what? There was a list of ten best floggings published on the 25 April, and we missed it? I rushed to the online archive.

Oh yes, there was a list, with commentary. The quoted works are:

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
White Jacket by Herman Melville
Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes
Lesbia Brandon by Algernon Swinburne
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Billy Bunter by Frank Richards
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

Nice as it is of the Guardian to publish the list in the first place, I’m not entirely satisfied with it. “David Copperfield” has to be in there, but excuse me, would you send somebody digging through the million pages of “War and Peace” before mentioning “Tom Sawyer“? Honestly.

Plus, the entire thing is M/M. That’s just typical. When I was a feldging spanko of tender years, I was convinced, from the books I read, that girls never got spanked, and therefore the only way I was going to have my needs met would be to pretend I was a boy. This list would have done nothing to comfort my thirsting soul. Hello! Girls? Get spanked too. “Little House” books aren’t a classic for nothing.

Still, Guardian, thanks for the list; I haven’t been aware of some of these works.

One of the nice things about our new house is the proximity of a rather nice wine merchant. It therefore seemed logical to spend one of our first evenings in the area at a wine tasting. (Forget unpacking – there’s booze to be drunk!).

They handed out a sheet for us to record our tasting notes. Those present appeared to split into two camps: those who scribbled pretentious comments (“full-bodied and perfumed, with a sweet smell of diesel mixed with garden roses”) and those who merely gave each wine a score (“7 out of 10″).

I went for a rather different technique for recording the quality of the wines, as you’ll see below. Strange thing is, a few days on I can still recall exactly what I thought of each from my spanking scoring system (click to enlarge):

I am now a very proud and pleased owner of a swivelly desk chair. It’s large and comfy, with convenient little wheels on its feet.

Abel and I rolled it into the house this morning, paused in the middle of the room and looked at each other.

“Do the wheels lock?” Abel asked.

“Um, no.”

“So,” he said, “what would happen if you were whipping a girl on it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, grinning at the mental picture. “She would swivel round and round.”

“No,” he said. “She would travel along the room with each stroke. You could say to a girl, ‘I will whip you across the room.’ And continue the whipping until she reached the opposite wall.”

I really don’t know about that: it would take an awfully hard stroke, I think, to shift a chair with a girl along the carpet. I’m curious whether this would work, but I’m not keen to test the theory on my own bottom.

Any volunteers, perhaps?

I found myself reflecting the other day on the relative merits of giving a spanking OTK (over the knee, as most kinky types will know) and OTF – over the furniture.

See, my spanko interests originated in the world of school fantasies. And, in those, it would have been quite unacceptable for there to be any physical contact between master and pupil. Bending over a desk or the back of a wooden chair were thus the oft-imagined punishment positions in my emerging kinky reveries. There were occasional diversions to the arm of a solid leather sofa in the headmaster’s office, or to the end of a dormitory bed. But spanking – or more specifically caning – was very much an OTF affair.

The only exception was bending over… well, over nothing, as some girls found themselves touching their toes. And as my kink developed, and the schools morphed into castles and prisons, whipping benches appeared on my scene – still with the girl at the end of a cane or birch. That one could collect such a variety of implements added to the attraction.

And then I started spanking more folks for real, and found the women with whom I was playing draping themselves over my lap. What on earth? From a role-play perspective, I rather struggled: my schoolmasters still couldn’t bring themselves to touch their naughty charges, and as for fatherly spankings… well, uncles or guardians were as far as I could comfortably go. But even then, I was more likely to unbuckle my belt.

Then, of course, my playmates started to misbehave, getting themselves into trouble – and I found that real-life misdemeanours requiring punishment lent themselves more naturally to instructing a girl to assume the position across my lap. And the fact that a good, firm hand spanking could make a lass writhe so (and trust me, my hand spankings are usually pretty firm) meant that the absence of an implement wasn’t a problem. Fingers could even leave marks, just like a cane stroke!

At this point, I rather blush. For, of course, spanking at this point can (with the right and willing partner) take on a more overtly naughty dimension. Hands might stroke and caress, to comfort a girl’s sore behind – and they might tend to stray. But god forbid that she would sense any, erm, rising interest on my part as she lay draped across me. (Shy, me, see!)

So now I find I can enjoy both, in almost equal but quite different measures. My deep-down loyalty lies with positioning a girl OTF, but the attractions of OTK do rather appeal. I’m still left with struggling to reconcile the idea of combining the two, though – for me, it needs to be either OTT *or* OTF, and combining them feels somehow wrong. Warm-ups before (say) a caning are therefore a challenge – I can never quite mentally justify how to integrate them into a formal punishment scene.

And then, of course, there’s TTAB (Tied To A Beam), but that’s another story…