The Spanking Writers

Last week, chasing a patch of sunshine, we went for a drive into the countryside. On the edge of a picturesque Cotswalds village I looked along a narrow side road to see it run up a steep hill, near the summit of which there perched a lone house.

That, I realised, was where the local disciplinarian used to live. If I were a local girl, my misbehaviour would normally be dealt with by my father. But if he thought I was being particularly obstinate, he could send me to walk up the hill, so that I could explain myself to That Man In The House.

He would receive me in a room specially equipped for dealing with local delinquents. I would try very hard not to look at the array of implements displayed on the wall, or the various stools and benches in a row. My sins being relatively small, all he would need would be a straight-backed chair and an ebony hairbrush – not unlike what I would expect at home, but so much more frightening in the hands of That Man.

Unlike my father, he would have no qualms about spanking me until I cried and hang limply over his lap. He would explain that, when I grew older, if I didn’t mend my ways, he would punish me much worse – would I care to take a look at his canes and straps?

I would shake my head, eyes shut tights, and promise that I would never, ever be naughty again.

We would both know that eventually I would be back.

Girls in my stories and scenes often end up being dealt with by their guardian. It’s a convenient role – domestic rather than scholastic, but avoiding the need for parental punishment (such things relatively rarely being my thing).

The arrangements vary, but usually the girl’s parents are no longer on the scene (some unspoken tragedy having befallen them several years before). The guardian is usually wealthy, always lives in a big house, is single and childless. The girl will be at boarding school; she’ll return to his house for school holidays. He’ll be caring – but somewhat aloof, and uncompromisingly strict.

It struck me the other morning, though, thinking about a future scene, that such figures are usually fairly two-dimensional in my kinky reveries. So I set about dreaming up more on my guardian character.

See, he’d grown up in the same street as the girl’s mother. They’d been best friends – even when the boys usually played with boys, and the girls with the girls, and never the twain did meet. Only children; their parents close; both of their houses almost equally home to each of them.

They’d explored the world with each other and through each other’s experiences. They’d confided, commiserated and comforted when needed. They’d cuddled – but chastely; they were too close for friendship to turn into a ‘relationship’; more brother-and-sister than boyfriend-and-girlfriend.

And then they’d gone to different universities, and she’d met a charming young man, and before too long she’d graduated, married – their daughter arriving   a year or so later. The choice of godfather was an easy and obvious one; he’d been honoured and delighted.

He’d watched the girl grow up into a striking and successful young woman – so like her mother at that age. (And, before you wonder, as with her mother, his thoughts were entirely proper!).

Her parents had been posted overseas when she was 15, and a scholarship pupil at the most prestigious girls’ boarding school. (I like the idea of ‘posted’, rather than some disastrous accident!). And they’d asked whether he would be her guardian. (It wouldn’t be feasible for her to visit them, for some reason. I know: they were anthropologists living for an extended period deep in the jungle!).

So the girl moved into one of the spare rooms in his house; stayed with him in the vacations – even been taken with him across Europe every summer to broaden her cultural education, staying in grand hotels. He took great pride in her success at school – which he documented in long, hand-written letters to her parents, which reached them weeks later.

And the use of corporal punishment – after all, the starting point for my scenario? Very infrequent; in loco parentis, as they had requested. But used, nonetheless, even as he remembered consoling her mother years before as she cried into his shoulder – after those rare occasions on which she’d been sent to bend over the dining table or the end of her bed, for a whipping with a doubled-over belt. Only, as a gentleman, he preferred to use the cane – when strictly necessary.

Strolling across a sunny village green last week, we observed a family having a picnic. The daughter, a girl of about 17, had short, hot pink hair.

“Hmm,” said Abel. “Nice of her parents to let her keep the colour after they’d spanked her for dying her hair in the first place.”

Me, I imagined a different story.

Once the spanking was over, and she stood in the corner with her jeans down, hands itching – but not daring – to fall to her smarting red bottom and give it a sneaky rub – her father asked if she’d learned her lesson.

“I have, I promise,” she said, sniffling between words. “It’s a silly colour, I don’t know what possessed me. I’ll have it re-dyed tomorrow.”

“Oh, no, young lady,” said her father. “You will keep the colour for two weeks, so that everyone can see what a silly girl you were. Learn to live with the consequences of your rash decisions.”

Her spanking may have been over… but her punishment was not.

One really couldn’t help but notice the lass over by the bar in our favourite local pub last night – gorgeously pretty, in a figure-hugging black dress.  I speculated: why was she waiting along, toying with her half-pint of lemonade, glancing at her phone every few seconds, willing it to ring?

Ah, I worked out: she was waiting for her boyfriend. See, it was the leavers’ ball at the local public school. And he’d invited her, of course. He was due here any moment to pick her up and take her to the celebration.

Only, she’d been a pupil in the same year at the same school. Until last summer. When she’d been caught breaking some sacrosanct school rule. Caned by her housemaster. Expelled by the headmaster.

This would be the first time she’d been back since. She’d be amongst old friends, of course; many would have stayed in touch. But the staff would be there, too. And simply walking through the school gates would bring back so many memories – not least, of the last time she’d walked out of them on that fateful day a year ago.

(She was actually presumably just going out for the night. But I  thought my version was better. And when I remembered that the poshest school locally is all-girls, and realised that it would therefore have been her *girlfriend* taking her to the ball, the whole thing seemed almost too perfect not to be true!)

Sitting in Starbucks. At the next table, a well-spoken lady is being interviewed in great detail by two smartly-dressed market researchers. I’m evesdropping, wondering whether they’ll pick on me next – and whether I’d dare respond honestly.

“Why did you come to Starbucks today?” (Well, I’m staying in an hotel down the road; I’ve just spanked the friend I’m staying with very soundly before taking her along to the conference she’s attending; I’m killing time while she registers).

“What drink did you choose and why?” (A high-energy fruit drink. I want to spank her again later. And I need something to wake me up).

“What do you think of the decor?” (I like the comfortable seats. For myself. But I wish you had more hard wooden ones for girls who’ve just been spanked).

“Cleanliness of the store?” (My table was a disgrace. Bring the lass behind the counter over here immediately and thrash her for her slovenely performance).

“Any improvement suggestions?” (A kink zone downstairs, full of interesting furniture, from which vanillas would be banned?)

On second thoughts, I guess it’d be better if they went and interviewed the girl sat all alone over by the window. (“The Headmaster just caned me and suspended me for the rest of the day – but I can’t go home early or my parents will find out…”?)

As Haron’s discussed, she and I rather enjoyed Wednesday’s TV programme transporting a family back to a 1970s lifestyle.

The particular section that caught my fancy was their holiday in a Blackpool bed & breakfast. I can picture the scene. It’s a little after nine in the evening. Grown-ups from the various families are sitting downstairs, cups of tea in hand, chatting politely to the landlady. Their offspring are upstairs, asleep. And then a loud crash from one of the bedrooms disturbs the peace.

The fathers jump to their feet and rush to see what’s caused the commotion. Within minutes, they’re back – one accompanied by his teenaged daughter in her nightdress.

“I’m afraid Jennifer here has broken a chair in the bedroom. We’ll make good the damage, of course. But might I make use of the dining room next door for a few moments?”

The landlady would agree. The noises of a particularly sound thrashing would soon be all-too-audible: the whacks, the yelps, the sobs. And then father and tearful daugher would be back, he adjusting the buckle of his belt, she murmuring an apology to the landlady before being sent straight to bed.

Last night we accidentally happened on a TV programme on More4 called “Never Did Me Any Harm”. (The title caught Abel’s eye as he was channel-hopping.)

The aim of the programme was to introduce 5 kids of one family to the way their mum was brought up in the 1970s. The mum had grown up in a working-class Northern family, sharing a bedroom with her sisters in a house with no bathroom indoors; she had to do lots of household jobs, go out to work for her pocket money, and go on holidays to Blackpool. Given that she had grown up to be the lovely person we saw in the show, all of that really didn’t do her any harm at all. And now, for a certain stretch of time her kids – aged from 3 to 17 – had to experience the 70s living, from washing at the kitchen sink to really rather awful TV for no more than an hour every day.

They were nice kids, but still I basked in schadenfreude as I watched them peel carrots for the first time ever.

The one thing that the programme was missing was authentic 70s spankings.

So I imagined a programme I would make instead. Starring me as a contemporary 14-year-old. A spoiled girl that I am, I wouldn’t take well the absence of my Playstation and all the extra chores that I wasn’t used to doing. I mean, sweeping stairs on hands and knees? Who does that?

I would have a strop, and walk off to read in the garden when I’m supposed to be cleaning. (See? I would even choose appropriate 70s entertainment, so it’s not like I’m breaking the spirit of the programme.) All too soon, my mother would emerge from the house, carrying a heavy wooden clothes brush.

“When I was growing up, a display like this would have earned me a spanking over my mum’s knee. It never did me any harm, as you can see, so this is what you’re about to get, young lady.”

No amount of protesting would make any difference, and I would be firmly pulled over her lap, my dull old-fashioned skirt would be swept out of the way, and my knickers would be pulled down. The hairbrush would be set to work, cracking against my bottom, sending tears rolling out of my eyes. It would be a short, no-nonsense punishment, after which I would be sent back into the house, to sweep the stair with a sore bottom.

At some point I would also be spanked in my nightie in front of my brothers, as we all lined up to brush our teeth at the kitchen sink, but that’s coming up in the next segment, after the break.

Anyone out there able to lend us a couple of million – admittedly with no prospect of repayment? Please? Pretty please?

See, this week’s Country Life features something I want to buy: a “Classic Georgian country house with secret passageways for sale”, no less.

It’s the history of those subterranean passages that really appeals. The eldest daughter being caught by her father returning late one night from a secret, moonlight rendezvous with her suitor – a quite unsuitable man he’d expressly forbidden her from seeing. Sent upstairs to change into her nightdress and wait whilst the butler went outside to cut suitable switches; bent over the end of the bed for the soundest of thrashings.

The maid, fearing punishment that evening by the butler, discovered trying to flee the house by one of the secret escape routes. And *how* he whipped her as a result, the riding crop borrowed from the head groom chastising and chastening to great effect.

Or that time in the forties when the house was requisitioned to be used as a school – educating posh young ladies who’d had to flee London, alongside the local girls. The arguments and fights would be legendary; the two groups of rivals would only be united when sharing a furtive cigarette in the hidden tunnels, and when hauled before the headmaster to be caned after they’d been caught.

Two million? It’s not much, to ask, is it?

Last week the Times printed this cartoon:

I’m not entirely ignorant of what’s happening in British politics, but I didn’t really get the joke. But ouch – that top one doesn’t look very appealing.

It must be like being switched with a blade off cactus!

I’ve been so busy that I’ve only just got round to reading a copy of the New Yorker that I picked up in mid-May. The book review was of Duncan Wu’s “William Hazlitt: The First Moden Man”, a copy of which I must purchase immediately.

Not because I’m especially interested in Hazlitt’s life or writing, I hasten to add – even if his former house in Soho is one of the lovelist, quirkiest hotels we’ve ever stayed in. No, it’s the following interlude that cries out for more detailed reading:

“In 1803, whilst visiting Coleridge in the Lake District, Hazlitt chatted up a local woman in a tavern in Keswick. Either she insulted him or she rejected his advances and he, so the story goes, lifted up her skirts and spanked her.”

A ‘modern man’, eh?

I wonder if Haron and I should join the Hazlitt Society and offer to recreate the incident at one of their meetings?