National Trust punishments

Big country houses are always a source of kinky inspiration for me. So many of my fantasies play themselves out against a background of lords and ladies, butlers and serving girls that a trip around any preserved property is guaranteed to fire my imagination.

Of course, I pretend to be interested in the history of the place, whilst allowing my mind to wander. The paintings (I wonder whether the young lady in that one ever got whipped?); the furniture (oooh, they could have bent girls over that and tied them in place for their thrashings); the gardens (see – a birch tree: that must have been the one from which they cut their switches!).

I’ve visited two such places recently, both run by the National Trust, and both succeeded in providing suitable entertainment – even the one I toured in vanilla company. Actually, that one was perhaps the most interesting – a slightly smaller property by the Trust’s standards, inhabited by the same family from the 1600s to 1990 or so, during which time they had far too little money to spend on updating the house. As a result, it really is fascinating – with none of the gloss and polish and Victorian “improvements” that characterise so many of these places.

What particularly surprised me, though, was the thought that whilst a house of this stature would always have had servants, there wouldn’t actually have been that many of them. When I’ve planned scenes or written stories in this sort of setting in the past, I’ve always imagined there being a huge cadre of serving staff. As a result, there’d be lots of maids, each fairly anonymous (other, perhaps, than one of their number who became the special favourite of the lord of the manor, or his son). If one of these girls ended up being whipped, she’d be able to blend into the background – the number of her colleagues bringing a degree of anonymity, enabling her to hide in the crowd as she licked her wounds, unnoticed by her lords and masters.

Yet in this particular place, there’d probably only have been a couple of maids – two, three, four? – helping the cook and butler around the house. So when a girl had to be punished, there’d be no hiding place, no secrets. One pictures his lordship, knowing that a girl had been whipped, asking her as she brought his tea what she’d done and whether she’d learnt her lesson: she’d blush, squirm, apologise, the fact that he knew making her even more ashamed of having had to be flogged.

I’m going to blog a series of posts in the next few days about the other country house. But I did rather want to start the ball rolling with the thought of this one, poor, punished lass…