The Spanking Writers

I’m endlessly fascinated by my conflicting reactions when I hear about my girls being whacked at scene events, especially at extended gatherings such as the recent Finishing School. Over the past weekend, for example, the drip-feed of texts and calls coming my way let me know – for example – that (in their guise of their respective characters) Haron had been punished for running in the corridor; that Cath had “got double” being caned as Head Girl for misbehaviour after dinner – alongside Emma Jane as her co-conspirator.

Each case provoked sympathy from loving me – a desire to reach out and offer hugs, comfort. And yet, then, kinky me found the idea delightful. After all, these are kinky girls – at the event entirely by choice: the earning and receipt of the punishment are very much part of what they relish.

More than that, my very knowing they’ve been whacked and will be sore – my inevitable voyeuristic attempt (details! details!) to form a mental picture of what went on, imagining how brave they must have been and how beautiful they must have looked – is something I find extremely hot. And I genuinely love it that they have such fun playing with other people.

My place on the “hug – hurt continuum”, as I shall grandly name it, is influenced for me by various factors. There’s the severity of their punishment. Even when a girl is deeply in character in a scene designed to be intense, the more severe the whacking, the more I instinctively tend towards hugs, sympathy. But at the same time, I can actually feel more soppy and protective if the spanking was far from severe, but was earned less deliberately. Take Haron’s corridor exploits, for example, where I doubt she had intended at the time to get into trouble. I imagine a moment of dismay when she realised she’d been caught and, a split-second later, what the consequences would inevitably be.

What else has an influence? Are there other people around to offer hugs in my absence? Do I know the top(s) concerned (and the organisers); am I confident that they would have been careful, caring – which was absolutely the case at the past weekend’s events. (And actually, the girls wouldn’t choose to go to such an event if the other participants weren’t entirely trustworthy). Maybe, too, there’s when we’ll next be together, so I can offer and enjoy real-life hugs (and probe, perhaps, for more details to satisfy my pervy curiosity): in this case, that’s only a couple of days away.

If we’re in contact during the event, there’s also the need to strike a balance between letting them know I’m thinking about them and that I care – and not wanting to break the spell of the scene or bring them out of character by interrupting from afar, too regularly, or expecting them to do so. That’s not always an easy balance for me to get right: perhaps I tend too much towards the “hug” end of the scale.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts – from tops, as to how you respond when your girl(s) get punished when you’re not around; and from young ladies who are on the receiving end in such circumstances: to what extent do you find hearing from your partner(s) and knowing of their concern to be good and helpful, and to what extent does it interfere with the scene you’re playing and the character you’re trying to inhabit for the duration?

“Please, Miss, may I go see how Pandora is doing?”

My room-mate had left the dinner table half an hour previously to nurse her cold upstairs. The Deputy Headmistress of the finishing school, Miss Hammond-Grant (aka Miss Ham-and-Eggs), immediately grants me permission to check on her. I race up the grand staircase to the dormitory floor and bound into our room, only to find out, to my bewilderment, that Pandora isn’t anywhere to be found. As the whole school is gathered in the dining room, and outside there’s altogether too much snow to go for a walk, I haven’t the slightest idea where she might be. However, I reason that she’ll come out when she’s ready to face the world again. I return to the dining-room, where the girls of Mrs Darling’s school are entertaining their guests.

I slip into my seat. My naughty friend Tombola Van Hoyden catches my eye across the table. “How is she?”

“Er,” I say, trying not to look at the Deputy Headmistress. “She needs some time.”

The matter is left at that. In a short while it turns out that Pandora had sneaked out of the back door for a smoke, and got locked out. My real-life self feels guilty for not thinking to check outside, but my schoolgirl persona is delighted. I covered for my friend, and got away with it!

—

The following morning there are five or six of us frantically washing up after the big dinner, getting ready to serve breakfast to the staff and guests. After that, there will be an assembly, where Mrs Darling and Miss Hammond-Grant will deal with the girls for an accumulation of misdeeds – after a rousing rendition of the school song. The latter has been adapted by the Deputy Head from “To Be a Pilgrim”; we’d been taught it the previous morning.

One of the girls freezes amid the washing-up. “Are they going to expect us to know the words today?”

The girls vaguely recall Mrs Darling saying something to that effect, which we had all completely forgotten. Despair enters my heart. We have all been so busy with chores and lessons that there’s barely been time to sit down, never mind do homework. And there certainly won’t be time to do it now, with hungry guests showing up for breakfast in half an hour. It looks like there will be spankings in assembly.

The Head Girl, Catherine Thomas, doesn’t loose her cool. “Let’s learn it now, together. Jemima, read us the words.”

Ah, salvation! Jemima Symington-Gore picks up her regulation notebook, with the copy of the school song tacked on the inside of the cover, and reads it line by line, with the rest of us repeating after her without stopping our frantic activity.

“To Darling’s we are sent,” I mutter along with my friends as I ferry clean glasses to the breakfast room next door. “Our tawdriness repent.”

Ten minutes later, we are word-perfect, and the rest of the girls, who are arriving from other areas in the house are also catching up. There are a few good singers in the group, and the song echoes, sweet and strong, above the chaos of the kitchen: “It is our one intent / To be a lady.”

We have won. There may be spankings in assembly (of course, of course there will be!), but not for this.

—

Friendship. Camaraderie. Naughtiness and mischief. But mainly, most significantly – friendship is what I take away with me from my weekend at the finishing school.

Thank you to the girls, great friends to jump down the rabbit hole with, and to the staff and guests, who were waiting to catch us.

Emma Jane posted a great entry earlier this month at ‘A Painful Awakening’. In it, she took inspiration from a book of letters that well-known folks have written to their 16 year old selves. Her version was so good that the book’s editor re-published it on his vanilla website; others also took inspiration from the post, with Kaelah (for example) writing her own moving thoughts at the Rohrstock Palast.

Much as I found Emma Jane’s post so incredibly touching and wonderful, the whole concept’s left me deeply unsettled over the past few weeks. Whenever I’ve found myself on my own – already unduly tired and stressed as it is – I’ve not been able to put it out of my mind for long. For it’s rather dragged me back to a time when I was deeply miserable, a time I’ve fought pretty hard to forget.

I had much for which to be thankful at 16 – a good school, kind and loving parents. I was a successful student – high grades, top of the class, never in trouble. But that was only half of the story.

Never unduly popular – the son of teachers at the school, academic not sporty by nature – 16 was probably my lowest point. The bullying, for which I’d long been easy prey (and which still to this day occasions the odd nightmare)? Yep, that was at its worst. Standing up that summer to be counted, objecting to the continuing torments: that didn’t endear me to the bullies or their ever-so-many friends.

Feeling desperately awkward and immature – a late developer physically, with classmates who were in any case a year older than me. Easily embarrassed, feeling foolish around the oh-so-grown-up girls who’d just joined the sixth form at my otherwise all-boys’ school. Overlooked (surprisingly to most people, but in retrospect doubtless entirely reasonably) by the powers-that-be when the initial  batch of school prefects from my year were appointed. Not being part of the in-crowd, of any crowd; the least likely to be invited to the parties that were happening all around. Yours truly.

Yep, being re-introduced to my sixteen year old self – and recalling things that I’ve never, ever discussed since leaving school – has been rather depressing. Even though, of course, if I were writing a letter, I’d be pointing out that life would work out much better than I could have imagined then: I’m so, so lucky to have loving relationships with three such amazing partners; to know so many wonderful people through the scene; to be successful in my working life.

But that continuing terror of being lonely, alone? Of being the one left on the sidelines whilst others have fun, the kid on the edge of the playground with no-one to play with? Why I’m sometimes so disconsolately (and unfairly, unreasonably, needily) upset and sad when my loved ones attend scene events that I can’t (often for very sound reasons) attend myself?

The overwhelming need for recognition and praise from my peers, my perhaps overly-competitive nature – continually needing to prove myself to myself and to others? The (irrational) worry and rising panic if I don’t hear from those closest to me for an unexpectedly long time: have they stopped loving me? I’m not looking for excuses for some of the less attractive facets of my character, but the experiences of  1984 – my year of being 16, give or take a few days either end – doubtless contribute a lot.

As for kink? In many ways, I guess, it may actually have been for the best that I didn’t realise that my fascination with spanking wasn’t – as I feared at the time – something unique to me, shameful, perverse. I’d have been far too immature to know what to do about it, and I was far better equipped to prosper in the scene when I did discover over a decade later.

Anyway, enough of all of this introspection. “Just ignore the bad memories and focus on today, on all the positives,” you’d doubtless correctly advise. But it’s not as easy as that, when you’ve been drawn back by your demons – albeit writing about them’s a pretty good way to help to banish them again. Even if the elements of 16 year old me still inside worry, before pressing the ‘publish’ button, that anyone coming across the post will think worse of me as a result of what they’ve just read.

I’m spending this weekend at Mrs Darling’s Academy for Young Ladies, which is a finishing school run by Lucy McLean of Northern Spanking. Getting there required a five-hour train journey, on which I set off yesterday with my suitcase and carefully packed school satchel.

I fantasised that instead of going on a weekend of kinky fun, I was a schoolgirl setting off for my first term at a new boarding school. My uniform, complete with a grey felt hat, identifies me immediately as a St. Hild’s girl. I can see a few other girls in the same uniform, but they are older and completely uninterested in me.

A boy sits across from me. “Going to St Hild’s?” he says. “I go to Bede’s down the road.” He offers me his hand in a ceremonial handshake.

Fast-forward a week, and the two schools, St Hild’s Academy and St. Bede’s School for Boys are all gathered in a chapel they share, boys and girls separated by the aisle. I see my acquaintance from the train, and wave at him. He looks shocked, but waves back.

What I don’t realise is that girls and boys aren’t meant to communicate in church. My Housemistress descends upon me like the wrath from Mount Olympus, and I can see my friend being berated by his housemaster, as well. “But I didn’t know,” I object. The housemistress takes it as defiance, and after chapel I’m in her study, my skirt off, my knickers down, the slipper printing red blotches on my bottom.

I get a reputation after this, as “that first year who’s friends with a boy”. Somehow that makes me cool. I don’t mind being cool, but it also brings a lot of unwanted attention from the teachers, my housemistress in particular.

At least I have a friend, even if I don’t talk to him that often.

So, here’s the question….

You’re in the Headmaster’s office. Two girls were spotted committing some grave offence (truancy, perhaps). You were caught: your friend escaped unrecognised.

The Headmaster ponders the situation. “On the one hand, you fully deserve to be caned – but so does the other girl involved. On the other, one might argue that it’s unfair for you to take the punishment if your colleague gets away with it scot-free.”

So he proposes a solution: “double or quits. I’ll toss a coin. Heads, and you walk away. Tails, and the six strokes I’m going to give you will be doubled to twelve, so you take the punishment for both girls.”

What would you choose? (And would your decision vary according to the number of strokes – for example, if you’d originally been due a dozen, but the wrong call would increase that to 24?)

I dreamed I was at a student protest last night. The crowd was surging, I felt myself pushed towards the riot shields. A policeman’s hand snatched me by the collar and yanked me out of the crowd. I fought back, trying to wrestle free and blend back into anonymity again, but the man held me fast.

I heard a shout, saw another policeman gesturing to the one who was holding me with a short whip. I found myself turned around and held in a strong grip, while my back was exposed to the man with a whip. I felt it come down with a dream force, a thud, but no pain.

My most overwhelming emotion, as more strokes fell, was sharp shame – because despite the appalling violation, I was turned on. What if the policemen noticed, I wondered. What if my friends in the crowd noticed that I was actually enjoying the whipping? I could barely think through the hum of shame.

It’s the first time I’ve felt any kink-guilt for a while. I’d forgotten all about it, but apparently, my subconscious hadn’t.

I tweeted* the other morning in frustration, after my hotel alarm call woke me at the most inconvenient point of a rather enjoyable dream. I thought I might share a little more of the scenario that was so frustratingly interrupted…

I was mesmerised by a display of rulers in a stationery shop yesterday. Narrow and wide, thin and thick, they all seemed to whisper naughty fantasies to me.

I walk into a prefect’s study, my heart beating in my throat. The prefect, tall and imposing, eyes me with disdain. His mouth curves in a smirk at my obvious discomfort.

“You again? I swear, I spend half of my life punishing you. Go on, you know the drill.”

Begging is useless. I walk forward silently, and extend my hands, one palm cradled in the other. He gives me a gentle tap with the ruler first, taking aim, and immediately brings it down with a stinging crack. I hiss and blink away tears that immediately spring to my eyes.

“Swap,” the prefect commands.

I swap my hands. The ruler taps again, and cracks down again, a matching print on my other hand.

“Swap. And keep your eyes open.”

That’s the most horrendous part: having to watch the ruler fall every time. I withstand six strokes, three on each palm, and by the last one I’m weeping openly, as much from shame as from pain. More than anything I want to hide my face from him.

When he’s done, he waits for several long seconds before allowing me to lower my hands. “Get out of my sight. If I see you here again before half-term, you’re going to regret having hands at all. Clear?”

Oh yes, it’s clear. I retreat to bathe my sore palms in cold water, and mentally promise myself to be on my best behaviour for the rest of my life.

So my coffee is weak and cold this morning, I can’t drag a brush through my hair, and there’s a loose thread in my jumper. Clearly, it’s the fault of my maid.

I think I’ll let her finish dressing me, and then sternly order her to fetch a riding crop from the implement stand in the corner of the room. She will need to lower her knickers and bend over the foot of the bed, her bottom rising creamily from the foam of her uniform pettycoat.

I won’t be unduly harsh. Six strokes is all I’d give her. The crop will leave bright crimson prints on her bottom, which will stand out starkly against her skin. She will yelp and gasp, but I doubt she’ll cry – unless it’s from shame at letting me down. And she will tearfully promise to do better.

Yes, that’s what I’ll do.

I only need to find a maid first.

It’s 08:32, one morning last week. I’m sitting in a conference centre in Germany, waiting to run a workshop for a client. The start time? 08:30. The number of participants in the room, from the dozen who should be here? Precisely none. So much, I ponder, for the famed German reputation for punctual timekeeping…

I scan down the attendance list, and within seconds the fate of Petra, Melanie, Tanja and the other female delegates is sealed. A chair is moved to the front of the room: each of the young ladies called over on their arrival to be bent over my knee and sound spanked on the bare.

I enjoyed the mental image for a moment, and then put the little scenario straight out of mind. The problem? Less the implausibility of spanking my clients, no matter how deserving, than the realisation that the tardy arrivals also included the likes of Manfred, Hans and Wolfgang…