Weaving my way through a crowd of rush-hour commuters at Baker Street at around 6pm the other evening. In our midst, a solitary schoolgirl, carrying her satchel, looking downcast.
Surely school had finished hours before, I thought. So where had she been? Why, it was obvious…
Detention started after the other girls had left: an hour of copying the school rules in longhand with her fountain pen. And afterwards: that most lonely of walks to her housemaster’s office, to have to listen to how disappointed he was in her and to learn her fate.
Momentary relief that it was only to be four strokes, not the six she’d feared, had quickly vanished once she’d heard the instruction to bend over and touch her toes. And the senior cane had proved far more excruciating than the one he’d used the only other time she’d been punished, three years before.
And now? Trying to work out what credible-sounding excuse she could use for her late arrival home. For if the truth came out and they found she’d been lying, as well as in such trouble at school, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about…
Would the consequences have something to do with the belt?
I knew when I wrote it that you’d think that, Alias 😉 Yes, very much so!