The Spanking Writers

My dreams have been very appropriate to the start of September, the traditional back-to-school time. I dreamed that I was, indeed, back to school, starting my last year. There was a great deal of pomp and circumstance to do with the final year students being nearly grown-ups, but also we got reminded a lot to wear our uniforms, to be polite to teachers and to do the homework promptly. And yes, there would be corporal punishment when we didn’t do well enough.

My dream self was baffled by the contrast between being expected to behave like a responsible adult and yet to be treated like a child in many respects, including very possibly being caned. The uniform was particularly constricting: I thought I should be allowed to choose my own clothing.

The dream ended with me about to be caned by the deputy headmistress for initiating some sort of uniform protest in the corridors. I woke up incredibly upset about it.

How strange that something that I’m so fond of in real life would prove to be the subject of so much angst in a dream.

In a supermarket the other day two children were messing around a lot. They played a game that looked like a mix of catch and nuclear warfare. Their minder, a girl of about 20, wasn’t even trying to calm them down – she was trying to finish her shopping and get out.

I imagined that she was the family’s au-pair. What she didn’t realise was that one of her employers’ neighbours was also in the shop, and saw the children running wild. The neighbour phoned their father that evening, just a friendly call to let him know that the au-pair might not be doing her job as well as she might.

The father called the girl into an empty living room for a talk. He realised, he said, that his children could be difficult, but she couldn’t just ignore bad behaviour and hope it would go away.
The girl said contritely that she understood, and that she would do better.

This promise wasn’t enough. In a bid to demonstrate that bad behaviour shouldn’t be ignored, the father instructed her to lower her jeans and bend over the sofa cushions. Knowing the procedure, she meekly leaned forward as he unbuckled his belt and slid it out of the loops.

The whipping that followed was not unduly harsh, but firm enough that the girl was tearful and sore by the end. Her promises of better work were far more sincere and convincing. The father allowed her to stand, then gave her a warm hug, reassuring her that he wasn’t angry, and was merely doing what was necessary.

The girl sniffled into his shirt and took mental notes.

The setting: a discussion I was leading recently with a group of senior managers.

The issue: their complaint that they spend too much time on internal bureaucracy, and (as a result) not enough looking after their customers.

My contribution: “has anyone heard of Janus?”

They looked blank, so I carefully wrote the word up on the flipchart: JANUS. In block capitals. Where it remained, to my great delight, for the remainder or the workshop.

(Clearly, I was talking about the Roman god, whose two faces look in opposite directions – rather like said managers, forever trying to focus both internally and externally. Any suggestion that I might have been referring to the famous Soho spanking shop or the magazine of the same name would be entirely misplaced. But I was a little disappointed that none of the ladies in the discussion blushed and squirmed uncomfortably in their seats).

Oh, but this story is making my spanking hand itch something awful.

How about this: two Swedish schoolgirls bought bugging equipment in a gadget shop and installed it in the teachers’ common room.

Seriously. They did. They got caught when one of them bragged about it on Facebook, thus failing Spying 101 in a rather spectacular manner. The real-life result of this was a court case, a guilty verdict and a hefty fine.

I picture a different outcome. There would be an after-school staff meeting which the pair of girls would be ordered to attend. A chair would be placed in the middle of the room, and the girls would have to bend over its back one after the other, skirts up and knickers lowered to their ankles. The Headmaster would administer a full dozen of cane strokes to each upturned bottom, with the whole teaching staff looking on.

Afterwards, the minutes of the staff meeting, including the two canings, would be posted on the school’s Facebook page, with links to the girls’ profiles.

That’s only fair, no?

A lovely, if cruel, little scene came to mind as we cruised down the Grand Canal in Venice on our luxury launch the other day*. A young woman, daughter of a nobleman, was in her bedchamber in her family’s palazzo, overlooking the water. As servants busied themselves in the background, a fierce argument was playing out between the girl and her mother.

You see, it was the day of the girl’s wedding, and her father had betrothed her – much against her will – to the much-older son of the ruling Doge. The marriage would bring great advantage to the family’s fortunes – but which bright young maiden wants to be paired up with some old fogey, no matter how influential and wealthy, purely for her parents’ political ambitions?

Tempers flared as the maids tried to dress the girl for the impending service. Eventually the mother’s patience gave way, and the young woman found herself flung over the maternal lap and on the receiving end of a hard hand spanking.

Far from calming her, the punishment had precisely the opposite effect, for as soon as it was over, the lass grabbed her wedding dress, opened the windows on to the balcony, and flung the expensive garment into the water below.

She was taken to her father: the soundest of whippings ensued… and the wedding proceeded that afternoon as planned.

Returning to ponder the scene some more as I wrote it up later, it struck me that she would doubtless prove to be most unwilling when her new husband came to take advantage of his marital rights that evening. But afterwards, he would hold her tight; he’d tell her that he knew he might not have been her ideal choice of spouse, but would vow to be a good husband and look after her well if she’d try to love him back…

* OK, it was one of the public vaporetto boats, but one can dream…

Our American friends have been sending their young children off to school this week. This made me think about my own primary school days. Particularly the merit and demerit system used in my school, and how I used to fantasise it was ever so slightly different.

I started school in one of the last years of the Communist rule, and so the discipline structure was quite interesting. The first grade was divided into 5-person groups (called “the stars”), with one kid in charge (“the commander”). I was the commander, naturally.

Now, when one of the kids did something impressive, the whole group got a merit mark, a little red star that went on a bulletin board against your group’s name. If one of you was naughty, the group received a blue circle. And the six or so groups in the class competed with each other as to which one was doing best. The thinking was, I suppose, that if there was a naughty kid in one of the “stars”, the other four would guilt them into being slightly better behaved.

As the commander, I was somewhat responsible for my naughty boys (I had two), and was frequently told that I should exert influence over them somehow. I did the best I could. But mostly I just spent a lot of time wondering what would happen if, miraculously, the school introduced spanking for getting too many demerit marks. Would it be only the naughty kid who got spanked, or the whole of his “star”? Or maybe just the kid and his commander? For the commander to be spanked would have been the perfect way of me to get what I wanted without actually having to misbehave, which would have been just perfect.

The Soviet education system didn’t believe in spanking. Shaming, group responsibility – yes, spanking – no. Yet, whenever I think back to the bulletin board with the little red stars and blue circles, I wonder how the spankings would have been arranged.

Very efficiently, with much ideology behind them, I have no doubt.

As Haron crawled into bed on our last night in Florence, turning off the lights, it struck me that our grand hotel must have opened in the pre-electricity era.

I imagined a maid, all those years ago, lighting the candles in a gentleman’s room. She’d stumble; disaster would strike as the thick velvet drapes caught light. Flames would start to flicker… and the distinguished guest would react just in time, the bucket of iced water averting calamity.

Calamity for the hotel, that is, if not for the maid. An incident so serious would have had to be drawn to the attention of the general manager; the following morning the girl would find herself tied naked over a table in the staff quarters, the other housemaids assembled to watch her exemplary punishment. The gravity of the potential consequences of her carelessness would be discussed; the whipping that would follow would be justifiably severe.

As I look out of the window at the grey, rain-soaked horizon on my first working day after the holiday, my mind wanders to what it must have been like to be a young teacher returning to a boarding school just before the start of the school term.

The girls are not back yet, only the staff, and although the young woman enjoys teaching, she can feel the vaults of the venerable institution pressing down on her, weighing her to the ground. After a summer spent with her college friends in Provence, with much laughing, drinking and silliness, she is shocked to be among the adults again, expected to set the standards of behaviour, and to enforce them.

She jolted particularly unpleasantly when one morning the janitor delivers the supply of new canes for her classroom: two each of junior and senior canes, to be hung on hooks in a cupboard, like umbrellas – but far more sinister. She knows very well that, despite her reluctance to use corporal punishment, she will do so with no outward hesitation when there’s need. Such is the culture of the school; the girls expect it, as much as the other teachers.

She goes through the lists of her pupils, and wonders which one of them will need to be caned first, and for what sins, and how. Most likely, it will be a few quick swats on the hand in the classroom, to get back the miscreant’s wandering attention. Or it might be a stroke or two over the seat of their knickers between lessons.

She knows, though, that sooner or later she will have to issue an instruction for a girl to see her after prep, and then deliver several proper, searing cracks on a reluctantly bared behind. She tries to guess which girl this would be, and briefly wonders about running a sweepstake.

Then she firmly shuts the cupboard on her new arsenal, and goes back to her lesson plan.

I posted last week (“Still Daddy’s Girl”) about the number of twenty-something American girls travelling in Italy with their families. Later in the trip (from which we’ve now sadly returned), we sat at the next table to a slightly younger lass, enjoying dinner with her parents – giggling at her dad’s jokes, blushing at the waiter’s flirtatious attentions.

We surmised that she had just finished her final year at school; the European trip was by way of congratulations on her top grades and admission into some prestigious university. She’d be about to start her gap year – which, her father had decreed, would be spent in the sixth form of a very traditional English girls’ boarding school. For her to pass A Levels with top grades in one year rather than the usual two would require ferociously hard work – but her great-grandmother had been educated at the same establishment prior to the family’s emigration to the States, and some traditions deserve to be upheld.

Clearly, a guardian would need to be appointed for her time in the UK. After all, she’d need somewhere to stay during those long weekends and mid-term breaks, when travel back to the States wouldn’t be feasible. And she’d need someone nearby to monitor her progress at first hand, and to deal with any disciplinary matters that may require attention.

When she arrived at her home-from-home in late October for her first half-term break, she’d hand over the envelope with her report card. It’d glitter with praise – A grades, top marks for effort. Her guardian would congratulate her – perhaps even proposing a small glass of congratulatory champagne. But she’d hesitate, blush, then hand over a second envelope: “My housemaster also told me to give you this.”

The neatly-typed letter would be short, to the point. The group of girls had failed to appear for the first lesson after lunch on the day before the half-term break. When they had belatedly returned to school premises, it had been established that they had spent their break in the local public house. Each girl had therefore received six strokes of the cane from her housemaster.

And family traditions must prevail… She’d be sent to her room, and told to get ready for bed, despite it only being seven in the evening. Her guardian would follow, an hour or so later, crook-handled cane in hand. “Two strokes at home for every one at school” would be the rule: he’d make her lower her pyjama bottoms and touch her toes, before administering the painful punishment. A hug would follow, and the gentleman would then retire to his study to compose a note to her parents…

As our Twitter followers will have read – @abeljenkins and @adelehaze, if you’d like to add us to your lists – we’ve been fortunate enough to have been upgraded to some truly wonderful suites during our Italian holiday. (Rome: rack rate for the suite, more than €4000 per night. No, I haven’t typed too many 0s in that. Our rooms in a Florentine palace: decorated with beautiful nineteenth-century hand-painted  frescos).

Some 250 or so years ago, such suites would doubtless have been occupied by other English folks on their Grand Tours. We imagined one such, setting out on his trip (for it was usually the sons of the nobility who went touring), taking with him his favourite maid.

Some incident would occur on their journey, whereby the young lass in question would do something* to upset or offend another travelling gentleman. Our hero would promise to deal with the matter severely once they reached Rome the following afternoon.

He’d call the girl into his suite a few hours after their arrival in the Eternal City. He’d praise her first – how well she’d looked after him on their journey, how diligent she’d been. But, he’d continue, her conduct the previous evening had been quite unacceptable: she was to go to the hotel reception, and ask the staff to make up two birch rods, and she should bring them to him just as soon as they were ready.

She’d stand before him some half hour later, tearful and ashamed. She’d listen as he expressed his disappointment; blush as he told her that he knew she’d been whipped by the butler some weeks before their departure for the continent; obey as he told her that he would start by dealing with the fact that she had let him down, and so was to bend over his knee.

He’d bare her, put an arm around her to hold her in place, then he’d spank her oh-so-hard, talking all the time of how he thought she was a good girl, how she’d worked so hard – and why it was therefore such a surprise, such a let-down, that she’d embarrassed him so. She’d sob as he told her how she should have known better.

Once he’d finished this first part of her ordeal, he’d permit her rest on his lap – allowing time for her to compose herself (and for the dread of what was to follow to start to mount). And then it would be time for him to honour his word to the other gentleman, and to punish her for the incident in question.

She’d be instructed to bend over the arm of a chair and to bare her backside. He’d take the first of the birches, and slowly and purposefully administer a dozen fierce cuts. Unlike during the hand spanking, he’d remain silent whilst birching her, allowing the rods to convey his message. And then he’d discard the first bundle in favour of a fresh birch, and add a further still-harder twelve.

Afterwards, she’d stand and he’d hold her tight in his arms; she’d lean against him, crying, and he’d comfort her, gently kissing her forehead to reassure her that all was forgiven. It would, of course, have been quite improper for a gentleman in those days to allow his maid to curl up next to him on his bed and cuddle her until she fell asleep. But they were a long way from home, and nothing improper would take place, so we shall leave them there in each other’s arms…

* I have no idea what heinous offence she could have committed, but wasn’t going to let that get in the way of a good story. Suggestions welcome!