The Spanking Writers

A cruel, cruel dream the other night. A respectable girl, tied naked to the whipping frame, her fine, expensive clothes crumpled on the dirty floor. The gaoler, birch in hand, flogging her without mercy.

Her sobs, at the end of her court-awarded punishment. His request: “And where is my guinea?”

“Guinea? What guinea?”

“The standard fee for your flogging. For my time, and for the birch rods.”

Whimpering: “But I don’t have any money with me.”

And the officer taking a cane from the wall. “Well, if you can’t pay me, you deserve to be punished.”

The hard strokes, laid across her freshly-birched buttocks. And then – him moving close behind her. “To be punished… And, of course, to pay the price for my services in a different way…”

I went to a business meeting recently at the head office of a rather prestigious city law company – a fabulous place, with a buffet lunch that merited a Michelin star. What interested me, though, was less the meeting room that we were in than the one I’d spied from outside as I walked up to the building.

The blinds weren’t closed, you see, and nosey passers-by could read everything being projected onto the screen from the presenter’s laptop. She chattered away to her audience, oblivious to the fact that the client’s innermost legal secrets were plain for all outside to see.

I imagined a senior partner happening to glance in as he walked past: stopping, horrified at how much he could see. He’d send one of the office butlers in to discreetly close the blinds – and would schedule a meeting with the lass concerned in the self-same meeting room later that afternoon.

He’d cane her, of course – no value after all in dismissing such a promising young member of staff for a first-time breach of the rules, no matter how serious. But what would make it worse for her was his insistence that, before she removed her knickers and lifted her skirt to bend over the desk, she should go and open the blinds. “Perhaps it’ll make you think about what people can see from the street in future,” he’d explain, before administering the first of her twelve painful stripes.

Quite often, the disciplinarian in my occasional little fantasies turns out to be the girl’s guardian. Her own parents are absent from the scene, for reasons usually unexplained – often, in my mind, for geographical reasons (she’s at school in the UK, her parents work and live abroad) rather than any past tragedy. I imagine a formal arrangement, under which a family friend, relative or even a paid tutor would look after her in loco parentis - with, of course, the use (or otherwise) of corporal punishment being clearly discussed in advance.

But what if he such an agreement wasn’t in place – if the subject of punishments hadn’t ever been contemplated? What if, instead, he’d uncovered some dastardly wrong-doing that would make her parents distraught were they know about it – and so, to avoid upsetting them, had decided that it might be best to take matters into his own hands? “We can either deal with this here and now, and your parents don’t need to find out – or I can pick up the phone and call them right away.”

Any such thrashing, one feels, would be rather severe – the gentleman wanting to leave her thoroughly punished and to ensure beyond any reasonable doubt that there’d be no repetition. Over his knee and then his belt? Or a bundle of switches freshly-cut from the garden? Followed, naturally, by a hug, giving her time for her to recover her composure… All I need now is to work out what her offence might have been, and an entire lovely little fantasy would have fallen perfectly into place!

So, how quickly can a girl undress? I mean fully: removing her high heeled shoes, her elegant little evening dress, her fine lingerie, every item of her carefully-selected jewellery.

See, I’m picturing a gentleman in a smart suit and tie, seated in a comfortable armchair, telling a girl that she’s to strip – and that he’ll give her one stroke of the strap for every second it takes before she’s standing stark naked in front of him with her hands on her head.

Ten seconds: ten lashes? More? Less?

And then I’m imagining the coquettish girl, who turns it into an erotic challenge – slowly disrobing, taking her time, looking him in the eyes as she does. She knows it’ll lead to more strokes. She wants it to lead to more strokes, craving the pain and what he”ll do to her straight afterwards.

–

And now I really am quite distracted from the boring admin that I should be doing working from home this afternoon. Back to the invoicing… but with a smile on my face…

Anyone else puzzled by DFS? For my non-British readers, I should explain – they’re a furniture company, whose adverts for the past twenty years or more have offered apparently-incredible discounts in a sale that “must end soon”. Soon? Twenty years? How do they get away with it?

I happened to glance at one of their newspaper ads recently. On sofa number one: a youngish couple, curled up happily next to one another. On the next – two young kids, looking happy.

Sofa three? A guy with a remote control in his hand, watching TV. Or was it porn, I wondered? And that set me off. For sofa four would surely seat a smart gentleman, in front of whom stood a sorry-looking girl with a bare, red bottom. After all, what better use of a sofa than to put a badly-behaved girl over one’s knees and spank her soundly?

Sadly, the ad agency hadn’t followed my logic, for the final piece of furniture actually showed a chap stroking a dog. But I reckon my idea was better – and I doubt any UK readers will ever be able to look at a DFS ad in quite the same way again…

Last weekend, Emma Jane and I stayed in a London hotel with a somewhat unusual – and incredible annoying feature: “soundscapes” in the lifts. Every trip between floors was accompanied by the chain’s specially-commissioned atmospheric noises – a rainforest; water washing on the seashore; laughing voices; a flushing toilet (or, at least, that was what it sounded like); the sound of a cane whacking against a sobbing girl’s backside. Actually, the last of these is made up (as you might guess) – but one could live in hope!

During a very lovely, relatively quiet, fairly vanilla weekend (enjoying the fruits of an indulgent Coco de Mer trip perhaps aside), we did stumble across one place that sparked my kinky imagination. Spencer House is London’s finest surviving 18th-century private palace. After being restored at great expense over the past couple of decades, it’s open to the public most Sundays.

Now, I can usually pervert any old house, imagining past thrashings of maids, mistresses and more. But the guide here was so fascinating that I remained deep in concentration in the stories of the architecture, furniture, paintings and the restoration project.

Then we came to the final stop on the tour. The Duke who’d built the property had, unusually for those days, married for love. And he and his young bride had had the final “Painted Room” built for one another to enjoy – a truly beautiful space, just off the great hall, where they could simply be together, alone:

I couldn’t help but imagine the frolics that might have taken place there between the lovers. And that original chair, with its view over Green Park? That was the one in which he sat as his young bride daintily bared her bottom, and giggled her way across his lap.

Things got ruder, naturally, for they’d surely brought in their favourite young serving girl; kissed her, caressed her, stripped her. Bent her over the arm of the sofa, the Duchess holding her hands as the Duke striped her backside with a riding crop? And then each taken their pleasure from her, and her from them?

I almost feel guilty – for the room is so superb, so very special, that corrupting it feels, well, somewhat wrong. And it’s interesting that the fantasies I managed to set in there were so consensual: anything else would have felt, frankly, disrespectful!

A while ago, a group of us met for coffee in London’s esteemed Wellcome Collection. None of us had realised that the building’s security staff perform a thorough, slightly paranoid, search of visitors’ bags on arrival. Fortunately, perhaps, we were all implement-free, thus sparing any blushes.

Actually, I wouldn’t have blushed, being quite blase about such matters – but the guards might have done, as might some visitors. And that’s where I started to get devious, inspired by news of one of our party having revisited the establishment recently with some naughty toys in her bag.

I picture a girl being made to report to the building with the necessary implements in her bag, prior to a punishment – or, even, as a punishment in itself. The well-worn Mason Pearson hairbrush wouldn’t be an issue; the single slipper might raise eyebrows; the two-tailed Lochgelly tawse would leave her blushing and squirming, especially were the guard to ask for an explanation.

Mmmm. Ways of embarrasing, humiliating, a girl – without even having to be present! I like. Although, of course, I suspect I’d want to be waiting just inside the lobby to watch – and to take her firmly in hand once she’d been sent on her way by the guards.

Some time ago, the Gloria Brame posted the following photograph of a 1920s beauty contest on her very-wonderful blog:

I thought it was rather lovely – especially when you consider that this must have been taken just after the heats for the contest – the girls in question having just been selected for the following day’s Grand Final. Problem was for them that, overnight, their high spirits would lead the group to being caught smoking and drinking long after the strict curfew time that applied to all contestants.

They’d each have been paddled, hard, on the bare, their pleas that the marks would show during the swimsuit section of the  morning’s contest totally brushed aside: “You should have thought of that before you behaved like this; the audience will just have to see how badly-behaved you’ve been.”

At around the same time, Gloria posted another wonderful seaside image:

How demure! How lovely! How unfortunate for the sisters that their father had told them to be back at the hotel by four p.m. at the very latest, so that they could rest before dressing for dinner, and that it was now nearly five. And, indeed, here he is – striding across the manicured lawns to fetch them… They’d not felt his hairbrush for the longest time, and certainly not together. That was about to change…

As my colleague and I wandered out of the train station late on Monday evening, it was drizzling gently. We looked up at the heavens, and decided that the ten-minute walk back to the house would do us good; that the light rain would refresh us after a heavy dinner with work people. Yet by the time we were a few hundred yards in, the heavens had opened. “Soaked to the skin” would be a fair description.

I passed the last part of the walk, trekking miserably up the hill in the torrential rain, by trying to come up with a kinky take on the situation. What if I was a girl’s guardian, waiting for her at home as she arrived back late, soaked, in the dark? I’d meet her in the hallway once she’d let herself in: “Take those wet clothes off, right now.”

Duly naked, and covering herself with embarrassment, she’d stand before me in the living room as be made to explain why she was in such trouble. Walking alone in the dark rather than taking a taxi; staying out later than agreed; risking catching cold in the storm. I’d lay her across my lap on the sofa, wondering as I did whether her shivering was from cold or fear. And I’d redden her bottom with my hand until tears came to her eyes. But that wouldn’t suffice…

“What happens if you put yourself in danger, unnecessarily?”

“I… I get caned, sir.”

“Indeed. Go upstairs and get ready for bed, and fetch the cane from my study as you walk past. I’ll come and see you in ten minutes…”

What I should be doing in my hotel room at 6am, with a major presentation to give to 300 people at the start of today’s conference: re-checking the slides, practising my script, tidying my room to check out before breakfast.

What I am doing? Thinking about a hard, judicial caning, the girl naked and tied down for a large number of strokes, administered slowly, hard, by a uniformed guard with no sympathy for her screams.

I suspect her original sentence had been doubled, somehow. The magistrate had sentenced her to, say, 24 strokes. Perhaps the Punishment Centre officers, on stripping her, had found the empty packaging from the painkillers she’d sneakily taken to try to lessen the effect of the whipping. She’d have been forcibly and intimately searched to check she had no other suppliers hidden away, then locked in solitary to wait for five hours until they’d worn off.

Perhaps she’d tried to bribe the guards: “My father’s wealthy; he’ll look after you if you go easy on me.” In either case, she’d have been taken before the Senior Officer, who’d have listened to what had happened and calmly, in a matter-of-fact way, increased the 24 to 48.

I really must do that work. And I really must get this image of the  sobbing, striped girl out of my mind. It really is quite distracting: deliciously so, in fact!