The Spanking Writers

Yesterday morning we asked a young hotel concierge a question about some particulars of Venetian public transportation. The boy – an apple-cheeked, smiley blonde creature – jokingly said that we seemed to have a better grasp on the workings of the traghetto than he did, because he was a new trainee, on a recent transfer from Germany.

Abel wished him good luck, and said, “I hope you’re enjoying Venice as much as  we are.”

The boy’s face showed a sour grimace, and then he laughed embarrassedly at having displayed a genuine emotion. “Uh, it’s very…”

From the side, an older concierge crept up and deftly grabbed the boy by the ear, giving it a mock twist. “It’s very… good for tourists!” the trainee concluded, blushing like a virgin bride.

We laughed and departed. I felt very evil for spending a good portion of our subsequent walk imagining a flogging the lad undoubtedly received in the back office.

Quite often my dreams place me in fantasy schools, and these tend to be quite strict: with uniforms, canes, prefects – the works. This time, though, I was starting in the sixth form in a new school, and my parents happily informed me that, although it was an old, traditional establishment, I would be glad to know there’s no uniform there.

I was dreadfully disappointed with this. It was hardly a proper school, then, was it?

However, the dream then skipped to me being kept back after the lessons finished, and I was due a caning from the classroom teacher. The lack of uniform didn’t make a slightless difference for the strictness of the school.

I’d still rather have dreamed about something more traditional. I shall have a stern word with my subconscious.

We’re getting ready to go on holiday, and this means the cat had to go to the kitty prison. I took her this morning. The guy running it showed me to the little room where the cat is staying, and I watched him pour water, unroll the mats and open the meshed window.

“Just letting some air in for her,” he explained. “Some fresh air would be good, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It’s what they used to tell us at school,” he said. “In minus five degrees, with the window open above your bed. Bracing!”

“Oh, yes?” I said, keeping a mildly interested face. “A strict school, then?”

“Just the usual,” he said. “A little bit of shivering cold, a little bit of the cane – same as everywhere.”

I didn’t dare ask for specific episodes, so this is where the conversation petered out, but not before he assured me that my cat wouldn’t be facing any such hardships.

I’m ever so relieved. I’d began to wonder.

So I’m happily browsing the web, and I discover an article from the learned “Encyclopaedia Britannica” about corporal punishment:

By the common law of England, Scotland and Ireland, the infliction of corporal punishment is illegal unless it is done in self-defence or in defence of others, or is done either by some person having punitive authority over the person chastised or under the authority of a competent court of justice…

Among persons invested with punitive authority, mention must first be made of parents and guardians, and of teachers, who have, by implied delegation from the parents, and as incidental to the relation of master and pupil, powers of reasonable corporal punishment. Such powers are not limited to offences committed by the pupil upon the premises of the school, but extend to acts done on the way to and from school and during what may be properly regarded as school hours (Cleary v. Booth, 1893, I Q.B. 465)…

A master has a right to inflict moderate chastisement upon his apprentice for neglect or other misbehaviour… At common law the master of a ship is entitled to inflict reasonable chastisement on a seaman for gross breach of duty…

In civil prisons, whether they are convict prisons or local prisons, corporal punishment may not be inflicted except under sentence of a competent court, or except in the case of prisoners under sentence of penal servitude, or convicted of felony, or sentenced to hard labour, who have been guilty of mutiny or incitement to mutiny, or of gross personal violence to an officer or servant of the prison (Act of 1898, § 5). Flogging for these offences in prison may not be inflicted except by order of the board of visitors or visiting committee of the prison, made at a meeting specially constituted, and confirmed by a secretary of state…

The mode of inflicting the punishment is prescribed by the Convict Prison Rules (rr. 82-85) and the Local Prison Rules (rr. 88-91), which limit the number of strokes and prescribe the instrument to be used for inflicting them, the cat or birch for prisoners over 18, and the birch for prisoners under 18.

I nearly choked on my coffee, until I looked more closely and found that this was the 1911 edition of Britannica, and not its contemporary counterpart. But I do love the section on civil prisons – the concept of a scene involving a girl brought before the board of visitors sounds oh-so appealing!

Always erudite. I’ve recently been reading Alfred Church’s 1883 volume “Roman life in the days of Cicero”. (OK, OK, I was idly searching for references to canes on Google books, but I can at least pretend to be learned…). It provides an interesting little section linking our activities back to more ancient times:

The third choice of the famous Winchester line, “Either learn, or go: there is yet another choice–to be flogged,” was liberally employed. Horace celebrates his old schoolmaster as a “man of many blows,” and another distinguished pupil of this teacher, the Busby or Keate of antiquity, has specified the weapons which he employed, the ferule and the thong.

The thong is the familiar “tawse” of schools north of the Border. The ferule was a name given both to the bamboo and to the yellow cane, which grew plentifully both in the islands of the Greek Archipelago and in Southern Italy, as notably at Cannae in Apulia, where it gave a name to the scene of the great battle. The virga was also used, a rod commonly of birch, a tree the educational use of which had been already discovered. The walls of Pompeii indeed show that the practice of Eton is truly classical down to its details.

As to the advantage of the practice opinions were divided. One enthusiastic advocate goes so far as to say that the Greek word for a cane signifies by derivation, “the sharpener of the young” (narthex, nearous thegein), but the best authorities were against it.

OK, so sometimes one can jump to entirely the wrong conclusion…

I’ve set up a few Google ‘news alerts’, which merrily fill my mailbox every morning with spanking-related items from around the web, The other morning, in came an article about au pairs. The brief synopsis included the following:

Top Ten Mistakes Host Parents Make When Choosing an Au Pair…. “We do not use corporal punishment in our home….”

Oh… my… goodness. My mind filled immediately with thoughts of a young lady, far from home, being chastised for failing to adequately fulfil her au-pairing duties. Lectured about setting a bad example to the children. Warned that such behaviour could not be tolerated. Given the choice of packing her bags and leaving in the morning – or of lowering her jeans and bending over her employer’s lap to receive a hard, prolonged hand spanking.

Actually, the article was more of a warning to parents to make sure that the new au pair wouldn’t resort to handing out spankings (and quite right, too). But I do far prefer my interpretation…

My friend spotted this car, and was so kind as to send me a photo:

That’s a simply wonderful numberplate. However, even with the rather open lifestyle that we lead, we sometimes need to de-kink the house, so as not to shock innocent vanillas to the core. How does this person accomplish that?

That said… I want a kinky license plate too.

I was surfing book reviews, and I happened upon an interesting blurb for “Fool”, a novel by Christopher Moore. Apparently, it is -

a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear from the point of view of the Fool, and it entailed much shagging, spanking, wanking, murder and, horror, several split infinitives “It was quite bawdy,” Moore understates.

Really? That bawdy? It may seem imprudent to put a book on your “to buy” list just because it’s supposed to be a quite bawdy, but the Fool has always been one of my favourite Shakespearean characters, so I can pretend I actually want to read the book for its theme, and not just for the promise of much spanking.

Though who am I kidding?

You know how it is: you wait ages for an interesting statue, and then two come along at once…

I’ve recent been reading Jeremy Paxman’s fascinating volume on “The Victorians”. Having long been fascinated by the Great Exhibition of 1851, I was curious to find this little paragraph, describing an item that hadn’t featured in the previous books I’ve devoured on the subject, namely:

a presentation of the American sculpture Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave* (1844), [which] caused a sensation. The sculpture… depicts a Greek maiden who has been captured by the Turks and forced to stand naked in a slave market. The statue was secreted in a curtained alcove but placed on a stand that could be rotated discreetly by gentlemen in order to reveal her delightful posterior.

The web is a wonderful thing, for as well as Wikipedia’s tantalising description (“the title suggests that she is some sort of captive, and is on display for sale as a sexual object in an unknown market”), there’s an illustration of the sculpture in the Crystal Palace itself:

This surely demands a closer look, so let’s peek behind the curtain of Victorian discretion:

And now let us reach for that legendary rotating stand:

Oh yes. Oh very yes. As one academic essay comments, “The treatment of the back especially, is one of the happiest efforts in modern sculpture.”

Apparently the original work lives in Raby Castle – not very far from where Haron and I lived for seven years – although there are copies dotted all across the States. I think we need to take a trip back up north, and contemplate how the young lady might have been punished by her new master… or in the harem, even.

One further online reference to the sculpture lists it with a number of other artworks classified as “Women as helpless, chained (and usually naked) victims”. This is a genre that, I feel, deserves further investigation…

*I typed that as ‘Geek Slave’ the first time around. That sounds intriguing, too!

We wandered into our local branch of Past Times last weekend, curious to see what items the store was offering that might evoke nostalgic feelings for British traditions from days gone by. A traditional white cotton nightshirt just had to be bought – perfect for a scene in which a girl is sent to bed early, or called into her guardian’s study late at night for a discussion regarding her behaviour.

And then there was this:

Why, I wondered aloud, were they selling fairies in bondage? The poor little thing looked quite distraught, with her ankles and wrists bound tight. Imprisoned, perhaps – a whipping sure to follow. It was only then that we realised that the chains were actually designed to hang up the piece, and that the apparently ultra-kinky item was in fact entirely vanilla…