The Spanking Writers

I’ve been keeping a little list for a while, sparked by a slightly tipsy conversation a little while back with our friend Martha in which we tried to devise the worst spanking story title imaginable.We rejected the gruesome, the simply tasteless. To be truly awful, the title had to be realistic – yet clichéd beyond belief, or simply fundamentally misguided.

Here are a few of suggestions:

“Paddling to her paddling”
“His rod of love”
‘The rotten rattan”
“Barely striped”
“I caned, she’s sore and conquered”
“The corporal’s punishment”
“Weal he, won’t he?”

Come on – do your worst: you must be able to add to the list…!

“So how’s your writing?” asked my friend yesterday. She’s one of my oldest friends, used to sit two rows back from me at school, and was one of the early readers of what passes for creative fiction when the writer is fourteen.

My writing was great, I assured her. Most of it was in English these days. Some of it got published, yeah; she wouldn’t want copies. Most of it was also, um, well… sort of naughty. *whisper* Erotica, you know.

“Cool!” said my friend. “Let me guess, does it involve, teachers and students?”

…When you’re fourteen, and a baby writer, and kinky but don’t know it, you write spanking stories and think they’re just stories, and show them to your friends.

Then you grow up, and realise you’re kinky, and laugh at the old stories, and write some new ones – anonymously, online.

You think that your friends have forgotten the long series about that girl in that strict boarding school, or that one about the magician’s apprentice who got into trouble five times a day, or that one a pair of home-tutored twins.

Well, your old friends remember. And when you grow up to write erotica? They aren’t very surprised.

I have a question for the girls.

Seriously, girls only; chaps, look away.

The question is this. When you go to stay with your parents, do you take your… er… buzzy toys with you?

I have never before contemplated this idea, but then, I’ve never faced such a long time alone in Vanillaville – not since I discovered buzzy toys, anyway.

I made and remade my mind on this a dozen times before leaving. “My parents’ flat! Sacrilege! – What’s the big deal about that? It’s not my childhood home or anything, no memories of innocence to despoil. – But my mother is such a light sleeper! – Yes, and Ann Summers make quiet toys. – But airport security OMG! – Yeah, and? You’ve flown with canes before, woman. And you’ve got a spanking book in your luggage. Any qualms about that?

Anyway, I gave in to my devil-may-care side, and Mr Buzzy travelled with me.

So yes. How do you girls deal with this dilemma? Is it even a dilemma for you?

My dream last night was really unusual, in that I didn’t wake up just before my dream-spanking could start, but slept quite happily all through it.

But here’s the full story.

Abel and I were spies. We had infiltrated some sort of uber-religious camp, for whatever purpose. Our cover story was supposed to be that we were husband and wife, but somebody in our spying organisation had messed up with our fake papers, and they came out saying “father and daughter”.

Now, this was a challenge, because he’s only 12 years my senior, so we had to make him look somehow older, and me look younger. And, obviously, we had to live like a single dad and his college-age daughter, complete with the traditional discipline that the cult encouraged.

Now, Abel wasn’t going to actually spank me (it was a dream, OK?). But the leader of the cult suspected something, and when I did something that in his view deserved a punishment, he showed up in our hut, and demanded that I be spanked there and then.

Abel made me fetch a wooden spoon from the kitchen, pulled up my dress, tugged down my knickers and turned me over his knee. Because in my dreams I don’t have the sense of touch, and a spanking doesn’t feel like anything, this would be where I’d normally wake up from the sheer wrongness of a wooden spoon not hurting at all. But I didn’t; I just pretended it did hurt, and performed like a good little spy for the cult leader’s benefit.

I woke up quite frustrated at not having had a proper spanking, but I guess you can’t have everything…

Whilst ogling a particularly cute young lady the other day, I started to wonder: what do vanilla people get up to in the bedroom?

I mean, for spanko couples, a romantic night in behind the closed bedroom door might start with the partners discussing kinky ideas. The girl might end up over one’s knee, being warmed up with an initial spanking – gentle at first, then increasing in intensity. There could well be some role-playing next: stern lectures to set the scene before (say) a measured caning.

There’d be cuddles after the whacking – calming a punished girl, applying soothing creams – before moving on to intimacy (even then, perhaps, allowing time for the odd pause to tie an occasional rope).

But vanillas? I guess the whole process is just accelerated: shut the door, and move straight to cuddles (without even the need to rub in some arnica). It must be so boring. I guess they must just fall asleep earlier at night…

People who know me, know that I have bad memories about my former maths teacher – to the degree that I still have occasional nightmares about being in his class. (Which, over ten years after graduation, means that my memories really are very traumatic.) I never say his name without automatically adding “hope he burns in hell”. I’ve always ranked him among the most monstrous creatures in my personal bestiary.

Anyway, I was talking to my mother on the phone, and she suggested that I may want to have a look at a Ukrainian news site. She warned me not to take a drink when I did, because I may splutter in indignation.

So I take a look. And what do I see?

My former teacher (now promoted to principal, grr) standing next to –   drum roll – George W. Bush. Who is visiting Kiev. And got taken on a tour of my old school.

What? TWO of my personal monsters next to each other in the same picture?

I did splutter, I confess. Traumatic school memories aside, I still don’t like the idea of my alma mater being contaminated by Dubya’s presence. I hope he got booed.

On the other hand, the even has made me reassess my scale of monsters. Obviously, my former teacher remains responsible for some of the more unpleasant days of my life, but on the grand scheme of things? Maybe he’s not that bad after all. Maybe just being excessively strict isn’t grounds for going to hell.

I even have a reason to be grateful to him, because he has provided inspiration for some of my best, darkest spanking writing.

Which is more than you could ever say about Baby Bush.

The girl at the next table at lunch in Oxford on Good Friday had stepped straight from one of my stories. Clearly a good girl: chunky hand-knitted cardigan, hemp Oxfam bag, the vegetarian option (of course). Pretty, in an understated way. She smoothed out the map of the university’s colleges, discussing the afternoon’s itinerary with proud parents: I might apply there next year, or there, or there…

Her mobile bleeped; she read the text; her father reached out his hand and took the phone from her. He read the message, smiled.

But what if he’d read a different message, from her closest friend at boarding school:

My Dad got ltr from hdmstr about caning. Intercept yr post!

She’d blush, remembering ruefully back to the final night of term earlier in the week and their painful trip to the Headmaster’s study. “Girls in the Lower Sixth should, quite frankly, know better, and I intend to make an example of you. Now, which of you would like to go first?”

We were driving along the other day, when we saw a white van inscribed with a logo of a company. The logo said: “Anker”.

What do you think Abel said:

a) That’s not how you spell ‘anchor’,

or

b) Look, the sign’s missing a ‘W’!

And this man is trying to pretend he’s a dignified, responsible schoolmaster. Yeah, right.

One interesting side-bar to our Beamish visit was the tale of the stolen tawse. At the front of the schoolroom, behind the teacher’s desk, hung a long, black, three-tailed strap: not too ferocious-looking (compared, say, to my XH Lochgelly), but heavy enough to do the job. How authentic, I thought to myself, starting to imagine its lifetime of correcting young ladies in some north-eastern school.

Sadly, on closer inspection, it tuned out not to be an original artefact, but a rather more modern version. (They have a wonderful room elsewhere in the museum full of horse leathers. Does their saddler also turn his hand to other traditional crafts, I wonder? And if so, please can I have his address?)

Still, despite its inauthenticity, one of our party plucked up the courage to ask the ‘teacher’ about the implement. (It could never happen, but that small gleam of hope no doubt lurked in her mind: maybe, just maybe, he could be persuaded to demonstrate its use). He tugged at it – and showed that it was firmly tied in place.

“It’s our fifth this year,” he explained. “People keep stealing them.”

I was too shocked, I must confess, to say a word. The thoughts of what might happen to a young lady found to have stolen a tawse during a school trip to Beamish only came later. And I’ve not been reflecting since on how often schoolmasters’ implements must have been stolen over the years, and the consequences for the offenders once caught. Honest.

PS The idea of returning later in the year in costume, pretending to be museum staff and shocking fellow visitors, has a certain appeal: “Daddy, why is that lady lifting up her skirt and bending over? Why does that man have a stick in his hand?” “It’s called the cane: they used it to punish naughty girls in those days.”

“Come here, young lady!” thunders the voice from the upstairs landing. Frowning, and trying to figure out what I might have done wrong, I trudge to the bottom of the stairs and look up at Abel.

“What have I done now?” I ask plaintively.

“Come up here.”

I heave a deep sigh, and ascend, one slow step at a time. “What have I done?”

“You are very naughty.”

“But what have I done?”

“Nothing yet, but you’re about to do something extremely naughty.”

He stares. I stare back. He finally dissolves into giggles.

“You’re about to eat this chocolate I got for you last week.”

And so I did. Mmm, it was sinful. If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession after that chocolate. However, I have one defence: he started it!