THE SPANKING WRITERS

Last week’s Sunday Times Magazine featured a “day in the life” feature by the Headmaster of Eton: a soliloquy about things he will normally do on a working day.

Apparently, while the boys “take refreshments” mid-morning, the staff at Eton come together every day for “Chambers”, which, the esteemed gentleman says –

…enables the house masters to see me if there is a disciplinary problem with a boy – anything from missing a lesson to more serious matters. The boy gets summoned to my office, usually just before lunch. It’s a pretty formal appointment: the system is called “the Bill”. I always listen to what the boy has to say. Sometimes he has a different perspective on a situation. It’s not always a simple exercise in administering punishment.

But mostly, it’s about punishment, right? I can see a fantasy school adopting this formal summoning procedure. The glowering housemaster, the menacing pause.

“I shall be speaking to the Headmaster about this at the Chambers, young lady.”

Milk and chocolate biscuits tasting like paste, as she wonders what is being said.

The summons.

I stayed in a hotel in the deep Hampshire countryside last month: a lovely little rural pub converted into a very chic little restaurant-with-rooms. Everything was quite perfect – until a power cut at three in the morning, which caused something electronic to splutter a dying bleep, waking me with a start.

It was *dark*. Not your normal dark – dark backlit by the faint glow of city lights, of street lamps, of distant passing cars – but properly, I’m-in-the-middle-of-nowhere dark.

As I lay on the bed, unable to get back to sleep, I whiled away some of the time imagining a kinky variant of this pitch black world. The prison cells lined a narrow corridor, deep in some dank stone dungeon. No natural light here, just the flicker of the torches flaming on the walls. And before the guards departed for the evening, even those would be extinguished, leaving the women – the king’s captured enemies? – engulfed by the absolute darkness until morning.

Except, some nights, their captors would return in the middle of the night. The prisoners would wake at the sound of the dungeon door being unbolted, at the stomp of approaching boots. Each girl would be praying: don’t let it be my turn. The guards, carrying candles, would stop outside the designated cell; would open it; would enter and step through the crowd of occupants to unlock the chains of the girl who was to be taken and whipped.

A little while ago the “Modern Morals” column in “The Times” received the following question from an anonymous correspondent:

We were told to write a 3,000-word book report over a school holiday. Then we got a new English teacher, and our old one forgot about the report. As only three of us had done it, the rest of the class didn’t want us to hand in the work, in case the teacher made them do it, too. So we didn’t. But was it fair for us to have slogged for nothing when others didn’t do the work at all?

Oh, but I feel for the author of the letter, having been in a similar situation myself several times. Not with new teachers, but with old teachers who forgot all about the assignments they set. God, I used to hate that. The Times ethics columnist thinks the correspondent should be happy with all the precious learning they gained from reading the book and writing the report, and not to be the sort of swot who only worries about grading. He probably used to be the sort of person who would tease his classmates when they cared about their exam results, and call them swots.

Of course, if this situation occurred in my sort of school, the new teacher would turn out not to have forgotten about the assignment, but to have been waiting to see if the pupils are honest enough to turn in the essays when nobody had asked to see them. When there are no essays forthcoming, the entire class has to stay after school to write them in detention.

The three people who had done the homework in the first place, hand theirs in at the start of detention. They get a short lecture about bending down to peer pressure, and are allowed to go home. The rest of the class each have to stay until their work is done. As they come to the front with the finished paper, they each get two sharp licks of the tawse on each hand, to encourage their hard work in the future.

…Never let it be said I can’t nurse a grudge.

My dream last night, very vivid. A uniformed maid stands very upright, facing the wall, trembling slightly. Behind her, a long, polished dining room table – this is a particularly grand house.Her name is called; she turns, and sees the four girls who have been punished before her, bent in a line over the end of the table. Their skirts are raised: aghast, she sees their red, striped backsides.

She walks towards the master of the house. Despite this being her first punishment at his hands, she already knows the routine, having listened as her four friends were disciplined in turn before her.

She bares her bottom at his command, bends over the table edge, stretches out. She cries out as the whip cuts down, unbelievably painfully. Six strokes, just like each the friends who were now reluctantly observing her thrashing from their table-end vantage point.

We found a picture of this wonderfully designed customisable clock in “The Guardian”, and decided that every kinky household needs to know about it.

See? The numbers are held in the jaws of tiny crocodile clips, and you can replace them with your own thing.

Such as pictures. Of bottoms with cane stripes.

With a stripe for each hour.

That would be a thing of beauty, right?