A Caning Story from Janus 20. To view more stories click here.

Laura… Janina… Tania
Three cases of the illicit thrill
by Richard Manton

READ these two confessions from blushing brides and one from a young married couple. Then decide if the statements are:

(a) Fantasies of deluded readers
(b) Stories made up in the Janus office
(c) Cases cited by a medical authority

– ‘I found I could bear any number of strokes with the cane on my buttocks. Although my heart beats with fear whenever I have to strip and lie over the table, it has also made my married life complete and happy.’

– ‘I’ve been aware of this streak in me ever since school, where I actually began to enjoy my punishments. My husband would be terribly shocked if he knew about this.’

– ‘We keep a thin cane in the wardrobe and she bends over the chair… It leaves us eager to get to bed.’

If you opted for (a) or (b), go at once to the bottom of the class. The cases are quoted verbatim in Sexual Stimulation in Marriage (1971) by S. J. Tuffill, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Now take a deeper breath. A bride may enjoy love-punishments, but surely no girl ever enjoyed a bare-bottomed judicial thrashing? Wrong again. The Female Husband of 1746 is an outraged account of the conduct of a young lesbian, Molly Hamilton, soundly birched by the public hangman on 10 October. Shrill with indignation, the account describes how the birching so roused Molly’s ‘monstrous and unnatural desires’ that she urgently bribed the gaoler to bring her girl friend in for the night. Court records list Molly as getting herself birched three more times in eight weeks.

Girls who grow passionate under such punishment are unusual. A man is a fool to believe that ‘all girls like it’. Most would simply yell and run. But if he thinks such girls never exist, he should ponder one or two painstakingly researched reconstructions of the past…

* * *

Imagine a summer afternoon, long ago in the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In Budapest, the crowds lined the smart boulevard of the Andrassy-ut, under the striped awnings of the shops. The entire city was agog to see the Archduchess Sophie driving from the station to the palace on her arrival from Vienna.

Well, almost the entire city.

Suppose you had been in Budapest on that day. You might have stood with the crowds in the beflagged streets and cheered the Archdukes. But perhaps you would have preferred to attend another ceremony – a matter of strict discipline – which is recorded as having taken place at the same time.

A small group of Hungarian aristocrats drove in their carriages across the graceful suspension-bridge, the broad Danube gliding away between converging hills. The old castle and the new palace stood high and sinister above the busy river. Among the group was a lady who afterwards described the events of that afternoon, in Aus den Memoiren einer Sangerin – the memoirs of a singer. She was referred to cryptically as ‘Pepita’. It was rumoured that her real name was Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, Wagner’s own prima donna. Whoever she was, the conventions of the day obliged her to publish the details of this incident anonymously.

Armed with the permission of the civil governor of Budapest, the party arrived at the house of detention. They were admitted at the gate and shown to a room on the ground floor whose window looked upon the inner courtyard. Just outside that window stood a long low bench with a padded top. On the ground nearby lay a long tapering switch.

The culprit, sentenced to three months detention for petty theft, was a 17-year-old girl of medium height and slim figure. One can well imagine the light golden-brown hair in a long pageboy style, brushing the back of her collar as she walked. The attention of the men quickened at the sight of her softly rounded young face, its high-boned beauty and playful blue eyes, a charmingly tilted little nose and a neatly painted mouth which smiled easily.

In passing sentence the court ordered that Laura’s punishment should be reinforced by a whipping every few weeks during her detention. This was quite a common condition of a sentence of imprisonment. The slim leather switch was to be used on the taut, apple-firm cheeks of Laura’s bare bottom!

As the visitors watched, a small procession entered the sunlit courtyard. Apart from the girl herself there was the warden of the house of detention, the officer who would inflict the chastisement, and the civil governor of Budapest in person. Even the arrival of the Archduchess could not take precedence for him over tanning a pretty girl-delinquent. When the witnesses looked at the girl, their eyes widened. She had been dressed in a costume ‘worn skin-tight over her lower body so that the shapes of her bottom-cheeks were clearly outlined’. In modern terms it was like a pair of jeans fitting clean and smooth on her slim young hips and thighs. The rear view of such a girl, swinging along with jaunty vigour would surely draw every modern man’s gaze to the tightly-strained denim, the classic ‘apple shape’ beauty of Laura’s firmly and seductively rounded buttocks.

Laura was instructed to kneel at one end of the long bench. Then she was required to raise her hips and lie forward along the bench, almost as if on all fours. She lay with her head pillowed on the bench, her face turned aside towards the window where the onlookers stood. The high-boned prettiness, the innocent appeal of the blue eyes, the parting of the golden brown hair on her forehead made their hearts jump with anticipation.

Laura’s bottom, its trim young cheeks tightly rounded and broadened by her posture, was presented as clearly as if in tight teenage jeans. The eyes of the visitors roved over the kneeling culprit, from the pretty face with the long pagestyle hair to Laura’s bottom, to her face again and then to Laura’s bottom once more…

It was an important part of her sentence that Laura should be chastised at regular intervals. This was by no means her first taste of the switch. It may have seemed strange that, though she kept her eyes lowered in the presence of the visitors, the girl, according to the account of her punishment ‘showed not the least sign of fear’ at the ordeal of 30 strokes. If, indeed, Laura ‘lowered her eyes a little in self-consciousness’, it was no doubt because she was required to slip her pants down so that the punishment might be inflicted on her bare buttocks. It was, technically, a private punishment, unlike the public canings or birchings which also took place in Austria-Hungary a hundred years ago.

It seems that the officer who would inflict the chastisement could hardly take his eyes off the pretty young face. At length he measured the long quivering switch across the slim bare cheeks of Laura’s 17-year-old backside. It was not surprising that under the menace of the cold switch the girl’s buttocks and thighs began to tense with anticipation. Yet as her lips parted gently and she let out a hall-suppressed sigh, she was not acting the part of a girl whose heart pounded with fear at the severity of her punishment.

The officer’s eyes gleamed as he raised the switch and brought it down across the slim bare cheeks of Laura’s bottom with a crack that made the courtyard stones ring. Remarkably, Laura did not scream, though her sighs became longer and harder. The astonished visitors looked and saw Laura’s bottom cheeks quiver under a second impact of the judicial switch, her young backside continuing to squirm as the next stroke was measured.

The girl’s face, says the account, appeared to be racked by anguish which was of a form indistinguishable from pleasure. Those who watched the punishment had naturally moved round for a full rear view of Laura’s charming young buttocks. The chastiser smacked a wicked tapestry of switch-prints across the seat-cheeks of this 17-year-old nymph, each impact intended as a swelling line of anguish. Laura’s bottom-cheeks and thighs squirmed and tensed with a strange ambiguous rhythm. Had she learnt to blot the punishment from her mind by the excitement of self-love? Even the thrashing was a spur to ecstasy.

The chastiser had dealt with Laura before and knew her tricks. He lingered over each stroke, ignoring Laura’s breathless appeals to be finished with quickly. He paused often, stopping to inspect the smarting willow-pattern across such a very pretty young bottom as Laura’s. The girl hugged the bench under her, tensing and gasping. He noted the squeezing and slackening, the rhythmic swelling-out of Laura’s buttocks and their tightening until her rear cleavage was a thin pressed line.

Laura’s bottom! How the eyes of the onlookers coveted it! The switch smacked down with vindictive accuracy across the stripes already printed there. Laura herself neither screamed nor protested. ‘Her face was racked by more pleasure than anguish, the pleasure reaching supreme intensity at the fifteenth stroke. Her eyes rolled back, her mouth opened gasping, and she seemed to reach the summit of her heart’s desire.’

‘She should have made it last longer,’ said one of the Magyar aristocrats with knowing amusement. ‘Fifteen strokes still to come – and no more distractions for Laura now!’

The chastiser had triumphed in the end, as he was bound to, with his malicious sense of timing in allowing Laura to finish herself too soon. He touched the switch to her bare legs lightly, forcing the 17-year-old nymph from the depths of dreamy bliss to the cold fear of reality at what still lay ahead. There was consternation in the blue eyes of the girl who looked back at him imploringly over her shoulder as she lay along the bench. The slim cheeks of Laura’s arse tightened at the cool switch-touch.

‘Keep that pretty young bottom quite still, Laura!’

He ensured she did not ‘enjoy’ what followed. The courtyard sang with pistol-crack echoes of the supple switch across Laura’s young backside. A wild look of panic crossed the pretty high-boned face and soon there was the weeping and pleading which ought to have occurred from the beginning. Under the naked smart of discipline the slim tight cheeks of Laura’s bottom ‘quivered and writhed frantically at every stroke of the punishment’.

Understandably, the chastiser disciplined Laura longer and harder for trying to cheat her sentence. The visitors who examined Laura’s delectable young seat afterwards noted that ‘the imprints of the switch were clear enough to enable one to count the strokes’. When they added them up, these enthusiasts looked at one another with astonishment and amusement – but no tales were told. Those who oppose such punishments might add that the chastiser’s severity was excited by the prettiness of Laura’s bottom and legs, as well as that of her face. Why did the pretty girls always get it worse?

The punishment over, Laura was led to a ground-floor room, where the female guests were allowed to visit her. This was not usually permitted, but the room was one with opaque windows, preventing anyone seeing from outside. If a woman official should enter, it would be natural to find Laura with her knickers down in the tiled room with its baths and basins.

The prurient curiosity of Budapest’s ladies makes nonsense of the ‘high moral example’ set by judicial birchings. Laura was urged to kneel forward over a chair. Ringed fingers loitered and fondled under the pretext of examining the efficacy of punishment! ‘You managed to enjoy yourself while you were thrashed, didn’t you, Laura?’ murmured one matron, ‘More than once?’ Laura, her voice self-consciously hushed, whispered that she could only do it once. Those who resist the moves to reintroduce judicial corporal punishment nowadays might rest their case on such evidence as this!

* * *

Supporters of judicial birching will regard Laura’s aberration as exceptional. Here come the bad news for them. The diarist of Aus den Memoiren einer Sangerin and such tomes as Geschichte des Korperliche Zuchtligung record an even stranger incident in the Hungarian city of Raab. Our own prima donna’s informant was evidently Madame Anna von Luft and the case was apparently that of a 19-year-old girl student, Janina. The story of Janina was passed down from one generation of Raab matrons to the next, their mouths pursed with disapproval but their eyes smiling!

Janina had a slay prettiness, a round fair-skinned face with the slant blue-green eyes of east European beauty. It seems that she had been involved in some kind of revolutionary political activity. This had led to a sentence of 12 months in the Raab house of detention with a public chastisement once a month. The regulations required that Janina’s fair hair should be cropped very short, which gave the girl a perversely seductive look.

Janina was a girl with a softly rounded figure. Even the boyishly cropped fair hair would not have deceived a man about her femininity for two seconds. One might speculate on the motives of the authorities who took a girl of 19 like Janina, with her softly feminine figure, and then cut her fair hair to make her look more like a boy for her punishment! It was presumably thought that there would be less danger of the onlookers or the chastiser treating her leniently if Janina had a short boyish haircut rather than flowing blonde tresses!

At 19, Janina was of age to undergo public discipline rather than the private whipping given to 17-year-old Laura. Such public punishments were well-illustrated in Hungary’s most distinguished film The Round-Up, where a naked blonde beauty undergoes the ordeal of chastisement. Anna von Luft confirmed that there were ‘innumerable girls in regional and municipal prisons under sentence of a series of whippings’.

The scene in Raab would have differed little from those elsewhere. On the afternoon of Janina’s first thrashing the cobbled market square was crowded. A space was railed off just outside the main gate of the house of detention where a low wooden platform stood. In the tall houses overlooking the square the windows were packed with watching faces, aged crones and young girls, old men and young alike.

Ten minutes or so before the hour struck, the wooden doors of the high fortress archway opened. Two officers from the house of detention carried a long low bench with a padded top and placed it on the platform in the shadow of the stone walls and towers.

It seemed as if the executioner was anxious that Janina should not be late, for she was brought out several minutes early. The executioner, by the way, was so-called merely because he ‘executed’ the sentence of the court, not the culprit. His interest was exclusively in Janina’s tail rather than her head!

A hush descended on the packed market square as Janina appeared between the chastiser and his assistant as they mounted the few steps to the platform. The round pale face with its high cheekbones, its slant green eyes and cropped fair hair drew every gaze upon it. Janina was dressed in a short snug-fitting woollen top and a pair of tights in thin brown wool.

Once again, such a scene belied the official pretext of providing a moral example. The softness of Janina’s young breasts must have been delectably shaped by the woollen top. Below the waist, the thin clinging wool outlined the soft feminine contour of her thighs and hips. As she turned her back, there must have been sharp intakes of breath in the crowd at the sight of the soft weight of Janina’s 19-year-old bottom-cheeks!

Dressed in this costume, Janina was required to sit on her heels, facing one end of the bench and with her back to the crowd. The uniformed officers who kept order ranged themselves round the foot of the platform as a form of crowd control. Janina was ordered to lift her hips from her heels and kneel tightly forward along the padded bench. The crowd held its breath. The girl went forward, her boyishly-cropped fair hair touching the padded bench, the round high-boned face with its slant green eyes turned wonderingly aside. Behind her, hundreds of eyes stared at the brown woollen seat of her tights, the straining material broadened and rounded by the fattened swell of Janina’s backside!

Because the chastisement was public, Janina would not be bare when her tights were taken down. A form of thin cotton panties rather like stretch-briefs in consistency were worn for the punishment. To compensate for this, a more supple and whippy switch was used to increase the ordeal, and the number of strokes was added to. The custom was that when the hour struck, the girl’s outer tights must come down. She then remained, presenting herself in the punishment posture, for half an hour. Then the thrashing was given.

The mechanism of the clock tower began to whir, the assistant took the waist of the tights as Janina knelt forward over the bench. In an expert movement, he stripped them down to her knees.

There was a shocked silence in the great crowd. A silence as profound and absolute as one might expect after a nuclear exchange. Anna von Luft was the first to hint at the reason for this.

UNDER HER TIGHTS JANINA’S BOTTOM WAS BARE!

The revelation was so mind-blowing that it took the crowd a moment to realise the implications. Those soft pale cheeks of Janina’s backside faced the silent onlookers with a mute and innocent appeal. Yet the 19-year-old girl student had known that her tights would be taken down and that she would be required to show herself in the market square.

JANINA HAD DELIBERATELY LEFT HER KNICKERS OFF FOR PUNISHMENT!

As the second bombshell exploded in the minds of the crowd, there was a stirring in the square. The smiles began to broaden. Under the pretence that the chastiser’s assistant was making her assume such a posture, Janina’s waist was well tucked down at the back and she was showing her seat very fully to the crowd. Still incredulous, the crowd realised something else. Janina knew beforehand that the wickedly supple switch was officially regarded as too severe to be used except when a girl was wearing her knickers. Yet the executioner’s hands were not the only horny thing about him. No leniency would be shown because Janina’s arse was bare! The third bombshell burst in the minds of the citizens of Raab.

JANINA PREFERRED TO HAVE THE WHIP ACROSS THE BARE CHEEKS OF HER SOFT PALE BOTTOM!

The executioner stood to one side smiling quietly at the girl and recognising a certain hard wantonness in Janina’s slant green eyes. His assistant intuitively sensed what the 19-year-old girl student needed and played her game. His mouth pursed in a smile, he assumed a stern voice and ordered her to kneel more tightly over the bench, to show her soft pale buttocks more fully, to open her knees a little. Seizing the pretext of having to obey helplessly, Janina did so. As Anna von Luft described it, the men and women in the crowd began to call to Janina from a few feet away at the barrier. What sounds the cobbles of the square might now echo if they could!

‘Look at her! Just look at the young slut!… Show your legs and bottom a little more this way, Janina!… Oh, the wanton young whore!… You randy young piece, Janina! Executioner! Ten gold pieces to make her sing loud and clear!… Only five more minutes to wait, Janina! Then the whip across your plump bare bottom-cheeks!… Looking forward to a sore bottom, Janina?’

During this ribald chorus of insults, it seemed as if Janina was making slight thigh and buttock rhythms not unlike those of Laura. The thrill of being helplessly bare bottomed before the crowd, hearing its insults, waiting for the whip, caused Janina’s self-excitement!

Those who believed that Janina’s conduct was caused by the whip itself were proved wrong when the time for Janina’s thrashing came. Turning her short crop of fair hair, she fixed her slant green eyes upon the chastiser full of imploring and trepidation. He measured the long quivering switch across the soft pale cheeks of Janina’s bottom. There was a silence in the square, all eyes upon the 19-year-old girl so blatantly displayed for their edification. The switch rose and flashed down with a sharp crack across the plump writhing cheeks of Janina’s backside.

According to Anna von Luft, Janina did not ‘enjoy’ her punishment. The executioner was inexorable and severe. Not a voice was raised in the crowd to ask for a reduction of the punishment. With such a softly appealing girl to be dealt with, it was unthinkable that the chastiser would be content with less than the full penalty. For some reason, a girl like Janina whose hair has been cropped to make her look more like a boy, seems to get it worse. So it proved, the executioner also inspired by having Janina’s bottom bare!

Janina’s pale bare buttocks jumped and quivered under the smarting strokes of the switch as the executioner wove her a seat of fire. Her face, turned desperately to the crowd, was a tragic mask of brimming eyes and wide distended mouth. The switch produced its ‘plum-coloured tracery’ and then touched up the ‘buttock tapestry’ again and again. Janina ‘screamed and gasped’ under the punishment of her bottom, said Anna von Luft, who was undoubtedly one of those women who had hired a window for the occasion. At last, what Anna von Luft called Janina’s whip-marked bottom-cheeks had received their full punishment. She was led down from the platform and back into the building. There was a stir of activity in the market square as the crowd broke up and life in Raab resumed its normal course.

The drama was not quite over. Madame von Luft was one of those privileged aristocrats before whom all doors opened. On this occasion she was admitted to the house of detention and allowed to take her turn at the judas-hole through which Janina, now alone, could be seen.

Janina’s pants were still down but she was not weeping as brokenly as might be expected. Naturally, Janina’s buttocks had been amply and vividly patterned by the punishment. Yet she did not attend to that. She stood with her back to the long mirror, her short crop of fair hair turned, the slant green eyes above the high cheekbones staring with admiration at her mirrored rear view.

She did not enjoy being whipped. The desperate writhing of Janina’s bare bottom-cheeks, Janina’s screams and pleading alike are evidence of her ordeal. Yet now she knelt over a convenient piece of furniture in the punishment-posture, able to see her chastised buttocks in the mirror. With soft sighs and tensings, Janina relived her punishment, the excitement of hearing again her own frenzy and the reprimands of the chastiser, as well as the voices of the crowd who mocked Janina as a slut and promised her a pitiless punishment. Her case was entirely different from Laura’s. Janina, playing with herself, enjoyed her discipline only as a fantasy of recollection – an enjoyment repeated nightly.

* * *

Slowly the pattern becomes clear and one disentangles myth from truth in the stories of girls who ‘enjoy’ chastisement. Laura perhaps did not enjoy it at all. Unable to escape 30 strokes with a switch, the desperate 17-year-old girl did the only thing she could to distract her mind from the anguish and to offset the effects of punishment. Janina did not ‘enjoy’ one moment of her tanning. Yet in order to provoke a drama which would feed her erotic fantasies for the future – for she would certainly have no other sex life in confinement – she deliberately left her knickers off, despite an appalling price to be paid in extra pain.

Janina would certainly not have been resolute enough to incur such extra anguish during the chastisement. The first stroke would have changed her mind! She knew this. The girl student left her pants off while still high on a masochistic thrill of self-excitement. Too late to repent when Janina was bare-bottomed on the bench! An extremely poignant predicament…

Some alleged cases, close to our own times, are more complex still in the vexed field of female masochism. The Denning Report of 1963 and the trial of Stephen Ward, revealed the existence of parties held by England’s top people ‘at which girls were whipped’. Rest assured, they were not innocent girls dragged screaming from the streets lo be flogged in front of cabinet ministers. They were volunteers. A letter to the press from one of the girls in March 1966 revealed that these ‘parties’ were held in specially equipped premises – not your average front room – and that the girls came there for their own reasons. We are now on territory much closer to the cases of Dr Tuffill, where the girls submit to chastisement as part of sexual drama.

One case, half revealed in the press, illustrates this. The girl in question was 19 years old and we will call her Tania. She worked in one of those boutiques which dotted the great cities of the 1960s.

Tania was a girl of average height with a soft prettiness of face and figure. There was a coquettish innocence about the brown curls clustering over her forehead and cut short at her collar. She had a pert, slightly olive-skinned face with a tendency to dimples at every half-concealed smile. The high cheekbones made her blue eyes seem rather deep-set and shadowed. Yet Tania had a straight little nose and a demurely tucked-in chin.

Tania’s working clothes, a snug white sweater and the pale blue of tight jeans, showed her soft young figure to perfection. One might see her leaning over the counter on her elbows, chin cupped in her hands, cigarette between fingers as she read a magazine. Dozens of gentlemen with no intention of buying would browse in that shop. Tania’s cropped brown curls and slightly dimpling prettiness had an attraction. Yet as she leant forward, lounging over the counter, the short white sweater moulded her proud young breasts like firm hanging fruit. A surprising number of men browsed on the shelves behind her. By pretending an interest in some item there, it was easy for them to enjoy a rear view of her for 15 or 20 minutes as she bent over the counter. The straining denim jeans-seat presented Tania’s broadened bottom, making her look completely irresistible.

Tania’s bottom was one of her most seductive features. She would bend with her waist tucked downward. This caused Tania’s 19-year-old arse to broaden and swell more suggestively, its cheeks lewdly parted under her jeans-seat. The men who viewed her also saw a clear outline of the seat of Tania’s panties. Tania’s knickers were a pair of stretch-briefs clearly visible in shape through the splittingly taut denim of her jeans.

Tania was a very appealing 19-year-old, polite and eager to please. Yet through her infatuation with Kurt, she was drawn into a strange world of sexual drama and fantasy. One evening he collected her from work and drove her directly to the place where the drama was to be enacted. No time to pop home for a bath, despite Tania being very self-conscious about appearing spick and span before the others when her rear charms were unveiled.

The audience, if one can call it that, consisted of a score of men and two women. The scene was a school detention room presided over by a middle-aged mistress and an assistant master. There were six delinquent girls, all of them but Tania in school uniform. The scenario was that each would be punished for some offence committed during the detention class. Then the headmaster would arrive – played by Tania’s lover – and true retribution would be handed out, principally to Tania herself.

The effectiveness of the drama lay in the way it imprisoned the actors and actresses by its power. This detention class lasted for about two hours with no excuses and no permission to leave the room. The mistress began with the junior girl, a nymph with solemn blue eyes and fair tresses. ‘Slip your skirl and panties off, Rachel. Bend over the desk. Twelve with the strap for being late. Ah, you’re getting a bottom like a real young lady, aren’t you, Rachel?’

The strapping seemed to be for real with tears and squirmings. Tania’s turn came soon with a punishment for her outrageous conduct in arriving for detention dressed in jeans. It was no easy matter for the mistress to bend a girl of 19 over her knee. Yet Tania’s cropped brown curls were soon bowed and her seat presented. There was much handling of the tight full cheeks of Tania’s broadened jeans-seat. Then the ‘assistant master’ undid them and drew them off.

Tania’s panties, the white stretch-briefs, were taut across the broadened swell of her young bum.

‘Not wearing regulation knickers, Tania? Let me have a really close look at the seat. Such a tight fit between the legs, Tania! And how the leg-hole elastic dents those soft pale bottom-cheeks, Tania! These are more like honeymoon panties, aren’t they, Tania? I’ll cane you for that presently, when your mistress has finished.’

The spectators were enormously excited at the sight of 19-year-old Tania sprawling over the mistress’s knee like an over-grown schoolgirl. So would you be. The cropped brown curls, the light olive-skin and high cheekbones all added to the piquancy of Tania at 19 being made to lie over the woman’s lap like an awkward child.

‘Twelve with the strap across the seat of your knickers, Tania!’

‘Six! It was six!’ The gasp of shock indicated the first departure from a prepared script.

‘Twelve with the strap across your bottom, Tania, you young slut!’

‘No!’ Tania’s blue eyes widened. ‘I’ve got to be caned later!’

Broad smiles of amusement broke on the faces of the spectators. The grim-faced mistress brought the strap down hard across Tania’s full-cheeked bottom. She aimed fairly low where Tania’s knickers did not completely cover her buttocks. Tania sang out loudly.

Two! Three! Four! The blows of the strapping cracked down.

‘Don’t try to squirm, Tania. Tighter over my knee! Keep the seat of your knickers towards the audience, Tania, or we’ll start again!’

When the strapping was over, the woman slid Tania’s panties down and off, making the girl show her cherry red seat fully and broadly.

‘Your bottom towards the audience, Tania! You’re here to show it!’

Presently it was the turn of the assistant master as Tania stood with her cropped curls bowed, bare from waist to heels.

‘Tania! Bend over the teacher’s table, Tania! At once! So reluctant, Tania? Six strokes of the cane for wearing non-uniform knickers. Yes, you have been strapped, haven’t you? Such a full blushing pair of bottom-cheeks, Tania! Yes, indeed, you’re going to get 18 with the cane from the headmaster later on for being a little thief. Perhaps six now will get you in the mood, Tania! Bend tighter. Let’s have a broad-bottomed view of you, just like over the shop counter! Afraid you won’t be able to bear all your punishments, Tania? You should have thought of that when you put the wrong sort of knickers on!’

A tearful few minutes in Tania’s part of the drama was to be followed by more preliminary reprimands and punishments, as each skirt and pair of panties lay discarded. ‘Sandra Williams, bend over the desk! Twelve with the cane! Take your hand away from your bottom, Sandra! Touch your toes, Monica. I can’t believe you’ve never had the strap before! Kneel forward over the chair, Carol Jones! You’ll soon find out what the whistle cord is for!’

A good deal of this is only verbal drama, but not all of it. The detention class ended and various girls were allocated to the patient onlookers for chastisement as ‘teachers’. Their offences were derived from the classic mythology of schoolgirl eroticism. ‘Sandra Williams, bare-bottom spanking for whispering in class! Carol Jones, bare-bottom birching for having secret sex-fun! Susan Webb, bare-bottom caning for unpunctuality! Jacqueline Grant, bare-bottom birching for impudence! Sue Webb, bare-bottom birching for rudeness!’ The litany was endless but Tania was ‘it’, as the letter to the press revealed.

Tania’s imagined crime was to have stolen the mistress’s jewel case and hidden it away somewhere. She was due to bend over the table for 18 strokes with the ‘headmaster’s’ cane before being asked where the case was hidden. If she then confessed, all would be forgiven and forgotten. She was required to bend over the table tightly with her back to the audience, her cropped brown curls bowed until the spectators saw Tania as only a backside and a pair of legs!

Dozens of men had gazed yearningly at Tania’s broadened, 19-year-old bottom-cheeks in tight jeans as she bent with thighs parted a little to some shop chore. The sight of her now would have stopped them in their tracks! Though the flush of the strap had faded, it was visible that the six with a cane had been given for real across the statuesque young rounds of Tania’s buttocks!

The ‘headmaster’ saw this as he flexed his own long slim bamboo.

‘You’ve been in trouble during class, haven’t you, Tania? I’m glad you’ve been caned for it. Don’t expect me to be lenient with you because of that. You’ll gel it all the worse! Thai’s a promise!’

The preparations for the caning were carried out ‘as slowly as possible’. There was ‘a lot of talk’ about Tania’s bottom! What a broad young seat, he said, what a shame it had not been caned hard and regularly – but that would change from now on. There were instructions to Tania to bend tighter, to stick her bottom right out towards the onlookers. Then the cane was measured across it, long and repeatedly.

The cane flashed down across the bare broadened cheeks of Tania’s 19-year-old bottom. Her gasp grew to a cry as she realised how ferocious the smart of the bamboo was when the impact began to swell. Smack! Whip-smack! Crack-smack! Whip! Whippp! Wh-h-i-i-p!

‘Don’t twist your backside away from the cane, Tania! You’ll get extra for that!… Your bottom, Tania! Round it out more fully!… Let you wear your stretch-briefs for the rest of the caning, Tania? Certainly not!… Don’t even think of straightening up, Tania! Not unless you want to be put bottom-upwards over the desk for the punishment to start all over again!… Don’t clench your seat-cheeks like that Tania or you’ll have it on your legs instead. And the strokes won’t count either!… Contain yourself, Tania! You can’t possibly have 18 across your buttocks without some of them hitting the same place twice!… Tania! Really! What a thing to do in front of us all!… Bend tighter, Tania! No need to be bashful. With two ladies in the audience you’re well and truly chaperoned!’

The dramatic entertainment may have been carefully planned beforehand but Tania’s wild cries, her gulps and sobs during it and afterwards were real enough. The use of the cane on her beautiful bottom was cruel and severe and the bamboo prints were raised and blazoned across the broadened young cheeks of Tania’s arse!

When the punishment ended, the scenario required Tania to confess the hiding-place of the stolen jewel-case. She did so and the mistress was sent to fetch it. Then there was a departure from the script. The woman came back, trying hard to hide a smile.

‘It’s not there,’ she said firmly. ‘The little madam is lying!’

Tania’s consternation was unmistakenly genuine and moving by this point. It seemed that she had willingly – if perhaps a little reluctantly – entered the amateur theatricals of chastisement. Had she expected this development – or was she now trapped in a nightmare?

‘Very well, Tania,’ said the headmaster. ‘You know the price you must pay. Over the table again! Eighteen with the cane was the penalty, I believe? I shall leave you to the attention of the assistant master while I go to fetch a suitable instrument to chastise such wilful misconduct. I hope you decide to tell us the true hiding-place before I get back, Tania! Though perhaps on second thoughts, Tania, I rather hope you refuse to…’

Since the action of the drama had been made up, it was quite impossible for Tania even to guess at an alternative place. The events of that evening and the part which Tania’s bottom played in them are perhaps best left to the imagination!

* * *

Those who debate the issue of judicial corporal punishment and those who discuss the myths of female masochism should ponder such cases as these. Laura, Janina and Tania might be put together as strange aberrant creatures. Yet each one is different, as each girl is different. What types do they represent?

1. Laura certainly appeared to enjoy her punishment. Yet one might just as easily conclude that her squeezing and squirming was a desperate effort to counter the ferocious smart of the switch across her bare bottom by having a nice time elsewhere. Would supporters of judicial tanning permit such things? Could they prevent them? Or would they impose extra punishment?

2. Janina, aged 19, presents an even more knotty problem to those who support such punishments. Few disciplinarians would complain if Janina presented her bottom bare for caning rather than in a pair of stretch-briefs! And how on earth would they prevent punishments given to support law-and-order from being used as the raw material of the girl’s erotic enjoyments? Anna von Luft made a final revelation about the girl. Janina, she said, ‘deliberately committed and confessed to several misdemeanours for which the inevitable penalty was a spell in the house of detention, a series of public birchings and the shame which resulted from them.’ Hence Janina’s delightful exhibitionism!

3. Tania, like the other two, did not enjoy the discomfort of the cane. Yet she derived an excitement from being enveloped in a dangerous drama of chastisement. If judicial birching were ever restored, a man who had to deal with Tania would face an extremely difficult though intensely interesting subject!

There is much pressure in public and in parliamentary circles to restore the birch – a great majority of the country supports it. In the climate of sexual equality, girls could not be exempt. Some of us are sceptical of the moral or disciplinary value of restoring such discipline. Yet we would respect the views of many Janus readers who, like most of their countrymen, think otherwise.

Make no mistake, the problems posed to the silent majority by Laura, Janina and Tania are more complex and adult than the defiance to punishment by an adolescent reformatory tomboy like Elaine Cox. A youngster who defies the cane merely in order to keep her prestige among other girls is not in the same league. Our disciplinarian readers assure us they would find her no problem. With the young rebel kneeling over the block and a good flexible cane to hand, they would guarantee truly exemplary discipline across the full pale cheeks of Elaine Cox’s fifth-form bottom!

Yet a girl like Janina defies her chastiser in a very different way. Increasing the number of strokes will probably make no odds. The same secret, perverse thrill, will capture her afterwards. That may also be true of Tania. Let us put the advocates of judicial tanning on the spot by asking you to tell us how you would solve the following problem.

Judicial chastisement has been restored and you are one of those appointed to administer it. At regular intervals you visit an institution which houses Laura, Janina, Tania, and – if you like – Elaine. You know the problems presented by each. It is your duty to ensure that punishment means just that and is not a girl’s way of self-enjoyment or maintaining prestige by defiance. How will you prevent these four young ladies resisting, exploiting or defying the chastisement you give? Here is your chance to win us over!

This surely is a problem worthy of mature, adult consideration, more complex than any presented by bare-bottomed Elaine to her master. At the beginning of this feature you may have got the wrong source for the quotations and been sent to the bottom of the class. Such disgrace can be overcome by a neat piece of homework…

A Spanking Story from Janus 58. To view more stories click here.

The American Spread-Eagle
by John Undermeyer

DAWSON KENDALL, senior executive of Supremacy Studios (Hollywood) spoke tersely into his car telephone. ‘We shall be home in 20 minutes,’ he told his butler. ‘Please see that Amelia and Romy are prepared, and waiting for me in the Blue Room.’

Prepared was a euphemism. It meant undressed – stripped to the skin, showered, lightly dusted with powder, and with a touch of expensive perfume to the nape of the neck, the inside of each elbow, behind the knees and at the back of each ear. It was important to Dawson that girls smell nice. Clean, fresh, wholesome, even toothsome, he thought, and swallowed some saliva that had gathered in his mouth.

If Dawson’s 28-year-old beautiful driver had overheard the telephone call she showed no sign of it. Dawson dressed her all in black, with calf-length boots, breeches and a wide, tight-fitting waist-belt. He did not permit her a cap, however, lest it partly hide her beautiful face. She kept her gaze strictly on the road ahead, handling the limousine with a smoothness that came from eight years of loyal (and almost silent) service.

This Saturday morning, he had been watching the rushes of the studio’s latest film. It was a pot-boiler; put together by a minor director on a low budget. Low, that is, compared to the cost of most films Supremacy turned out. Three million dollars was enough, he thought, but then the film should recoup several times that much, bearing in mind the scenes he had just approved.

They showed the two juvenile leads in a bedroom, indulging in love-play which led to a passionate consummation of their desire. Since the two minor stars involved were genuinely attracted to each other, they played their parts with conviction. Dawson felt himself aroused at the climax of the scene. The two stars were with him, together with the director, lighting-cameraman and other senior studio officials and he knew none of them were totally unaffected. Yes, he mused, with a love-scene like that in the movie it would pull at the box-office. Critics might carp, but the public knew what it wanted.

Dawson turned to congratulate the nymph who played the female lead. ‘A great job… most professional,’ he beamed at her. She smiled her thank-you, but behind those perfect teeth and sapphire eyes he caught the flicker of dislike. In a few years that flicker could grow to outright insolence, he knew. Even now he was certain she despised him in private conversation with her film-star lover. Only his seniority in the studio made her defer.

Oh for 20 minutes with you in the Blue Room, thought Dawson. He had a few implements there, a short-handled six-thonged whip, for example, that would bring this proud filly into line. Good actress she may be, and valuable to the studio with her lithe, nubile body, pert little breasts (always carefully outlined by a silk-cupped bra) and her immaculate clothes. But she had no respect. Dawson insisted on respect; especially from pretty young women who, without the backing of his studios and publicity machine, would be nowhere.

The car was slowing now, outside a small but impressive high-fashion shop, the public face of a much larger company that supplied costumes to his film-makers. On display were clothes from the famous names in Paris, New York, Milan and London, but Dawson did not linger among the cat-suits, party dresses and lingerie. He made his way to the private office to collect a special order, placed several weeks ago with the woman who owned and ran the company, a long-time personal friend in her forties who rose to greet him as he tapped and walked through the door.

After the pleasantries she turned to her office desk and unlocked one of the drawers, taking from it a tube about three feet long, capped at both ends. ‘I think you’ll find this will answer your needs,’ she said, her voice silkening. ‘I had it specially made by one of our best people, skilled at his craft and a man of the utmost discretion.’ Prising the cap from one end, she slid a long, thin, crop-like instrument into her hand and with a teasing grin whipped it downwards through the air. ‘So light and easy to handle,’ she said, ‘with such a well-designed grip. I only wish I could be there when you put it to use. But tell me what you think.’

She handed the rod to Dawson, and as he inspected it, went into her professional sales-pitch. ‘Basically it is whalebone, thin, strong and pliant. But it is wrapped tightly by the thinnest strip of superb quality leather, starting at a fine point and spiralling down to the handle. The handle, with indentations to guarantee a firm grip, is also leather, but much harder, and with a rondule at the holding-end so it fits snugly into the heel of the hand. Originally the maker put a tab at the point but on reflection I asked him to remove it and taper the end; the slap sound did not seem appropriate for one who, I know, prefers sibilancy in the drive downwards. Ah, incidentally,’ she let one eye drop in a knowing wink, ‘I’m told the designer tried it out on his au pair before despatching the order. She had misappropriated some money he had left lying around. And I am assured he believes it to be one of his best, most efficacious creations. Would you care for a few practice swings? I have a recalcitrant salesgirl in the front shop who… but perhaps not; there’s the question of noise.’

The suggestion of practice swings brought Dawson’s mind back to the starlet who had displeased him at the viewing session earlier. He recalled the image of two writhing forms on golden satin sheets, actor and actress locked together in heaving pleasure. How he would like to make that disrespectful young madam writhe for a different reason! He brought his attention back to the chastising rod, off-white in colour, with a grey handle and perfectly smooth rondule. The air sang as he swathed down with the aerial-thin whalebone. Once, twice, and a third time for good measure. The eyes of the shop-owner widened and her lips pursed at the sight of Dawson’s strong right arm plunging with full force against an imagined target. But she knew her role.

‘I can see you like it, my friend,’ she whispered. ‘Allow me to return it to its case, which you may carry from the shop as openly and innocently as if you were taking a roll of special fabric to enhance one of your film sets.’

Back in the limousine Dawson checked his watch. Only five minutes to his home in the ‘Hills’; acres of verdant garden, fishponds stocked with golden Koi Carp, a swimming pool which was admired even among the set he mixed with for its size, concealed lights and room-temperature water, all surrounded by a high brick wall turning his home into a fortress, so necessary for security these days. He knew his wife would be at the poolside, cooling off before lunch in one of her favourite white bikinis. He loved Alice to wear white bikinis which set off her tan so perfectly. Alice was his second wife, 26 years old, intelligent and graceful. His first wife had died in a car crash (mercifully he had not been driving) and he had loved Alice almost from the day he met her. But before lunch with Alice he had Amelia and Romy to attend to. In the Blue Room, with its padded table and dimmable lights, and with this brand new instrument which lay on the car seat beside him. It had felt so novel to his touch, to hold and swish through the air, and he could not wait to try it out.

His chauffeuse closed the limousine door and a pretty maid opened the front door without any need for him to press the bell. He strode through the house and out to the verandah and pool. Alice sat cross-legged at the pool-side, her arms resting on her thighs, eyes closed, her body drying in the sunshine. He bent to kiss the nape of her neck, letting his tongue flick out under the lobe of her ear. She opened her eyes, stretched her long, lithe legs and lifted her arms to pull him down.

‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘let me get changed first. And remember, after the indiscipline of last night, I have an appointment to keep with two lying young misses in the Blue Room.’

Yes, Alice remembered. The butler had reported to her that Amelia and Romy had been proved to have lied to him. She had not asked for details, his word was enough, and she had assured her chief servant that the master of the house would administer punishment at the earliest possible opportunity. Alice put aside her thoughts of lunch; she knew that when Dawson had finished his task in the Blue Room he would want to make love to her. She debated with herself whether she would ask him for permission to be present to see the little liars suitably chastened, but decided she had better go quietly to her shower-room and rinse away the smell of the swimming pool before Dawson came to her. And check that the bed had been made with clean sheets and the air conditioning turned to Cool.

Dawson took the open staircase two steps at a time to change clothes. He never went to the Blue Room improperly dressed. Two minutes later he wore slacks, an open shirt and costly sailing pumps with non-slip soles.

While he removed his rings and then dusted his palms with powder, he mused on how he had come to meet the girls who were shortly to be disciplined. Amelia was born in Mexico, 18 years earlier, from a native woman and a white man. The melding of their two colours gave the lass a distinctiveness amongst her people, her delicately-hued skin and finer features setting her apart. A few months ago she had slipped across the Mexican border into Texas. Most of these immigrants were quickly caught and returned to their home country. But Amelia had been lucky; her guide had taken her by a safer route and once in the USA she had been passed into hands who promised to find her work. In fact this meant that messages had travelled through the grapevine about a very beautiful teenaged girl, with maidenhood intact (a doctor who worked for the escape committee had checked that) who might interest a tycoon with the means to look after her. After the appropriate negotiations Amelia had been delivered, under cover of darkness, to the Kendall mansion. Next morning the butler had presented her to Alice, with whose approval she was taken on to the Kendall staff.

The second miscreant, Romy, was a year younger. Her mother was Swedish and had come to Hollywood to act. But the pressure of film-making and the intense competition, combined with a liberal income, had led to drugs. Dawson had taken charge, and through his own doctor, and at his own cost, was paying for the mother to be cured of her addiction. In return for secrecy and the substantial medical bills, he had asked for the care of Romy, to provide her with a home and to ensure, he said, that she did not follow the same route. Both girls were now part of his household and his butler took care to remind them of what could happen if either showed signs of rebellion.

Comfortably dressed now in an all-white ensemble, Dawson Kendall took up the innocuous-looking three-foot tube he had collected at the fashion salon and made his way to the Blue Room. The padded door sucked gently at the air as he opened it. He turned the dimmer-switch up so that the room was filled with light, then faced the waiting girls, searching them with his eyes to ensure they had been prepared as he expected. What he saw pleased him.

The Mexican wore raven-black hair which fell to her shoulders and shone in the intense light of the room. Her breasts were well-formed and distinctly separated at the cleavage, but not over-full. She normally wore a bra, he knew, but the skin was sufficiently taut not to need one. And the skin-colour: that was what made her exceptional; a mix of olive and gold, unblemished and smooth. Her limber figure tapered from broadish shoulders towards the gentle incurve of the waist, then out again at the hips, over welcoming thighs, finely-toned calves and delicate feet. Another feature that attracted Dawson was the hands. Narrow palms, tapering fingers, well-suited to the sewing needle, perfectly manicured nails. This could have been an Inca Princess from another age, and he wondered how so lovely a creature had escaped the hungry young Mexican bloods who surely had pursued her from her early teens. Her decorous shyness was the only clue.

He turned to Romy, inches shorter, a year younger, with hair as fair as the other’s was black, cropped into a boyish cut, fringed over the eyes and dove-tailed at the back of the neck. Her breasts were like fine, shallow champagne-glasses, round and with more growth still in them; no bra was needed here either, but Alice had insisted. Firm healthy support for a 17-year-old would make sure that beauty was not allowed to fade prematurely. Only here, in Dawson’s sound-proof chamber, was her brassiere dispensed with. But where the Mexican could have been a Princess, this young minx was a pixie, quick of movement, with darting eyes and small hands, and a mouth that rarely stopped talking unless it was in the presence of Dawson and Alice, or, of course, in the Blue Room.

He knew by the perfume that drifted from their bodies they had been bathed and prepared. Moreover both were without clothes, save for one garment which Dawson always demanded. They each wore a brand new pair of white cotton briefs, elasticised at the waist and legs. Every time they presented themselves the knickers had to be completely new, taken freshly from the pack after their shower, and stepped into carefully, pulled tightly to fit, pristine clean and so snug that the groove that lay centrally between the thighs was visible to view. No wisp of hair showed itself at that point however; that was for later, when the uncovering took place and punishment was about to begin.

Careful thought had been given to designing the Blue Room. Dawson liked to flog his virgins as they lay face down in the spread-eagle position. To arrange this Dawson had caused a special bench to be built, in the shape of a stretched ‘X’, so that arms could be laid either side at one end, and open legs stretched out at the other. The top was padded in blue leather (as were the walls) and it had one exceptional feature. In the centre of the cross a deep indent had been made, so the spread-eagled girl would touch the leather everywhere save at the precious point where the legs joined. That delicate area touched nothing, and for a very good reason. When punishment began, and a writhing body pressed itself against the leather, there would be nothing down there to press against. Bare flesh would wrestle against blue leather along the whole length of the body save where (some might say) it was needed most. Dawson had colleagues who believed that girls should be allowed to press that special place against some firm surface, as compensation, however slight, for the pain. But why, Dawson replied; surely punishment was the infliction of pain, very severe pain that had to hurt, to burn, inflame, torment. Retribution for bad behaviour was the purpose, and there could be no relief from the bite of the rod.

Moreover, Dawson insisted that when flogging was over there must be no masturbation; this sly practice was utterly forbidden. The instruction was instilled into the girls, and would never be forgotten by the butler into whose care they were passed directly afterwards. Dawson did not trouble to see how the butler enforced the rule; he assumed his orders were obeyed automatically, as they were at the Hollywood studio. However Alice, who sometimes visited Amelia and Romy as they lay sore on their beds after whipping, assured him there was no way even the most urgent need could be satisfied by straying fingers. Why go to all the trouble of having the cross-bench specially designed if its effect were to be negated afterwards?

There was one further refinement that made the Blue Room perfect for Dawson’s needs. Next to where a girl rested her chin on the leather, a mirror was inset, catching the light from the fully turned-up bulbs, so that the young and anxious face could be seen clearly by the chastiser. Dawson knew his canes and straps bit deep, but he could not be satisfied unless he saw the face contort, the eyes screw in pain, the mouth open to gasp out and shriek. And he knew his rod was doing its work well when tears dropped on to the mirror and formed salty streaks or even tiny pools of proof of her suffering.

Dawson now unsealed one end of the tube he had brought with him into the Blue Room. Both girls eyed the package curiously, anxiously wondering what it could contain, and eyes widened and mouths fell as they saw the very long and extremely slender ivory-bound instrument with its shaped grey handle slither on to the bench. Setting aside the tube, Dawson raised the superlative rod and presented it for inspection. Surely, the girls thought, he will not use this on us. But even before the thought could fully register, he held it out in both hands towards them.

‘Naughty little liars who deceive their betters deserve to see what is in store for them. You will both kiss my new tormentor to acknowledge your fault before we begin.’

The raven-jet hair swung round Amelia’s face as she fearfully bent forward to touch the terrible instrument with her tawny lips. Her head stayed hung in shame as she stepped back and Romy bowed down to press pale pursed lips against the leather.

‘Formalities are now over,’ declared Dawson and he signalled Amelia to the waiting cross-shaped bench. As she went, her elegant thumbs slipped themselves into the elastic waistband of the gleaming white knickers and began to push the cotton downwards, over the olive hips, stroking the thighs, rippling gently over the knees, sliding the remaining distance over golden calves, and finally lying forlorn on the floor as Amelia’s powdered feet stepped out of them. There was almost a kind of dignity in the descending movements; a dignity and assurance that would very soon disappear, Dawson thought determinedly.

The sight of her delicious naked form lowering on to the trestle brought his pulse-rate up a notch. He had caught a whiff of that same insolent self-composure from the actress in his film this morning: the expensive whippy whalebone rod would dissolve that. His anger at the rebuff suddenly burst forth; he could wait no longer and even before the Mexican girl was fully in the spread-eagle position he lashed down.

Amelia’s arms and legs, which milliseconds before were about to settle on the leather top, exploded outwards, fingers leaping forwards, toes doubled back, the perfectly-developed body stretched to capacity. The scream came next and Dawson’s nostrils flared, breathing in the expensive perfume that seemed to puff from the girl’s body. Loud though it was, it could not ring round the room for the walls were lined to absorb and soften shrieks. Her head was flung backwards as she howled, in an unavoidable reflex action.

Dawson’s arm raised again and he drove a second blow into the immaculately-curved olive-skinned bottom. The crack! of the rod impacting into her rebellious flesh was most satisfying to him, but only whetted his appetite for more. His eyes on the mirror saw lips pull back in frenzy to reveal perfect teeth as a second sound shrilled from the contorted mouth. Tears, which had taken her eyes by storm at the first stroke, now ran down her cheeks. I want that mirror soaking, he thought, wet with salty tears.

With a whistling zing, the leather-bound whalebone took a third bite and now the mirror was shimmering. Not glistening enough for his liking, but there would be more salt water where that came from. Three lashes were the normal punishment for lying (albeit the fault happened very rarely) but Dawson reckoned he could safely administer a fourth. Dignity was all spent now, in the brilliant movements of her body, but he was still remorseless and as his stroke fell the howl that came from the cross made him draw in his breath. The pitifully bruised bottom was churning as the hips crushed into the leather and the arms and legs stretched against the tormenting blow. He noticed how that oh-so-sensitive centre point was clear of contact with anything, and was now pulverising space. The bench was well-planned indeed: no satisfaction was possible in that area. Punishment had been called for and now it had been administered. The mirror shimmered with moisture; gulps and sobs huffed from those erstwhile-pretty lips.

Gradually, the girl’s body fell limp, jerking just a little as it fully absorbed the pain. Dawson spoke in his sternest tones. ‘That will do, Amelia. Stand when you can. Pick up your knickers and go immediately to your room where you may conveniently be attended to.’

Paying no more attention to the ‘Princess’, Dawson turned to the smaller girl. This normally playful nymphet was already weeping, so awstricken was she by the effect his new-bought rod had wreaked on her olive-skinned companion. The water-magnified pale green eyes, pleading so pitifully, made not the faintest impression upon Dawson’s resolve.

‘Come forward, young woman,’ he commanded her. ‘Remove your protection as Amelia has done before you, and position yourself on the cross-bars, for you must pay for your untruthfulness and I impatient to begin.’ But Romy was too afraid to take her new white cotton briefs down gracefully. She tried, but much too slowly for Dawson, who wrenched at the protesting elastic. Desperate to please she moved to help but Dawson slapped her hands away. He dropped his rod, and with both hands free he swiftly and mercilessly unpeeled his victim, tossing the white material aside to watch it slide across the polished floor. Pushing the girl forward, he reached greedily for his instrument of discipline.

Romy stumbled to the crossed-bench, and in her forgetfulness (or perhaps because she remembered) she tried, for a brief instant, to place her pubis in contact with the padded blue leather. Dawson caught the movement. ‘For that you will have two more cuts. When I say position yourself carefully, you must be careful with every part – especially with that golden treasure-trove.’ And it was true, for Romy’s golden mop of hair was reflected perfectly above the join of her thighs. She was pure, natural blonde, and Dawson was momentarily tempted to touch that secret place with the tip of his malign switch. But decorum forbade it. He must be content to lash. And to be thorough, also: the excess chattering, the skittish laughter was fine enough when she was allowed to play on his tennis court, using racquets he paid for, sports gear charged to his account. But there was a price to pay for ingratitude and disrespect.

He placed his rubber-soled sailing pumps firmly on the floor, feet well apart. His arm stretched back until his elbow bent entirely over his shoulder. Fingers clenched round the shaped-leather handle, he swathed the air and made agonising contact with the pale, creamy, tightly-stretched skin of Romy’s mounded buttocks. The girl’s head flew back, her spine arched, her head jerked violently and the shriek of a tormented mink rent the air. She began to scrabble in an attempt to move off the cross, crying, ‘No! Oh please no! I can’t bear it!’

The move caught Dawson unawares. His new plaything with its ronduled handle must be even more effective than he had dreamed! Now we shall see a really wet looking-glass, he thought as with a firm hand he pushed her downwards, far too strongly to prevent any escape. Beyond pity, he felt his pulse grow even stronger and noticed with swiftly rising pleasure giant tear-drops splashing on the mirror beneath the tousled head.

That pool of tears would grow to a stream before he put his pliable persecutor to rest. He drew breath for the next stroke and the tang of perfume filled his nostrils; his senses always heightened so acutely in the Blue Room. With full force the whalebone thrashed again and the pale, sexy buttocks leapt painfully in the air, jerking atop spread-eagled thighs. This proof that the pain was taking effect was endorsed immediately by tearful pleading: ‘Spare me, please. No more. No more!’ No rippling laughter in that voice now, no sidelong flashes of the emerald eyes. Just slack lips and the threads of running water dampening flushed cheeks.

When you have paid enough, thought Dawson; and when I am ready for Alice.

He changed hands, holding the ivory-coloured crop in his left hand. His aim would not falter, he knew, and nor did it as the long, narrow wand shrilled downwards and cracked implacably across the twice-marked bottom. Mewls of helplessness rose from the blonde girl’s throat; golden eyelashes, already awash, blinked to brush away the flowing tears. Her well-proportioned, rounded beauty had never appealed so strongly to him. Yet only in one way would he ever acknowledge her charms – with the power of his punitive ardour.

The fourth stroke of chastisement fell even as the girl was writhing from the earlier blows. Her head shook wildly from side to side, her keening broken only by deep wrenching sobs. Her bottom was the source of unquenchable pain and the mirror was wet with brine. So plentifully did the weeping come now that drops were falling from the over-full surface of the glass on to the floor.

Three for the lies and two for the cheating; the fifth should really be the last. Dawson’s mouth fell dry as he studied the welted bottom carefully. Skin that had been washed, powdered and pale as alabaster a few minutes ago was now crossed with angry weals, bringing a crescendo of torment to this Swedish miss of seventeen. What a delightful canvas to work on. How receptive a surface. How firmly the strokes were applied. How right for the colours to be reds and purples, with white here and there. How the picture grew more interesting with each new touch. This work of art would be well remembered. What a shame only one person could enjoy the display. With these thoughts, he drove the fifth stroke down.

Yet Amelia had received one extra cut, just to please him. Now this deceiver deserved equal treatment. He returned his rod to his right hand, and paused to measure the final stripe. He flexed the whalebone to give himself time for breath, savouring the sixth lash even before it was administered.

When girls first lay on that blue bench there was resistance and resentment. Arms and legs were rigid; buttock muscles clenched to hide those central lips. But when five strokes had been laid on, trembling thighs fell open, spread-eagled legs splayed wider, and the whole body went into wild motion in a way that often suggested an activity that, by definition, would only be available to them after they had ceased to be virgins. Romy’s reactions were no exception; on the contrary, she was proving memorably athletic on the cleverly designed crossed-bench.

With firm determination the sixth and final stroke was driven home. Dawson’s rod rent the air and impacted noisily into the double moons. A howl of agony told him it was the coup de grace. The force brought her legs up at the knees. Arms dropped, this slender body lay in full submission.

The teenager’s bottom was trembling and juddering with shock. How tempting it was; how easily he could have laid more stripes on the tender flesh, watched the muscles contract with pain, the hips rise against the downward force of the crop, the buttocks cavort madly from unassuagable agony. But Romy had paid, and the contours of her face and the tears on the mirror confirmed that to his full satisfaction. Those six marks would go from crimson to purple tinged with yellow, the bruises would come, the ridged weals take days to disappear. He turned away to lay his instrument on a side-table, it had done its first stint of duty well. He pressed a secret button which would summon his butler to attend on the girls in their bedroom. There were special oils and ungents, healing balms which would cool and soothe their seared bottoms. Gently applied they would speed recovery and these virgins would resume their household duties. One tiny tender tip would not be attended to, of course, however urgently it demanded attention. Touch me, touch me, that secret place would urge them; the plea must go unattended, that tingling must not be relieved.

Dawson pointed to the pair of white knickers which lay on the floor. ‘Go to your room now, Romy – and take those briefs with you. After treatment you may rest, and only rest!’ As the girl struggled off the bench, he emphasised the point once more. ‘No touching! Or you will be back here for a further stretch’. The weeping maid acknowledged the instruction with a nod.

In another part of the house, beautiful Alice Kendall lay naked on the freshly-ironed sheets of a giant double bed, her body stretched langorously, hair flowing over the pillows, the breeze from the air conditioning sending her sweetly perfumed smell wafting towards the door. As her husband entered she twisted her limbs invitingly. She could also hear, in the far distance, the sobs and gulps of two well-flogged and penitent teenagers, now having their agonised bottoms more gently attended to. These noises, and the imagery they evoked, brought her to a state of wanton preparedness.

‘I hoped you whipped them soundly, darling,’ Alice smooched. ‘Did you give them full marks for bad behaviour?’ How marvellous to be made love to by a masterful male, so strict, so demanding, and who had just exercised his rod. ‘Now, my husband, it is my turn to be spread-eagled. Do not spare me.’

A Spanking and Caning Story from Janus 52. More stories are available here.

The Rumour
by Michael Burntwood

MOST girls at our school like him. Some have a crush on him and there are those who never seem to cease talking about him.

Mr Brisson, our Art Master, is tall and slender and very handsome to look at. Some girls in the classes he takes prefer to rest their eyes on him during lessons instead of occupying themselves with boring schoolwork. His wavy hair is dark brown and he has a tiny moustache, which a lot of us teenaged girls dream of feeling against our skin if he once would kiss us. But then there is the rumour.

Nelly and I learned the truth about that rumour in a hard way. We did not know that it was more than a rumour. In our school a girl never complains about the way he sometimes taps her on the seat of her skirt. The girls like that little touch of his hand. Some girls blush, but they don’t move away, hoping he will do it again.

The rumour is quite exciting and tells that he once took two 17-year-old girls across his knee and spanked them, for having made obscene drawings and caused quite a commotion by showing their masterpieces to classmates. But not even the girls in his class know if he really did do that. The truth is a deeply-hidden secret between the three persons involved.

Nelly and I came to learn that Mr Brisson actually is capable of dealing with naughty girls in the way such girls deserve. Now we would truly have preferred it to be a secret from us too, if what happened was the truth behind that rumour.

I don’t think anyone could imagine my feelings while I was sitting there on that hard chair nervous and miserable, watching the sight in front of me. On the chairback behind me my skirt was hanging and if I looked down, which I mostly did, I could see my tie bulging over my breasts which felt taut and sensitive inside my white blouse. Below the hem of my blouse I saw my navy blue knickers and the bare strip of skin between them and my nylon stockings, above which tight white suspenders stretched from the stocking tops up under the legs of my faded and now somewhat outgrown knickers. My legs were trembling, so I had to hold them with my hands on my knees and I was too ashamed to look up. I felt more naked without my skirt on than I would have done in the showers and I was frightened. I wished I could close my ears in the same way as I shut my eyes, so that I wouldn’t have to hear.

In front of me was my best friend Nelly. It was her voice that I heard. Sometimes she had her face turned towards me and sometimes she was looking away. Nelly is one of the prettiest girls in the whole of our school, with long curly blonde hair and an oval face with big blue eyes. She has a cute little nose and rather small pouting lips. But this was not how I saw her now. When she turned her face in my direction it was contorted. Her cheeks were flushed and tears dropped from her eyes. Wailings, squealing sounds and cries came from her mouth.

Nelly wasn’t sitting up, as I was. She was lying down. Her shoulders and head were close to the floor and she had her hands on the parquet floorboards for support. Her long shapely legs were pendulating up and down. She was stretched out across the lap of our Art Master. Her tummy rested on his thighs.

Mr Brisson hadn’t asked her to take her skirt off, as he had me. Nelly had hers on because she was wearing her school uniform with the pleated skirt, whereas I had chosen that day to dress in an almost pencil-tight quite short skirt in the same colour, but which they didn’t like me to wear at school.

Nelly’s skirt was turned up round her waist and her navy blue knickers were not where knickers are supposed to be. They were pulled down to barely a few inches from the backs of her knees. She was wearing knee-length white socks, not stockings, so her thighs were bare except for where the knickers encircled them.

It was Mr Brisson’s flat palm which was causing her to make all that heart-thumping noise. He was spanking her naked bum with resounding slaps and his intention was to make her regret the commotion that she and I, or to be more correct, I and she had brought about during his lesson. There was double proof that he was doing well. First the blubbering cries from Nelly’s mouth and secondly the ever-growing bright red patches across my friend’s well-rounded and very cute, now wobbling and flinching girlish bottom.

I really didn’t want to watch, but I couldn’t avoid hearing the loud, sharp slapping sounds when his hand time and time again met Nelly’s bouncing bottom-cheeks. These noises and the sounds from her lips set my nerves on edge in the most alarming way.

I and my contemporaries are well aware of how a spanking makes a girl’s bottom sore, but I would gladly have changed places with Nelly if I had been allowed to because I knew I was not to be let off with a mere spanking. I had to sit there and wait for my turn. Before Mr Brisson had started to punish Nelly he had sent me to open a cupboard and take out a long ugly-looking cane, hard and shiny and frightening. That cane was lying across my thighs waiting to be made use of when Nelly no longer was an object for his attention. I had to sit there apprehensive and scared and very envious of Nelly, who was to be let off more lightly than I. Of course my best friend had cause to blubber and wince like an eel, as she did. When I at times furtively glanced at them, I could see that her appleformed very girlish compact little bottom was red like stoplights, but thinking about myself I wished for him to go on a few minutes more.

Her spanking came to an end and it was much too soon.

Whining and with her knickers below her knees now, Nelly stood up and Mr Brisson sent her to stand in the corner. She was not allowed to pull her knickers up, but he said nothing about her skirt. She didn’t have to hold it up as girls sometimes must, to be made really ashamed.

What afterwards happened to me I would rather not tell. To girls of seventeen a spanking doesn’t mean so much, it’s more embarrassing than painful. A caning on the contrary is something quite else. That was what I was going to get. I disliked having to stand up and hand that lithe instrument to him. His eyes were looking me over and it was awful, because I didn’t have my skirt on. It is truly humiliating to have to stand as I had to. I didn’t know where to put my hands. My blouse ended above my belly-button and I knew his gaze was directed below that level. Even when I closed my eyes I could feel him staring at me and it made me very nervous. It was a relief that my navy blue school knickers weren’t of the see-through kind. But I had goose-pimples on my naked skin at the tops of my thighs. It would surely have been less shameful if I hadn’t been wearing nylon stockings and a suspender belt. My cheeks were hot with blushing.

Mr Brisson stood up and grabbed my arm right below my shoulder. He led me to his chair, which he turned round. He ordered me curtly to bend over its back. I had never been told to do so before, but I was trembling with fear and knew there was no way I would dare to disobey him. The position he wanted me to take would make me arch my bottom up for him to cane. At that moment there was just one thing I longed and prayed for, and that was to find some way out – that a miracle would happen so that I wouldn’t have to feel that horrible cane across my bottom.

There was one thing I could be sure of and that was that I would not find a way out. I hated the cane at school and I hated the cane at home. The pain was terrible and the marks on my bottom stayed for many days before they started to fade.

I was on the verge of tears, but I knew I had to obey. I cast a swift glance at Nelly in the corner. She was standing there with her legs apart and her knickers round her calves, blue against her white socks. She was still rubbing her eyes with her knuckles because she wasn’t allowed to rub her smarting bottom.

My knees were weak as I bent over. With clumsy hands I clasped my fingers hard round the edge of the seat. The top of the back-rest dug into the upper fronts of my thighs and I was aware of Mr Brisson moving round behind me to stand close to my left side, cane in hand. Nelly was still whimpering faintly.

The anticipation was absolutely dreadful. I closed my eyes and my body was trembling. My knickers stretched taut across my bottom which felt so exposed and vulnerable, and I prayed that he would let me keep them on. The cane was going to hurt much more than his hand had hurt Nelly. But in despair I felt his cold fingers coming up inside my blouse at my hips and waist. He inserted them inside the elastic waistband and I fidgeted and the first tears wet my cheeks. Such things do not take long. In a few seconds only, my knickers had been pulled down to mid-thigh, baring my bottom. I sobbed in desperation and to stand properly I had to move my feet apart and backwards to keep my balance. It was now that I became aware of how uncomfortable it was to have to bend over the back of a chair like this. Its wooden top edge now pressed hurtfully into my tummy, making me stand on the balls of my feet to alleviate it. Fearing the worst and feeling very precarious, I had to listen to him.

‘I’ll give you ten, young lady,’ Mr Brisson declared sternly. His words naturally added to my despair and desperately I pleaded for leniency but to no avail. Instead I felt his left hand pushing down hard on the small of my back as his booming voice admonished me.

‘I told you, it will be ten,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll count them myself Jeanette, so you don’t have to. Just don’t fidget too much because if the cane doesn’t hit where it is supposed to teach young girls to behave, it will not count,’ he said pedantically, but I could hear the pleasure in his voice. ‘Be still and don’t clench that nice little bottom of yours.’ He paused tapping me with the cane across my buttocks. ‘You ought to know by now that it hurts less if you are relaxed.’

There was a pause again and the cane wasn’t touching my skin any more. And then he continued, ‘Now this is number one.’

WHAAACK! The swishing sound before the cane hit my flesh was too short a warning.

‘Aaaoooouuuh!’ I squealed and pressed my thighs together scissoring my calves as the pain seared through my bottom. Just as the first stroke always does, the shocking scorching sting came as a complete surprise and made me realise I had forgotten how awfully it hurts to be smacked or caned. And a caning always hurts far much more than a spanking.

‘Number two now, Jeanette.’

That same vicious whistling sound… ‘Yyyeeeooooww!’ It really did hurt down there close to my thighs, but I forced myself to stay still.

‘Number three.’

‘Oooouuuch!’ The cane struck straight across the middle of my buttocks but not so hard this time.

‘Four, Jeanette.’ I didn’t like the sound of his voice.

There was a pause of waiting first and then it fell.

‘Aaoooouuh!’ This one hit me lower down and stung wildly. My bottom jerked a lot and I started crying for real.

‘This is five.’

‘Ooouuuch!’ Higher up and it didn’t hurt so much, but I still couldn’t help yelping out. I sobbed and panted, hoping I would be able to take them all without fuss.

‘And now this is six.’

The cane really stung this time. It felt much worse. I screamed out and my cheeks were suddenly wet with tears. The pain in my bottom was maddening. My legs were quaking and the chairback felt sharp against my tummy.

Faintly through my blubbering cries I heard, ‘Seven’. And this was the stroke I had feared all along. The cane whipped across my thighs above my stocking-tops, blazing like the devil. Involuntarily I pushed the chair forward and my position was now even more awkward and uncomfortable.

‘Eight now.’

I kicked both legs upwards as the cane struck again across the tops of my thighs, singeing my skin. My legs are so much more sensitive than my bottom and I detested getting such revealing weals there.

‘Nine, Jeanette.’ His voice sounded calmer and unaffected, as if this was just a job he had to do. He was punishing a 17-year-old girl for her own good. But I cried of course and for the third time the cane bit sharply into the flesh on the back of both my thighs. The chairback cut hard into my stomach at the same time, but I didn’t care about anything except the need of a fire brigade for my burning bottom.

‘Ten, now.’

‘Ooouuuch! Ooooh! Oohhh!’ Thanks anyway, I could have said. I got it across my bottom this last time, like a crackling flame. I cried and cried. My whole bottom was so hot and sore. I knew it was over and my feet found the floor. Mr Brisson held my arm, helping me to stand up.

If he had wanted, I would have promised him anything at that moment if he could guarantee that I would never be caned again. I felt sure he had been terribly strict with me. I knew my bottom and thighs bore many angry smarting weals. Those marks on my thighs meant that I couldn’t wear shorts or a bathing-suit or even my gym outfit until they were gone. There was to be no visit to the pool for me this week and I would have to find some excuse for the gym lessons too.

Mr Brisson didn’t allow me to pull up my knickers. He sent me to join Nelly in the corner and Nelly was ordered to lift her skirt and hold it bunched up around her waist at the front. He wanted both of us to stand there with our bottoms on display for his own pleasure and our salutary humiliation.

Nelly held her skirt up with both hands, but as my skirt had been taken away I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I desperately wanted to clap them to my bottom in order to soothe the smart in my skin, but I knew Mr Brisson would be angry if I did. At first I crossed them in front to hide the patch of fluffy hair between my thighs, but as my tummy was turned away from him I had no reason to do so and I felt silly holding my hands like that. So I put my arms down by my sides and after a while I let my fingers play with the suspender straps in front of my thighs just to keep them occupied.

I was still sobbing, but Nelly had calmed down. While we were standing there I soon found to my surprise that I didn’t feel ashamed at all, as girls are supposed to do when they are sent to the corner. Instead I was thinking about our Art Master who was the only person in the room to see us. I thought he must be feeling satisfied with his efforts. He was looking at two very dejected 17-year-old schoolgirls whose sorely smarting bottoms showed unmistakable signs of a treatment of the kind which has always been prescribed for the bottoms of troublesome teenaged girls. Oh, but it hurt!

Ten or fifteen minutes later we were allowed to dress and leave. Walking home, Nelly and I didn’t talk very much. We were both certain that the rumour was true. We promised each other never to tell anyone about what had happened to us. Possibly there would be a new rumour spreading amongst the girls at our school. But we were never going to talk about the old rumour or comment upon the new one concerning Mr Brisson and ourselves. Any girl who wanted to could find out for herself about Mr Brisson’s remedy for naughty girls.

A Spanking and Caning Story from Janus 57. To read more stories click here.

Questions and more questions
by Michael Burntwood

Gymshoes pattered over the varnished wooden floor of the gym hall. The netball match had started. It would settle the question, which team was to be appointed to play in the school championship final against the winning team from the fifth form heats.

Long-legged sixth form girls were running up and down from one side to the other following the ball, eager to do their best to win the game and on Parents’ Day belong to the team which would show the younger girls that sixth form young ladies as always are the best.

One of the teams was dressed in dark blue leotards and the other wore white sleeveless vests tucked into brief running shorts of shiny red nylon. Today, however, it seemed as if there was something wrong. Miss Hampton, the gym teacher, had to blow her whistle to break the game from time to time.

Again the shrill tone from her whistle sounded within only the first minutes of the match. The game stopped and surprised girls stared at each other in bewilderment. An explanation came when Miss Hampton pointed her arm at one of the girls in a leotard.

Sighs of vexation were heard from several of the players in both teams. The player who had now once again caused Miss Hampton to stop the game was a slim-waisted blonde girl, the only one with a pageboy coiffure. She belonged to the blue team and was dressed in a leotard which seemed to have been outgrown at least a year ago. None of her chums was particularly amazed because they knew that Madelaine, for one reason or another, quite regularly became subject to their teachers’ displeasure.

‘That was the third time, Madelaine, that you deliberately aimed to hit Lorna with the ball. I can’t understand why you are more interested in attacking Sonia and Lorna than doing the best you can to help your team win. It’s unfair to them that some of you are fighting all the time. I suppose you and Lorna and Sonia for some reason are on unfriendly terms and can’t concentrate on the game. So we will have you three sit down on the bench and keep quiet. Then the rest of the girls can play this game according to the rules. To make the teams even, Carolyn can play for the whites.’

Madelaine, Lorna and Sonia looked sullenly at the teacher and glanced tight-lipped at one another. Then they very sulkily sat down as they had been ordered to, and Miss Hampton signalled for the game to recommence. Slender-built, lissom girls started to run across the floor, following the ball from one side of the hall to the other, calling out with excited voices. But it hardly came as a surprise when, only a couple of minutes later, the whistle blew again and there was a new break.

Girls in both teams now became annoyed because the signal had nothing to do with the game. There was no reason to stop the attack the white team was making towards the basket on the blue side. Though they were now sitting on the bench, the three girls were also the cause of this latest interruption. They had caught the attention of Miss Hampton as they were trying to push each other off the bench. The teacher was obviously more angry this time. In a very harsh tone she ordered the girls to stand up. Exchanging angry glances, the girls obeyed.

The scolding that Miss Hampton bestowed upon the miscreants finished unexpectedly. She sent the three 17-year-old girls to stand in the corner, and to stop them scuffling she ordered them to clasp their hands on their heads. When the girls had obeyed, Miss Hampton turned back to the teams and, clearly irritated, blew her whistle to start the game again.

The players, occupied with the game, did not care at all for the three unruly girls in the corner, even though something quite out of the ordinary had occurred. On very rare occasions it had happened that a girl had been put in the corner during a gym lesson. In the sixth form it had perhaps never happened before. But the girls chasing the ball were totally engaged in the game and going all out to win. Their young bodies in tight-fitting gym outfits flew across the floor on long teenaged legs, firm breasts bouncing and round buttocks jouncing above lithely-tapering thighs.

At times, when the game was stopped, some of the panting girls glanced at the three lanky figures in the corner. Gazing at their backsides and noticing their well-rounded bottoms, they would have welcomed with ill-concealed spitefulness the sight of reddish tramlines marking the skin on the nether halves of the three girls’ trim buttocks. Buttocks which Lorna, Sonia and Madelaine were displaying, as the leotard Madelaine had on, and the brief red shorts Sonia and Lorna wore, had ridden up because of their raised arms.

Most of the girls blamed Madelaine for what had happened. There were those, not only in Madeline’s team, who had plans to show her what they really felt about her disturbing the game. They surely would know what to do when they returned to the changing room to shower and put on their school uniforms once more. Madelaine could expect to get slaps from hard hands or wet towels on her thighs and buttocks, till she had smarting blemishes on her bottom and the backs and fronts of her long, shapely legs.

The game had not proceeded for more than another five minutes before there was a further outbreak of disorder. Madelaine pinched Sonia’s right thigh. Perhaps she did it harder than she had intended. Perhaps Sonia yelped louder than she had cause to. Miss Hampton’s whistle stopped the play. Red-faced with anger and looking extremely stern, she turned to the girls in the corner in time to see Madelaine put her left hand back on top of her head. In the harshest tone she demanded an explanation, while the other girls on the floor stared, noticing that Sonia was rubbing her thigh with one hand. Very severely, Miss Hampton held her eyes fixed on the guilty-looking schoolgirl’s down-tilted face.

‘You are really the most incorrigible girl I’ve ever had, Madelaine,’ she expostulated. ‘Now go to my room and wait for me there. You can sit on the chair by the door – and don’t you dare do anything else. I’ll deal with you after the game. And you, Sonia and Lorna, sit down where you are. I’ll have a talk with you when the others are changing.’

Even Madelaine was forced to blush as she trudged alone out of the gym hall with all the girls’ eyes upon her. She sat down moodily on the chair in the gym mistress’s small room. On the other side of the door, the game started again. She could hear the sounds from the girls. They were however unusually quiet and had good reason to be low-voiced. All were aware that they had better be on their best behaviour. Miss Hampton had already been provoked far enough and would hardly stand for any more nonsense today. None of them wanted to tempt their teacher to resort to still stricter methods in order to maintain her control.

Madelaine now felt far from happy as she sat fidgeting on the hard chair. If she could imagine anything that Miss Hampton had in store for her, she felt certain that it would not be something nice. Her lips were closed and her eyes downcast, as if she were studying her gym shoes. She held her long legs stretched out, her heels resting on the floor and her hands nervously moving up and down along her lithe, silk-skinned thighs.

It was not the first time Madelaine had been in Miss Hampton’s room. She had been there before, but never in fear of being punished. It was awful to sit there and have to think about punishments. Shivering, she remembered what other girls had said about a girl who had been taken into this room for some mischief. She recalled what she had heard about where to look. She did not want to turn her eyes in that direction but could not withstand the temptation to check if what she had been told was true.

One look, a mere glance, was enough. It was true. It was there on the second shelf from the top. She could see part of it sticking out. It was the crook-handle end of it.

Madelaine bit her lip hard and rubbed her palms against the thin fabric of her leotard where it tightened across her narrow hips. She felt certain about what was going to happen. Miss Hampton would take that cane down. Then… in that very stern voice she sometimes used, she would tell her to stretch her left hand out, palm upwards… But… what if she wasn’t going to cane her across her hand?…

Madelaine shuddered at the thought. Could there be any way for her to escape? All sorts of thoughts raced through her head.

Perhaps she could explain to Miss Hampton what had happened? Why she had been so angry with Lorna and Sonia. It would be embarrassing for her, but maybe just for once the truth would help. Seconds ticked away and became minutes.

Madelaine became more and more anxious, sitting on the chair, waiting for something she hated to think about, but which was inevitable. Unconsciously, she had put her hands in between her thighs, pressing them tight to her crotch. She trembled and felt cold, wearing only the thin, outgrown leotard. She would have liked to convince herself that she was the innocent, injured party, but she could not. It wasn’t all the two other girls’ fault.

Breathing rather fast, Madelaine straightened up. Through the door she clearly heard Miss Hampton’s whistle sounding three times. Madelaine stiffened, sitting up properly on the chair. After a while everything became silent in the gym hall. One of the teams had won the match. Madelaine did not know which one. Then she heard the girls clattering away to the changing room. Cautiously she turned her head and looked across her shoulder at the door with its framed glass pane. She felt a cold shiver run up her spine – a shiver of fear that Miss Hampton was soon going to open that door and enter the small room. Her breath came in rapid gasps and her body rigidly quivered.

But all of a sudden there was a strange sound. A noise that set all her nerves on edge. She heard repeated dull slaps, which were followed by half-suppressed yelps from a girlish voice. Madelaine held her breath and listened intently, her cheeks growing paler. That sort of slapping noise was something she recognised. It had to come from a hand landing hard on tender flesh; the yelps were how a poor girl complained about a smarting pain which increased in her flesh every time the hand bounced up from the firm bottom, where it served the purpose of teaching the young lady how to behave.

Only after at least ten smacking reports did Madelaine become absolutely sure who it was. That was Lorna’s voice she heard squealing and whining. The noise went on and on and that kind of sound did not make Madelaine feel more calm. She became acutely scared, for it was obvious that Lorna was not getting off lightly. Minutes seemed to pass before the spanking came to an end and the stomach-churning squealing turned into a blubbering wail.

Madelaine wrung her hands, feeling tears coming into her eyes and a heavy pressure inside her. In a way it was worse to have to listen than to be chastised herself. She strained her ears, hearing what must be Sonia’s voice objecting plaintively.

‘No… no-oo, Miss Hampton! I haven’t done anything! It wasn’t me! I don’t know why Madelaine pinched me. Please. Pleeeease. Don’t. Dooooon’t. No-ooo. No-oo, Miss Hampton…’

Though Madelaine was scared, she could not stop herself. On trembling legs she stood up close to the door. Stealthily she raised a corner of the brown-and-white striped curtain and looked through the glass. She saw them in there near the wall to the left. Lorna was standing away from them, holding her hands to her tear-stained face.

Madelaine inhaled sharply and stared at Lorna. She could hardly believe her eyes. Lorna was 17 years old, as they all were. Yet she stood there so shamefully bared. She had her tight red nylon shorts right down and encircling her ankles, and was displaying her flat tummy and the dark triangle of her pubic hair. The lower half of her body was entirely exposed.

But Madeline’s eyes almost at once turned away from Lorna, as she caught sight of Sonia, who was half-bent across Miss Hampton’s lap. Miss Hampton was sitting on a low vaulting-box, clearly trying to make the eagerly-resisting teenaged girl lie down across her knee. She held Sonia’s left wrist with one hand and the other was grasping the girl round her waist.

Madelaine flushed. Never could she have imagined that anything like this could happen to the girls in the sixth form. It was extraordinary. First, Miss Hampton had ordered them to stand in the corner. That was probably the first time ever that girls of their age had been sent to be shamed like that in front of the whole form. But now. This was much worse. Miss Hampton not only spanked girls who were 17 – she even pulled their shorts down and took them across her lap!

Madelaine saw how Sonia struggled in vain to be free. It did not take Miss Hampton long, for the gym mistress was strong. Madelaine almost pressed her nose to the pane of glass. Sonia was perched across Miss Hampton’s lap and lay there with her legs floundering. She tried fervently to hold on to her shorts with her right hand, but a few slaps on her thighs made her obedient and the tight-fitting shorts were tugged down. And then Sonia became still, lying with her bottom up quite bare, prepared to be spanked till it was red all over.

The sound from the hard slaps could be heard more clearly now that Madelaine had her face close to the glass, and she could see with her own eyes how the arm was raised and then brought down, the hand rising high in the air and descending with sheer force. The sight of the rippling flesh starting to develop red marks from Miss Hampton’s fingers and palm became too much for Madelaine. She closed her eyes. Panting, she slumped down on the chair in great anxiety, convinced that her own punishment was going to be no less shameful. Miss Hampton would certainly perform what she considered to be her duty and it would be on Madeline’s behind, not on her hands. It was not much of a consolation to her that Lorna and Sonia were also going to leave school today with red and tender bottoms.

Further away, Madelaine heard the school bell sounding the end of the school day. Soon her mates would pour through the school gates, giggling and chattering and having nothing at all to worry about. With a deep sigh Madelaine wondered whether her chums, or at least some of them, really believed that she was not afraid of punishments. She was. Her bravado was only an outward act. She was scared every time she had to endure some kind of chastisement, whether at school or at home. Madelaine herself did not think any girl could be particularly brave when it came to having to pay for her misdeeds. A girl’s bottom was sensitive and a cane so awfully whippy.

Half-paralysed by shame and fear, she stood up when the door was opened and then shut again. She felt too afraid and too shy to look up. She knew it could be no one other than Miss Hampton who had come in.

All her fears came true. Miss Hampton went straight to the wall with the shelves and stretched up her arm and took down the cane, before she turned to her. Madelaine did not want to look up. She glanced to the left and looked out through the window There outside, she caught sight of other girls fully-dressed, crossing the school yard in pretty navy blue uniforms, swinging their satchels, happy and carefree on their way home from school. Looking at them, she felt so ashamed and naked, standing alone in front of the gym teacher, clad only in her very tight, too-old leotard.

She heard Miss Hampton’s voice but did not distinguish the words properly. The gym mistress’s voice held no compassion for her. She was talking like teachers always did, about how schoolgirls were expected to behave. Teachers and parents always talked like that, but such words rarely inspired much interest from girls in their upper teens. She could not listen and she did not look up at Miss Hampton. Madelaine felt terrified and appallingly embarrassed, and she could not bear to look at the threatening cane Miss Hampton was bending between her hands.

The gym mistress angrily became aware of the girl’s disinterest and suddenly swished the supple cane through the air, striking the outside of Madeline’s left thigh with smarting effect. The searing, unexpected pain made Madelaine jump out of the way and let out a shrill, protesting yelp.

‘I told you to bend over the end of that couch, Madelaine,’ Miss Hampton repeated, pointing at the massage-bench alongside the wall behind the girl. It was high, covered in rather worn-looking brown artificial leather. On it was a cushion in the same material, but that looked almost new.

Tears were emerging from Madeline’s eyes, and a whimpering from her mouth. She looked down at her thigh, rubbing the sore red mark on her skin with her left hand. Then, with a deep intake of breath, she slowly and with very short steps went to stand at the foot-end of the couch.

‘Please, Miss Hampton,’ she sobbed. ‘It hurts. Please, don’t use the cane. I… I have marks already. Daddy caned me at home the day before yesterday. That was why I got so angry. Lorna and Sonia teased me when we were changing our clothes because I still had those marks.’

‘Yes, I know. They told me when I asked them why you were making such a disturbance. They have already been punished. Now it is your turn. Bend over and don’t let me have any more fuss.’

Madelaine was reluctant to obey, but hard, unrelenting hands helped her. The leather cushion was pushed beneath her tummy and when Madelaine lay forward on the bench-top, her feet did not quite reach the floor. Her long legs were dangling in the air and a strong hand held her down. Madelaine had no option but to resign herself to her fate. Miserable and unable to resist Miss Hampton’s demands, she felt her teacher’s hands at the legs of her leotard, tugging them up. Shuddering, she gripped hard on the sides of the couch.

It was awful. She knew that most of her bottom had been bared. The leotard had been pushed up so high the cloth was cutting into her crotch. Miss Hampton yanked it even further. Her bottom had now been made completely vulnerable, and all that Madelaine could do to suppress the sound of her sobs was to press her face flat against the cool leather top. Any time now she feared that the cane would fall ferociously across its target. Her bottom tensed and relaxed repeatedly, the soft flesh wincing in expectation of her first-ever caning from the gym mistress. Madelaine knew what it would be like. She was only too well acquainted with the ways in which a cane could hurt. Experience had taught her more than she ever wanted to know about such things. She hated and detested being caned.

The sensation therefore came as no surprise to her. She had waited in anguish for at least a minute for the cane to whip into her soft flesh, and sure enough it did. The pain was the same as she had felt only two days before, when Daddy had used the cane that was kept at home solely for that purpose. Miss Hampton had aimed carefully and struck straight across the bare centre parts of her buttocks. The searing pain made Madeline’s lips form a scream, but it never left her mouth. She succeeded in repressing it, but almost all the breath left her lungs and her hips heaved and wriggled.

The resilience of her bottom and the suppleness of the cane co-operated, and the teacher’s implement recoiled smoothly from the stung and quaking flesh. A stripe of white across the pale skin marked the place, well below the tugged-up legs of her leotard, where the cane had made its brief visit, and within seconds it turned pink. The first tears of pain fell from Madeline’s eyes on to the covered bench-top, yet Madelaine felt proud that she had not cried out.

The next two strokes were slightly less hard, although their cumulative pain and shock caused her hips to hump up and down energetically. But number four surprised Madelaine, as it really did hurt dreadfully. The scorching pain it caused very low down across her buttocks forced her to emit a plaintive cry and involuntarily she kicked up with both legs.

‘I see you really felt that one, Madelaine,’ said the gym mistress in a tight little voice. ‘Perhaps that was just as hard as you get from your father. The rest will hurt like that one did. You have six more to come.’

‘Oh no! No more, Miss Hampton! Pleeease! It hurts so awfully. Aaaaooouuch!’ Madelaine shrieked as the very flexible cane whipped into the apple-curved rounds of her bottom for the fifth time, indenting another set of tramlines right above the previous ones. This time the smart made Madelaine snatch her body up off the couch, her visibly inflamed bottom performing a mad dance in the air.

The gym teacher’s response was to order her to move forward on the bench so that her whole body, from head to ankles, now lay flat on its leather-covered surface, her long legs parted slightly and stretched out horizontally. Now Madelaine could not hold back her blubbering cries any longer. But as Miss Hampton made her wait in suspense for the next stroke, Madelaine tried awkwardly to induce her to let her off the rest of her punishment.

‘Please, Miss Hampton. No more now. It hurts. It really hurts. I’ve learnt my lesson – I really have. Daddy was so strict, I’m already so sore. Please, Miss Hampton, please don’t cane me any more!’ At the same time she started to struggle and attempted to turn on her side to protect her buttocks.

‘Oh no, Madelaine,’ the teacher warned her, suddenly sounding spiteful. ‘If you make a fuss I’ll give you two extra strokes.’

Madeline’s squeal this time was shriller when Miss Hampton’s cane, to emphasise her words, landed with a loud crack, etching a blazingly painful red stripe across both her thigh-backs at least an inch below the crevice where the swelling of her buttocks began. Crying from the savage smart, Madelaine clung tightly to the end of the padded bench, dutifully submitting herself to Miss Hampton’s unbearable discipline.

Now at last Madelaine realised how stupidly she had behaved. Instead of getting revenge on the two girls, she had made Miss Hampton more angry than she had imagined she could ever be. Never before had Madelaine been caned twice in one week. Once was more than enough – far more than enough. Sonia and Lorna had been lucky. They had escaped with a mere spanking. Of course a spanking was humiliating to a girl of 17, and still worse when she had been taken across the knee and had her knickers pulled down. But Madelaine would have given anything to have exchanged her punishment for the chastisement they had received.

Snivelling and sobbing, Madelaine tried to brace herself for the remaining strokes that were still due to her. She did not know how many more it was to be. She had lost count because of the pain. Had she been able to see her own bottom, she could perhaps have counted the number of strokes Miss Hampton had given her, for these marks were stronger and more livid than those left by the recent caning from her father.

The pause was over and Madelaine just had to cry out again when the cane scorched her soft flesh, almost too high up this time.

Again there seemed to be a pause, and Madelaine had a few moments’ grace. Her cheeks were wet with tears and she could not stop weeping. The lithe cane rested right across her nervously trembling bottom, aligning itself for another stroke. Madelaine did not know that Miss Hampton was studying the marks her cane had already made in her skin. She did not know anything any more, only that she had been a very naughty girl and was now paying the price for her misbehaviour. The teacher seemed to be quite satisfied with the tramlined marks her instrument had produced on Madelaine’s trim, girlish bottom with intent to make the culprit feel sore and remorseful. The girl still had to take a few more strokes, however, and she noticed a couple of areas where there were inch-wide gaps between stripes. Slowly she raised the cane again.

‘There are only three more now, Madelaine. Try to be a brave girl and your punishment will soon be over.’

The three cracking whacks fell only five to ten seconds apart and Madelaine cried out, wailing from the pain each of them caused her in that part about which parents and teachers seemed to agree that girls possessed not only to sit upon.

Whimpering and shivering, Madelaine climbed off the padded bench and stood up straight when Miss Hampton told her to. Tears were flowing down her cheeks and the red, swollen tramlines across her buttocks ached and burned like fire.

Weeping, Madelaine was allowed to leave the room and weeping, she showered when she had reached the changing room. The water helped to ease the pain, but when she towelled she felt the soreness of the long, raised stripes. As she dressed, her thoughts turned from what had happened to what she had to face when she came home. Mum had asked her to hurry, but instead she was already at least half-an-hour late. She could not leave until she felt reasonably sure that people would not notice from her face that she had been weeping.

At home Mum and Aunt Doris would be impatiently waiting for her. Aunt Doris was busy making a new dress for Madelaine, and that was why the girl was expected home straight after school. Mum had reminded her once again as she had left for school that Aunt Doris was coming to try the new dress on for size. Madelaine sighed as she thought how life for a schoolgirl sometimes seemed to be so complicated. At home she would have to undress and stand between Mum and her Aunt in nothing but her underwear. Protests would be useless. Aunt Doris could not come back another day and Madelaine could not try on the new dress when she was wearing other clothes.

No knickers in the world could conceal reddish stripes decorating a pouting girlish bottom after it had been given ten sharp whacks with a school cane and on the bare too. There was also the weal across the backs of her thighs, which was not possible to hide at all. Mum and Aunt Doris were bound to notice the marks which still were red and swollen across her buttocks. Mum would almost certainly pull her knickers down to see everything. Then, amidst all kinds of exclamations, she would probably count the stripes.

There were going to be questions and more questions. How would Madelaine be able to find answers to all of them? No, Madelaine knew there would be no end to all those questions a Mum and an Aunt could put to a poor unhappy teenaged schoolgirl, whose bottom was still fierily tender after having just been dealt with by the cane. And why, oh why, didn’t she live more than five minutes’ walk away from school?

A Spanking Story from Janus 59. To read more stories click here.

Noreen
A Travelling-Man’s Confession
by Richard Manton

I DOUBT if you would care to change places with me, supposing you were to see me on the train or in the dining-room of a commercial hotel. A travelling-man with a leather bag and a portfolio of documents. A face with spectacles and moustache that you might change for a million others and never know the difference. A dull fellow on his way to perform some tedious duty for a mean employer. That is how you would see me. Journeying late at night in ill-lit draughty carriages. Sleeping on starched and unfamiliar sheets, lodging on lonely beds in rented and fly-spotted rooms.

You see? I cannot lay claim to the make-believe of romance. The secret I share with you now is an episode in the most ordinary life.

You would not look at me twice. A sympathetic glance and home you go to the arms of your warm plump Louise, or your wriggling little Jacqueline, or your dreamily lecherous Michelle. Perhaps you have a fluffy young wife with a round and agile little bottom who will carry in the supper and precede you lasciviously up the stairs to bed. Or else an almond-eyed and tawny-skinned young mistress with a touch of the perverse about her waits for you in a secret apartment.

How you pity the poor travelling-man! But I do not envy your private moments with Michelle or Louise. I might give my reason in many words or few. For the moment, I choose just one.

The word might be Joanne, or Sharon, or Vicky. For the moment it shall be Noreen.

To you that name means nothing. For me it evokes an image as real as your own face in the morning mirror. A girl of nineteen. Not a beauty queen but lithe and plainly good-looking, damnably provoking as only a well-built young trollop can be! Picture a fair-skinned firm-featured young face with a resolute chin that hints at defiance. See the lazy insolence reflected in the slant of her brown eyes. The hair is lank and dark, worn in a level fringe across her forehead, cut round to touch her collar and cover her ears.

There are girls of nineteen who demand to be treated gently as Meissen dolls and others who do not. Noreen belongs to the latter kind. She is quite tall in figure, not flabby but well made. Her shape is of the kind that goes with a white blouse and plain denim shirt, or a white singlet to show her firm breasts and strong young back, matched by the tight fit of smooth denim riding-pants. The pale blue denim, strained taut as drumskin on her well-exercised young figure, shows thighs that are sturdy but not fat, hips that are robust, and a pair of nicely firmed-out globes – Noreen’s bottom-cheeks under her tight jeans-seat. She has the look of a well-developed outdoor girl, who prefers sensible tight pants to the flowing skirts of the middle-class miss.

Let me tell you how I first saw her.

I shall not be so indiscreet as to give you the name of my employer nor that of the charity whose patron he remains. You know as well as I that there are young men and women who fall by the way and are reclaimed under a regime of stern moral authority and wholesome toil. Among female miscreants in their teens or twenties there are young sluts, trollops, tarts, slatterns – call them what you will – who must otherwise languish in the moral corruption of a prison. Happily, a magistrate may grant a probation and impose what conditions seem best. The charitable organisation of which I speak offers secure premises and a programme of useful labour. Two or three years of residence with enlightened supervision and demanding work is to be preferred to the contagion of the penitentiary. But one dare not consign young women to reformers – male or female – without further inspection. Who will guard the guards themselves, as the wise Roman asked?

I will. In me you see what the Russians would call the Inspector-General of those establishments which owe their existence to my employer’s generosity. I am the man whom their directors dread. They know I watch keenly during my visits and travel back to London with my reports. So long as I exist to monitor them, the public sleeps content. Scandal is what authority fears most. I need not remind you what newspaper revelations followed the canings on the bare tomboy bottom of Elaine Cox, the fifth-form girl, or the naked birching of the round lascivious buttocks of Jacqueline Grant. We want no more of that.

I followed my calling for about two years, drawing up my reports promptly and neatly. I am an exact man. Those who know me would tell you as much. It was a fine day in November when I set out on my visit to Hollingsworth, the country residence where Mr Brown apprenticed delinquent beauty.

The railway does not run to that remote moorland hamlet, almost within earshot of a steep and lonely coast. There are no chance visitors at Hollingsworth House. You leave the train at a cathedral city 15 miles short of your destination. Someone waits by appointment in the station yard to drive you the rest of the way.

Mr Brown has great commercial influence in that city. He is not so great a benefactor as my employer but Hollingsworth is his ‘hobby’ and he spends upon it the surplus of the wealth which his business brings in.

In a mere story, chance would never play the part in my life which it did that November afternoon. Through some misunderstanding the driver who was to take me to Hollingsworth supposed that I should be on the later train. I found myself standing, leather bag in hand, in the station forecourt. I had an hour to wait. Rather than remain there, I went wandering the streets, admiring a mediaeval corner here and a Tudor mansion there. Mr Brown’s name occurred several times on the boards of prosperous enterprises.

It was in passing one of these that I noticed a well-built girl of nineteen vigorously shining the floor where the treasures of Mr Brown’s emporium were set out. I knew that the girls at Hollingsworth were required to work for their master. I suppose I knew that they were sometimes brought into town to do so. But I had never noticed this one on my visits to the moorland house. She had been only one face among thirty or forty. Had I not chanced to encounter her now, I do not think I should ever have picked her out.

She was kneeling with her back to me, sitting on her heels, working her cloth with vigour and determination – reflected in the set of her jaw and the wide points of her cheekbones. It was not a job to be done in flowing skirts. Noreen was dressed for her menial task in white singlet and the faded blue denim of pants. A stout leather waist-belt kept the denim tight and smooth, making her lower figure an object of great interest. Several gentlemen paused to glance or stare. She responded with a pretence at indifference or a contemptuous flick of her fringe. I believe it was this challenge in the girl’s manner that made her irresistible to one’s authoritarian instincts.

When she inclined her back forward a little, with the energy of her polishing, the faded blue denim of the jeans was skin-tight over Noreen’s bottom-cheeks and hips, which naturally swelled fuller and broader as she sat on her heels. To this day I do not think Noreen realised the rear view she offered to these casual admirers. Yet such was her disdain for them that I doubt if she cared. Sometimes she stopped and turned her face to one of the gentlemen with a hard and most impudent stare, as if to dismiss him. But the day’s work must be finished and soon she resumed it.

To reach further, it was necessary for the girl to lift her hips and go forward on all fours, the collar length of lank dark hair falling loose about her face. As she raised her haunches from her heels and went forward on hands and knees, it was possible to hear a sharp intake of breath among those who saw her. In this posture, each of Noreen’s buttocks filled her jeans-seat like a smooth and taut balloon-swell, though her thighs were still the firmly-muscled legs of a well-exercised working girl. Her broad leather bell pulled the washed-out denim still closer against her rear curves.

How suggestive was the sight she now presented! The faded blue jeans were skin-smooth, shaping the firmly-stretched mounds of Noreen’s behind. At the same time, as she knelt forward on all fours, the stout central seam of the jeans-seat was drawn deep and taut between the slight fatness or heaviness of Noreen’s broadened bottom-cheeks. It was strained forward under her legs where a certain intimate softness of feminine flesh was moulded by the thin denim. No wonder that Noreen at nineteen had the reputation of a strapping young wench. To look at her now was to understand why. Her backside, in this posture, appeared robust and full-cheeked but firm and well-shaped at the same time. Noreen’s knickers were clearly outlined through the thin taut denim of the jeans. They were briefs of elasticated cotton, usual among girls of her age and type. From the rear opening of her legs, the ridge of the hem arched up brief and tight over her buttocks, showing that the cheeks of Noreen’s statuesque young backside were half bare under her jeans.

She worked vigorously in this posture for five or ten minutes, inclining her hips a little this way and that, unknowingly presenting her young behind one way and another, sometimes backing towards her admirers, sometimes kneeling over more tightly to polish under a chest or counter, Noreen’s rear cheeks more fully and separately presented. The smiles exchanged among her admirers confirmed how their imaginations penetrated the smooth denim while Noreen presented her rear aspect with such unwitting abandon. Those who studied her had lost all interest except one. She had ceased to exist as a girl of character and offered them instead a single object which the theorists of fetishism insist may exclude all others. They cared nothing for her – but only for Noreen’s bottom.

Those who peruse the literature of the subject know full well that the female bottom comes in types and shapes. There are the trim tight saucy buttocks of a soubrette like Jacqueline. You may find the pale oval beauty of the rear cheeks of a nymph at sixteen in Judith or Tracey. Or the full-cheeked adolescent pallor of Elaine’s bottom, the appeal of the tomboy A dozen years senior to her, Joanne’s full-mooned backside presents the erotic maturity of the experienced and Amazonian young wife. But whatever one’s preferences, Hollingsworth House supplies them all.

Noreen was none of these. Hers was the backside of the study firm-hipped girl at nineteen, whom one puts to hard labour. There are, I know, voices to deplore that Noreen’s arse should have been the sole subject of her admirers’ interest. But if you will reflect upon it, did not that particular female arse tell one a good deal about the character of its young owner?

I confess that, after what I had seen, it was unlikely my visit to Mr Brown would pass without Noreen’s backside appearing over a stool or trestle. My critics might maintain that this proved my own obsession. But if her bottom was an expression of her character, was it not her character upon which the chastiser operated?

I need not have concerned myself. There was a man nearby who had watched Noreen’s rear view longest and closest, his tongue running repeatedly along his lips. His outrage took the appearance of excitement. Now, in an access of moral fervour, he entered the premises. I later heard, he confronted Mr Brown with a protest about the suggestive manner in which the young slut conducted herself. I cannot tell you his words but I saw animation and colour in his face. There was a tremor in his hands, indicating the offence he felt.

I would have supported his complaint but it was clearly unnecessary. Having no wish to involve myself without purpose, I walked back to the station yard and found my driver. He was a burly taciturn fellow who spoke little during the journey. From main roads we turned into lanes with tall hedges. From these we climbed the moorland slope, coming in twilight to vast horizons of darkened scrub and a sky the colour of ink. A light but stinging rain was in the air, blown fresh from the rollers that churned and broke at the cliffs’ foot a few miles off. Beyond the village, several miles from the nearest farm, a track turns off the road. Bumping and swaying, we followed it for ten minutes, coming at last to the gabled mansion of Hollingsworth. A paradise in summer, I daresay, but a place of darkness and gloom in November. Mr Brown was not yet back, said Mrs Fox the senior guardian. With a glass of sherry and a volume of Barchester, I chose the leather chair and awaited my host.

Mr Brown said nothing before dinner, which we took in his private dining room waited on by two of the girls. Only when the savoury was cleared and the port set down did he reveal his preoccupation.

‘I fear, sir, that your stay will be marred by a distasteful but necessary exhibition. A girl of nineteen, whom I supposed could be trusted to work for me in the city, has proved me wrong. She is to be made an example of tomorrow night. I do not suggest that you should attend. Two of our local magistrates and their ladies will be present to see that all is properly done.’

‘It is no more than my duty to attend, Mr Brown,’ I said. ‘I know that Lord W—— would wish it.’

‘As you please,’ said Mr Brown a little gruffly. I do not think he was displeased but he could not be sure how I would report this to Lord W——.

That was the end of the matter for the time being. I assumed, of course, that Noreen was to be whipped but had been told none of the details. It would have been wrong of me to interfere, for I was there to observe and make a report, not to implicate myself in the running of Hollingsworth House. As I lay in bed, before going to sleep, I recalled the sight of Noreen that afternoon as clearly as if it had been a photograph. In the case of a robust and defiant girl of nineteen, I thought, there was no reason why the whip should not be used upon the buxom young cheeks of Noreen’s backside. In that case, I could think of no more appropriate posture than the one she had shown herself in, upon all fours. They would kneel her over a block or a heavy stool, I supposed. I could not imagine that they would let her wear a pair of jeans during her punishment. The question then was whether we were to see her rear cheeks clad in the white stretch-cotton briefs of Noreen’s knickers. An interesting sight no doubt. But tantalisingly on the edge of consciousness as I drifted to sleep was the thought of seeing the full swelling pallor, the strapping young cheeks of Noreen’s bottom presented bare for the whip.

Next day, as I made my little tours of inspection in the house and through the gardens where the girls were put to work, I could scarcely keep my eyes off Noreen. The incident of the previous afternoon had given her a new significance for me! I found that I loitered to watch her at work as she bent to her task, weeding or seeding as they say. Several times she flicked back her lank dark hair and stared round at me without straightening up. The slant of her brown eyes and the firm resolve of her fair-skinned features showed a mingled contempt and resentment. But I stared her out with my authority until one of the guardians ordered her to her task again.

Far from being abashed, I remained standing quite close behind this provoking nineteen-year-old. I did not disguise from Noreen that my interest was in the sturdily-rounded, smoothly-jeaned cheeks of her bottom. Prudence forbade that I should weight and fondle those thinly-clad rear cheeks in my hands. Yet by quiet smiles and indications with my eyes, I made sure that the girl knew what I was looking at and what my thoughts were. I am certain that Noreen felt, in her imagination, the ghosts of my hands in their roving examination of her and my fingers’ insistent delving and running, parting and probing. For an hour or so I tantalised her like this at a range of a few yards.

That evening the two magistrates and their ladies were to arrive at nine o’clock to see justice done. After dinner, at about eight, Mr Brown withdrew to the room where Noreen awaited her retribution. I was not invited to accompany him and I can give only my impressions of the examination he carried out.

The door of the room was open just long enough for me to see Noreen. The girl was lying on her belly upon a high couch, her arms tight against the wooden legs at the front and straining down towards the floor in a rather exaggerated and unnatural manner. The pillows were not under her head but packed under her loins to raise her hips and make her rear cheeks swell out fuller and broader. Noreen’s face was turned to the door to watch Mr Brown enter. If she felt butterflies in her tummy at what was to come, there was no sign of it. Under the narrow and level fringe of her dark hair, the same resolve appeared in her fair-skinned features. The brown eyes stared impudently. Indeed, two spots of anger seemed to burn at the points of her broad cheekbones. The reason for the anger was plain to see. The young hoyden was clad only in her short white singlet, obliging her to offer a view that was much in demand among her followers. The hem of the singlet was drawn up to the small of her back so that the swelling full-moon pallor of Noreen’s rear cheeks was admirably presented to Mr Brown.

Before the door swung to on its automatic device, there was time to see Mr Brown approach. He sat at an angle on the couch, level with Noreen’s hips but looking towards her feet. Ignoring her face and, indeed, her upper half, he circled her waist with his left arm to steady her. Leaning to do this, we were confronted at eighteen inches by a full view of Noreen’s pale seat. One heard her gasps of frustration, a determined gritting of her young teeth. But the double swell of Noreen’s behind was at the disposal of Mr Brown’s survey.

I cannot give an eyewitness account of what occurred in that room during the next hour, while the discipline was prepared elsewhere. Nor would it be proper to tell tales. Yet one longed to be a fly upon the wall! Happy the fly when the full pale cheeks of Noreen’s bottom are the centre of attention. The insect must feel swelling enthusiasm and stiffening resolve, striving to bring its busy back legs to order. The girl had been obliged to wait alone an hour like this. No doubt the daring bluebottle enjoyed a long intimate pestering of Noreen’s bare backside. A most vulgar intrusion into privacy! How many men would yearn to be that audacious and intrusive fly in such a cheeky locale!

From the next room, where I waited, it was possible to hear Mr Brown’s murmurs to Noreen as the girl tensed at his investigation. Her gasps were sometimes almost a snarl of defiance. The springs of the couch shifted under the squirming pressure of her knees. There were sounds as of Mr Brown smacking his hands hard, or making some similar contact. There was a smack to make Noreen’s bottom turn this way and another smack to make her turn it another way. There was a smack to make Noreen lie further over and double smack to make her lie still. There were smacks for good reason and smacks for no reason. I cannot tell whether it was Mr Brown’s hand or some aspect of Noreen that smarted like fire by the time the door opened again.

Nor can I verify all his words. The advice, ‘You must make a start, Noreen!’ is very like, ‘You fat-arsed young tart, Noreen!’ if a wall is between speaker and listener. But I heard some significant words, and many a sounding seat-smack. ‘Each Saturday night … over a trestle, Noreen … backside properly bare … bamboo teaches obedience first… your bottom, Noreen … frantic already? … your bottom again, Noreen! … snakeskin … can’t? … get it anyway, Noreen! … chastiser naturally eager … your bare bottom, Noreen … shrill and urgent … all night … changed girl, Noreen! … state of your bottom, Noreen! … begin again! … bottom smacked first, Noreen … across your backside, Noreen!’

There was no doubt that Mr Brown’s examination of the seat of this nineteen-year-old hoyden was conscientious in the extreme. I concluded that he considered the pale sturdy cheek-swell in every attitude of tension or slackening, every shifting and rounding. He observed closely the nature of the curves, fatter and softer in the lower slope. He steadied the flanks and mapped with his hands the smooth double contours. From the cool mounds he passed to the warmer incurve and subtle changes of skin tone firmly revealed. By the time he had finished, he had acquired a knowledge of the terrain that might be envied in vain by Noreen’s boyfriend or her bridegroom, were she allowed to have either.

It was after nine when we were summoned to the exercise-room. There I met the two magistrates, accompanied by their ladies. I was surprised that these middle-aged gentlemen had such very young wives. But then, perhaps ladies and wives are not always the same thing. We were accommodated in easy chairs while Noreen was brought in. A tall stool was at the centre of the floor to lend her the support she needed.

It would be wrong of me to invent more than I saw – and indiscreet to colour in certain details of the next half-hour. I was able to see Noreen’s face for she flicked her narrow fringe and the collar-length of her hair back in order to look round with firm-featured contempt at us. Indeed, Mr Brown ordered the young wanton to keep her face towards us so that we might observe the effect upon her. Guiding her flanks, he also required Noreen to turn the swell of her broadened bottom more fully towards us. I may tell you that the eyes of the young ladies were sparkling with anticipation and that the gentlemen already shifted as if at the tightness of their suiting.

The cupboard switch was quiveringly long and supple. Mr Brown teased out the preliminaries by measuring this way and that across the robust cheek-pallor before him. He gave Noreen a first taste with an energy that made the very air sing. She kicked out with what was, I think, a purely reflexive anger. Cautioned for that, six times across her cheek-swell and twice high on the rear of her legs, Noreen gasped and tensed. Caught twice again, she drew one knee up urgently as if to show us how he had made her smart. Not once did she straighten up. Often her shoulders lifted as if she strained to raise from the floor a weight that was too much for her. There was no weight that I could see.

With the singlet hem well above her hips, Noreen’s backside was indeed properly bare. The lesson taught her was exemplary, as such lessons should always be. With such vulgar impudence as Noreen’s on display, one hoped that the ritual would not end before the clock’s hands reached the next five minute mark. Nor did it. One hoped, then, that the next mark would be passed. And so it was. The one after that. And the next. Nor did the pace slacken. In dealing with this robust young working-girl, Mr Brown always ensured that each impact landed long before the previous one could be contained. There is such a telling smack with supple snakeskin. One saw first a jump and quiver of Noreen’s pale bottom-flesh, then a vigorous but constrained surging and rounding. But the next aim caught her at once and the restraint broke in a most unladylike display of kicking out and a salvo of vulgarity directed at her betters.

Mr Brown curbed this by saluting the lower and fatter swell of Noreen’s bottom-cheeks. What posterior contortions she performed! We saw her toes curl with the intensity of it. One knee was jammed frantically into the back of the other in desperate self-containment. Twice more she kicked out and, after a pause for a vigorous reprimand, she paid dearly and repeatedly for her misconduct. Noreen’s bottom assumed more attitudes and angles in tribute to Mr Brown’s skill than one would imagine possible. Had it not been for the stool, I think her knees would have given under her. But by this support she was enabled to receive all that Mr Brown required.

The clock moved on again, and still he was not satisfied with his strapping young trollop, as he called Noreen. He wove her a seat of fire, making her rise on her toes at the skill of his intricate design. Had there been a recording of the event, it would have been prudent to enjoy Noreen’s soprano arias for the next ten minutes with the volume turned down a little. I am sure that no tragedienne ever equalled the mask of frenzy that she turned to us now.

Mr Brown was unmoved. A close survey of Noreen’s blazing cheekiness was followed by a resumption. Noreen’s bottom already offered a provoking subject to an artist in tones and colours. So wild were her evasions that she had to be reminded to turn it fully to the onlookers again. Mr Brown never spoke in anger, however. His tone was impersonal and implacable, as befitted the occasion. He gave his attention to Noreen yet again, with yet greater skill and energy Then he turned to reprimand, and then to Noreen’s bottom once more. She made the stone walls ring and I thought it indeed prudent that we were out of earshot of the other girls and the guardians. That shrilling outburst was expiated low down, on Noreen’s fullest cheekiness. And still Noreen’s bottom claimed all Mr Brown’s concentration. He was far from satisfied with her.

It seemed that each time the session neared its conclusion, Mr Brown could not quite bring himself to finish off. Oblivious of the clock-hands, he flexed the singing switch, imprinting another scorching kiss – and then another.

I do not think, when he at last returned it to the cupboard, that either the ladies or the gentlemen could complain of his leniency towards Noreen. The final scene is not one that can be adequately described – or should be written down even if it could be. I will only say that it was decided, upon my suggestion, that a permanent improvement in Noreen’s conduct might be effected by a visit from a certain official whose expertise is in severity. This was arranged, though a convenient date was some weeks away. Noreen was informed at once so that, as Mr Brown smilingly described it, she might enjoy a month or so of anticipation.

The cynical will always put the worst interpretation on these matters. My report on Hollingsworth House was entirely favourable. Let me tell you why. That Noreen who was under reformation broke the conditions by her wanton public display and repeated insolence, I cannot doubt. That Mr Brown, having resolved upon chastisement, took the utmost care in examining Noreen’s suitability for it is entirely to his credit. That the occasion was one of propriety and prudence is shown by the presence of the magistrates and their ladies. I was obliged to urge my patron to show every favour to the worthy Mr Brown.

There are those who will give way to evil gossip. Not I. I do not presume to put a sinister construction upon events. I visited Hollingsworth House as often as I could after this, even spending my own time there at certain weekends. So strongly did I feel that Mr Brown should be supported in his moral endeavours. During my frequent visits, I had a comfortable room which looked across the courtyard to the wing where Noreen, Sian, Maggie, and several of the other girls slept. They could not leave that suite of rooms. The locks ensured that. But safety required that they should be able to reach the remote washroom at the end of the long corridor, from which a fire alarm might be sounded.

There were many nights when the light burned in the washroom at the end of their long corridor from midnight until the lamp paled in the light of dawn. I recall myself that I once put a hand on the shade at seven in the morning and it was still warm! On those nights when the light burnt in the end washroom, Mr Brown was present in that place. I gather it was his custom to supervise certain maintenance work at night. A good deed done in secret, no doubt. On these nights, the guardian reported to me with a smile that Noreen was not in her cubicle at the time of checking. Her clothes remained except for one short singlet and her briefs, in which she customarily slept. It was certainly true that one would see the light in Noreen’s cubicle go on briefly and then the light of the washroom go on and remain for several hours. Then that would go out and Noreen’s window be briefly lit before Mr Brown and the overseer left. But this I regard as coincidence and of no significance. Once or twice I have seen the same coincidence in the case of Maggie or Sian.

Only the malicious will make anything of Noreen’s absence in the distant tiled apartment, where a drink of water was to be had. Her prolonged absence from bed might seem unusual – but what possible reason would Mr Brown and his overseer have for detaining Noreen in that washroom, clad in her singlet and briefs, for several hours of the night? I made a point of being the first to enter that spacious and high-ceilinged room on several mornings. Judge the case for yourself. I do not think you would intervene on Noreen’s behalf.

I found nothing ominous about the tall and heavy stool being left carelessly at the centre of the floor. A pair of Noreen’s knickers, the stretch-briefs, lay discarded on the tiles. Merely her slovenliness to be sure. I daresay Mr Brown and his overseer must have worked there several hours, for fifteen or twenty of their cigarette-butts were trodden out on the floor and the air was still smoky. They had been clearing a drain, I think, for three or four garden canes lay splintered on the table. Such slim rods are useful for clearing the pipes. Two looped lengths of sash-cord, rather frayed and knotted at regular intervals, suggested that these industrious gentlemen had also been at make-do-and-mend with the windows.

Noreen, whose visit presumably interrupted their worthy labours, deserved little praise. The white threads caught on the rough top of the stool matched the damage to the belly of her singlet which I observed next day. She was sluttish enough to lie over furniture rather than walk round it to reach what she wanted. Low down on the forward legs of the stool, the varnish had been badly marked by a furious and energetic scratching of fingernails, which I know was her deliberate vandalism. One of her shoes lay in a corner, where she had kicked it with considerable energy. The tiles were marked by her shoes, whose tips were scuffed as if by Noreen rising on her toes to reach right over the stool. The legs of the stool itself were snubbed at their ends as if she had budged it on the tiles with her full weight upon it. Skin had scuffed on the stool legs as well. When I saw that Noreen’s bare knees were slightly grazed, I thought she deserved it for pressing herself so roughly against the furniture. The violence of her energy I leave you to imagine!

I made my report accordingly, praising Mr Brown’s industry and recommending that Noreen’s insolence and brooding resentment required a lengthening of her probation by two more years. On the night after I informed Mr Brown that this request was granted, I noted that the washroom light went on at 11 pm and off at 3 am. The second night it burnt from 2 until 5 am. The third from midnight until 6.30. I heard not a single untoward sound from that distant lighted place, except those one hears at night in the country – what I took to be the screech owl and the muffled but urgent mewing of a female cat.

Sometimes it is taxing to make precise observations. The night after that, the light in Noreen’s window went on briefly at 11 pm and the washroom lamp burned for an hour. Then all was dark. At 1 am the girl’s light shone for a minute and the washroom light for two hours. And then again at 4.30, the brief light in her room and an hour of the washroom light. I believe I should have slept through it all. But the moment that washroom lamp showed, it brought such plaintive protests from some screech-bird or other that you would have thought murder was done three times that night, long and slow.

I concede that on many mornings there was no doubt that Noreen appeared subdued, or rather cautious and thoughtful. Where is the harm in that? She also walked carefully and cautiously, as if on an invisible tightrope and sat down in a somewhat strained and unnatural manner. One day, when the time came for her to shed the working-jeans in favour of a denim skirt she was, as usual, in the presence of two guardians, Mrs Fox and Miss Stuart. Of course she did not strip off her underwear in front of them but merely the top layer.

The hem at the seat of her white stretch-briefs arched up high and tight over each cheek of Noreen’s backside, not entirely concealing her complete rear view. Miss Stuart smiled at what was now revealed as the nineteen-year-old girl turned her back, bending down to pick up the fallen jeans from the carpet.

Turning to Mrs Fox, Miss Stuart said that she now understood why Noreen had been so pensive and self-absorbed all day. Miss Stuart explained that she had had no idea that the exemplary discipline upon Noreen, ordered by the inspector, had been carried out the night before.

Mrs Fox smiled too, for Noreen heard every word that passed. She explained that the judicial ritual was not to take place for another fortnight. It would be more formal and rigorous than any that had so far marked the young trollop’s education. On the previous night Noreen had received no more than a bottom-smack or two, given casually for her impertinence to her betters. The formal reckoning that lay in store was to be a prolonged session of far greater intensity. When Noreen was told the precise date and time, and what to expect, said Mrs Fox, several days and nights of waiting would follow. At night one would hear the restless and sleepless movements of this nineteen-year-old culprit, the gasps and sighs of her frantic self-pity at the appointment awaiting her. Noreen might be glimpsed lying there and looking over her shoulder, desperately examining her own backside in the mirror, as if to catch a final glimpse of it in its present unblemished pallor. In her sleepless apprehension there would be touchings, frettings and squirmings, until Noreen’s bottom itched in her dread anticipation.

Mrs Fox reported all this while Noreen stood there aghast. And then the glances of amusement and satisfaction which Mrs Fox and Miss Stuart exchanged were turned upon the insolent girl. Noreen was unable to take her gaze from the smiles of the two women as the dismay in her contemptuous young face turned to panic.

I would not have you imagine that my life is taken up with Hollingsworth House, for it is only one of the almost twenty establishments under my supervision. I might as well have talked of Joanne or Heather, Lesley or Louise, Sharon or Vicky. But I have chosen to begin with Noreen, for that surely is a story to reassure you that you need not pity the plight of the travelling-man with his case and his portfolio of papers.

The camera as well as the pen is used in submitting reports to our patron. Copies of the photographic gems are also made for the inspector. As I sit here, a selection hangs framed before me, all the same subject. The first two would be the pride of any lensman. Full-plate studies, they present facial portraits in a variety of moods. There is Noreen with her defiant resolve in her firm young jaw and profile, contempt in the slant of her brown eyes. There is another similar, where she has shaken her fringe clear and is looking back over her shoulder, the lank dark hair just lapping her collar. Another shows her firm young face upside down, lank dark hair falling, as Noreen looks back fearfully at something in the room through the arch of her own bare legs.

There are a dozen portraits in all and you would marvel at the change of expression on the young trollop’s face. Noreen looking back over her shoulder again, frantic at what is happening, knowing she can endure only a few seconds more of the minutes or hours to come. Noreen with mouth wide and wild, eyes brimming. What satisfaction this would have given her followers! Then Noreen, a big girl of nineteen, chastised and self-pitying as a well-smacked infant.

By no means all the close-ups are of her face. A dozen more are equally informative. Noreen’s bottom immortalised as she bends to some labour or other, unaware of the interest taken in her. The full-plate shows the jeans drawn smooth as her skin over the swelling hemispheres of her buttocks. The tight line of Noreen’s briefs just visible from between the back of her legs and up over each cheek. The central seam drawn deep and taut as a hawser between Noreen’s bottom-cheeks, making this a most suggestive study of the seat of beauty-caught-bending. A swelling full-cheeked masterpiece, the more suggestive for the subject’s unawareness of this public display.

Then a quartet of Noreen’s backside bare over the stool, caught from a variety of angles. Several more full-plates display the cheeks of Noreen’s bottom in every stage from pallid smoothness to the indescribable embroidery of a lesson taught by an expert teacher. The willow-pattern was never printed more fiercely nor with greater ingenuity than this.

A man cannot always find pretexts for a visit to Hollingsworth, least of all when there are so many other calls upon his time. But science has reduced the miles to naught, in one respect. To be sure, a travelling-man must sometimes spend a night in a rented and fly-spotted room, but the telephone by his bed may ring. He may pick it up and hear the voice of Mr Brown. Indeed, the benefit of the telephone is that when the caller places it carefully one may hear all that passes within ten feet of it. Mr Brown has a voice that is calm but clear.

‘Pants on the chair, Noreen … Now the sofa, if you please … Over the scroll at the end … Forward tightly … Quite still for the inspection … Ah, one must always start at the bottom, Noreen, with a girl of your sort … Much rounder and fuller, if you please … Now, smack on target, Noreen! … And smack again! More tightly over! … More bottom-swell, Noreen … Such absurd modesty, when the door is safely bolted! … No danger of interruptions, Noreen! … A well-caned seat for you later on, Noreen … Something to admire in your mirror tonight! … I can feel your heart beat faster, Noreen! … First I must cure my itchy palm … Smarting from that bottom-smack, Noreen? … One to make your cheeks clench! … Another to make you jig! … Anyone would think you’d sat bare-bottomed in spilt rouge-powder, Noreen! … Keep properly still for the next one … I’ll have you looking like a hand-reared girl before I go to the cupboard for the switch … Right where it smarts, Noreen! Quite still! … Other bottom-cheek, Noreen! … Does it feel like sitting on a wasps’ nest? … More of your bottom, Noreen!’

The travelling-man in his shabby room closes his eyes and listens contentedly for the next hour. Is it reality or illusion, the shifting of sofa-springs, the gasps from a determined and insolent girl of nineteen? The sounds of Noreen bottom-smacked, the printing of the fire-red willow-pattern on sturdy pale moon-cheeks, Noreen’s arias and Mr Brown’s commands – true or false? Others might hesitate but a travelling-man knows the truth. His smile conveys the answer as he listens. No prude is he. He may be well to the rear in ferreting out the secrets of Noreen, Sharon, Vicky, Joanne and their kind. But his audacity behind closed doors with young married women, or adolescent tomboys, would surely raise the temperature of the hot-blooded fly on the wall.

The printing of a vividly smarting willow-pattern seat for Noreen to contemplate ruefully in her bedroom hand-mirror is a long and intricate process. With the firm-cheeked spread of Noreen’s backside over the sofa, it could hardly be otherwise. It would be unreasonable to expect Mr Brown to ignore an opportunity for adding an intimate leather cirlicue or a lurid stripe on the lower and falter swell of Noreen’s bottom. The listener thoroughly enjoys the sounds in his lonely room, smiling at the thought of his next visit to teenage Sharon or mature Joanne or Noreen herself. He settles down and listens intently to the soprano wildness of a strapping young trollop.

I remember a weekend in Mr Brown’s private rooms during March. The house had been in his family for generations, the walls hung with portraits of previous owners. After several inspections I noticed a photograph, a family group including servants, taken at the turn of the century. I scrutinised it, astonished to find a likeness of Noreen staring from the row of housemaids.

That attractive but plain, firm-featured look, the broad points of the cheekbones, a slant of the brown eyes, lank dark hair with its level fringe, must be common among young sluts of her sort. I confess my taste is modern. Victorian damsels are seductive in frills or petticoats. I prefer to see Noreen’s bottom as she kneels on all fours to her labour, big-cheeked in that posture but not flabby, smoothly and tightly clad in Falmer jeans. On occasions of formal severity, I prefer only a plain white modern singlet, short enough to leave Noreen’s backside and hips full bare when she bends over.

A modern slut has no inhibitions under correction. Stung to fury, Noreen will curse her chastiser and the onlookers as ‘bastards’ and use expletives one prefers not to record. It is delightful to see her begin like that, incurring extensive extra discipline. More delightful still when, Noreen’s bottom well-patterned but the drama still only beginning, there is pleading and promising, turning soon to wild shrillness and unimaginable vulgarities. Noreen, the modern girl, offers extreme possibilities to a disciplinarian!

I could not resist asking Mr Brown about the photograph. He smiled and inquired if I believed in ghosts. I do not, and said so. But I agreed when he said that one might believe in family likenesses. Noreen was descended from the vision in the sepia photograph, he told me, another female bumpkin who had worked at Hollingsworth House in her day and tasted similar corrections.

He was about to tell me more. From the way the smile played on his lips, I guessed what it was before he spoke. He knew, of course, of my passionate interest in Noreen. He had seen the full-plate photographs of her face in varying moods, the dozen camera-portraits of Noreen’s bottom in varying conditions and postures, which grace my study wall. He knew my eagerness to see her over trestle or stool. There can be magic in a name, he said. I had picked out not only a likeness – there were several of those – but the very girl of the past who had a similar character and whose name was also Noreen.