Saturday, 16 March 2013

My First Caning


I have written a number of stories on my disciplinary experiences, true and imagined, and many have made their way onto this blog. A friend, reading one that was particularly descriptive, asked me if it really happened. I said that if it didn’t it should have. What I meant was that I reveal lots in my tales but I leave it to others to determine the truth. It is usually in there somewhere. All I will say as that from fifteen to fifty I regularly bent over, often with pants down, for someone’s attentions. In the early, schoolboy, days the bending was undertaken in fear and trepidation. In later life it was with heady anticipation. Growing up has many compensations. One of them is visiting folks or establishments who specialise in recreating that strange need. Beats playing bingo in a seniors club any day. And keeps me young. I once told a doctor, nice chap with a wicked sense of humour, that if more folks got spanked in their daily life he wouldn’t have to dish out so many pills. He did not disagree. Many yearn for schooldays was all he said.

I clearly do. In junior schools all whacks were given by hefty palm to the bottom or nasty cane to the hand. Seemed to be some rule, written or otherwise. Cane and bottom never made contact. So it was with some trepidation that I graduated to senior school at the ripe old age of eleven and three quarters. There, I was reliably informed, canes only made contact with bottoms so we had better be ready. The information coincided with my mother putting me into long trousers. You are growing up now she said. The unfamiliar feel of long trousers came on the first autumn day of the new school year. The unfamiliar feeling of a cane across them came a little while later. I was in my first year of senior school so I must have been about twelve. I was done, it was a fair cop guv, along with two other boys for spitting at classmates. We were on the first floor and they were in the playground. One spit led to another and, as happens, an impromptu childish game was underway. We, the three spitters, were caught by a small and mean minded art teacher. It was the end of the lunch break and, presumably for that reason, he told us to wait in the adjacent staff library and reading room. Two teachers were in there and, when asked what we doing, one of my companions said that we had been sent there. My other companion said he thought we had been sent there to be caned. As the two teachers chortled and, gathering their books, left the room I absorbed the enormity of that statement. Canes at this school meant canes across bottoms and that had never happened to me. Already tears were forming.

If I had doubts about the truth of my companion’s statement they were dispelled when the art teacher returned. In one hand he held a red book, the school punishment book, and in the other he held a long and fairly thin cane. Accompanying him as witness was the assistant art teacher, as tall as the cane wielder was short, and his height added to the pompous absurdity of the mean minded man that I, at that moment, hated. Preliminaries were quickly dispensed with, names entered in book and comments about disgusting practices amplified. He called the first boy to him, I think he had been caned before and knew the procedure, and told him to bend over and touch his toes. The boy did so speedily and the diminutive art master turned up his jacket and tapped the cane against the small bottom. The thin trousers stretched against the bottom and presented an easy target. Stick it out boy, I don’t want to miss he said and seemed almost amused at his comment. The boy complied and thrust his bottom out as far as it would go. Three strokes, he said, thank your stars it isn’t six. I could see the boy’s legs tremble and they continued to do so as the three strokes of the cane hit his rump. He flinched after each one but did not get up until told to do so and, ruefully rubbing behind him, gave me a weak smile. I was already walking to take his place as the master had indicated that I was next. I was scared. Remember I was only eleven and three quarters and a bit. And I had never been caned before on my bottom. This was what I had been warned about. And now it was happening.

I was shaking as I bent over and clutched my ankles, I could do so in those days, and waited for the inevitable sting. Stick your bottom out boy, he said as he lifted my jacket over my back, that’s the only bit of you I am interested in. The assistant master gave a muffled chortle and I now hated him as well. Thrusting out your bottom whilst clutching ankles on shaking legs you hardly own is not easy. But I did it and my last memory before the inevitable fire across my behind was of a buzzing head well down, a bottom high in the air, and a tap of a cane on that place it was ready to strike. And strike it did. Three times. Mercifully quickly. Each thwack stung my cheeks and spread a small fire across them. The shock at each stroke registered in both my brain and my bottom but, rising when indicated, I realised I had survived. I rubbed vigorously on my attacked parts and was still rubbing when the third boy, a portly lad, got his. I shan’t miss this one, the master said still full of futile jokes. By the time the three of us left the room the sting was beginning to fade and by the time I sat down, late for my next class, my behind was immersed in a gentle throb and a pleasant glow. It had not been that bad, I didn’t cry and he hadn’t whacked us really hard, and it was only three. I could live through such battles.

Recreating such scenarios has been a constant pleasure through adult years. Never thought so at the time, relieved as I was. It was an unpleasant but bearable pain whose only compensation was allowing classmates to see the damage. They were a bit disappointed, brutes that boys were and are, as the lines were thin and faint and few. But it was my first caning so it represents some sort of watershed in my life. Even if the master who dished it out was probably the most unprepossessing and uninspiring teacher I ever had. Explains why he never figures in any of my stories. Not even his jokes.

Alfred Roy

Stories to come:

One Old –  Crying for the Cane (M/m)

One New - Harry and Alexandra (FM/fm)