The slipper at bedtime

The skirt lifted

How could he, she wonders again, how could he be doing this to her?

She had thought the brutality of her last punishment from him – six cold cuts across her palms, delivered by the rattan cane that hangs behind his desk – was as bad as it could get. She had dreaded a repeat performance today.

But never could she have guessed that it would be this.

A girl, in the first flourishing throes of womanhood, bent over his knee like some silly oversized infant across the paternal lap to receive what he had referred to, just ten minutes before, as a “very sound smacked bottom”.

And as if even that wasn’t dreadful enough, here he was fussing with her skirt, pulling and folding in an age-old ritual experienced by many thousands of her kind before, to prepare her tightly knickered bottom for punishment.

How could he, she wonders again, as the first sobs come, oh how could he?

The blonde spanked

A struggle quashed

The smacking of Sally

Spanked in trousers

The governess: caned and then spanked

But she had tried, and she had tried so hard, to please him, and even still she had ended up like this again – thoroughly whipped at the hand of his wicked cane and now across his knee, her bottom bare, awaiting the unforgiving strike of his angry hand.

Of course there is always an excuse; the master of the house must always have an excuse. This time he claims that the daughters he has bestowed to the governess’s care are becoming ever harder to control. And any lapse in their behaviour is naturally the fault of the governess.

Poor Sally though, who has worked far beyond the call of duty through the years to bring his two wayward daughters up, has her own theories on these punishments. For one, they always seem to happen when the lady of the house is away – at her fortnightly bridge meetings, or her book group. And for two, the master makes no attempt to hide the stiff swell that inevitably comes when she lowers herself across his expectant knees.

And when the lady goes away for a weekend, as she has this time, taking the girls with her, then Sally knows it won’t just be a smacked bottom: it will be the cane-whipping, then the spanking and then… that.

Because when the lady is away the swelling in the master’s trousers becomes more insistent than ever, pushing up into her belly with an urgency that is renewed each time his hand strikes her already striped bottom, and – he says – it is her job, as the one who causes the swelling, to relieve it too.

Poor, poor Sally.

Over his knee

Five time – five times he’d had to warn her about the quality of her English essays. He liked her; she was one the best students in the year, a girl blessed with that rare mix of ability and creativity. But something had happened. In the last term something had happened that had distracted her from what had once seemed a surefire path to Oxbridge. Late submission of homework; lazy essays that read as if they had been rushed off in a morning; and worse still, those unmerited, hushed asides that disrupted his classes and bought silly stifled giggles from her friends on the back row.

But Mr Hayworth had his own special methods of dealing with such girls, and this afternoon it would be the turn of this particular girl – and her particular bottom.

The plimsoll

Pyjama bottoms lowered