Spank: The Improbable Adventures of George Aloysius Brown

In
my
fantasy
I
bend
to
hi
s
knee
I
am
hi
s
Entirely;

Outside, a
warm
breeze
gathers
and
sighs
a
w
hisper
o
f
silk
falls
from
my
thighs;
Naked
now,
I
wait,
I
taste,
the
first
sweet
sting
of
his
embrace;
Moist
in
my
dark
place
my cheeks blush

with
desire;

It
does
not
cease
I
am
on
fire
Untitled
by
CM Jones

I wrote that. Sweet, isn't it? I love poetry. One day my poems will be published, The
Collected
Works
of
Catherine
Mallory
Jones, and I wonder if I will have to appear on the literary talk shows and explain this one. I didn't give it a title. People – even my mother, I dare say – could read it and not be entirely sure what it's about although my
Nan
would twig in a minute. Secretly, I call it Ode
to
Spanking, which for me is an entirely imagined and unconsummated experience that has dominated my fantasies since puberty. But time is running out if it's going to happen before I leave school. Next week is the end of term and tomorrow is my 18th birthday. Although I lost my virginity last summer in a fumbling encounter behind the church with a boy I used to know from Sunday school, my desire to be erotically disciplined so far remains frustratingly unfulfilled.

Honestly, only my best friend and roommate Jennifer Emerson knows how desperately I
long to be thrust over a man's knee and soundly spanked for some real or imagined transgression. Oh, and my
Nan
knows too, which seems only fair as she has so far taught me everything I know about sex. She tells me stuff I could never discus with my mother.

"
Catherine,
"
she told me during a visit to her little seaside cottage one blustery Sunday afternoon,
"
I have taught you to sew and to knit and to play chess and I feel I have some standing in matters of your social education. Now I want to teach you about your body and the wonderful ways to celebrate femininity. She told me about Germaine Greer.
"
Australian feminist, you've heard of her, haven't you, dear? She wrote a marvelous piece entitled
Lady
,
Love
Your
Cunt
. It's an inspiration. I think I have it somewhere, I'll send it to you. Am I shocking you? Surely not. More tea, dear?
"

It was Nannie Burton, a music hall star in the 40s, who taught me how to exercise my vaginal muscles as a hands-free method of bringing myself to orgasm. What you do is to clench and unclench them putting direct pressure on the clitoris. It takes practice, but once you get the hang of it you can get off almost anywhere. I remember once during a family outing to
Brighton
on the train, I was seriously into it, staring innocently out of the window as the fields and hedgerows drifted by. I must have had a look of contentment on my face instead of the usual adolescent scowl I normally wore during family trips because mother asked me if I was feeling alright.
"
She's fine, dear,
"
said
Nan
who obviously guessed what I was up to and abruptly changed the subject.

So I read Germaine Greer and by chance I read something in the
New
Yorker
that
I swear to you changed my life. I was in my dentist
'
s waiting room thumbing through his stack of old magazines when I came across a piece by an American journalist, Daphne Merkin, who confessed in a lengthy essay that when she was my age she fantasized about having her bottom spanked and although it didn
'
t happen to her for the first time until she was in her mid-twenties, she became obsessed.
I could have hugged her. It was an immense relief to know that what I was experiencing, the longing, the deprivation, the mortification – if that
'
s the right word – had been hers when she was my age. I smuggled the magazine out of the dentist
'
s office and read it time and time again. Parts of it I can recite by heart:
"
Although
I tend to be loquacious bordering on confessional with my friends about my interest in erotic discipline and what it might suggest about me necessitated a degree of privacy that I was otherwise disinclined to observe. But even as I write the foregoing I feel a sense of relief (as well as shame) at finally giving voice to this confession, at putting down on paper, under my own name what I know to be true o
f myself.
"

All women, she suspects, have a secret longing to be spanked as
"
a facilitating prelude to the enactments of lust
,
"
and when I read that, I wanted to stand up and cheer. Yes, that
'
s me. I am not weird. What I am feeling is normal. She will never know how much strength she gave me and renewed confidence in my own sexuality. Like me, she could not remember a time when she didn
'
t think about it as a sexually gratifying act –
"
a heightened and deeply pleasurable sense of exposure, of the helpless display of my bottom
.
"

I have a great ass. Nobody, except Jen, has told me so, but I know what I see in the mirror and I have studied anatomy and the history of art. During summer holidays with my parents I visited many of the great galleries of
Europe
and I have admired the nudes of the Renaissance painters. Believe me, my ass is the fairest of them all, plump, firm, and perfectly round. Think of Ursula Andress emerging from the ocean in Goldfinger or Bo Derek cavorting on a sandy beach. That
'
s me, a perfect 10.

After lights out, Jen and I frequently conspire about how to get a man to spank us. As junior girls we had a schoolgirl crush on each other and I, being almost a year older and a head taller, was the authority figure. For Jen to be bent over and spanked seemed to us to be sweet and right. She has a pretty bottom with pearl white skin that reddens easily. We devised scenarios to add authenticity, homework not done, her borrowing things without asking. Some days Jen would deliberately provoke me early on and it only took one look of disapproval on my part to tell her she was going to get it later and we both could savor the prospect as the day dragged on. After lights out she would come to my bed for her punishment and I would tell her to her to bring me a slipper. When applied to her bare bottom it was quieter than my hand and we didn
'
t want to be disturbed by any nosy teachers who might be prowling the dormitory corridors.
I would keep her waiting standing at my side before bending her over. It was wonderful moment of submission, vulnerability and trust.
By this time we were both aroused and I would pull down her pajamas and lightly run my fingertips across her buttocks as a signal I was about to begin.
The sexual tension was exquisite, almost unbeara
ble.

Yet for all the schoolgirl satisfaction this brought, I could never imagine our roles being reversed. As the American writer confessed when she discussed with her friend how to get a man
"
to do it
"
the idea of actually announcing that one wanted to be spanked
"
was compromising beyond words
.
"
I felt the same way.

All these thoughts were passing randomly through my mind as I walked along the cliffs at Shoreham, skirting the Lazy Daze Campground where there seemed to be a bit of a kerfuffle going on with much shouting in German that I couldn't understand. I was on my way back to school after an afternoon in town, which was permitted on Saturdays to senior girls in school uniform. I paused at the head of the sweeping circular driveway and read, for the umpteenth time, the tasteful copperplate signage announcing the Chiltern Hills Academy (founded 1856), R.C. Montgomery, Principal.

As usual my heart skipped a beat.

Like a lot of the senior girls, I had a crush on Raymond Charles Montgomery. He was athletic and good looking, at 38 the youngest headmaster of a prestigious private school in
Britain
. A graduate of
Oxford
University
and
Sandhurst
Military
College
, he had apparently served with distinction in
Iraq
where he had been decorated for bravery. I don't need to tell you that R.C. Montgomery had a lead role in my fantasies. But in a few days I would walk down this drive for the last time and my school days would be behind me. And then suddenly it came to me, inspired I suppose by desperation or expediency, a plan so audacious it might just succeed. I could hardly wait to share it with Jen.

"
Are you crazy?
"
she said.
"
He'll see through it in a moment. You could be expelled even at this stage. Worse, he might call the police. You could be accused of entrapment, or sexual harassment. Certainly he would tell your parents.
"
She giggled.
"
I think it's brilliant. Go for it, girl. You're both adults. What man in his right mind would pass on the opportunity? Hey, next term you will be at
Cambridge
. What have you got to lose?
"

Excitement was already building inside me and at that moment I actually believed I could make it happen. I would forge a letter to the headmaster requesting that I be disciplined for showing disrespect to a senior staff member, one of the most serious offences at the
Chiltern Hills
Academy
. And if it all went hideously wrong, I would claim it was an end of school prank, deny I had any intention of going through with it, it was a just a crazy lark, I was dared to do it. One thing I knew for certain is that Raymond Charles Montgomery has a reputation as a risk taker. Preparations took all day Sunday, including composing and writing a letter in the spidery hand of my home room teacher, Elsie Cunningham. It was a birthday treat to myself.

At 6 p.m., when I knew R.C. would be in his office, I tied my long red hair in pigtails, a nice touch, I thought, which made me look younger, put on a fresh uniform consisting of a knee-high plaid skirt (although it was above the knee on a tall girl like me) white cotton blouse buttoned to the collar and long white socks. Beneath my skirt my cotton knickers were regulation school issue, baggy and navy blue, but I had chosen the thinnest pair I could find, worn threadbare from a hundred washing cycles. Clutching the note I had written, I started the long walk to his office, pausing at the high windows that look out onto the quadrangle in an attempt to slow my heart beat. For a few minutes I listened to the wind in the chestnut trees and watched the rain sweeping down from the hills, tramping in over soggy playing fields. Hard on the rain came the dusk and far off on the horizon there was a flash of lightning. Out to sea a storm was building. I counted the seconds until I heard thunder. Six. My lucky number.

No turning back now. I knocked at his door, was summoned, entered and stood before his desk. I handed him the note I had painstakingly written.