Room 2D

By Richard Manton from Janus 21 Richard Manton tells the whole truth  —  revealing an aspect of his own life which up till now has been a secret between the Editor and himself… Let me tell you the truth as simply as I can. Lesley: Behind Closed Doors   appeared in  Janus 13 . It was only a story — until the letters began to arrive. Many correspondents, as in R.W.’s Manton Answered ,  Janus 17 , deplored the fact that the law could not provide chastisement for a promiscuous young ‘libber’ who deserted marriage and kids. No surprise in that. What disconcerted me was the ease with which these readers saw Lesley as not, as I hoped they would assume, a fictional heroine but part of a continuing chapter in my own life. It seems pointless to conceal the facts now. What follows is my recollection of an encounter, vivid now as then, which introduced me to that interest which all Janus readers have in common...

By Richard Manton from Janus 13 You might decide that the situation described in this story is mere fantasy. However much you might like to bamboo the bare bottom of a promiscuous boyishly-cropped young wife like Lesley, such things simply do not happen in fact. Least of all in the convenient seclusion of a remote island with no prying eyes and no one to hear her cries. You bet it couldn’t happen? How wrong you are! In the recently published diaries of Evelyn Waugh — to look no further — there is an entry for 15 April 1925 when a party of young people were staying on Lundy Island, 20 miles from land and almost deserted. Just before midnight, Waugh walked into an ‘amazing orgy’. A girl (still alive and not named in the diary for reasons of libel) was having her bare bottom tanned sadistically. She was a volunteer. The punishment also involved other humiliations. The girl’s bottom cheeks were slapped ‘rosy’, but that was not enoug...