The Headmaster’s Morning

Reggie abounds with enthusiasm. Story from Blushes 1

Leaving the hall after morning assembly, Reggie’s mood of optimistic anticipation is given even more of a lift by the sight of Elizabeth Brown, in company with her friend, Chalmers, hurrying along the corridor in the direction of his study to keep their assignations with him, the representatives of the Board of Governors, and the business-end of a cane, in that order. Two short skirts, each plumped out by full hips and — as he knows from experience gained on other occasions — decidedly caneable bottoms, flick to and fro across the backs of bare thighs, beckoning him to follow. He resists the urge to hurry along behind and instead walks sedately towards his study relishing the prospect of beginning the day with two howling prefects to get him off to a good start.

The likely presence of Miss Wilkinson, a member of the Board, at the forthcoming meeting, dismays Reggie not at all. She and he have crossed swords before, and will almost certainly do so again today, but the Major will be there too, and knowing his penchant for the well-caned female bottom, the decision will be a foregone conclusion. ‘Thrash ‘em, Headmaster, and to Hell with their tears!’ Reggie can just hear him saying it now. No — Miss Wilkinson will not be a problem. In fact, she might even prove to have a certain diversionary value of her own.

With a cheerful smile on his face, Reggie shoos the two girls, whom he finds waiting pink-cheeked outside his door, into the committee room adjacent to his study. The girls stand with their hands behind their backs — comforting their little bums, perhaps, or so Reggie likes to suppose — while with a touch of theatre to make the whole thing just that little bit more amusing, Reggie selects a cane from those hanging conveniently in a cupboard and swooshes it dramatically several times. The girls’ faces pale markedly — they both know what canes can do to tender bottoms, and to have to be reminded of it is unnerving to say the least.

Tie twisting in her fingers, Chalmers risks a tiny smile but spoils it by gulping audibly as Reggie smacks the cane down against the palm of his hand.

Reggie’s grin widens as he feels the smart biting into his hand. It hurts — perhaps he was a little too boisterous with that stick — but the pleasure of it lies in his ability to transfer the sensation in his palm, in his imagination, to the sensation that harder strokes will shortly be engendering in the naked buttocks of the two frightened girls. He can’t resist teasing them both about their imminent canings.

‘Couple of the Governors are here this morning — going to decide what we’ve to do with you both.’ The girls’ glances wander from his face, to the cane, and back again, all wide-eyed anxiety and jelly-kneed funk. ‘Hope you thought to put on clean underwear, girls,’ says Reggie as he leaves them in the outer room and goes through to the committee room. He doesn’t wait to see the effect that broadest of hints will evince.

Miss Wilkinson, in an amusing imitation of the girls’ fascination with the sight of the cane in Reggie’s hand, fixes her gaze upon its menacing, quivery length, almost as if it comprised a threat to her own shapely bottom. Seeing that he has the woman’s attention — he is obliged to think of her as a woman even though she is barely a couple of years older than some of the girls in the school — Reggie treats her, too, to a demonstration of the cane’s suppleness by bending it in two and flicking it through the air with a waspish hum.

‘I see you come equipped to uphold your reputation as a disciplinarian,’ says Miss Wilkinson — rather cuttingly, it seems to Reggie.

‘A good caning never did any girl I’ve ever met any harm,’ he says, resting his gaze upon what he can see of Miss Wilkinson’s hips as she sits on her chair.

The meeting, when it starts, goes very much against Miss Wilkinson and equally as much in favour of Reggie and the Major. Miss Wilkinson’s flushed face as the decision is taken to cane both the waiting girls — ‘on the bare, Reggie, on the bare’, as the Major insists — might be annoyance, or it might be embarrassment. Reggie rather hopes that it is the later. Anyway, he means to make something of a production out of the performance he has been called upon, democratically, to give, and if the silly woman doesn’t like it, well then, she shouldn’t have made a point of insisting on the matter of Brown and Chalmers’ indiscretions to the editor of the local paper being made the responsibility of the Board, instead of leaving it to the Headmaster to deal with in his own way.

Brown, when she is summoned into the committee room, has the good manners to look decently apprehensive at the likely outcome of her appearance before the little assembly. In fact she manages to look scared stiff, a frame of mind which is not helped by Miss Wilkinson’s brave attempt to minimise the punishment the girl is about to receive by bringing up the matter of ‘The Rules’.

‘Headmaster, may I point out that the rules state that no more than six strokes of the cane may be administered by you to any girl in your charge? I trust you will abide by that ruling, despite the Major’s bandying about of the words ‘a good, round dozen.’

Perched on the very edge of her seat, Elizabeth obliges Reggie and the like-minded Major by omitting a little squeak of fear at all this talk of ‘strokes’ and ‘round dozens’. Ignored, even by Miss Wilkinson who is riffling through her copy of the rules, the girl shoves her hands down between her thighs with a delightfully childish pout on her pretty face. Failing to overcome the temptation to smile indulgently at the rash Miss Wilkinson, Reggie draws himself up to his full height and, having taken a breath in order to maximise his enjoyment of one more moment of triumph, informs the young lady of her mistake.

‘I think you will find, Miss Wilkinson, that in the case of a decision by the Board of Governors — we three are representing that Board here today — that a girl is to be chastised by the application of a cane to her bottom’ — the word ‘bottom’ rolls out in a deliberately sensuous way and brings another blush to Miss Wilkinson’s cheeks, ‘— the maximum number of strokes permitted is twelve, not six.’

With a flutter of pages Miss Wilkinson looks for the pertinent rule. Finding it, she, like Elizabeth, looks most disconcerted, but she cannot argue.

‘So, twelve strokes it will be.’ Reggie raises his eyebrows, ‘agreed?’

‘Good round dozen, Headmaster,’ declares the Major. ‘To hell with the tears — let her know she’s been thrashed, that’s what I say!’

Reggie, who finds the Major’s enthusiasm a little daunting himself at times, turns to the girl who is the subject of this discussion, and finds her close to tears already and most reluctant to get to her feet when told to do so.

‘We’ll have your knickers down, if you please, Brown.’

The tiniest ‘Oooh’ escapes the girl’s lips, but she knows well enough that there is nothing for it but to ‘get ‘e, down’ as the Major unhelpfully interpolates. The necessary lifting of her skirt treats the men to a tempting foretaste of bare thighs, and then the girl’s navy knickers put in an appearance as she slips them down below buttock level, just as she has done on other, more private occasions.

The poignancy of the moment is added to for Reggie when he glances up from Elizabeth’s attempts to undress herself without having to appear too undressed, and sees that the other girl, waiting outside yet well able to see and probably to hear all that has gone on, is clutching her hand to her mouth and standing in such a way as to give reason to suppose that she might be about to wet her knickers with fright. For the sake of Miss Wilkinson’s already injured pride, Reggie hopes that the girl manages not to disgrace her sex by doing any such thing, either now or later, when he has her across the committee table in her turn.

Prompted by the Major, Elizabeth now hoists her skirt to her waist despite Miss Wilkinson’s protest at the Major’s rather direct way of insisting that they should be allowed to ‘have a look at you, girlie’, and then, gestured towards the table by a flick of Reggie’s cane, Elizabeth approaches it with some trepidation and not a little hesitancy, which Reggie puts a stop to by the expedient of a none-too-gentle nudge in the small of the back. Landing bottom-up across the edge of the table, the girl emits a gasp as she arrives rather precipitately, and then, without pause for more than the briefest survey of the bottom he is about to cane — he has, after all, seen this saucy little bum before, which is why he has been looking forward to gaining access to it again — Reggie lays the cane across the two impertinently up-thrust cheeks, taps them once, twice, measuring and, in truth, delighting in their bouncy resilience, then without any further preliminaries, he brings the cane down with a crack that would satisfy even the Major’s appetite for soundness in the matter of caning.

----//----

Waiting unhappily just outside the door, Marion Chalmers watched her friend fumbling up under her skirt for that token of schoolgirlishness, her navy blue knickers, and felt her heart sink. What Elizabeth got, she would get in her turn, since the people seated round that table would see no reason to punish either of the girls less severely than the other. Elizabeth’s bum, now bared for the cane, was positioned across the edge of the table. Several hands reached out to clasp those of the ashen-faced girl, less to comfort than to restrain, no doubt, and the Headmaster’s cane delivered its first, heart-stopping thwack!

Watching Liz’s hips wriggle against the table, Marion’s panic-stricken brain groped for anything that might yet rescue her from the caning she herself was about to get in something like a dozen strokes time. Desperate, and not thinking at all clearly, she thought of the only thing that might save her. That’s what she would do! She’d tell them about the Headmaster! In fact, she’d tell them about everything —

----//----

‘I take it, Chalmers, that you would prefer it if I did not cane your disobedient bottom for you, hmm?’

Stretched out across the desk in his study, her knickers clinging to the tops of her thighs and that awful, helpless feeling of naked vulnerability like a halo round her bum, Marion had stuttered that yes, she really would prefer not to be caned, sir, if that could possibly be managed, only when she’d said it, it had sounded more like ‘Ooogh!’ as hope had mingled with despair and the cane, patting her plumped-out buttocks, had intimated that it, at least, would be quite happy not to have the arrangements changed at this last minute. She had pulled her wits together and made herself understandable — just.

‘No — no — um — that is, yes sir — er — er —’.

‘I think I take your drift, Chalmers.’ Pat — pat. ‘But you do have to be punished, of course.’ A trifling re-arrangement of her knickers; the hint of the tip of a finger.

‘Yes sir —’. A little involuntary squirm of the hips, guiltily suppressed. A slow dawning of understanding through a mist of apprehension, then, with nothing to be lost even by rash immodesty, a slower, deliberate wriggle, the cane’s arrival across her upturned bottom expected at any second to chastise her provocativeness, inept though it may have been yet all the more appealing for its evident inexperience.

He flicked the cane up under one cheek, but not hard enough to sting — well, not much. Marion’s answering wriggle had been only a little exaggerated — just noticeably so.

‘I see you understand — er — the necessity of punishment that is.’

‘Yes sir.’ Still as a mouse, waiting for the cat to pounce. Had she guessed right? Or was he simply playing?

‘Very well, Chalmers. I shall spank you instead.’ His hand under one bum-cheek — the finger-tip hint again. ‘Ah — you will come to my house this evening, at seven.’

‘Yes sir.’ A little too quick, but how she hated that cane. Any sacrifice was worth not having to suffer the wretchedness of one of his canings.

‘Er — come as before, Chalmers —.’

‘Exactly, sir?’ That had been embarrassing!

‘Yes, Chalmers,’ with a harder flick of the cane to remind her not to forget.

There were secrets, and big secrets. Big secrets were things like telling your friends you had to go home for the weekend — ‘Lucky cow!’ they’d said — and catching the bus at the gate and getting off at the station and waiting out of sight until the Rover nosed into the car park. Coming back on Sunday night and saying how good it had been to be away from the place, and blushing if you met the Headmaster in the corridor on Monday morning. And then, some time that next week, the summons, upon some pretext, to his study. The brisk, no nonsense interview; knickers down, back across the desk for the caning you thought you’d wangled out of the week before. Good and hard so that you didn’t get any silly ideas — good and hard, if you but knew it, to remind you so that you were just as anxious next time to wriggle out of another caning the same way as before, even though you were beginning to guess that it was really only a caning deferred, but even that, though, was a comfort when you were across that desk with the stick teasing your bum and the old Man winding up to give you half a dozen real stingers. At sixteen and a half you didn’t have the nerve to plump for a caning there and then instead of the next week.

Things like that were big secrets — going to the Headmaster’s house after supper was a little secret, though getting caught sneaking across the field with just your mac over nothing but naked you would still take some explaining. A girl could die of embarrassment, turning up at the front door of the Old Man’s house like that — not that it got better, of course, once you were in there, with a smacked bottom to come and him keeping you waiting for it without even a pair of knickers on that were going to need taking down!

‘I take it, Chalmers, that you would prefer it if I did not cane your disobedient bottom for you, Hmm?’

‘Yes, sir. You may take it. In fact, sir you can take anything whatsoever you happen to fancy taking sir, only please don’t cane my admittedly disobedient and to be absolutely honest, awfully helpless-feeling bottom!’

----//----

And bed-time bum-smackings — that was another thing. Alright, if a girl deserved a spanking, then maybe she ought to be spanked. But spanked in front of her room-mate, and then both made to strip off stark naked before being allowed into their pyjamas, while the Old Man just stood there and watched? Surely that wasn’t in the rules, was it? What if she told the governors that! Half panicking at the sight of Elizabeth’s bottom jerking as the last stroke swooshed across it, yet half indignant that that old lecher should get away with what he did get away with, Marion’s sense of the injustice of it all urged her to throw caution to the winds!

She would tell them! The lot! She was quite determined that she would!

----//----

The ensuing few minutes are difficult to describe with mere words. The startling vigour with which Elizabeth’s agile young body reacts to the cane’s vicious stimulus takes even Reggie, who prides himself on having seen it all before, quite by surprise. One can only suppose that all that talk of ‘caning’ and ‘dozens’, and the presence of both the Major and Miss Wilkinson, has heightened the girl’s sensibilities to the point where sheer panic magnifies the effects of the cane’s application out of all proportion to reality. The cacophonous sounds of cane on bare bottom, of screams, squeals and full-throated yells, together with Miss Wilkinson’s complaints at being enlisted, under protest, by Reggie to assist the Major in holding the girl down whilst he gives her the prescribed twelve strokes, and one extra which he sneaks in on the chance that Miss Wilkinson won’t have managed to keep count — well, it would have to be witnessed to be believed!

At length, and after determined efforts on the part of young Elizabeth to frustrate the best efforts of all three of them to send her back to her class with the well-caned bottom she does, in truth, thoroughly deserve, the weeping, bottom-clutching girl is allowed to scoot from the committee room, still howling at the top of her voice.

----//----

‘Chalmers!’ The Headmaster’s voice chilled Marion’s hot-blooded determination to shop him, but she struggled to keep the intention alive in her breast. As upright as she could walk she went into the room.

‘Chalmers — ‘ The Major was speaking to her, his eyes somewhere about the level of the hem of her skirt, ‘— we see no reason to differentiate between the foolishness which you displayed in the matter of the flag-pole and its incineration, and that of your friend, Brown.’

‘Sir — um — excuse me sir, but —’

‘Take your knickers down, Chalmers.’

‘Um — but, sir —’

‘Two extra strokes, I think, Headmaster. Now then — knickers down please Chalmers.’

‘Oooh — but, please sir —’

‘Four, I think, Headmaster.’

‘Oh dear —’ Marion’s skirt inched up her legs as she groped for the waistband of her pants. The cane rattled against the table as the Headmaster picked it up. Marion’s knickers slid down to her knees. Did she dare risk one last try?

‘Sir — please sir —’

‘Six extra strokes, Headmaster.’

Knickers down, bum beginning to tweak at the threatening whistle of the cane as it was swished experimentally several times, Marion’s little bout of defiance was over. In due course, to the embarrassment of the Major’s secretary, but to no one else’s discomfiture save her own, she got her twelve strokes — plus six for being slow about doing as she was told — and between them, she and her bottom afforded a pleasant second half to the morning’s business for the assembled worthies of the Board of Governors.