Variation on a Theme — Spankers Gallery - The Artist #1 (Culver)

Culver felt the text of Spankers Gallery - The Artist could have been more salacious and has developed a couple of variations on the theme.

This first one is from the annals of Malory Towers…

‘Pamela!’ boomed Mr Greyburn, the Girls’ Art master, his deep voice loud above the chatter of the Upper Sixth classroom. ‘Come here at once, and bring your drawing with you!’

Immediately there was a flutter of excitement around the room. Everyone knew that Pamela was up to her tricks again. Fair-haired and pretty, with a mischievous glint in her blue eyes, Pamela had a way of behaving as though the classroom were her private stage. Though she had reached her eighteenth birthday, she had never outgrown her fondness for childish pranks, and she adored nothing better than being the centre of attention.

Pamela rose to her feet with a triumphant grin and paraded down the aisle as though she owned the room. Several of the girls nudged one another, stifling their giggles.

‘Oh, Pamela is such a one for pranks and scrapes!’ whispered Daphne to her neighbour, her eyes shining with delight.

‘Yes, but she’ll land herself in a proper fix before long!’ returned Felicity, barely able to keep her voice down.

Pamela offered her drawing to Mr Greyburn with an impudent smile, then turned to face the class. She positively basked in all the sniggers.

Greyburn regarded the paper with great solemnity.

‘Hmm,’ he said at last. ‘Yes… good! Very good indeed!’

Pamela’s smile faltered. That wasn’t exactly the response she’d anticipated. She’d rather hoped he’d descend to exasperation and bluster, as this would have secured her victory over him in front of the class.

‘What do you think, girls?’ asked Greyburn, turning the picture round.

The effect was instantaneous. The classroom filled with shrieks and squeals of laughter. Some of the girls doubled up at their desks, others clutched their sides, and several were quite literally in tears.

‘Enough of that!’ cried the schoolmaster. ‘As you know, you were all asked to draw a member of your family. A mother, a father; perhaps a younger sister, in the Fifth. Yet unless I am very much mistaken, this… resembles a parrot!’

‘That’s right, sir,’ Pamela affirmed, revelling again in the audacity of her prank. ‘It’s Polly. Mother always says she’s just like one of the family.’

Again the classroom dissolved into hysteria. Several of the girls were quite weak with laughter now, and even prim Rowena, sitting in the back row, had to hide her face behind her handkerchief.

‘Really, this is most unseemly behaviour,’ declared Greyburn, rapping on the desk. ‘Nevertheless, I cannot ignore such a fine drawing. Pamela, this must be displayed upon the wall!’

Pamela balked at this. Her sketch was meant as a joke, nothing more. It certainly wasn’t artwork for formal exhibition.

‘Oh, what bad luck!’ Daphne whispered to Felicity. ‘Fancy having one’s drawing displayed with all the swots’ work!’

Greyburn thrust a blob of poster-putty into Pamela’s hand. With a sulky expression, she turned to the wall to mount her masterpiece.

The class fell into an expectant hush.

Pamela began to fix Polly the Parrot as high as she could reach.

‘Not there!’ barked Mr Greyburn. ‘Lower!’

Pamela’s cheeks flushed as she moved the drawing down.

‘Lower still!’

Pamela obeyed, bending awkwardly. She felt mutinous but kept silent.

‘That’s it,’ said the master, satisfied, as Polly ended up no more than three feet above the floor.

The class collapsed into helpless mirth once more. Girls leaned against one another, shrieking with glee.

‘Now,’ Greyburn chimed, ‘stay just where you are, Pamela! Don’t get up! Remain bent over!’

He went to his desk and withdrew from the drawer his trusty implement of punishment, a thick, two-tailed tawse.

At once the room hushed, and a low murmur passed from girl to girl.

‘Oh, gracious!’ exclaimed Daphne, alarmed on behalf of her impudent friend. ‘Surely he’s not going to…?’

Holding the tawse in one hand, Greyburn lifted Pamela’s skirt with the other, placing the garment over her back and pushing the tail of her blouse up with it. Then he seized Pamela’s regulation knickers by the waistband and tugged them down until they encircled her knees.

Pamela always loved being centre of attention, but this she hadn’t bargained for! She could hardly believe it! Sir had bared her bottom! In front of the entire class!

Greyburn ordered her to place her hands on her knees and told her flatly that she was going to get six strokes of the tawse.

She fought a mounting sense of panic. How could she possibly retain any shred of dignity? It was hard to keep your chin up when your bottom was up for a leathering! She thought how foolish she had been to underestimate this old master.

Twenty pairs of eyes looked on with awe as Greyburn raised the tawse.

Daphne shifted her attention between Pamela’s naked bottom and an unmistakeable twitching she’d noticed in the tweed of the teacher’s trousered crotch. How awful, Daphne thought, he was actually aroused! What a beastly old creep!

Yet Greyburn wasn’t alone in becoming excited.  In the back row, Rowena flushed and scissored her legs beneath her desk, instinctively thrusting her hand down under her skirt and jamming it tightly between her thighs. When tensions ran high, even the best-behaved girls could lose their heads!

Greyburn delivered the first stroke with cruelty and skill. The tawse cut through the air and cracked viciously across the centre of Pamela’s bare buttocks, leaving a wide crimson mark.

Pamela let out an ear-splitting yell. She tried to absorb the shock, determined that she wouldn’t weep in front of her friends, no matter how excruciating the pain.

The remaining strokes followed in quick succession, each more searing than the last. Pamela’s cries filled the room. Her eyes brimmed with tears but she held on as best she could and blinked them back bravely.

Greyburn concluded Pamela’s strapping with a particularly vicious stroke, traversing the previous five lashes at a sharp angle. The loud crack provoked much gyrating of buttocks and an indecent churning of thighs. And not only Pamela’s. It didn’t escape Greyburn’s attention that Pamela’s cries were answered by breathy gasps from around the room, and an urgent scraping of chair legs. The little devils were actually enjoying this! In time, he’d have to deal with them, too!

Greyburn admired his handiwork, his groin pulsing warmly as he surveyed the broad red bands marking Pamela’s buttocks. It seemed he hadn’t yet made her weep. No matter. He’d deal with her again later. That evening, in fact. In the privacy of his rooms, after Horlicks, bath-time and lights-out. He'd have her nude, freshly soaped and powdered, and he'd certainly make her cry her eyes out then!

Greyburn instructed Pamela to remain in her bent-over position until the lesson was over, prolonging her humiliation. She desperately wanted to rub her smarting rear but she knew that would never do. It would make her friends think that the tawse had really got to her. She musn’t allow them to think so. She had her name to think about, her reputation as the most stubborn girl in the Sixth. Little did Pamela realise that the other girls, in the aftermath of her strapping, were too lost in personal, woozy reverie to give a jot, one way or another, about her reputation. The fact that Pamela was on the verge of tears, that her bottom throbbed like mad, and that she yearned to massage her burning cheeks — all this was lost on her flushed contemporaries.

The rest of the lesson passed in a curious mood. The girls’ attention was inevitably divided between their drawings and the alluring sight of the rebel’s punished bottom. Greyburn circled the classroom numerous times, his knuckles ‘accidentally’ brushing against Pamela’s scalding nates on more than one occasion. He took detours to hover over various pretty girls at their desks, talking to them about their pencil work. He lingered especially over girls who, like Rowena, remained flustered and breathless or who, like Felicity, had chosen to sketch their equally attractive sisters in the Fifth. As he loomed over Daphne, she nibbled nervously at the end of her pencil, all too aware of the twitching in Sir’s trousers, merely inches from her face.

When the bell sounded for the end of the lesson Greyburn permitted Pamela to stand and pull up her knickers. And to Pamela’s great relief, he put an end to ‘Polly’. He tore the offending drawing from the wall, screwed it up, and dropped it smartly into the waste-paper basket. Poor Polly — and poor Pamela! Her silly little joke had backfired dreadfully, and although she didn’t yet guess it, there was more, and much worse, in store for her that evening!