Lesley: A Sound Thrashing
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.
----//----
How unlikely the adventure seemed! I was sharing a house,
in two flats, with Victor, a friend from schooldays. He was living with Lesley
and I with Cheryl, though we acted like one household. Believe me, I had no
designs on Lesley. I didn’t even like her! A spoilt little
middle-class girl had grown up into an arrogant and promiscuous young wife.
Several years of trendy ‘open’ marriage and kids ended with her quitting that
scene to assert her ‘woman’s rights’. In other words, sleeping around.
She looked like what she was: snooty, dismissive,
self-centred. The high-crowned pudding-basin crop of straight fair hair with
its long parted fringe was regulation-trendy at the time. The aloof blue eyes,
firm fair-skinned features, and the slight sulky heaviness of mouth and chin
completed the portrait.
Don’t get me wrong. She had her attractions. At 28 she was
quite tall and trim with a slight but firm erotic maturity. Her long thighs
were lithe, taut, well-exercised. A white singlet showed the proud elasticity
of her young breasts. Her hips were marginally broader now than when she was a
bride of 19 or 20. Her brief experience of child-rearing had merely imparted a
slight firming-out to the cheeks of Lesley’s bottom.
I won’t deny her appeal. Like the gentleman in Janus
13, I enjoyed watching her weed the garden in trousers of thin black nylon.
As she bent with legs astride, the thin black cloth was drum-skin tight across
the round, firmed-out maturity of Lesley’s arse-cheeks!
And that’s as far as our romance would have gone, if it
hadn’t been for Victor’s leg. Victor’s leg? Yes. He broke it —
rather badly. In a novel, that sort of ‘accident’ has to be accounted for by
some dramatic incident. Poor old Victor just slipped a little on a wet leaf and
went down on one knee on the pavement. Not hard, but awkwardly. There was a
crack you could hear on the far pavement. Two weeks in hospital, said the young
houseman in casualty, and probably six months in plaster.
I expected Lesley’s panties to get hot after a few nights
without poor old Victor. I did not expect to find them discarded in Cheryl’s
sheets! My bare foot contacted them as Cheryl and I were making love. Black
stretch-briefs. Cheryl was a slinky nylon and lace girl. Lesley graced the
washing-line with black briefs. It was perfectly obvious the knickers were
hers.
Some friends tell me I should have been ‘turned on’. I
wasn’t. I was bloody furious. Cheryl self-consciously confessed to having had
sex-fun with Lesley that afternoon — seduced by Lesley, no doubt!
A word about Cheryl. At 22 she had a soft, fair-skinned
face and figure. Her blue eyes above high cheekbones showed a certain timidity.
The fair tresses were worn loose and lightly waved to her shoulders. Her
office-costume was a short black jacket and snug cream linen trousers. Each
time she bent across a desk to reach a file, every male eye zeroed in on the
tight cream linen shaping those soft full cheeks of Cheryl’s bottom!
She didn’t deserve my anger. I turned her on her belly,
took a broad lightweight belt and thrashed Cheryl’s backside soundly. This was
a purely spontaneous reaction to her lesbian infidelity and it satisfied my
anger rather than my lust to see the soft pale cheeks of Cheryl’s arse jump and
quiver under the lashing strokes of the belt. I was damned if I would be the
lousy lover whose girl had to get her kicks with another woman!
Naked under my dressing-gown, I left Cheryl sobbing and
scarlet-bottomed. I strode up to the other flat and confronted Lesley. She
shook her long parted fringe into place disdainfully.
‘It’s none of your business,’ she said in her High-School
and College-Girl voice. ‘You don’t own Cheryl. She’s free to
choose.’
‘If it happens again!’ I said with inconclusive fury.
Lesley awaited the rest with cool indifference.
‘Well?’ she said at last, contemptuously, ‘What if it
does?’
‘I’ll thrash the cheeks of your bottom raw!’ I shouted,
still ‘high’ on the impromptu whacking I had just dealt out for the first time
ever to my scandalously unfaithful girlfriend.
What a bloody silly thing to say! I thought as soon as the
words were out. With the resistance Lesley would put up, it would be more like
a pub brawl than a whipping.
I boasted defiantly, ‘I’ve just thrashed Cheryl’s backside
with the strap! Don’t imagine I can’t deal with a stuck-up, snooty promiscuous
bitch like you, Lesley!’
‘You pig!’ she said coldly, her femininity outraged for
Cheryl.
That Friday, Cheryl had the afternoon off. I came back to
the flat in the evening, found the bottom sheet rumpled, a pair of Lesley’s
shoes ill-concealed under the bed, and a pair of Lesley’s knickers —
initialled! — in Cheryl’s dirty-linen basket!
Worst of all, though Lesley flaunted what she had done,
Cheryl went on her knees and swore nothing had happened. When a woman will lie
like that to protect her love she can no longer be trusted. My one thought was
to get her out of the house, away from the lesbian machinations of the young
libber. That evening she was on the train to her sister, a long-promised and
often-postponed visit. It was the start of a long Bank Holiday weekend which at
least broke up their ‘romance’ for a few days.
I came back from the station and sank down in the
armchair, drained by the crisis. I may have dozed off, though I don’t think I
did. However, without hearing preliminary footsteps, I heard the handle of the
sitting-room door turn. Then Lesley was standing before my chair.
You imagine a slinky, seductive temptress, the Mata Hari
of East Finchley? Sorry to disappoint you. Under the long parted fringe of her
perversely boyish crop, the blue eyes were disdainful as ever. The moodiness of
her clear pale features and wilful mouth seemed unaltered. She wore the long
skirt and boots of those young women who think it chic to look like a Russian
peasant-maid.
Did I drop an octave to my best bedroom voice? What I said
was, ‘Why the hell have you come down here?’
‘I understood you were going to thrash me,’ she said
coolly, ‘until the cheeks of my bottom were raw.’
Under almost any other circumstances, we might have burst
out laughing and gone on to more obvious amusements. To my dismay, my own
voice, seeming to come from somewhere outside me, said: ‘Get your things off,
then!’
Another voice, in my head but getting fainter all the
time, pleaded that this was insane — that I should be very
sorry later.
Lesley shook her fringe into place with an impatient
gesture. She undid her blouse and shrugged it off, then removed her boots and
skirt. She stood in nothing but a short white singlet and a pair of sheer,
honey-toned panty-tights. These nylon tights were transparent enough to show
the trim whiteness of her thighs, the pressed fern-like pubic hair in the
triangle of her loins.
Remember, I had never seen her stripped before. She turned round. I stared and stiffened. The honeyed nylon gloss of the tights alluringly and revealingly veiled the full pale moons of Lesley’s bottom and the duskier cleavage between them. Having her kids had left her, I thought, with the firm proud seat of a Spartan soldier-girl.
She stood by my chair, her back to me and I ordered her to bend over. My hand roved over the cool, firm glossiness of the seat of her tights, and I murmured to her.
‘I’ll thrash you in the bedroom, Lesley. You’re going to
take some real punishment tonight, believe me. I shall want you lying
bottom-upwards on the bed with the pillows under your loins to raise your
backside.’
I waited for her refusal or rebellion. Lesley, as she bent
with hands on shins, turned her arrogant urchin-cropped beauty.
‘All right,’ she said quietly, ‘If that’s how you want
me.’
We went into the bedroom and she stretched herself out on
the bed, face-down, head turned aside and face towards me. I gathered all the
pillows and wedged them under her loins, raising her hips so that she was
almost kneeling, rather than lying, over the pile. I found one more pillow for
her head.
‘Your husband should have thrashed your bottom for you
when you deserved it, Lesley,’ I said quietly. ‘Not to mention your teachers
and your parents. You’d be a good deal more content and happy with life now.’
She did not reply. I grasped the waistband of her tights, inserting both my thumbs into them. Lesley raised her hips a little to make the stripping easier, as if it were beneath her dignity to resist. As the filmy tights were peeled down, her pale thigh and buttock flesh seem to swell free a little from the constraint.
I chose a cane from the amateur theatricals props lying
around the apartment — but it was real enough! Now Lesley should feel the
impact in earnest! First, with my other hand, I mapped the pale cheeks of
Lesley’s seat, feeling their cool, smooth pallor for the first time. Using the
authority to examine which any chastiser has, I allowed my fingers to part the
cheeks and make a full inspection. Lesley’s hand moved gently and groped the
front of my trousers.
‘Don’t do that, Lesley, or I’ll double your punishment’
Words alone can’t convey the tingling, heart-stopping
sense of thrill in that room during those minutes before the thrashing. I felt
like God.
‘You’ll take twenty-four with the cane, Lesley,’ I said.
She turned her high-crowned crop, looking back at me as I slid a hand under her belly to support her and pulled the rear of her white singlet high above her fair-skinned hips. The arrogant blue eyes were still challenging me — to do what? Subdue her? Dominate?
I raised the cane high and lashed it down across the proud
pale cheeks of Lesley’s bottom with a sharp smack. Her face tensed in a grimace
and she drew breath quickly. Mindful of her conduct with Cheryl, I determined
to give her a tremendous thrashing. The first stroke had left a thin crimson
path and the smart had made her tense her buttocks, compressing Lesley’s
bottom-crack to a thin tight line. I made her lie properly and then lashed her
with the supple bamboo.
She cried out in a kind of panic but, after all, Lesley had asked for this in every sense. Crack! Sm-a-a-ck! The bare statuesque cheeks of Lesley’s 28-year-old bottom were writhing and squirming uncontrollably. My resolve to give this promiscuous urchin-cropped young wife the hiding of her life was only stiffened by this. After five or six she gave a wild cry of dismay.
‘Don’t try to twist on your side, Lesley!’ I said sharply.
‘Learn to keep that young backside of yours facing upwards for discipline!’
The face turned aside towards me now was that of such a
forlorn and woebegone little girl! Tears were brimming in the blue eyes and the
sulky mouth was drawn down in doleful self-pity — I had none for her. Under the
pressure of squirming knees, the bed-cover was rustling gently.
‘Take your hand away from your bottom, Lesley! If you do
that again, you’ll go back right to the start!’
With her short fair crop and very feminine hips, Lesley
was sprawling arse-upwards over the pillows like an overgrown page or
stable-girl being thrashed by the grooms. Twice more the cane whipped and rang
out across seat-cheeks already crowned with scarlet.
‘Stop!’ she sobbed. ‘Please! Just for a minute!’
Did she mean it? Was it part of her thrill to scream such things in order to be denied and reprimanded? She was denied, anyway. The punishment lasted quite a while, partly because I followed the age-old practice of curbing excessive squirming by giving that stroke again and adding another to the total. Quite often I wanted to land the cane across that softer and more sensitive area of Lesley’s arched-up buttocks. Absolute stillness was imperative. She rarely managed it. The result was the bamboo came thrashing down on her thighs. To her wide-eyed dismay the stroke then had to be repeated across her bottom and one more was added to the sentence.
The beating must therefore have been near-indescribably
painful for her. When it was over, she lay on her belly over those pillows,
calming her sobs and gradually stilling her writhings, as if the ordeal of
being caned had totally exhausted her. At the lightest touch of my fingers,
Lesley’s blushing buttocks flinched away and she gave a gasp.
Yet now there was a change in her behaviour, even without
the subsiding of the agonising smart in her backside. Lesley was like a little
girl who has needed a good spanking to curb her waywardness, and now wants to
make-up to the adult world by being soft and loving. Her blue eyes still a
little weepy, she began to fondle and feel for my zip. ‘I’ve taken my pill,’
she said.
What followed is, in detail, a private matter. She was in
no state to lie on her back. Let me say that the view I had during the
proceedings of Lesley’s bottom blushing furiously from the bambooing, and the
heat those cheeks were tangibly emitting, excited me to the most prodigious
feats.
We lay there together, the time nearly midnight. I sat up,
circled her waist with my left arm to steady her, and looked down at the bare
splendour of Lesley’s cane-marked buttocks. She was, in other respects,
remarkably aroused. No longer the snooty, arrogant young libber, Lesley was
making little squirming and tensing movements of her thighs and buttocks, as if
using her bottom to flirt with me. Or was Lesley’s bottom, more dangerously,
flirting with the cane?
There was one way to find out. I stood up and reached for
the smooth wand, now cooled after its hot contacts with her arse.
‘Bite hard on the corner of the pillow, Lesley, or the
neighbours are going to have a very disturbed night!’
Even as I raised my switch, the proud young cheeks of
Lesley’s behind began to tense and squirm. Was her excitement one of fear, or a
bizarre and unexpected thrill which overcame her with the speed of an ambush? I
hope for her sake it was the latter! In the hours that followed this
promiscuous urchin-cropped adulteress had a very hard time indeed. Again and
again the thin wealing bamboo cane resumed its intimate acquaintance with
Lesley’s 28-year-old backside!
Lesley’s bottom! I was an expert on it by the time we rose
in the morning. Had she had enough? Well, had she? We went into the bathroom
together, she wearing only the short white singlet which ended at her waist. I
kept making her bend for an ‘official’ inspection of the punished cheeks of
Lesley’s arse! Then her eyes fell on the hockey gear which had been left there
since I was referee for a match the previous Saturday. I saw she was looking
with fascination and a little alarm at the silver whistle and the cord attached
to it. Did she wonder if this was why I had brought her into the bathroom? I
smiled at the questioning blue eyes under her long parted fringe and saw a
tremor of panic.
‘Bend over the tall stool, Lesley! Very lightly!’ I said as I picked up the whistle. ‘Ah, your legs tremble a little? Be sensible, Lesley. You’ve gone so far now, we may as well take you all the way!’
It was a very chastened and moist-eyed little girl who served breakfast to her cruel teacher, clad only in her singlet. That morning, whether reading the paper or whatever, Lesley carefully avoided the act of sitting down. When she forgot herself and tried the softest cushion, it was with a wince and a gasp. So she lay bottom upwards on the sofa like a harem slave-girl, or curled gingerly on her side on the carpet at my feet. From time to time I put her over my knee and massaged her burning backside with cold cream, though I confess my creamed fingers spent much of their time between her thighs or between the cheeks of Lesley’s bottom rather than upon them! She did not seem to mind…
For obvious reasons, Lesley pleaded not to be made to put
on her tights or even to have her skirt brushing against her thrashed
bottom-cheeks. I was entirely agreeable, but there was one problem. We were
both due to visit Victor that afternoon, in the ward where he lay with his
plastered leg hoisted by someone else’s petard. How on earth was Lesley going
to get there?
‘He won’t expect me,’ she said simply. ‘While you were at
the station last night, I phoned a message for him that I was going with Cheryl
to see her sister. I promised to see him in a week.’
Two things hit me simultaneously. First, I was going to
have Lesley under discipline for an entire week! Second, that the
young bitch had deliberately arranged it should be so, by her phone call. I
knew Lesley was a promiscuous young woman but, surely, her pants must have been
hot as fire when she arranged this scenario!
I went alone to see Victor, saying what a shame it was
that Lesley couldn’t make it. Not to worry, Victor announced, she’d been a real
brick and spent the whole of yesterday afternoon with him. I was about to say
she couldn’t have done, because she was in bed with Cheryl. But it seemed best
to say nothing.
‘Yes,’ said Victor musingly, ‘Lesley was a brick. She was
here before they brought lunch in and stayed until after six. She must have had
a real job to get packed and away.’
‘But she can’t have been here all that
time!’ I said, an awful suspicion dawning in my mind. Victor looked at me
oddly.
‘Don’t be bloody dense, old boy! Of course she was here. I
was here too, so I ought to know!’
I drove back to the flat with my head spinning. Lesley and
Cheryl had been in bed on the first occasion, all right, after which I
threatened to thrash Lesley’s backside raw if she ever did it again. She had
not done it again but she had set the scene to make it look as if she had!
Cheryl was innocent after all.
But why? Lesley was asking to be thrashed. She was a
promiscuous young woman who soon missed Victor’s tender loving care. Was she
truly excited by the thought of getting a beating? Or did she just reason that
while her pants were down for discipline, lots of other things would happen
too?
I got back to the flat and saw her lying bare-bottomed, a
pale urchin-cropped odalisque, on the sofa.
‘What happens to little girls who tell lies, Lesley?’ I
asked, taking off my jacket. She looked her most wilful and aloof, well aware
of what I had discovered.
‘They get caned,’ she said, as if giving a command. ‘Then
the teacher takes advantage of them. What’s unfair is that, after that, he
canes them even harder for being dirty girls.’
She was right on every point. Victor returned, time
passed, his leg mended. He and Lesley went off on a delayed holiday to one of
those picturesque countries which keeps getting into trouble through its
old-fashioned ideas on crime and punishment. Victor came back alone, telling me
that they had broken up during the holiday and that Lesley had now gone her own
way.
The time had also come for Victor and I to take our
separate paths. A house was an easier proposition for getting a mortgage than
the flat would be. I helped Victor move on the first day and then attended to
my own move the day after. He was busy moving in elsewhere and, in any case, I
could easily manage on my own.
The amount of rubbish one acquires in a home is
proverbial. By the time I had made my trips to the dustbins and skip, they were
almost filled by Victor’s refuse! I was standing there, cursing quietly, when I
noticed the large reel-to-reel recording tape (cassettes are for amateurs) and
a box of 12 x 10 inch photographic paper. Had they been thrown out by mistake?
On opening, the box contained printed photographs. The first thing I saw was
that Lesley appeared on them! I put the recording on at random. The first thing
I heard was Lesley’s voice, shrill with panic, protesting indignantly:
‘That cane is a prison-farm bamboo! Tell them they can’t
use it, Victor! Please!’
But Victor didn’t tell them anything at all.
Instead of going to bed on the night before my move, I sat
up through the small hours, listening and looking. I had no idea if the sounds
and sights were genuine or if they were all part of some well-rehearsed
melodrama. First on the tape there was the announcement of a sentence being
passed on Lesley, in quite heavily-accented English, for crimes of adultery and
promiscuity. The strokes were to be at the discretion of the chastiser but not
less than thirty.
There was a passage of tape in which it was a woman’s
voice speaking to Lesley, evidently at night in the room where she slept.
‘Still awake, Lesley? It’s quite common for young women
not to be able to sleep on the night before their whipping. Let me feel your
pulse, honey. Heart pounding so hard already? You’ve never had this before,
have you? Waiting to be hurt! Longing for it to be over, yet dreading it as it
gets closer! There’s a way one woman can stroke another, Lesley. It often
exhausts a girl, relaxes her, and helps her sleep a little. Is that better?’
This went on for a while and then the woman said:
‘What a wide-awake little girl you are, Lesley! Not
relaxed? Not exhausted enough to sleep? Then I’m afraid you’ll just have to
twist and fret on the bed until your time comes. No, Lesley, we don’t have
sleeping-pills here. Come now, a little more attention from a woman’s soothing
hand. There! Is that nice, Lesley? Is it?’
If it was drama, the total realism of the scripts was
impressive. The next words accompanied the pictures, the first of which showed
a bleak white-walled room with two officials in charge. There was a device like
a low step-ladder beside which stood Lesley, her back to the camera, her fair
urchin-crop lowered so that the hair parted slightly on her nape. She looked
forlornly submissive. Her costume consisted of a short white singlet again and
black stretch-briefs.
‘Slip your panties off, Lesley,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘Give them to me! At once, unless you want a taste of punishment in advance! Good. Now, use the damp flannel and be quick about it. Finished? On the lowest step of the ladder then, bending very tightly over the top, arms at full stretch down the far side for me to hold. Ready for inspection?’
The photographic gem showed Lesley in position, legs
together, her body bent tight over the step-ladder. The sides projected up a
little above the platform at the top and seemed to wedge her waist into
position. With arms securely held by her attendant, and her feet confined to
the narrow step, she was well-presented. The stethoscope-hung doctor
approached. He had no need of the stethoscope, however. Bowing his head as he
stood behind her, his hands and eyes made a close and detailed inspection of
the full pale moons of Lesley’s bottom!
‘We don’t like self-opinionated young women who abandon
their own marriages in order to destroy other people’s,’ he said softly. ‘Not
in this country!’
What on earth had she done, I wondered? Started screwing around in some part of the world where a woman can get even worse than the lash for it? The lucky old doctor seemed to be making the most of his chance! One hand was squeezing and firming each of Lesley’s buttocks in turn with lusty appreciation. The fingers of the other played in every nook and cranny as he spoke.
On what radio network, if any, had this preposterous
melodrama been broadcast?
‘Don’t let them do it!’ Swallowing her feminine
indignation, Lesley was trying to wheedle the doctor in a ‘pretty please’ tone.
‘Not thirty!’
He seemed amused at this.
‘You need have no fear, Lesley. I have no intention of
intervening at thirty!’
This was not quite what she intended and there was a wail
from Lesley which was both peevish and yet panic-ridden. Her room for manoeuvre
was limited but she had twisted her fair crop round and turned her fair
self-possessed young face on her chastiser in an expression of dismay.
I found it hard to believe that this was not some stage
production, a very private kind of amateur theatricals! The educated and
emancipated young wife had been so well positioned that surely they must have
rehearsed it. Her firm long thighs were pressed tightly together as if she had
been on parade. The position over the ladder, though voluntarily assumed, would
take quite a while to straighten up from because of the way her weight was
thrown forward.
The frame was also ideally constructed for presenting
Lesley’s backside!
Lesley’s bottom, cheeks fully and tautly rounded, stretched hard and nicely broadened, offered a superb target. From a chastiser’s viewpoint, we were seeing Lesley’s behind at its best. That taut well-controlled firming-out after a few years of marriage and kids, made Lesley’s 28-year-old arse an ideal subject for discipline. They could have held classes and lectured on it, as Raymond Chandler might have said!
There was a sudden wild protest from Lesley. Looking back
over her shoulder she had seen the punishment officer choose a long supple
bamboo. He caught her eyes with a knowing smile, flexing and releasing the
switch to show its rapier-like spring. In her panic Lesley cried out
frantically that she wouldn’t be able to bear it. Anyone who knew the stories
of reformatories and such places could guess the reply to Lesley’s desperation.
As James Miles told Elaine Cox, if the chastiser chose to give such punishment,
the culprit — Lesley, in this case — would have to bear it anyway. Not being
able to was Lesley’s problem, not theirs!
The official with the bamboo cane raised his arm. There
was an intense silence on the tape. Then the bamboo whistled down with an
ear-stunning smack across the proud pale cheeks of Lesley’s bottom!
As the impact of the cane’s whipping expanded to a
paralysing smart, Lesley rose on her toes with the agony of it and her sudden
cry grew to a scream.
What was this strange ritual? Was it a kind of private
drama, no more painful than a week in seaside rep, devised and acted out by two
lovers? It wouldn’t be difficult for a young woman and her boyfriend to do
that, using a tape and a camera to record it. Perhaps it then became something
to enjoy on long winter evenings. Was it an actual judicial whipping for sexual
misdemeanours? In that case, had Lesley got into trouble without meaning to? Or
did the fascination of the thrill make her offend deliberately in order to
taste the fear, excitement and humiliations which attend a prison thrashing?
I wished I knew the answer. Though the chastiser got a
yell from the arrogant young woman with the very first stroke, he lashed the
reformatory cane across the squirming, tensing cheeks of Lesley’s bottom with
growing vigour and punishing zeal.
As she twisted her face round imploringly, in the next
picture, the dismissive blue eyes under the parted fringe brimmed over with
tears. The downcast mouth was stretched in a wild circle of anguish. What a
good little girl she promised to be now, if only they would give her the
chance. Yet these officials had dealt with so many young women in this way and
heard the frantic imploring promise so many times that they no longer even
bothered to give a gently amused reprimand.
As the long tape unwound its sounds evoked the scene. The
proud bare cheeks of Lesley’s arse danced to the tune of the cane and she drank
her own tears from her lips. There was a pause while they inspected to see the
places which a short woven tail might curl into. A sudden shrill protest from
Lesley soon indicated that the thrashing was about to be continued
relentlessly. Inspired by the firm pale beauty of Lesley’s bottom, the official
who gave the punishment wove her a seat of torment.
The large reel of tape turned slowly during this long
session of Lesley, the promiscuous urchin-cropped young wife, arse-upwards over
the step-ladder for a most monumental thrashing. As for the photographs of her
boyish-crop twisted round, mouth howling and eyes frantic, that must have taken
some rehearsing — unless it was real!
If there was a true moment of high drama, it was when she
was allowed to straighten up from the ladder — only to be led across to the
padded leather of the heavy sofa or divan. At first one assumed that this was
in order to allow Lesley to lie over it on her belly and recover from the
discipline. Then the voice said:
‘Kneel facing the end of the sofa, Lesley! Tightly
forward! I want your weight thrown forward on your hands and your backside high
in the sky!’
There was a pause of intent, stunned silence before the
outburst:
‘But I’ve been caned already!’
‘We can see that, Lesley. It was a punishment duly awarded
for a crime. Resistance to authority is another matter and carries a sentence
of the discipline strap across your bare bottom!’
‘But I can’t…!’
In listening to this I was not sure whether it was
supposed to be a second act in a radio drama, occurring some time after the
first. Or was it for real, a continuation of the night’s discipline under the
law of a backward and repressive regime?
Come to think of it, if you choose to have such laws, you
probably have to be very careful about picking the men — or women— who inflict
the penalties. Whatever the law says, has to be done.
That’s not always easy. Take the present situation. There
was Lesley, in fact or fantasy, the firm erotic maturity of her bottom-cheeks
patterned by the punishment received on the ladder. The orders required that
she should be strapped. What effect would it have on the chastiser to be
presented with Lesley’s buttocks, already smarting untouchably from her first
experience? No doubt there were officials who would have merely gone through
the motions of whipping, not really inflicting it all. I could understand that.
At the present time, however, they had apparently chosen a harder case, one who
was rather turned-on by such a rare opportunity.
At the top of her voice, Lesley listed the reasons why she
should not be dealt with. It was a waste of breath. Carefully positioned, she
was presented for the strap to measure its aim slowly across the glowing
willow-pattern.
‘Such a firm young seat,’ remarked one voice, ‘Like a
young bending Venus. Another bystander pointed out the advantages of the slight
firm maturity which marriage and kids had given to Lesley’s seat-cheeks. This
slight maturing, as well as the ordeals of the marriage bed and its pleasures,
the labour of child-rearing, made her better able to endure exemplary
discipline.
Had they really worked all this out in the chastising
trade? Or was it just part of a prepared script? Either way, the whistle and
smack of leather, a frantic gasp which Lesley emitted, all sounded genuine
enough.
‘Your bottom, Lesley! Arch it out more fully!… Ah, yes,
Lesley! You’d like it to stop, wouldn’t you? Just think of all the mental
anguish your promiscuous conduct has caused to others! Now you shall taste some
anguish of a rather different kind!… Did that one catch a sensitive stripe on
your backside, Lesley?… Don’t press your buttocks together like that, Lesley!
You’ll get an extra stroke for that!… I think we’d better turn the volume
control of the recorder down. Those yells are going to overload the capacity of
the system!’
How can I describe the views of Lesley’s behind which the
camerawork now offered? Imagine her — or any young woman — on a bicycle in
tight pants. In order to keep going up a steep hill, she lifts her hips from
the saddle and stands on the pedals, pumping with all her weight. From the
rear, one has that marvellous view of her backside in its slow, labouring
rhythm. The cheeks of her bum move in a glittering symmetry of arching and
squeezing, contorting and rounding, more tempting than any dance a stripper could
perform for her client! That was how Lesley was responding now, as the sinuous
leather whipped and smacked across her behind.
Despite my experience of her, it seemed like sheer science
fiction. At one point there was a frenzied exclamation.
‘I’ve had eighteen!’
‘Don’t waste your effort counting, Lesley!’ the woman’s
voice shouted, ‘No one else is bothering to.’
What the hell did that mean? Were they just going to go on
— and on — and on? They don’t do that, even in those countries,
do they? Or do they??
It had to be faked, a rehearsed recording and a few posed
photographs, didn’t it? Unless — what? I thought of Lesley, jaded by
promiscuous sex and seeking a new thrill. She’d certainly been excited with me
that week of Victor’s hospitalisation! I now imagined Lesley in that country of
the repressive regime. She knew the penalties. Had she deliberately allowed
herself to be caught committing adultery? That earned her a whipping. And then,
excited by some dangerous thought of going all the way, had she purposely
committed those other offences which would get her punishment doubled or
trebled? If so, she was regretting it now!
Eagerly they strapped her as though the earlier session
hadn’t taken place at all! It was like an old-style reformatory thrashing — and
then some! James Miles — the Man with the Golden Rod — could have taken lessons
from these chaps!
At last it stopped. Yet there was one more shot of Lesley
looking back over her shoulder in a kind of wild panic. I hoped, much as she
needed a tanning, that the state of her bottom was in part the work of the
make-up department. What was she looking at, though? The recording picked up
the sound of two pairs of footsteps entering the room. Lesley emitted a sound
of alarm.
‘Stay like that, Lesley,’ said the woman’s voice again.
‘Right forward! Bottom-upwards! These two lads are whipmakers’ apprentices.
It’s not often they get a chance to test their handiwork on such a model…’
I burst out laughing, as the tape ran out. It had to be
some kind of zany script. Surely? That punch-line decided me. Of course it
wasn’t going to make Radio 4 at family listening time or win the Italia Prize.
All the same, it was pure drama. Outrageous, surrealist drama with a strong
vein of black humour.
I said nothing to Victor. It might embarrass him to know I
had come across the private love-games which he and Lesley played. Still, I
knew the answer now, though I had no idea who the other man and the woman on
the recording might be. Perhaps they roped in the amateur dramatic society, for
all I knew.
Months later, I was talking to a mutual friend in fairly
‘high places’. There had just been a lot in the papers about an English girl
sentenced to a taste of the lash in such a country and the Foreign Office was
doing its best to prevent it. But we weren’t talking of that. Victor was the
subject of conversation — and Lesley. When I mentioned Lesley, the friend
looked at me oddly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘HMG does its best. Trouble is, if you
protest too much over the hopeless cases, they won’t take you seriously over
the others. When a randy young piece really goes and asks for a smacked bottom,
the best thing is to let her have it.’
That was all he said, before telling me
about the croquet at Hurlingham. I was left to make what I could of the cryptic
FO jargon.
And what of Lesley? That story had only just begun and
continues as I write these last words. We met again — and again. She has just
brought me a neatly copied out portion of this account, some words she once
used. ‘Little girls who tell lies get the cane. Then the teacher takes
advantage of them. After that he canes them even harder for being naughty with
him.’
She is wearing white bra and suspender-belt with
honey-toned stockings. No pants. As usual she bends over the desk beside me to
be examined before retribution. Her fair urchin-crop is turned, the arrogant
blue eyes under her fringe looking back, So I type, my elbow sometimes brushing
the bare pale flank of her hip. I shall pause and allow my hand to wander over
the cool smooth cheeks, the firm full moons of Lesley’s bottom. She is my
constant source of inspiration; she is obsessed with punishment.
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