Room 2D

From Phoenix 2 It squatted in the corner, fat body perched upon splayed legs, half-concealed in the wintry afternoon’s gloom. It didn’t move, just sat there, waiting. Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the polished floor and a voice, gruff and authoritative, told the newcomer to wait. In the gloom she waited, and every now and then dared a glance in the direction of the monstrosity which still crouched unmoving in the corner. Her eyes darted away each time, she fiddled with her hands, smoothed one dubiously over the seat of her little shorts, then had to look back at it again. A tiny, stifled sob sounded in the cavernous room and she put her hands to her eyes and brushed away what might have been tears. The little golden hairs on her bare legs stood up as she shivered and suddenly felt goose-pimply down her thighs. She held her breath. The heavy step returned along the corridor and the d...

From Phoenix 3 It was Mr Lloyd’s habit, whenever he had to leave the upper part of the school to go down to that part of it which had been built on the lower level, beyond the tennis courts, to make a point of going the long way round and pass by the assembly hall, which doubled as a gym during the day. It had windows facing on to the corridor, and anyone passing by could quite easily glance into the hall and see what was going on. On this particular day, though he’d had no actual reason to do so, he’d decided to take a walk down to the other school building. Past the hall. Mr Forbes was taking a gym lesson. A class were being put through their paces, and since the activity which the girls were engaged upon when Mr Lloyd chanced to pass by involved lying on their backs and bending their legs up and over to touch the floor with their toes behind their heads, first to one side and then to the other, it seemed a good enough excus...

From the highly sought after Phoenix 14, with superb illustrations by Hans Braun. In the span of history, until relatively recently, a beating was given across the bare flesh, and dress had a significance limited to the procedures and drama of its removal. Before the great change, the chances were that a victim would be crudely stripped and flogged without more ado, but, if dress played any part at all, it was as an agent of humiliation rather than as a layer of protection: a soldier was the more shamed by being stripped of his full-dress uniform and, by the same token, many a principal of a girls’ school would choose an occasion when the girls were in their ‘Sunday Best’ to take out one of their numbers for the enforced exposure that preceded a bare bottom birching. The ‘great change’ was scarcely more than a hundred years ago — in the middle of the nineteenth century — when a supposed Victorian morality, and an even more suspe...