The rooming house

Roger stared at the ceiling. It was a freezing cold night but he was snug and warm under the blankets. Cautiously he ran his fingers across the welts that criss-crossed his buttocks. The pain had gone now, but one or two were still tender when he touched them.

Perce, his boyfriend, lay by Roger’s side, breathing heavily: he seemed to be dreaming. Earlier, when they had made love, Roger could see Perce’s once dark blue bruises were turning a lighter shade, almost turquoise. It would take several days, more than a week possibly, before the evidence cleared of the twelve severe strokes of the cane they had been forced to endure on their naked buttocks.

Upstairs, in the top flat, Higgins, their landlord, slept the sleep of the just; alone in his bed. Higgins had moved in after his wife left him for another man. His children were grown up and making their own ways in life. He was very content to live in the block of flats his late mother had bequeathed to him.

He had never met such people as his tenants. As well as the gay boys, there was Lucy who had a small baby, but no husband. Upstairs from her was Miss Alison, an aging spinster, who apparently was once a successful actress. Higgings thought she was probably very lonely. Mr Weston, who lived in the flat next to the boys, was from the West Indies. Mr Higgins had never met a West Indian before he moved in. Now, he knew many: Mr Weston was a gregarious man and had many friends.

Higgins wondered what his colleagues at school would make of it if they knew about his band of tenants. Gay boys, unmarried mothers and West Indians did not feature much at the grammar school. St Francis was a traditional school: traditional classes, traditional sports, traditional religion and traditional discipline.

Higgins believed in corporal punishment. He knew the cane applied with some force across the stretched bottom of an errant schoolboy was a great motivator for good behaviour. Even those boys who came back for more eventually discovered the errors of their ways.

Higgins had taken an awesome school cane back his flat when he was forced to deal with Sterling. The boy had the flat next to Miss Alison. The aging actress was all alone in life and vulnerable to the advances of the nineteen-year-old charmer. Sterling was not after sex, of course. He wanted the money he firmly believed she had hidden in her flat. It was easy to befriend a lonely person. In no time he was running her errands and sharing cups of tea. When her back was turned he removed her door key and later had a copy made.

One Thursday morning; it was pension day and the only time in the week Miss Alison would be certain to be out of her flat, Sterling made his move. It was a small flat and it only took minutes to search. He went under the mattress, in the tea caddy, behind the drawers in the kitchenette. There was nothing to find. Frustrated, he was half way through the circuit again in case he had missed something when the door eased open. There was nowhere to hide.

Higgins was no fool. He sized up the situation immediately. Despite his willingness to inflict severe pain on schoolboys, Higgins was a kind man. Miss Alison never discovered that Sterling’s friendship was a sham; a trick simply so that he could steal her money.

And, Sterling? Later that day he found himself in Higgins’s flat. It was a straight choice: the police or a thrashing. It was no choice at all, not with Sterling’s record. If the police got involved, he would do time, there was no doubt about that.

Sterling had been fifteen the last time he felt the cane across his backside. It had been four years ago, only weeks before he finished school forever and embarked on his life of dead-end jobs and petty crime. It had not been too bad. Bend over, whack! whack! whack! stand up. It was all over in seconds. He had a bit of a sore bum, but it was nothing to worry about.

Yes, Sterling agreed, rather too enthusiastically to Higgins’s liking, he would take the stick.

“Where do you want me?”

Higgins detected a smirk. Was the boy daring him?

The experienced schoolmaster knew how to wipe a stupid grin from a boy’s face.

Sterling stood nonchalantly, unconcerned about the events about to unfold.

With his anger rising, Higgins tugged open a drawer and pulled out the cane.

Swish! Higgins swiped the stick through the air. Then he smiled. Sterling had for the first time caught sight of the rod that was going to be used on him. It was nothing like the short rigid bamboo stick they had used at his council school.

Higgins grasped the cane which he had chosen to use to inflict the beating. It was not particularly long, thick or heavy, but what made it fearsome was the series of roughly-shaped and hardened knots which decorated every three or four inches of its length. These gave the cane its remarkable ability to bruise boys’ bottoms, leaving marks that might last for a month and making sitting down a delicate and painful business for the unlucky victim. A severe beating would usually split the skin of the suffering boy and bloody his arse as a further reminder of the penalty for misbehaviour.

Sterling’s cocky demeanour vanished instantly. His face paled and he could feel his hair dampen with sweat.

His mouth gaped open, but no words came as he realised there was nothing he could say, except beg for mercy and his pride was not about to let him do that.

Swish! the cane flew through empty air. Higgins pointed the wicked rod at a low armchair.

“Right. I want you take down your trousers and underpants and bend across the chair.”

This time, Sterling did speak. “Wha …?” was all he could say before an impatient Higgins cut him short.

“It is the police or the cane. You choose, but you must do it now.”

Tears were already forming behind the nineteen-year-old’s eyes as mournfully he unzipped his tight loon pants and helped them over his buttocks and left them to slide to his knees. His breathing was laboured as he tucked his thumbs into the waistband of his mauve underpants and sent them in the same direction to meet his loons.

Sterling’s pale face turned scarlet as he realised he was now standing half-naked in front of this old man; a man who in a moment was going to rip his arse to shreds.

“Bend over,” Higgins feigned impatience.

Sterling closed his eyes, took a deep breath and curved himself over the back of the armchair. He was too tall to fit comfortably over the chair and had to bend at the knees. In this position his creamy-white buttocks jutted out behind him, offering a wonderful target for the cane to lash into him.

Only then did it occur to Higgins: despite all his years as a schoolmaster and the countless canings he had delivered, he had never before thrashed a boy on his naked buttocks. And, rarely, had he beaten a boy as big as Sterling (although there had been a time when he had thrashed five of the first XV rugby team and they had all been exceptionally large schoolboys).

Even so, Higgins laid it on with vigour. Sterling’s arse convulsed and he lifted one foot off the floor as the pain flooded from his backside throughout his body. But, he submissively stayed in position, hands gripping the seat cushion with some strength but with his behind still offered bravely for the remainder of the beating that Higgins continued with enthusiasm.

Higgins gave his bruised and now very colourful bottom a further four cuts in rapid succession. The two after that were directed at the crease between thigh and buttock and were laid one on top of the other. Sterling was now bellowing with pain, clenching and unclenching his quivering deeply ridged backside, and working extremely hard to maintain the correct position bent over the chair.

In the nearby flat, Miss Alison turned up the volume of her wireless.

Higgins was a hard and accurate caner and he delivered twelve of his very best, leaving Sterling hugging the chair and holding on for a minute when the landlord put the cane away and sat down.

There was no lecture. There was no need for one. In his own time, Sterling rose from his submissive position. He made no attempt to hide the tears that choked him. Gingerly, he pulled up his underpants and buttoned up the loon pants and without a word he shuffled from the flat and staggered down the staircase to his own room.

Three days later Sterling moved out and Higgins never heard from him again.

2

I think the gay boys Roger and Peace are my favourite tenants. They are so full of vim and energy. I know that probably has a lot to do with the pep pills they take; I’m not naive.

I’d never met any homosexuals before (at least not that I knew of). The boys were not what I expected. I thought homosexuals were all swishy and feminine, as if they were men trapped inside women’s bodies. Roger and Perce are nothing like that; you wouldn’t know they were gay to look at them. Although they are very well groomed; so that might be a clue. They are members of the youth cult called ‘the Mods.’ They have very tidy short hair and wear sharp well-cut Italian suits. Or for ‘leisure’ they wear brightly-coloured pullovers. They also have green Parka coats and ride around on Italian motor scooters.

I don’t think the Mods are gay; but I might be wrong. But there are so many of them, it can’t be possible. The Mods have a rival cult called the ‘Rockers’ who have untidy greasy long hair and wear leather jackets and jeans and ride large motorbikes. The two groups are known to have big battles at seaside towns on holiday weekends.

I don’t think Roger and Perce go out fighting, I’d never seen them with cuts and bruises, until I laid a few of them on the pair myself.

The boys seem pretty respectable. The government decriminalised homosexual acts for men aged twenty-one and over last year so it is perfectly legal for Roger and Perce to be sleeping in the same bed together.

They are mostly good tenants, although they sometimes come home in the early hours and disturb us with their scooters; or they play their music a bit too loud. But, all young people do that; my own sons were the same.

I do have one big problem with them: they don’t pay the rent. Or more accurately, they are late payers, or sometimes they only pay part of what they owe. There is no excuse: they both have good jobs at the John Lewis department store: Roger’s in men’s out-fitting and Perce is in soft furnishings. Between them they earn more than enough to afford the rent I charge.

But, instead of paying rent, they prefer to spend their money on sharp clothes and their motor scooters. I genuinely have lost count of the number of times I have asked them to pay up and the number of broken promises they have made to me.

So, I lost patience with them. They might be twenty-one-year-old adults but they still needed to be taught a lesson in responsibility. All I was asking was that they paid the rent before they spent the rest of their money on their luxuries.

They needed a short sharp shock to pull them up a little, and I knew exactly how I was going to do that.

They are not evil like Sterling, so it would not be right to flog them with the knotted cane I used to rip his backside to shreds. Instead, I collected a stout senior rattan cane from my large collection at school. It was the same one that I used on the five eighteen-year-old rugby players who disgraced the school by getting drunk after a match one weekend. It packs a great punch, especially when I am the one wielding it.

Of course, at school I was only allowed to administer a maximum of six strokes per boy and then only on the seat of his trousers. But in my flats I make the rules, so Roger and Perce were to get twelve each on the bare buttocks.

I gave the boys one last chance to pay me what I was owed. All I got were promises in return; the same as the last time I asked and the time before.

They didn’t seem surprised when I announced I was going to cane them. Nobody in the flats had ever spoken to me about the thrashing Sterling received, but I think my tenants knew what had happened.

I launched into a prepared speech. They could get the cane or they could leave the flats; and whatever they chose to do they would still have to pay me the rent. Leaving the flat was not an option; the law on homosexual acts might have changed, but gays could still be sacked from their jobs or thrown out of their homes. If the boys left my flat they would find it almost impossible to find another place where they could be together.

But, I didn’t want that. I wanted my rent money and if putting a whippy rattan cane across their naked arse cheeks got me that, I would be satisfied.

Meekly, both boys accepted the inevitable. I sent Perce to the kitchen, while I dealt with Roger. I had no idea if either of them had been caned before and I didn’t care. I intended to lay on a sharp dozen cuts that would leave even the most experienced receiver in agony. I was not, as our American cousins are apt to say, blowing smoke here.

Roger could not take his eyes of the cane as I swished a few practice stokes through the air. His trepidation was clear. He was not looking forward to this impending thrashing one little bit. Nervously, he lowered his trousers and pants and bent over the armchair.

He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth as rat-a-tat-tat I swiped six hard stingers across the crown of his buttocks. Then after a pause of twenty seconds to allow him and me to catch our breath, I whipped in another six, this time all in the under curve where the cheeks meet the thighs.

When he rose his eyes were blazing, but he successfully held back the tears. His face was deathly pale, but his neck was as scarlet as his buttocks.

I allowed him to dress and then ordered Perce to change places with him. I had always thought of Perce as a cute little mouse; he was short with dark brown eyes and sticking-out ears. Usually, he had a perpetual smile on his face; but not now.

I don’t know what was going through his head, but unbidden by me, he lowered his trousers and pants and almost threw himself across the chair in his eagerness to offer me his bottom. I had known schoolboys adopt the same attitude; they were arrogant in their belief that nothing I and my whippy cane could do would hurt them. I always disabused them of that idea.

I am pretty sure Perce had never been across a chair before for a caning. I had to instruct him to keep his head low, his bottom high and his legs apart. It took him several attempts before his body was positioned to my satisfaction.

Once he was positioned correctly, I rolled his shirt clear of his bottom. Picking up the cane I swished it a couple of times then stood to his left and gently tapped his pale buttocks. I lifted my arm to shoulder height then let the cane swish hard onto the naked cheeks. Perce gasped as the first stroke landed and he wriggled his bottom.

Perce’s compact but nicely rounded bottom had plenty of give. His chunky buttocks were first compressed by the force of the first blow before springing back as the cane was withdrawn ready for the second strike.

I was still new to the experience of beating boys on their naked bottoms, but I was beginning to see its advantages over caning on the trousers. I could see the strokes as they landed, enabling me to see where they struck, and if I was hitting too hard, or too weakly, to adjust my power.

The punishment on the bare was more painful and of course there was the added humiliation for the boy of having to lower his trousers and present his bottom submissively for the beating.

Perce was unable to contain his distress and gave out a series of loud shouts, not for mercy but simply to release the tension of the mounting agony in his beleaguered backside.

The next swipe propelled a lung-full of breath out of Perce’s mouth, and left him gasping and grunting inarticulately. The cane rose again and landed once more on almost the exact same spot, emptying the lad’s lungs for a second time.

“Last one, boy!” Try to take this one quietly please,” I requested with little sincerity as I cracked a deliberately extra hard stroke down, causing Perce to yell and stand up clutching at his battered bottom. I simply stared as he danced around clutching and kneading the burning flesh of his buttocks.

I brought the two tenants together and lectured them about fiscal responsibility: they must pay my rent. I did not say, but it was implied, that if the money was not forthcoming they would be back over the chair for another thrashing.

….

Roger stared at the ceiling, reliving the events from earlier in the day. If he missed a payment on his motor scooter and delayed buying that Italian suit he so craved, he should be able to pay off his rent arrears. No way did he want to go back over that chair, he thought as he caressed the scars on his buttocks.

Perce beside him was stirring. In his dream, he was in what he imagined was Mr Higgins’s oak-paneled study at the grammar school. The schoolmaster was dressed in an academic gown and he wore a mortar-board on his head. In his hand he swished a cane. Perce, was unbuckling the snake belt of his short grey flannel trousers before lowering them and then his sparkling-white underpants to his ankles, prior to bending forward to touch his toes.

3

Higgins replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and stared through the window into the darkness outside. It was an intriguing idea and it might just work. But, he did not even know the boy; it had nothing to do with him. It was probably best to leave him alone.

The call had been from Professor Ambrose from Brocklehurst University. Higgins had known Ambrose for thirty years or more, since as a boy the professor had been a pupil at St Francis and Higgins a junior master. Higgins could not be certain but he fancied Ambrose might have been the first boy he had ever caned: the first in a very long line of proffered buttocks that stretched across three decades. The very thought of it made Higgins feel old.

Ambrose was now among other things a senior tutor at the university with responsibility for the pastoral wellbeing of students. He had a problem, he had told Higgins in the phone call and it was a problem he felt certain Higgins could solve for him.

It was Baxter, a first-year student who was going off the rails and if drastic action was not taken immediately the eighteen-year-old boy would become a train wreck.

The story was simple; Baxter had arrived at university after a successful career at a very traditional school; Higgins would know the type, Ambrose assured him. He was, of course, referring to St Francis: traditional classes, traditional sports, traditional religion and above all, traditional discipline. But, at university Baxter had let things slip; seduced by the high-life of Brocklehurst he was neglecting his studies by spending too much time in coffee bars and chasing after girls.

Back home, in his small town in Scotland, Baxter’s widowed mother continued to scrimp and save and neglect herself to pay for her son’s university education.

Baxter had one last chance, Ambrose had said. He could re-sit his examinations in two months’ time, but to be able to pass, he would need to knuckle down to some hard work. Baxter needed an incentive; the knowledge of his poor widowed mother’s sufferings would not do the trick. Baxter would not work hard on his own; he lacked self-discipline. That was where Higgins came in. Would he take the boy under his wing and impose the discipline that Baxter lacked?

Universities faced a problem when disciplining students: there was not much they could do. Young people were not legally adults until they reached the age of twenty-one, so university staff acted in ‘loco parentis,’ that is the university stood in for their parents. But, that only went so far: a professor could not give a boy a damn good hiding when he needed it. Ambrose and some of his senior colleagues lamented that the university had no regulation that permitted them to use corporal punishment. If somebody had swished a cane across Baxter’s backside the first time he skipped a tutorial or failed to hand in an essay, he would not be in this mess.

Higgins sympathized with Ambrose. He had married late to a woman twenty years his junior and his youngest son Horatio was still at university. Higgins hoped the boy’s professors would show the same concern for him if he was not performing. Indeed, if Higgins found out Horatio was slacking, he would take the boy across his knee for a bared-bottomed encounter with the hairbrush: twenty years old or not.

Higgins continued to stare through the window, rain was softly falling and soon there would be a heavy downpour. The room had darkened, but he did not switch on a light. In his mind he weighed up the possibilities.

He had an empty room since Sterling had moved out suddenly; he could easily accommodate Baxter. If the boy accepted the new regime, it would not be too difficult to draw up a kind of contract concerning curfews, deadlines for completing homework and general behaviour about drinking and smoking. The penalty for breaking the contract would be corporal punishment. Higgins knew from a lifetime’s career in school-mastering that corporal punishment worked; he had no doubts about that and it would work with Baxter.

Higgins thought about the boy’s widowed mother and the sacrifices she had made for her son. Higgins owed it to her to save the boy. The boy had lacked a father figure growing up; perhaps now, he could be the father that the boy needed.

Yes, he decided, tomorrow he would call Ambrose and say he would take on the case.

Two days later Alexander Baxter, aged eighteen, first-year university student, stood impassively in the front room of Higgins’ flat. His new landlord had just helped him move his belongings from the university hostel. Higgins noted with dismay the boy had a portable gramophone and a number of records, but no books. To Higgins that summed up the boy’s problem.

Higgins eyed the boy, he was only a few months older than the sixth-formers at his school, but he looked as if he had visited from another planet. His expensively-styled hair flopped over his collar and he wore the tightest multi-coloured ‘tank top’ pullover imaginable. His trousers were equally as tight at the waist and across the buttocks, but the legs flared down into ‘bell bottoms’ that left folds of cloth covering his wet-look shoes.

Higgins had a lecture prepared, but the boy was not listening. Baxter had endured an embarrassing meeting with his professor and he already knew the score. He had not been too surprised when the subject of corporal punishment was raised: he was used to feeling the sting of leather across the palms of his hands. He had last received a beating only a few months previously, when in his final week at school he had let his guard down and had been caught smoking. He was a chronic smoker, but was rarely caught. The two-tailed taws was in everyday use at his old school, but he had thought he had left it behind when he moved to university.

He also knew that punishment by leather strap across the palms was almost unheard of in England. Here the preferred method of punishment was three feet of flexible rattan administered with some force across the seat of a boy’s trousers. Baxter did not like the idea of that one little bit.

However, the boy decided, it was all academic. He was not stupid; he knew he was in danger of expulsion. He was letting himself down and, yes, his mother also. He also had a strange feeling he might be letting Prof Ambrose down as well. He did not know why it was but his senior tutor appeared to be taking a strong interest in him. Baxter was not the only slacker student in his year, but he was the only one to be given this last chance.

Higgins completed his lecture.

“Well, Alexander?”

The boy started. He had not been listening. Had the old man asked him a question?

“Were you listening to me?”

Baxter’s blush confirmed he had not.

“Doh!” Higgins was losing patience with the boy. The sooner he spanked his backside black and blue the better.

Higgins had thought about it a lot over the previous two days. The boy needed a new discipline regime to make sure he behaved well and worked hard in future. But, he could not be allowed to get away with his past slacking. He would need to be spanked immediately, so that he understood why he was here and what his failings were.

Higgins had concluded it would be a spanking and not a caning. Higgins believed in the efficacy of corporal punishment and had no compunction in caning the boys at school, but he used a different method at home.

He had always spanked his sons on their bare bottoms while they lay (or in their younger days were held forcibly) across his knees. This was the appropriate way for a loving father to discipline his sons. At school a beating was more bureaucratic; the boys broke a rule and the regulation stated they should be beaten on the bottom with a cane (“on the seat as normally clothed”, as the instruction from the Department of Education had it). In that way the punishment of the boy by the schoolmaster was quite literally at arm’s length. But, a parental spanking was more intimate. It was almost an act of love with father and son in close proximity with the boy’s bared bottom bouncing across the man’s legs.

Higgins wanted to be a father to Baxter, or Alexander as he would call him, and he would treat him like a son from the very start. He had used a very heavy hairbrush on his own sons, but his wife had taken that when she left. Undeterred, he had visited the Co-operative Retail Store that morning and purchased a large oval-shaped clothes brush that would make a very fine substitute.

“I said Alexander that you will have to be spanked. You are to take down your trousers and your underpants and bend across my knee.”

Baxter’s impassive look cracked and Higgins could see the boy had not been prepared for this.

“I thought Professor Ambrose had explained …” Higgins let the sentence tail off.

“Yes, but …” Baxter was no better at completing his sentences.

“Perhaps you need time to think it over. I do not want to make you do anything that you do not agree to. If you want to stay here with me you will have to accept that I am going to spank you on your bare bottom for all your misbehaviour since you came to Brocklehurst. You must also understand that I will use corporal punishment on you in the future if you do not abide by our contract.

“If you do not want to do this, you may leave and return to the university hostel. But, you should know that in all probability you will fail your examinations and be sent down from the university.”

Baxter was perplexed. He understood corporal punishment and had received it many times at school, every boy did, it was that kind of school. Professor Ambrose had told him he would be subjected to it if he continued to break the rules, but he had not been expecting to be punished for his past actions. But, he understood it made sense that he should be.

Yes, he concluded he deserved to be punished, but not in this way. He expected the strap on his hands, or since this was England, the cane across his bum. But, this old man expected him to take down his trousers and pants and bend across his lap so he could spank his bare buttocks like he was eight years old.

Higgins was reasonableness itself. “I can give you until tomorrow morning to make up your mind. Then, you must either take your spanking or leave.”

…

I spent the most fretful night. I did not know what to do and I had no one to turn to. I couldn’t go back to my pals at the varsity and tell them what was happening: I’d be a laughing stock. I’m getting my bare little botty smacked. Wah! Wah! Wah!. I’d never hear the end of it.

I stayed in my room all night. It was a great room, much bigger than at the university hostel, with its own little cooker and wash basin. Higgins was going to charge me the same rent as at the university: it was a great bargain. I’d fallen on my feet, except for the very sore bum I had to suffer.

I unpacked my things. At the bottom of my bag were the pyjamas my mother had bought me on the eve of my departure from home. She said my others were a disgrace and I couldn’t be seen dead in them. I don’t know who she thought would see me in my pyjamas. They were a cheap pair, they were all she could afford, made of flannelette with red stripes. They could have been worse; the last ones she bought for me had designs of football players all over them. I had never worn the new pyjamas. I considered myself ‘grown up’ now and preferred to sleep in only my underpants, even on very cold nights.

As I unpacked the pyjamas I realised how much I missed my mother. She loved me so much and made so many sacrifices for me. And, how had I repaid her? I went out on the town as often as I could and neglected my studies. Soon I would be sent down from the university and the shame of that would break her heart.

It was not that I was unintelligent, I was brighter than average. When I bothered to do any studying I found it quite easy and I scored good grades. The thing was I was lazy: Professor Ambrose had spotted that. I was my own worst enemy; I had no self-discipline.

I stripped off my fashionable clothes and pulled on the pyjama bottoms. The flannelette material was thick and soft. I didn’t think they still made flannelette pyjamas; surely, the fashion was for cool cotton. Then I put on the jacket. It was a bit too big for me and when I glanced at myself in the mirror I looked like the small child I had until recently been. I couldn’t help it and I dissolved into tears.

After that, it was an easy decision to make. I had let my mother down and I had let myself down. I was the luckiest boy alive; I was being given a second chance. The next morning, despite the intense humiliation I would suffer, I would let the old man take me over his knee and spank my bare bum.

I think Higgins was surprised when the next morning I knocked on his door and he opened it to see a remorseful pyjama-clad teenager. The jim-jams symbolised to me that I was still not an adult and I needed to be reminded of that. I also thought somehow they represented my mother; they were the kind of clothes she would expect me to wear; not the fashionable cosmopolitan clothes I wore at university.

As I prepared to knock on the door one of the neighbours came by on the stairs; he was short and mouse-like, with shiny brown eyes and sticking-out ears. He beamed at me and I swear gave a wink as he hurried on his way. Something about him intrigued me and I hoped soon we would get to know each other better.

I did not have to say much to Mr Higgins. Once I told him I accepted his terms he was ready to get down to business. He walked to a sideboard, opened a cupboard and extracted a shiny light brown brush. The look on my face must have told him I had not expected this.

“You are too old for me to spank you with my hand, you wouldn’t feel a thing.” I swear he smiled when he said this. It wasn’t an unkind snarl; he was only stating a fact as he saw it. I had no way of knowing the truth of his statement, despite my beatings at school I had never been spanked on the bottom. My father had died when I was very young and my mother never laid a finger on me; not even when on the many occasions that I was spiteful and disrespectful to her. My Uncle Gordon, exasperated at my bad manners, had once threatened to take his belt to my backside if I did not stop giving my mother grief, but although I continued my shameful behaviour he never carried out his threat. I think my mother may have had a word with him.

Mr Higgins pulled a straight-backed armless dining room chair from beneath a table and placed it heavily in the centre of the room. Then, he sat down and spread his legs by maybe two or three feet. In doing so he had created a perfect platform for me to bend across his lap.

I had been awake half the night visualising this scene. I had determined that I would not make a fuss; I would ‘take it like a man.’ But, now the moment had arrived I was not so sure that I could be brave. The thought of taking down my trousers and exposing my private parts to a stranger (to anyone, really) filled me with horror. And, then to lie across his lap and show him my bare buttocks with the crack and everything was beyond any humiliation I had ever endured in my life.

I had not even started to think about the pain I would suffer. The strap whistling down across the palm of the hand had been agonising and I doubted that a beating on the bottom could be worse.

“Come here Alexander,” Mr Higgins’ tone was gentle and in a way that I couldn’t quite understand, this calmed me.

He reached his hand out and gently took the elbow of my right arm. Before I knew it he had guided me across his lap and I found myself face down staring at a dusty and slightly worn carpet. My feet were a little above the ground and my middle was resting on the plateau Mr Higgins had created with his open legs.

Instinctively, I tried to cover my buttocks with my hand, but found that Mr Higgins had positioned me so far forward that it was physically impossible for me to do this. I was soon to discover that Mr Higgins was an expert spanker and he knew how to place a naughty boy across his knees for maximum impact.

I was still wearing my pyjama bottoms, but any hope I retained that this would not by a spanking on the bare was dashed when he gripped the elasticated waist of my pyjama bottoms and slowly eased them down over my buttocks as far as my thighs. Then he raised my jacket away from the target area so that I was naked from my shoulders to almost my knees. I did not realise it at the time, but my new master had deliberately spared me the humiliation of taking down my trousers and exposing my genitals to him.

I felt a movement in Mr Higgins’ body: he was making his final preparations. Then: I had never experienced such a concentration of pain in my life. The brush crashed down into the centre of my left buttock; I exhaled so quickly that it seemed that I had no more breath in my body. Before I could gulp fresh air into my lungs, the brush landed with equal ferocity on my right buttock. Then it hit the left cheek again; and then the right. Then the left. Over and over again, he whacked his brush into my fleshy globes. There was no let-up; he set up a steady rhythm, spanking each cheek on and on.

My legs kicked out involuntarily and I wriggled my body to the left and right. I must have looked as if I was trying to do the crawl stroke at swimming. But, I was going nowhere: Mr Higgins had me securely gripped around the waist and the angle of my upper body across his knee was so acute that I had no means of escape. I had no choice: I had to lie there face down, bared bottom high, and let Mr Higgins spank the living daylights out of me. When he was satisfied I had suffered enough, and only then, would he release me.

I don’t know how many times he whacked that heavy brush into my buttocks but when it was eventually over and, back in my room, I inspected the damage in the mirror, I could see every square inch of my buttocks from the top where the spine is, across the fleshy globes, into the under curves, where the cheeks meet the thighs and the tops of the thighs themselves, were a mass of dark blue and mauve bruises. At the edges of the cheeks I could clearly see the oval shape of the brush imprinted into my flesh.

From the first whack to a long time after the final wallop hit home I was gagging for breath. I think the fact that I was gasping for air stopped me yelling and screaming with the pain. I was crying copious tears. I had never cried when I got the strap: boys never did. We were allowed to yelp with the pain; that was something we could not control, but any boy who blubbed would have been treated badly. The boys would have called them ‘girls.’ or even something much worse.

Eventually, Mr Higgins released his grip and allowed me to stand. He averted his eyes, so as not to see my cock, as I tugged my pyjama bottoms up. The pain was intense, but even as I stood hopping from foot to foot in front of the man who had punished me, it was turning to a throb that very soon would become a warm glow. I had suffered one heck of a spanking, but Mr Higgins was not a brutal man.

He smiled as I rubbed away at my bum.

“Will I need to do that again?” It was a gentle question. He did not seem to be a demented, angry man.

“No, Sir,” I sniffed. I meant it too. The slate had been wiped clean. I had been punished for all my misdemeanours since I had arrived at Brocklehurst. It was now up to me. Once I had been given time to recover from my spanking Mr Higgins and I sat down (me, gingerly) to agree a contract of behaviour. If Mr Higgins had cause to assault my backside again, I would only have myself to blame.

 

Other stories you might like.

Boy at the photocopier

The casting couch

The missed curfew

 

More stories from Charles Hamilton II are on the MMSA website

Charles Hamilton the Second

charleshamiltonthesecond@gmail.com