supplicium post mortem

When I write the phrase little chat, it is usually in upper case, Little Chat. I think you already know what that means. It is probably time I attribute the phrase to its originator. Mark first used, upper case, early in our correspondence, but I incorrectly remember hearing it first in a vignette he wrote for me.

Our email correspondence (until he moved to Gotham) stretches to almost a thousand emails each, almost all of them saved individually in txt files with names like “fmark232.txt” [the 232nd email from Mark to me] or “tomark33″ [my 33rd email to Mark]. As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a reference amongst all that, especially 15 years after the fact.

Tonight I was searching for the text of this Little Chat vignette, which I did using the Search function on my PC. It turned up many emails, and the first one I opened turned out to be the one in which he confessed that he loved me. I barely remember this email, but encountering it again absolutely slayed me. I won’t quote it. My eyes are still swollen.

I did eventually find Mark’s vignette and have posted it below as well as under the Stories tab. The scenario was Mark and Casey at the Lewises. This was an alternate reality to Home School, one we only played a few times. The idea was that Mark and Casey had run away from the Orphanage and had been found and adopted by the Perfect People (Dr. & Mrs. Lewis). I later (or was it earlier?) wrote a companion piece to his vignette, which I also posted under the Stories tab. After reading them both, I feel his is much better: more direct, less fussy and complicated, more spontaneous and full of heart. Looking at both scenarios from far away, I would say that we never lived or much played the letter of them, but the mood and heart of them were a constant feature of our life together, especially Mr. Prior’s life with Casey.

Without further ado, then, here is Mark’s piece, Wednesdays.

Wednesdays

by Mark Hastings

Sundays are for Regulars, for weekly cleaning.  Sundays are always spent together, at the Lewises.  Casey and Mark go to bed sore and peaceful and clean and warm.  Whole.  Sundays are a deep rich blue, the smell of dark polished wood, a full stomach and a feeling of belonging.

By Wednesday, that’s worn off a little.  Mr. Lewis is fond of saying, as he shaves on Wednesday morning, that Wednesday is the worst day of the week. Equidistant from the comfort of weekend.  Neither the residual freshness of Tuesday, or the slight anticipation of Thursday.  Nothing but acres of dullness.  Mrs. Lewis has Commitments on Wednesdays, so supper is usually something cold.  Mark and Casey both have School things that they hate. For Mark, it’s morning gym, ninety minutes of effort with the school Sergeant’s swagger stick flailing its response to slackness, and the inevitability of at least one vault-horse caning, ‘poer incurriger les otters’.   For Casey, double Latin in the afternoon with the psychotically sarcastic Mr. Whitworth, whose greatest pleasure is to decline irregular verbs in time with his strap-strokes, and who makes a virtue of leathering girls just as hard as boys.  Out in front of the class, but facing towards your peers so they are spared the worst witness of unprotected strapping, and can better concentrate on construe.

Mark has learned to avoid the Wednesday vault-horse, and Casey the mid-week strap, because on Wednesday evenings they have their “Little Chat”.

The children do the dishes after supper, while Mr. Lewis goes to his study, and Mrs. Lewis rests up.  There is a sense of anticipation, although it isn’t the edginess of Sunday, before the Regulars, because often a Little Chat is just that.  Even so, the dishes get done well, and quietly, on the whole, on Wednesdays.  Mark and Casey smarten themselves up, and jaunt carefully along the downstairs corridor to the study.  Sometimes Mrs. Lewis joins them, sometimes not.

Little Chats are lucky-dippy.  In the months since Casey’s arrival they have ranged from a particularly uncomfortable interview over a broken ornament (Casey), cleverly replaced on its shelf (Mark) and not discovered broken for some time afterwards (Mrs. Lewis), to a riotous game of Racing Demon in which Mr. Lewis was heard to swear when Casey stole his Ace of Spades, was sent to the corner by his family and threatened with a very hard whacking by Mark if he ever did it again.  On average, one or both of the Lewises feel that one or both of the children would benefit from a little additional discipline perhaps one week in two.

Little Chat discipline is always the same – slipper, paddle or hand, administered in traditional manner, across the knee of the parent in the clock-ticky quiet of Mr. Lewis’s study.  It’s very different from Regulars. Canes, birches, crops and straps are banned.  Punishments are measured in minutes, rather than strokes.  Usually either a Quin, being–as Casey might explain–five minutes, or a Dix, being ten.  Mark hates Dixes, with a passion, especially when they’re paddle, and administered by Mrs. Lewis. Casey has mixed feelings about the whacking, but she loves the closeness and warmth of Little Chats, the fire glowing orange while the wind blows white outside on winter Wednesdays.

So, Wednesdays are made red, a smell of incense, a little adventure, and fun.

Think you?

Last week I was fortunate to visit the Morgan Library and Museum, which has recently reopened after an impressive renovation.

A complex of buildings in the heart of New York City, The Morgan Library & Museum began as the private library of financier Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), one of the preeminent collectors and cultural benefactors in the United States…Mr. Morgan’s library, as it was known in his lifetime, was built between 1902 and 1906 adjacent to his New York residence at Madison Avenue and 36th Street.¹

To my knowledge Mr. Morgan is no relation of mine, but I can’t claim to have researched the genealogy. Any anyway, the point is the dyed-in-the-wool sexiness of this museum! The main part of the museum is clean, well-lit, and modern, but you can also walk through a devastatingly sexy trio of rooms in the 36th street building.

Let us begin with Mr. Morgan’s library. When I entered this room, I felt the opening of pores, the hunger, the sigh of breath that come upon me when I enter beautiful, old buildings of an academic and/or ecclesiastical character. The British Museum Library, for instance. The Bodleian, the 42nd street reading room, not to mention any number of churches (recently, for instance, St. Vincent Ferrer, where I went to hear a lecture on the “vices and virtues” of the New Atheism). Readers who share my penchant for libraries will want to acquire this bit of crack: The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World. The guard inside Mr. Morgan’s library was delighted to answer my questions about how one moved between the levels. He pointed out the shelves which were actually secret-compartment doors concealing staircases. Among many other things, the Morgan has quite a collection of Bibles, including a Coverdale Bible. This room so impressed me that I let slip to my companion, an older lady from church, that the room was like porn to me. I’m not sure if the silent look she gave me was sympathy or distress.

Moving around the Rotunda, we enter a scrumptious little room called the Librarian’s Office (click for bigger). It was impossible not to imagine being sent there, a misbehaving young visitor, and made to sit still in that red armchair while the Librarian completed his or her paperwork. Then, I am afraid the red sofa would come into use one way or another. There was more than enough room here to swing a cane, a strap, or any implement the Librarian might keep for such occasions.

Finally, we enter Mr. Morgan’s study (further tour here, which you really must visit if only to see the desk). This room so overcame me that I was forced to sit down and try to regain my equilibrium. Forget photos of scantily clad men. Forget tgi drawings, videos, stories, etc. Nothing–and I mean nothing–could have been sexier to me at that moment than this high-ceilinged, red-wallpapered, book-lined, stain-glass-window-decorated, wooden-furniture filled study. My friend and I rested on an upholstered bench which had been set before the fireplace. I have absolutely no idea what she was thinking about, or could possibly have been thinking about besides what I was thinking about, viz. being summoned to this study and dealt with by Mr. Morgan (uncle? father? grandfather?) in the most traditional manner. Later, I distracted myself by perusing the shelves, which appeared to focus on fiction, including many early (first?) editions of Dickens. The only thought I felt able to share with my friend was a celebration of the 19th century novel. They were long! Very long! As novels ought to be. So there.

Afterwards, my friend and I had a bite to eat and got a little drunk in the cafe. We wound up talking until closing time. She told me that although our church is brilliant in every way, she did not think I was going to find a suitable man there. I agreed heartily, though probably not for the reasons she had in mind. Conversation eventually degenerated into talking about M. It reminded me how very much he is missed, still, by people besides me.

But! The Morgan Library=kinky destination! If I ever have the pleasure of entertaining like-minded kinksters in town, I know where I will take you.

p.s. I realize I forgot to say that Jessica’s post Library Tales got me thinking about this outing and thus inspired the post. Thanks, Jessica!

The American Schoolhouse—ah, where to start? Luckily, Graham already has started us off along these delectable lines, noting, among other things, that the one-room schoolhouse of American lore was in some respects gender-neutral. Men and women whacked boys and girls, usually in full view of all (due to constraints of the one room).

Graham mentioned two key examples: Tom Sawyer (in its several forms and adaptations) and Little House on the Prairie (books, but especially the TV series). Little House fashioned the imagination of many, including yours truly, and continues to fashion young minds today if reports out of the Kinky House are to be believed.

illustration by Mercer Mayer

I’d offer a couple more: The Great Brain, in which the title character gets paddled for something he didn’t do, memorably drawn by Mercer Mayer and less memorably portrayed by Jimmy Osmond in the 1978 tv movie (if anyone has a link to this video, please speak up, as I can’t find the scene in the parts of the film uploaded to u-tubby). This paddling is a great scene, even though I personally dislike the paddle as an implement (I find it rather brutish and blunt; unsubtle). It’s enjoyable because a) the victim, Tom, is such an insufferable manipulator most of the time, I don’t mind seeing him whacked unfairly; b) Tom is brave, refusing to give his tormentor, Mr. Standish, the satisfaction of seeing him cry. As narrated by Tom’s brother:

I felt tears come into my eyes as I watched Mr. Standish give Tom ten hard whacks with the paddle. The tears weren’t for the pain I knew Tom was suffering. I knew my brother could stand pain like an Indian without crying. The tears were for the humiliation I knew Tom was enduring (The Great Brain, 121).

c) Tom gets revenge on Mr. Standish, which appealed to me as a young reader, the rebel against unjust authority. But, d) ultimately Tom’s revenge is revealed as cruel and callous, earning a terrific rebuke from Tom’s father:

“I have never laid a hand on you,” Papa said, breathing heavily, “but right at this moment if I had that paddle, I’m afraid I would give you a paddling that would make the one you got from Mr. Standish seem like patty-cakes” (136-7).

I was absorbed for some time in imagining that if-statement.

From the children’s book shelves we find If You Lived in Colonial Times ¹ by Ann McGovern. I would direct the reader to page 24 “What happened if you didn’t behave in school.”

I was lucky enough once to get a first-hand encounter with the one-room schoolhouse. I grew up within field-trip distance of the Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village, which is a gigantic outdoor museum of bygone American life. People are dressed in 19th century garb, and you can make butter like they did back in the day, see men forge horse shoes, etc. There is also a one-room schoolhouse, the Scotch Settlement School. When I was in fourth grade (age 9) my class got to spend a day in it.

At that age I was in a mixed 4th and 5th grade class of about 30 kids taught by a husband/wife team. I’ll call them Mr. & Mrs. Sweet because we all adored them. They were perfectly firm and took no nonsense, but they valued fun and unconventional methods. We got to go on more field trips than any of the other classes; they’d give us long recesses when we got cagey in the winter; they kept all sorts of live animals in the room; they’d tear up your math book and skip you ahead if they thought you could handle it; they read aloud to us regularly; and they had a carpeted claw-foot bathtub, shaded by a rainbow umbrella, where you could go and read books when you’d finished your assignments.

Mr. and Mrs. Sweet also had a paddle on the wall of their classroom. This disconcerted me. As previously discussed, corporal punishment was not used at my school (although it was legal in the state), but most of us got it at home. I just didn’t know how to feel about the fact that my favorite teachers kept a paddle on the wall, and, worse, would jocularly (?) threaten kids with it from time to time. (e.g. kid getting wild would be asked sternly: Do you want a spankin’? To which the only answer was a fervent shaking of the head no.) What’s more, this paddle was covered in signatures, supposedly the signatures of those who’d been whacked with it.  The subject was far too serious for me, at age 9, to have any perspective on the Sweets’ possible tongue-in-cheek threats.

Scotch Settlement School Greenfield Village

Still with me? Right, the schoolhouse: it is winter of fourth grade and we are going to spend a day having school at Greenfield Village. We will have free dress (no uniforms), and period costumes are encouraged. Costumes!?! I wore one of my Little House on the Prairie outfits, and even better, all the other kids made an effort, and Mr. & Mrs. Sweet were wearing costumes, too! OMG!!!!!!

All morning we sat at double desks, wrote on slates, did lessons out the McGuffey Reader, and got to sample the full range of old-fashioned responses to incorrect answers and misbehavior: writing lines on the blackboard, the dunce cap, holding books out in front of you, and—yes—whipping! This is where I got a little confused about how real it all was. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, with the deep thespian instinct of all good teachers, introduced the punishments one by one, beginning with the mildest, and working up to the whipping. They looked for victims, choosing the typically naughty kids in the class, robust kids, kids who would play along. When it came time for the first whipping, Mr. Sweet put on his gravest scowl, selected a long switch from the supply, and wordlessly beckoned the naughty boy to follow him. They exited behind the blackboard wall.

The Scotch Settlement School at Greenfield Village

[When you entered the schoolhouse, there was a row of pegs for hanging your cloaks, and on each side a doorway leading to the schoolroom itself. It was to this "cloakroom" that Mr. Sweet & boy repaired.]

A hush fell over the class and then we heard it: the unmistakable sounds of a switch being applied. Thwick… thwick… “Ow!” the boy cried out plaintively. Thwick-ow! Thwick-ow!! Thwick-thwick-thwick! Sobs.

Can you imagine my uncertainty and fear?

great pic of the hooks by Devonhaupt

Soon Mr. Sweet emerged, conducting the boy by the collar. The class found this risible, but Mr. Sweet merely glared at us and deposited the boy into the corner, where he continued wiping his eyes. The twitters in the class probably communicated to Mr. and Mrs. Sweet that we were with them, but also possibly that not all of us were sure how real the performance was. I, for one, was starting to feel sick to my stomach. My seatmate, Frances (the best friend of my friend) assured me it was just pretend. But wasn’t the boy crying? I asked. His face was red. Frances wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t long before Mrs. Sweet had to whip someone. They, too, were taken off to the cloakroom and subjected to the same painful treatment. They, too, emerged rubbing their eyes. This was quickly becoming a very anxious field trip for me. I wondered when we’d get to go visit the crafts people, or have recess. As the morning wore on and more punishments were meted out, kids started to vie with one another to get punished, eager for the excitement and attention. Everyone was getting it, bad kids, good kids. You didn’t even have to misbehave for the Sweets to find a reason to include you in the drama. Frances told me not to worry; it wouldn’t be bad if I got in trouble. But I was worrying, and worrying all the more because the Sweets were running out of victims. The majority of the class had got in some kind of trouble or another. I sat very quietly at my desk and worked very hard on my slate.

The whipping reached a climax with the execution of a girl called Beth, who was generally well-behaved and a great favorite of Mr. Sweet. He summoned her to the cloakroom with thespian gravitas, we heard the requisite sounds, but when they emerged, she had her hands over her face—to conceal her passionate tears? or… was it to conceal her laughter? For Mr. Sweet was holding a broken switch aloft for the whole class to see. He wore an expression of disgust and shock, that this girl had been so very bad that she had actually broken the switch! The schoolroom exploded in laughter. If there had been a curtain, it would have fallen.

It was probably then that I began to cotton on, but unfortunately, it was time for recess, lunch, and touring the rest of Greenfield Village. Beth, who was a trustworthy friend, later revealed the stagecraft (whacking the coats, with the kids crying out).

I can’t tell you how much I would like to have a second chance at that day. Or how much I’d like to take some of my former students on such a field trip. Or even, how much I’d like to try it on with various friends who could be relied upon to rustle up authentic costumes, and swot up authentic practices. Wonder what it would take to book a field trip there today…

Norman Rockwell's classic illustration for Tom Sawyer

¹ This book is the antecedent for an in-joke M and I had. Once when we were staying at an all-inclusive resort in Jamaica, I accidentally got smashed before lunchtime on Brandy Alexanders. We retired to our room where I (uncharacteristically) took off all my clothes, sprawled across the bed, and (reportedly) said: Tell me about the colonial days! before passing out. M teased me with this thereafter whenever a drink started to go to my head. Other people took it as an amusing, drunken remark, but he and I knew I had been asking him to tell me about birching of school children in the American colonies. lol.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine. This friend, like Abel (as he was forced to confess in his inspiring post on the same topic), was a teenager during the 1980s, and, also like Abel, is kinky today. (Imagine!) This friend of mine was raised by fairly straight-laced, waspy parents. Nudity was unknown beyond toddler-hood, and the facts of life were discussed in a way that tried to communicate neutral acceptance, as was the custom, but could never quite conceal her parents’ embarrassment and shame.  There was an excruciating episode–which I will not recount in detail because if you heard it you would have to pull out all of your teeth with pliers–surrounding her audition for a professional production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July. She was auditioning for the part of a pert, over-sophisticated girl whose lines included the words masturbating and cunnilingus. My friend’s parents didn’t really want her to say these words, so they talked the director into allowing her to substitute euphemisms (“Playing with himself” and “uh…..”). However, they also had to explain to her why this change was happening, and this involved explaining what those words meant. This is where I will draw a veil over the episode to save us all the need for Mind Bleach. Needless to say, although she made it to the final call-back, she was not cast in the role.

That was just background for you. I could tell you more stories along similar lines, but we do all need to eat today. Let me tell you instead about my friend’s first sight of a porn magazine. She was sleeping over at her best friend’s house (let us call this best friend Frances). This would have been around 5th grade (age 10-ish). Up at the top of the coat closet, Frances’s dad had a stash of Penthouse. My friend got only a glimpse of this periodical because she reacted pretty much as Poppy described here. (Such a great post, by the way!) This encounter with Frances’s dad’s Penthouse extinguished any interest my friend had in pornography. Thus, my friend looked to mainstream fiction, stage, and film for things to think about while falling asleep at night.

Fast forward to the late 1980’s when my friend was just starting college. Her mother was at this time going through a kind of rebirth, emerging  from a long, debilitating depression occasioned by divorce. As my friend discovered one day whilst poking through her mother’s bedside table, this rebirth apparently included a sexual revolution. Because in this bedside table, my friend found some extraordinary volumes. One, Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Two, a paperback called Venus in the Country, by Anonymous. There were a couple of other books along these lines, but my friend can’t remember the titles.

Now, you may well throw up a little in your mouth at the idea of finding your mother’s secret erotica stash. You might also writhe in agony imagining my friend’s discovery that her erstwhile euphemism-toting mama was a closet tgi enthusiast. But my friend, through some self-protective twist of psychology (or psychosis) managed to close her eyes to the source of these paperbacks and merely borrow them, one at a time, on the sly to peruse in her bedroom with the door locked. When my friend had to put the books back in place, she merely pretended she wasn’t doing what she was doing. Mentally, she went on a little vacation when it came time to borrow or return these volumes, which she did many times at the end of the 1980s. I guess she had a plentiful supply of mind bleach and no qualms about using it.

You may well ask why my friend did not simply jot down the titles and go buy copies for herself. Please understand: this would have been dirty. My friend would never have been able, then, to bring herself to purchase erotica in a store (Amazon.com did not yet exist). And to possess such books, to have them staring at her all the time from inside her own bedside table? Grody! Grody to the Max, in the parlance of the 1980s. My friend could only enjoy these books (thoroughly enjoy them) because they would not be there staring her in the face the next morning. She enjoyed them because they lived elsewhere.

And oh, did she enjoy them. The Sleeping Beauty series took her already wavy imagination and twisted it into tight kinks. And the quasi-Victorian compositions by Anonymous, where to begin? A commentator on Amazon says this of Venus in the Coutry:

I have owned this book for years having stolen it from my father’s dresser when I was a teenager. It is full of non-stop sexual encounters which seem to focus on the need to educate young maidens in the ways of the world.

My friend’s memory was hazy (when I interviewed her for this post) about the plots of these books by Anonymous. She remembers one in epistolary form (possibly the aforementioned Venus). It featured a household where the mistress took delight in corrupting the young girls who came into her service. Their bedrooms were equipped with peepholes, and early on the mistress arranged to catch some young servant pleasuring herself. The poor girl was hauled before the mistress, who threatened to send her back to her parents with a full explanation of her misconduct. The girl begged mercy, and the mistress granted it, but on two conditions: one, that she submit to an exemplary chastisement at the mistress’s hands; and two, that she submit to regular inspection to ensure she never do such a thing again. The poor girl agreed.

The inspection, to save the modesty both of the girl and of the inspector, would be done anonymously. The girl would go into the cellar and bend forward with her head and torso inside the dumb-waiter. The hatch would be lowered and locked across her waist, holding her firmly in place. Shortly, someone would come along, adjust her clothing, and perform the necessary inspection, which more often than not became an opportunity for sensitizing the girl to all of her exposed parts. The girl typically found herself in such a state after the inspections (by she knew not whom) that she was forced to repair to her chamber as quickly as possible to relieve the tension (all of which the mistress observed, delighted, through peepholes).

My friend also recounted a most satisfactory scene in which the mistress permitted her close friend (and governor at a reformatory) to conduct the inspection. This scene involved use of “the school spanking strap” as well as buggery, and afterwords, the girl was taken away, destined for the reformatory or the white-slave markets, my friend could not recall precisely which.

Of course, in later years my friend became more comfortable with erotic literature and acquired a respectable library of her own, but, she told me, she mourns some of those volumes from the unmentionable bedside table, since she cannot recall their titles, and since Venus in the Country, at least, is not readily available.

I told my friend that such lost classics are the spice of life, even more delightful through the confusion of nostalgia and likely improved by the imagination. Upon reflection, she rather agreed.

What about you? What are your Lost Classics?

My first and only encounter with a hostile authority (in scene) came during my first visit to Englandland. I stayed with M for three weeks. It was our third visit, in the sixth month of knowing each other. We played a lot that trip in the voracious way that you do when you are just starting to play. The setting was still “College” (standard issue English Public School, co-ed), and RP was making inroads with his relationship to Casey, as TL was with Mark. There was an exploration of implements, and even, sometime during the visit, experimentation with That Thing (a first for both of us, and a whole other story). M was living in a small, rented flat and working his corporate job during the day. I was mooching around, attempting to write (mostly unsuccessfully), and pretty much waiting for him to get home in the evenings so we could be together.

The scene in question arose out of some joint story-telling about a certain unpleasant prefect in the House by the name of Martin Halstead. Arrogant, sadistic, scornful, he was not to be trifled with. Via some confusion on my part about the way the hot-water storage worked in that flat, Casey managed to get on the wrong side of Halstead by using up all the hot water one morning before he got to have his bath. More out-of-scene storytelling floated the idea of being “sprung” into a scene first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to this, but I wasn’t against trying. I think I didn’t know if he’d actually go through with it.

But he did.

Malcolm McDowell's character in If never beat anyone, but he looks like Halstead here.

Early morning, I found myself awakened by a very nasty specimen in College school uniform. Martin Halstead demanded that I report to the Houseroom in full uniform in five minutes. Exit.

I hauled myself from sleep, feeling 1) a combination of scared/excited that this scene was actually happening, and 2) violated, because I’d been descended on when I was asleep, wholly unprotected. At any rate, I put on Casey’s preferred uniform (gray trousers, blazer, tie) and reported to the Houseroom.

There Halstead lit into me.

MH (with profound scorn): Just what do you imagine you’re wearing, girl?

cdm: My uniform.

MH (with even greater scorn): Girls at this school wear skirts.

cdm: We’re allowed to wear the boys’ uniform, too!

MH (witheringly): Go and change. Now. And be quick about it unless you want more than you’re already getting.

I/she went off and changed, feeling uneasy and slightly gross. Not only did a skirt afford only one layer of protection, but it also made it much easier for a creep like Martin Halstead to… I wasn’t sure what. I/she was also incensed at the injustice of it. Girls were allowed to wear the boys’ uniform. It was perfectly legal, and here he was saying I couldn’t do it! I have a tendency to get overwrought about injustice I am powerless to affect. This is why torture films, like the spate of political dramas that came out in the 1980s about South Africa and South America, squicked me. Here was Martin Halstead already demonstrating his unjust authority, and the scene had not even properly begun. I felt desperate.

I returned to the Houseroom, feeling under-dressed in skirt and gray knee-socks. Halstead delivered a searingly condescending ticking-off about my insolence at having used his bath water (as if water were reserved). I needed taking down a peg, he declared. And, he informed me, that was precisely what he intended to do.

from "The Moral Reformers"

I should say that this was in most respects an authentic prefectorial scene. School literature was full of these kinds of despots, as was M’s actual Public School. By Kipling’s standards, Martin Halstead was a pussycat. Up until this moment, I had loved reading stories like this, chapters like “The Moral Reformers” in Stalky, or even the war with Flashman in Tom Brown. Now that it was happening, however, it was having a very different effect. It was pushing my powerless/injustice buttons and winding me up dangerously.

Then the sentence: Halstead announced I would be receiving 18 strokes of the cane. I can’t remember the arithmetic, but this chilled me to the bone. I had never before taken that much in one go. The most I’d ever taken was nine (I think, though possibly 12). But what really filled me with dread was the character I was facing. Martin Halstead was going to hit as hard as he could. He cared nothing for my feelings. Nothing would make him back off. He hated me and wanted to see me suffer. He intended to break me.

I removed my jacket as instructed and stood before the Houseroom table. I don’t remember now whether he announced the protection then or half-way through, but I was to get nine over underpants and nine unprotected. It was unheard-of in severity. Also, the lack of protection struck me as obscene. Here I was a 5th form girl with this Upper 6th form boy, and he proposed to cane me unprotected, without witnesses? There was no arguing with him, however; and perhaps I was beyond arguing. I was moving rapidly into survival mode.

I bent over, and the first stroke confirmed my suspicion that there would be no holds barred. It was uncompromisingly hard, and it was delivered with complete hostility. It was by far the hardest whacking I had ever received.

I don’t remember the stroke-by-stroke details (this was almost 15 years ago now), but I remember that I stayed in place; and I remember that my body was yelping involuntarily through most of the second half. What I remember most is what happened to me mentally. Pushed to my limit, I found myself very calm, and very cold. I was a million miles away from crying, breaking, or even actually caring. Under attack, I retreated into a concentration-camp-like deadness. I could never win in this situation; I could only hope to survive it intact. And the only way to keep myself intact was to hide that self very far away. My body might have been yelling, but the real me—the real Casey—was not there. This was happening to someone else, someone not-us. Martin Halstead got his licks, but he didn’t get us. He would never touch  us.

When it was over and I stood up, I think he was disappointed. I was utterly dry-eyed, neutral, and stony faced. Robotically, I gave the replies he wanted. I only pretended to look him in the eye when he demanded it. He did his best at a devastating after-jaw, but eventually he dismissed me.

Unperturbed, I left the Houseroom. And Casey, wearing her entire uniform—blazer, shoes, and all—got back into bed and crawled under the covers, where she stayed most of the morning in a kind of suspended animation.

I think M kissed me goodbye before leaving for work, and I think I faked it enough to reassure him. I can’t remember very well.

Later in the morning, Casey got up, and I say Casey because the adult me was nowhere to be found. She had taken charge and no amount of pulling myself together could have ejected her. Casey, still stony, got up and wrote a long and measured letter to Dr. Malcolm (the Headmaster) registering a formal complaint about what had happened that morning. She was well aware that complaining wasn’t Done. She did not care. At this point, she took a perverse pleasure in violating School Practice.

The thrust of her complaint was that it had been unseemly for Halstead to have caned her unprotected without any witnesses. She also argued that, while she may have deserved punishment, the punishment given was out of proportion to the crime, and that a common understanding of uniform had been contradicted. She appealed to Dr. Malcolm to uphold justice.

She and I went out later, around the time M was due home, so that he could find her letter and figure out what to do about it. I seem to remember later that evening (right after we got back, or later?) Casey being summoned to see Mr. Prior. She went, still dead-in-heart, figuring he, too, could do whatever he wanted to her. She was beyond caring.

But Mr. Prior was no Martin Halstead. He was distressed to have learned what had happened. In fact, he informed her, Martin Halstead had been stripped of his prefect status. He would not be tormenting anyone else. Casey, gobsmacked. Furthermore, Mr. Prior wanted to apologize personally to Casey, for having failed to keep a sufficient eye on her. It shouldn’t have happened, he told her. It wouldn’t again.

This was not the end of the trip, and we played many more scenes, though none that hostile or that severe—not then, and not, that I recall, ever (at least with me bottoming). There wasn’t any blame on either side for this scene, but we both learned something about me, and about the ice-cold survival instinct I appeared to possess.

I have read a lot, then and today, from people who achieve a kind of release or catharsis from very hard scenes, from being taken beyond their limits. It always sounds appealing in theory, but M and I both learned in that early scene that it would never work that way with me. He, as a bottom, had cravings to be pushed like that, but as a top, he concluded that a) I would never respond that way; I would merely go dead; and b) if by some extraordinary action I ever was pushed that far, the results would be utterly destructive.

I know many people are different from me in this regard, but knowing this about myself has saved me from thinking I might enjoy playing with hostile authority. Despite having organized myself around it as a child, it was, and still is, a place with nothing but damage to offer me.

And connected with this—in my retrospective mind—is RP’s instinct, sharpened over time, generally to give Casey less than she asked for. She had, and has, an enormously provocative streak, and in the beginning he sometimes mistook it for a request for lots of whacking. As previously discussed, there were times in that first year when she would bring home a pile of dockets from an absolute train-wreck of a day. Pretty soon, he cottoned on to the fact that this was an expression of anger, a self-destructive impulse, like her impulse to break things or tear up her punishment book. Pretty soon he got to the point where he would leaf through her pile of dockets, chuck them aside, and proceed to deal moderately but non-legalistically with her, giving her just enough to stop the downward spiral and not a touch more. Sometimes he refused altogether to whack her and would simply grab her and hug her against her angry will.

Where, dear Lord, is another man like this?

My childhood tgi fantasies tended to revolve around hostile authorities, which is why I liked The Orphanage so much. The orphanage in my mind evolved out of my infatuations with Annie (as experienced in the Broadway musical), Noel Streatfeild’s Thursday’s Child, Oliver Twist, Daddy Long Legs, A Little Princess, plus any other orphanage I could find in the pages of literature.

A notable exception was Mandy, by Julie Edwards (Julie Andrews). Mandy imprisoned my imagination and my heart, but on some level made me uneasy, perhaps because it was in fact closer to me than the hostile authority orphanage. Mandy is about an orphan (named Mandy!) who has lived her whole life in a small, kind, homey orphanage. She’s allowed freedoms, has friends, and is beloved by the orphanage matron. But, she longs irrationally for something else. She climbs over the orphanage wall, finds a cottage in the woods, and secretly begins fixing it up. Long story short, in a moment of crisis, she is rescued by the landowner on whose property the cottage stands (a man on a horse, no less) and taken to recover at his big house. The man and his wife (?) fall for her. Then she gets better and goes back to the orphanage. Except now, even though she’s back with her friends and people who love her, she misses the man and his wife. It’s enormously conflicted and sad. Eventually, they adopt her. Mandy pressed somehow on a loneliness I felt as a child, even though I was growing up within a loving, caring family. In many ways, I was unable to deal with this feeling. The hostile orphanage was easier.

My orphanage (which I imagined most nights while falling asleep, which I attempted to draw in my notebooks) was called St. Peter’s. It was a special admissions type place. I (my character, whose name varied) was brought there one dark, rainy night by a priest of slight acquaintance. My mother had been an actress (the real kind, not an “actress”) but had died and left me alone, à la Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. This priest had presided over the funeral and out of pity brought me to St. Peter’s, knowing of its sterling reputation. I was about nine.

This orphanage was run by a grossly exaggerated and fictionalized version of Mrs. R, my children’s theater director, with the other children as avatars of my children’s theater friends. And in fact the children at this orphanage were chosen for their talents, and Matron made money taking us around and having us perform for people. So, even though we lived a horrible, hard life and had to scrub floors and do every kind of difficult chore and were subject to the meanest discipline, after dinner every night we were sent to the dining room and told to get on with our rehearsals. We kids organized our own shows and practiced them together. Sure, there might be rivalries amongst us, but we were absolutely united against the orphanage authorities: Matron; her scary (and retarded) brother, Jack; and the other people in her employ, who could also punish us as they chose.

There was of course a Bench at the orphanage, but you could be whacked at any time for any reason. We comforted each other in our misery and always—always—had our minds on the future when we would Run Away. Of course we would fail many times, and be severely punished for our efforts, but one day, my cadre and I would make it. We would escape, and after a period of thrilling, Faginesque adventures in The City (which would naturally include theatricals), I would happen upon the Perfect People, who would adopt me.

The promise of the Perfect People was essential, but my fantasies rarely left the orphanage. Something about the harshness and despair, coupled with the camaraderie and resistance comforted me. The dynamic with authority was important. You couldn’t win against Matron, not openly, so your only option was to resist her internally, to obey her, but not in your heart, to pretend compliance while secretly plotting your escape. The hostile authority was intoxicating for a Good Girl like me, naturally. As a Good Girl, I depended slavishly on the good opinion of the authority, unless of course the authority was a Bad Authority. Then, I could resist it, disobey it, undermine it, hate it. No wonder the orphanage was like crack to me. There I could transgress, break bounds, get into trouble and still be heroic and good. There, punishment was a badge of nobility. The heroine always suffered punishment, and yet she was always good. Win, win and win!

Perhaps you are feeling like you might be sick now. I am, too. But the interesting point is what happened once I actually began to play at age 26.

When I first started to play, APD, I wanted to be in the English school world. It was a nice blend of hostile, but not fully hostile authority. I would call it detached authority. Ideally, they were fair and not abusive, but stoicism was certainly called for. I enjoyed exploring the extent of my stoicism, and I felt a particular buzz because I had, for so much of my life, been so very fearful, particularly of physical challenges.

But—but. M’s instinct with Casey tended towards the domestic, and towards the firm and compassionate end of semi-con play. We imagined the orphanage together, but we never played it, at least not with me as the bottom. Actually, we played Casey at the Perfect People once or twice, and that “Casey” turned out not to be much fun; she was so traumatized, she scarcely spoke. She wasn’t very robust. So, whether through observation or instinct, M realized, I think, that although I had come out of the orphanage, it would not be a good place for me to visit, now.

We did one scene early in our relationship with him as a hostile top. It taught us a lot, not least because it was such a disaster. But that is another story…

Don’t you wish you could do that more often? I can think of several conversations, subsequently requiring mind-bleach, which wouldn’t have got to that stage if I’d been able to safeword, lol.

As previously discussed, I’ve never really played with safewords. This isn’t out of any philosophical stance, but simply because they proved extraneous in my play relationship and in the few scenes I did outside that relationship. Another common practice that has never quite entered my play is the warm-up. This probably has to do with the fact that when I play, it is always–through role–real, in which case a warm-up would seem at cross-purposes, and thus on some level probably pervy. I think, perhaps, I have been missing something.

I’ve no idea why, but this morning popped into my head a memory of a trip to the doctor for planters warts. This would have been just after I met M, probably just after my first trip to Englandland to visit him (three weeks of a dark December in Surrey). Planters warts are a painful and difficult-to-eradicate infection usually in the sole of your foot, in my case in the flesh of my heel. You have to soak your foot twice a day, scrape with a razor blade down to the roots of the thing, and then staunch the blood with a salicylic acid preparation. (Sorry, graphic part over.) Let us simply say that in addition to the expected kinds of pain, I was experiencing considerable discomfort during that trip.

Eventually I broke down and visited the doctor. Doc confirmed that it had gone beyond the soak&scrape stage and that the only solution now would be to freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. He warned me: this could get quite painful, and I should let him know if I needed him to stop. I, overflowing with confidence borne of newly discovered tgi play, told him it was fine. I gave him my stoic face. He put my bare foot up on the table and took out something that looked like a blowtorch. I blanched.

Ok, he said, I’m just going to keep on with this until you tell me to stop. It’s not going to hurt at first, but then it’s going to start hurting and keep getting worse.

Me: Sure.

Doc: Oh, and you should know that the pain is going to keep increasing for a while even after I stop, so you should tell me to stop before it’s at the absolute limit. K?

Me: (gulp, nod)

This was an interesting exercise: to safeword, but to have to safeword before you’d reached your limit. You didn’t want to do it too soon, because then the treatment wouldn’t be as effective, but if you left it too late, you might find yourself in an agony you didn’t want at all. It was, intellectually, quite hot.

Not that way, perverts. This is about the other kind of playing you do with yourself when you find you have lost your playmate.

Playing with yourself is hard, as previously discussed here and here (among other places), and it is most unsatisfactory for exercising anything but your imagination (and even then only a fraction of it); but, playing with myself is what I have been doing for the last twenty months.

Mostly this takes the form of conversations between TL and Casey, or me and Casey. Sometimes Casey turns up around other people, though she is pretty careful only to show her face around people who won’t recognize her. Once, for instance, we were going around a part of a wildlife park where you could pet the smaller animals. We were with a younger relative, and Casey was “in” 100%. There was one part where there were mice and squirrels nesting inside socks. Casey started literally to jump up and down: Socks! They sleep in socks!! Younger Relative was also experiencing cute-overload, though he was a bit more stiff upper lip about it. At one point he said, Oh, it’s your inner child. I said, That is exactly who it is! Unfortunately, I couldn’t introduce him to Casey just then, lol.

As a child (APD) I played with my dolls a lot, when I wasn’t at rehearsal for children’s theater. My brother and I were close in age and played together, but he was in many ways an unsatisfactory playmate. He was terrifically stubborn (a necessary defense, probably, against my bossiness) and although he could be made to go along with my schemes, he rarely seemed to make anything up himself. Also, he was a musical prodigy so from a young age spent hours in solitary practice of his instrument. So, I played with my dolls. Sometimes, now, it feels like the same thing. The only difference (besides the lack of dolls) is that I know now what real playing is, with a real playmate who will invent with you and move the play along and surprise you and blow your mind. I know enough to miss it.

M used to play all the time, in every way, not simply roleplay or tgi. It’s hard to convey, or even to think of an example. The plastic seedling trays were labeled by him. The onions say, for instance, unyons. Maybe you had to be there.

Last summer I went back to Englandland for the first time, and I met a couple of people whom I described to my mother as “blogging acquaintances.” Friend 1 took me out to lunch and then wandered with me through the streets of Eton. I had not wandered around Eton since I was eighteen, but it hadn’t changed much. We walked and talked, and then it started, inconspicuously. Watching a begowned teacher walking down the street carrying books, we caught our breath. “Except,” she said, “he should be carrying something else.”

Imagine a giant permission slip.

And so it continued, casually, as asides to the regular conversation: “Oh, I’d like to report to his study after games.” or, apropos of some boys in sports kit bending over to pick up gear, “Oh, you can stay just as you are, thank you.” You have probably done this kind of thing  yourself.

I think I might have burbled a bit to dear Friend 1. Simply talking this way was like being awakened from a kind of winter’s sleep. I hadn’t realized until just then how very much I missed it.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when I found myself g-chatting with Friend 2. We both type as fast as we talk, so the conversations tend to be dizzying, but at one point she said something about us going back to Switzerland. It was some kind of typo, as we had never been to Switzerland, at least not together, so I joked, “We had so much fun, didn’t we?”

She didn’t hesitate: “I know!”

Me: I liked that youth hostel where we went hiking.

Her: I preferred the chalet.

Me: It was very pretty, but you know that guy broke my heart.

Her: He had the most awful sweater!

Me: So true! I was blind…I miss that rather authoritarian rest cure place.

Her: Oh, man, no kidding.

Later, I realized: she was playing with me. I had a playmate! You may think I am grasping at straws, and in fact I am, but the point is how it felt to play, even with faraway Friend 2 via text chat, or faraway Friend 1 last summer. It felt like moving after being locked up for longer than you can remember.

This week, Casey has been pressing hard, against whatever it is she presses. (viz. the experience that gave rise to Double Teamed). One way it expressed itself was a powerful desire to buy her a dress I’d tried on at H&M. This dress was so cute (gray flannel pinafore, buttons up the back, tie at waist, knee length) and I thought Casey would look so cute in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well (I have a large cup size and it was fitted in the chest). I was bemoaning this to Friend 2, saying it might fit if I lost some more weight. Friend 2 suggested I get it and put it in the back of the closet, knowing that from H&M it couldn’t cost that much. So, yesterday, we went back to the store and I got the dress for Casey, in gray and in navy. And, now it even fit.

Home we get from the store, but she couldn’t try it on yet because TL had a student. Turned out the student needed help with a Latin translation, and it turned out one of the words was verberare, which, we discovered, means to flog. It was very difficult to keep Casey in check at this news. She tore open her own dictionary and scoured the page: verberabilissumus, altogether deserving of flogging! At one point TL’s student forgot what the word had meant.

Casey: To flog!

Kid: Oh, wait, I thought it was to beat.

Casey: Right, flog, beat, whip.

Kid: What’s flog mean?

TL at this point asked Casey to fetch something from the other room while she defined flog for the kid. When Kid worked out that the criminal in his translation was being threatened with verbereris, his response was, “Wow, harsh!” Casey had to be sent on another errand at this point.

Finally, TL’s lesson ended and Casey was allowed to put on her frock. Navy blue, white blouse, navy gym knickers, white ankle socks, black school shoes. And let me tell you, Casey has never been more In for the last twenty months. My body was taken over by her, walking like her, skipping around, even – wait for it – smiling. I felt quite literally possessed by someone else. Except I knew her. I had known her. It had been a  long time.

I wrote a little bit in the past about the first scene between Casey and RP, which was the first time I ever got whacked. It was during his first trip here in the summer of 1995, and we played it as a follow up to Mark’s first scene with TL (the first time she whacked him, or anyone). The scenario was that Mark and Casey had been seen sneaking out-of-bounds into the chapel balcony (at College, where TL and RP were co-housemasters and where Casey had just arrived as a new Fifth Former from America). A bit of wrought-iron gate had snapped off in the process. Mark had been caned. Casey was offered 4 strokes of the cane or 200 lines. I think her exact words were: “I don’t want to do the lines.”

M’s first visit lasted four days. On the last day we drove out of town and went on a hike in the woods. Afterwards, I remember being in my kitchen, him shaving at my kitchen sink, the smell of his shaving foam, and this overwhelming desire to be back in that relationship between Casey and Mr. Prior. I secretly got my hands on M’s pack of Marlboroughs, and as he was shaving, I went through to the study.

Picture my apartment as it was then: a four room railroad-style flat with no doors between the rooms, kitchen at the back, study at the front. It was August. Casey sat down in the “kid” chair, which was tucked out of the sightline from the kitchen. She lit a cigarette and pseudo-smoked it, ashing into a candle on the bookshelf. There was a box fan blowing a cross-breeze, and she took care to blow well into the fan so that the smoke would be visible, even if she wasn’t.

It seemed to go on a long time, this mouthing of cigarette smoke, the noise of the fan. And then suddenly, there he was: Mr. Prior.

“Morgan!”

She jumped six feet in the air, it seemed, having heard nothing, seen nothing. Stubbed out the cigarette. Stood up. He was gob-smacked by what he was seeing. How was it that this girl, this American girl, new to College just a few days hence, had decided to use his study, of all places, to smoke a cigarette? I don’t recall the dialogue, but it was brief. She was instructed to change into her uniform (she was wearing blue cotton shorts, sneakers, t-shirt) and report back in ten minutes.

In the dressing room, I put on her newly cobbled-together uniform. He had brought me a patch for my blazer. I’d found the blazer, grey flannel trousers, and Casey’s school shoes at the sadly now-defunct Domsey’s Warehouse. The patch had finally been stitched onto the blazer. I dressed, she dressed, trembling. We paced in the hallway. Scared. Frustrated. Confused.

On top of all this was another thread that had emerged in their earlier scene, and this was about Casey’s father. Carl Morgan was in military intelligence and was stationed somewhere dangerous, hence her being shipped off to College (parents divorced). But, she assured Mr. Prior, he was coming to visit her for half-term. He had told her so. In fact, she wasn’t going to be staying at College very long. She was pretty sure she’d be going home soon. Her dad had said so. This is what she thought about in the corridor waiting for the ten minutes to be up.

When she approached the study, RP was seated at the desk [my desk!]. He noted with grim approval her finally-arranged blazer, but got straight to his flabbergasted outrage.

“I just beat you yesterday!” he complained. What on earth could she possibly have been thinking?

“I wasn’t really smoking,” she said.

He almost did not know what to make of this. She explained that she’d only been stage smoking.

“Where did you get the cigarettes?” he asked.

Oops. Thou shalt not peach. “I’d rather not say, sir.”

RP was a Public School man and a gentleman and was prepared to accept this, for the moment. But he wanted to know why on earth she did it. It simply made no sense to him. “Were you trying to get yourself beaten?” he asked.

“No!” She struggled to explain, even to herself. “I just wanted… to be in here.” She dried up.

A silence full of so very much. And then somehow, through some genius of his, or grace, he seemed to get it, even though she didn’t. Even though I didn’t.

This time there was no choice of lines. It would be eight strokes. I can’t remember the technicalities of it, why eight, what they were apportioned for, but he told her to meet him in the Houseroom.

And so in the Houseroom [kitchen] she waited, sick and shaking before the Houseroom table. Pretty soon he came through, carrying the cane. Imagine, a man walking into my kitchen carrying a cane as if he knew what to do with it. He took off his jacket and instructed her to do the same. He took her jacket from her hands and told her to bend over the table. When she was in position, he pulled the tail of her shirt out of her gray school trousers [as previously discussed, purely for theatrical value!].

And it began.

She saw right away that he’d been going easy the first time. This hurt a good deal more, on top of the (first ever) four the day before. She was getting twice as many. He was hitting harder. I think she yelped.

Afterwards, when told to stand up, she gave the customary thank you. They shook hands. He met her eye and said, “Well stuck, Morgan.” It was sincere. There was that palpable but restrained love and care. My chest was melting like lava. I wanted more than anything to say there, with him, in that.

A little later there was a short scene in which he said good-bye to her. Mr. Prior had to take a short leave from College to sort out a personal situation. Miss Lincoln would be in charge. But, he told Casey, he would be keeping a particular eye on her. Again, the lava melting bones. Like heartburn in all your cells at once.

And one more thing, he told her. He had managed to reach her father on the telephone.

“When’s he going to get here?” she interupted, suddenly happy, hopeful, plunging entirely into that blind confidence in a rock-solid good thing.

“I’m afraid he isn’t able to come,” Mr. Prior said gently.

Imagine a tidal wave, searing, crushing, destroying.

“What do you mean?” said a small voice.

“He was sorry not to be able to talk with you himself,” Mr. Prior told her. “And he is very sorry he can’t come visit you as he said. He will see you at Christmas, though.”

Her lip was trembling. She blinked back tears.

“Oh. Right.”

“So,” RP continued, “it looks as though you’ll have to put up with us for a while longer.” She nodded, trying not to let the tears show. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Casey,” he said calling her by her Christian name for the first time, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “It’s no big deal.”

When the scene was over, she went away and sobbed.

Writing about this now, especially having read other people’s scene accounts, I can see how odd it must look. The tgi gives focus to the scenes, but it isn’t really the center, or even the most powerful force. The most powerful force, perhaps, is Casey’s heart. How it longs to be with Mr. Prior in his study, somehow. How lascerated it is by her real dad, who loves her very much but cannot help but let her down. How much of a cataclysm the whole visit turns out to be, how much she loves him (M, Mark, Mr. Prior) by any name, as she has never loved anyone or conceived of loving.

He had to get on a plane later that night. I collapsed in bed and passed out from the ordeal of his visit, from overstimulation, from a kind of grief. He promised to come again, soon, October. Ten thousand years away.

But then came, as so often with him, a lucky strike extra, a gift of grace. At eight AM, my phone rang. I dragged myself from unconsciousness to answer it. His flight had been teched. He was still here. He wasn’t leaving until that evening. We had a whole extra day.

I am so grateful I never knew—then or even the morning before he died—what was coming. I knew, then, that we needed the extra day. What I didn’t know was how much we needed it. How very much.

Jessica wrote a post recently about the idea of using an hour-glass timer to measure out 15 minutes of solid spanking. It made me think of the poor old tea-timer languishing in the pantry. (Image at right is it exactly.) This clever device has sands for three minutes (light), four minutes (medium) and five minutes (strong)–tea, of course! But, occupational hazard, it was instantly perverted. I seem to recall it was used more in imagination and intent than in actuality, but M often told me he wanted TL to cane Marky using the tea timer. We like the descriptors printed on the frame: weak, medium, strong. For boys like Marky, it would really have to be strong every time, wouldn’t it?

I have to say that as a tea timer, it is a flop. You get distracted while the tea is brewing and forget to look at it, and before you know it, they’ve all run out and you had no idea. If you were being whacked, however, you would never take your eyes off it, silently imploring the sands to fall faster. Please run out, now now now now now!