by Pet Jeffery
I wriggled as though I nursed a sore bottom, when I glanced across the public library table to assure myself that nobody was watching. Confident that no one closely observed my actions, and feeling naughty, like a schoolgirl reading Cosmopolitan in class, I reopened my Kindle Fire to reread the passage:
"...before I could draw breath, Mama slapped me for the third time. True to her words, Mama's right palm thwacked my rump more savagely than before. Thereafter, I ceased to count the smacks. No more than a second or two separated each from the next, nor did they grow milder. My spanking seemed to last for a very long time, in spite of the frenetic speed with which Mama's hand rose and fell. By the time Mama ceased, my derriere felt as I imagine it would if I'd sat upon a bed of hot coals."
Sitting upon a bed of hot coals must be dreadful, but it might not be as bleak as my current situation. As things stood, I had severed beyond repair any lifeline Mum might have offered. She and I had said things we couldn't retract. How much better it might have been if, instead of arguing, Mum had placed me over her lap like the character in the story, lifted my skirt, tugged down my knickers and spanked me. Of course, I told myself, such things didn't happen these days and even in the book's nineteen fifties setting, a 23-year-old like me would not have been subject to corporal punishment.
Little did I suspect that bare bottomed spankings would soon become a regular feature of my life, when my years, flimsy as snot-softened tissues, began to slip away.
My name is, or rather was, Penelope Wells, a Leicester girl. I am told that the city motto, semper eadem, translates as 'always the same'. I'm not sure whether that's intended as a complaint or a boast but, until recently it had fitted my life pretty well. I'd never secured paid employment, unless one counted a week or two of holiday jobs from time to time, in which I obstructed the business of an unfortunate shopkeeper. I remained at school until I failed all of my A-Levels at the age of eighteen. Rather than seek a career, I'd moved in with Timothy, my well-heeled boyfriend, in the upmarket village of Quorn. For almost five years I ignored Tim's infidelities, but that option eventually expired. He had installed Fenella into his bed. The new girlfriend had not only the plastic perfection of a Barbie doll, but her empty headedness too. I expected Tim to discard Fenella in a week or two, and I was shocked when instead I returned home to discover that he had changed the locks. In response to my furious knocking, the rat opened an upstairs window and tossed out sufficient cash to pay my bus fare into the city. My Kindle Fire was in my shoulder bag, otherwise, a few weeks later, I wouldn't have had a suitable device to download the spanking book.
Arriva Fox's route 127 took me back to my childhood home but, alas, not back to my childhood. For the last two or three years, Dad had been shacked up with a French floozy in Provence. I missed him. Nor was Dad the only person I missed. I'd lost touch with Chloe, who had been my best friend through most of my schooldays. Aged seventeen, Chloe had become Timothy's girlfriend. When Tim the love rat transferred his affections to me, my former best friend viewed me as a boyfriend stealing monster. Chloe's and my friendship ceased abruptly. I would have attempted to patch things up with my best friend, but Chloe left the city shortly after leaving school and I had no idea what became of her.
Unlike Dad, Mum remained in Leicester. She offered me accommodation, but she expected me to look for work. When, after the lapse of a month, Mum discovered that I hadn't applied for a single job, we had a terrible row. That was the point at which a spanking could have helped, but for now, my bottom escaped its first slap.
Cousin Rachel, who ran a drink and drugs rehabilitation clinic near Birstall, tolerated my presence for a week or two, before loaning me enough to rent a bedsit, and eat for the next month. Rachel emphasised the word 'loan'; she expected me to pay her back. My downward spiral took me to a squalid room on Kate Street.
My cousin considered that I had never grown up, calling me 'a Peter Pan girl'. Mum had said something with much the same meaning, but with more venom and less diplomacy.
One evening, while I sought something to take my mind from my depressing bedsit and non-existent prospects, I browsed an Amazon e-book called A New Family for Fenella. It wasn't expensive, I had a grudge against a girl called Fenella, and I felt that a new family was precisely what I required. The book focused my mind on spanking, but it did nothing to further my urgent need for employment.
With a sigh, I closed the cover of my Kindle Fire and returned to the current issue of The Lady. The magazine's title suggested to me that its job adverts might include agreeable employment, or the nearest thing to agreeable employment available in this harsh world.
As I flicked through the magazine, I saw a face in a photograph that reminded me of Fenella, Tim's new girlfriend. Was it her? She had a refined accent which I'd considered an affectation, but maybe she was genuinely posh. I gritted my teeth and told myself that there was no point in thinking about her; I needed to look to my future rather than to my past.
A few rapid page turns took me to the classified adverts, and they included, as I'd supposed, situations vacant. My immediate impression was that most of the ads were for housekeepers. Could I apply for such a post? What did housekeepers do? My mental image of a housekeeper was of a grim-faced middle-aged woman in a black dress, not me at all. Perhaps my perception stemmed from a film, although I didn't know which. Possibly, real housekeepers were younger and less forbidding. If I were to apply for such a position, I should first discover what housekeepers did. Apart from at least six adverts for housekeepers without any extra duties, there were two that combined the position with that of a cook, and one with responsibilities as a gardener. My culinary skills stretched to heating a tin of beans or microwaving a ready meal, but nothing much more demanding. As to gardening, I could scarcely distinguish between a nettle and nasturtium. If housekeeping generally involved neither cooking nor gardening, perhaps there was some hope, although I continued to doubt it.
Other adverts were obvious non-starters. Three required a couple, one was for a head gardener and, in a fifth ad, a boarding school in Scotland, the Abercrombie Ladies' Academy, sought a registered nurse. Slightly to my surprise, there was only one advert for a nanny. Perhaps I could apply for that, although my experience with children was minimal.
More mysterious were three adverts for companions, one of them combining the role with that of driver. My understanding of the word 'companion' was not of paid employment, yet one of those ads mentioned a generous salary which a widowed lady would pay into a bank account on which the successful applicant could draw in time to come. She would provide accommodation, food, and other day-to-day necessities. If I could land the job, I should be able to accumulate a nice nest egg, which I could use to... Well, I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but it was bound to come in handy. The successful candidate should be able to play the pianoforte, whatever that might be. My parents, teachers, and Cousin Rachel had often accused me of playing the fool, but that was presumably not the same thing. Maybe it didn't matter; the lady stated that she would provide lessons, if necessary. That was all right. If I preferred work to lessons, I wouldn't have remained at school until I was eighteen.
During my A-Level courses, I'd sat at the back of the class with Chloe Daniels. We'd rolled our eyes and giggled when, occasionally, we listened to the teachers' words. More often, we passed notes, played games on our phones, or surreptitiously read magazines. That passed the time, but lessons had been more fun when I was fourteen, and not too old to flick pellets at the swots. Once, Miss Robertson, popularly known as Golden Shred, nicknamed after Robertson's famous marmalade, had sent Chloe and me to Mrs Henderson, the headmistress, for disrupting the class. Old Hendo gave us a long and boring lecture and threatened to exclude us from the school. When I complained about our treatment, Nan snorted in derision.
"When I was sent to the headmistress for larking about," she told me, "I came away with a scalded bottom. She had a swishy cane; it burnt like a red-hot poker. You kids, these days, don't know you're born."
Nan was visiting Mum and me for a couple of weeks. Usually she lived in her native Suffolk.
"Come off it, Ma," my mother protested. "You were never burnt with a red-hot poker."
"No, I wasn't," Nan admitted, "but you were never caned, and I was."
There was something almost of triumph in Nan's facial expression, as though her caning were a victory over her daughter. Her feelings about the cane weren't wholly negative, I judged, and perhaps not negative at all. I wondered what the sensation of a cane whacking my bottom would be like, a question that had, over the years, occasionally returned to haunt me. Once I'd attempted to strike my own bottom with a garden cane, but I had been unable to deliver the stroke with any force. Now, in the library with my eyes no longer focused on the magazine, I again contemplated school discipline from before I was born.
I pictured myself and Chloe in trouble at school, facing an outraged Mrs Henderson. This required no imagination on my part, merely memory. I could remember the smell of the headmistress' study, probably compounded from furniture polish and musty old books. Mentally placing myself in school uniform was easy. When I returned to my bedsit, I could, if I wished to do so, literally wear the uniform. Tim, presumably motivated by spite, had prevented me from recovering my clothes from his cottage. With little cash at my disposal, I now relied upon garments and footwear I'd left at Mum's place when I'd moved out at the age of eighteen. Perhaps in a spirit of thrift, Mum had kept me in school uniform until my last day in the classroom. Most of the other girls in my form wore ordinary but smart clothes to school. In fairness to Mum, I had to admit that my non-uniform things were too informal, would have broken the dress code in half a dozen ways, and wearing them would have resulted in the teachers sending me home.
For a moment, I considered the outfit I wore at that moment: a short denim skirt and a lime green halter necked top. As a teenager, I had shown no sense of elegance.
My contemplation of my garments had removed me from Mrs Henderson's remembered study. With an effort of will, I mentally returned to the headmistress' wrath. I knew how Chloe's and my school uniforms would look and how mine would feel. I could picture the bookcases, the polished desk, and the large window with a view of the playing fields where girls armed with hockey sticks chased and thwacked a mud-spattered ball.
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