From the Top Shelf - Ellen's Story; The Die is Cast

I was pleased with the favourable response I received for last week's excerpt from Ellen's Story. Even Chross liked it! Today I have an excerpt in which she experiences corporal punishment for the first time. I hope you enjoy it.

Perhaps my obsessive preoccupation with corporal punishment stemmed in part from an unconscious longing to receive it myself. Everyone else around me seemed to be getting it - so why not me? My behaviour certainly merited it. As a child I'm afraid I was quick-tempered, fractious and cheeky, always getting into scrapes wherever I went. I must have led my poor distracted mother a terrible dance, but all she ever did was scold me, never giving me the stricter punishment I so deserved...

I had, of course, had my bottom slapped plenty of times by the boys in the village - but that was only in fun, occurring in the thick of the wild coltish games we played in and out of the barnyards and up and down the leafy lanes from dawn till dusk. My first taste of real corporal punishment came some years later, after I left the dame-school in the village where dear old lavender-scented Miss Beale had given up years ago trying to curb her boisterous, unruly pupils - and I began attending the newly-built Church of England school in nearby Bishops Stanton.

The headmaster, Dr. Smallwood, was a tall, grey-bearded, scholarly gentleman who, although ruling us with a rod of iron, was nevertheless patient, humorous and capable of great acts of kindness. His wife and he had been missionaries out in India, but tragically she had died of cholera, and shortly afterwards he had returned to England with his young son, Roderick...

The compulsory school uniform was accordingly all part of his grand plan to bring civilised order and discipline into our, hitherto, chaotic, unruly lives. The boys were, henceforth, exhorted to wear grey shirts, grey knee-breeches, and grey stockings, while we girls were expected to attend in black skirts, scarlet bodices and white pinafores. As a special concession to our vanity we were allowed to wear blue ribbons in our hair...

Provided the subject I was studying captured my interest I was a good pupil. But if I became bored or unable to understand something I quickly grew fidgety and began plotting mischief. Arithmetic was the bane of my life. Despite all Dr. Smallwood's patient efforts I conspicuously failed to appreciate the logic behind all those endless rows of figures. Then I became sulky and fractious - which was when the other side to Dr. Smallwood's nature would emerge; that of stern taskmaster.... Once, when I jibbed more rebelliously than ever beneath my mentor's just reproof, he did not hesitate to employ harsher measures. Perhaps all along I had somehow been trying to goad him into doing this. He made me stay behind after school, then gave me such a tongue-lashing - "A lazy, slothful girl, Ellen, is like a ripe fruit ready for the Devil to pick!" - that had me quaking in my shoes, after which he pulled me down across his knee, lifted up my skirt and petticoats at the back, and spanked me with all the fierceness of his pent up anger, directly on the seat of my drawers, so that my eyes watered with tears and I pleaded with him for mercy.

The whole thing was over in a couple of minutes, but it left me numb with shock - and feeling more than a little cheated. All that I was conscious of immediately after the event was a sense of gross indignity, coupled with the hot smarting in my bottom. But later on the incident began to take on a different hue in my mind. The more the spanking receded in time, the more thrillingly exciting it appeared to my girlish imagination. From that day forth I worshipped the ground Dr. Smallwood walked on, and I spent the remainder of my days at school simultaneously dreading and hoping that he would chastise me again.

Ellen did not have long to wait. A pupil she despised, called Priscilla, taunted her and insulted her mother. Ellen retaliated and the two girls scuffled.

Suddenly an iron grip seized me by the collar and dragged me bodily into the air. It was Dr. Smallwood. "Whatever is the meaning of this disgraceful brawl?" he thundered. "How dare you two girls behave like wild animals in the school playground! Older girls, too, who ought to be setting a good example to the juniors," he added, glaring into our faces.

"It was Ellen who started it!" Prissy whined, wiping the blood away from her nose.

"She should never have said those terrible things about my mother!" I retorted, still shaking with rage.

But Dr. Smallwood was not in the least interested in the whys and wherefores of who started what. "Come with me, the pair of you," he snapped angrily. "You have obviously forgotten all that I've taught you about behaving like ladies. Let us see if a good dose of the cane apiece will help to remind you!" and so saying he marched us, one on each arm, back to the empty classroom.

We waited, ashen-faced and weak-kneed, while Dr. Smallwood went to his room to fetch the cane. Prissy started to snivel and blubber babyishly. Like all bullies she was essentially a coward at heart. As for me, I was in a turmoil with all sorts of different emotions bubbling away inside me like a cauldron. I felt dreadfully afraid - and not a little excited. Would it hurt terribly? Would he cane our hands or our bottoms - and if the latter, would he pull our skirts up beforehand? I was glad I was wearing nice clean fresh drawers, and hoping spitefully that Prissy's would prove to be ragged and dirty. Even at that early age I was fastidious about my underclothing, a trait I inherited from my mother.

The actual caning was executed by Dr. Smallwood with an air of almost clinical detachment. I am sure he found it an extremely disagreeable business, an unpleasant necessity. For me it was a short sharp lesson in pure pain, and totally non-erotic at the time. He must have thought we were too old to have our skirts and petticoats raised, and I felt a small but definite pang of disappointment, recalling how he had partially unveiled my bottom before spanking it on that previous occasion.

This time there was no such ritualistic preparation. He merely ordered Prissy and me to bend over and grasp our ankles, while he applied four whistling cuts with his rattan cane across the tightly stretched seats of our black skirts. It happened so quickly that it was all over practically as soon as it had begun - but it left our bottoms aflame with those four thin lines of needle-sharp agony inscribed on our flesh. He had dealt with Prissy first, who disgusted me by bursting into tears even before the first stroke fell and who, by the time the final stroke landed, was howling unashamedly.

Then it had been my turn, and, summoning up all my courage like a condemned prisoner before execution, I gave the world around me a last farewell glance before bending down and offering up my bottom for its painful, humiliating punishment when, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the grinning face of a boy at the classroom window. He quickly ducked out of sight as soon as I looked in his direction - but in that brief second I recognised the flushed, excited features of young Roderick Smallwood.

The realisation that there was a secret witness to my shameful ordeal only augmented my feelings of abasement and mortification as I gasped, twitched and cried out loudly with each fiery cut of the cane...

There is little more to relate about the incident. Immediately afterwards both Prissy and I were sent home in disgrace, nursing our sore, smarting bottoms. I began to panic about what my mother would say when she found out. I resolved to keep quiet about the whole ignominious affair, in the hope that no word from Dr. Smallwood would reach her ears.

I suspect Roderick is also a lover of the rod, but we learn no more about him now. At home, Ellen examines herself in the mirror as she recalls the caning.

I was, although small in stature, quite a well developed girl for my age, and my awareness of this embarrassed me considerably. My breasts were by now plump, firm little melons that I habitually tried to conceal beneath loose-fitting blouses - and the delight the village boys took in slapping my now prominent and shapely rear caused me no end of blushes and agitated discomfiture.

Imagine, therefore, how I felt when I saw in the mirror the four parallel crimson cane weals, standing out proud across the rounded summits of my buttocks. I groaned aloud, mortified at having such a deeply demeaning badge of shame emblazoned across my bottom. Horrified, yet simultaneously excited beyond words, I traced with trembling fingers the painful ridges and indentations that Dr. Smallwood's rod had created. Was I scarred for life, I wondered, or would the awful marks fade in time?

Perverse girl that I was,I commenced rubbing the afflicted areas in order to deliberately exacerbate the stinging smart - and discovered that the sensations thus engendered were not all together unpleasant...

In my mind I pored lasciviously over every tiny detail of my caning. I recalled the disgustingly vulgar way in which Prissy had wriggled her hindquarters with each successive stroke. I tormented myself with the highly improper - but strangely exciting - thought that, instead of caning us over our clothes, Dr. Smallwood had instead made us lift up our skirts and petticoats and then lower our drawers so that his son could watch us being caned on our shamefully bare bottoms...oh, what a dreadful, awful prospect!

It seems that the enjoyment of spanking runs in the family, but you'll have to wait until next time to hear more on that subject.