From the Top Shelf - Awaiting Execution

Today's piece is from the collection of stories called The Reckoning by Rachel King, whose work I have published in the past. "Awaiting Execution" is the tale of three sixth form grammar school girls awaiting their fate at the hands of the Headmaster. It's a familiar plot line, and one that's a favourite of mine. It might be considered inappropriate by today's standards—even though I have edited it slightly to remove a few outrageously non-PC details—but Miss King has a really nice, humorous way with words and the dialogue is very English! If schoolgirl canings offend you, stop reading now. If, on the other hand, they fuel your fantasies, read on and enjoy!

Awaiting Execution

Wednesday, March 21; 9.30 A.M. Morning assembly has just finished and two sixth-form girls are standing self-consciously outside Mr. Royce's study, waiting their turn for one of his so-called 'little pep-talks'. A third sixth-former, Carolyn Eglinton, is already inside the study, being attended to.

Wendy Ferguson bites her lower lip anxiously and whispers in her companion's ear, "We're really for it this time, Lynne! He's in a foul mood - you can tell by the way he glowered at us!"

Lynne Challenor tries to look poker-faced and pretend she doesn't care. Petite, with black, urchin-cropped hair, she barely seems old enough to be a sixth-year girl. She has an air of sullen insolence about her that simply invites punishment. Needless to say, this is by no means her first visit to the headmaster's study. Nor, in all probability, will it be her last.

Mr. Royce's study is located at the end of a long, baize-green painted corridor. A deathly hush hangs forever over this corner of the school. The green-uniformed pupils avoid it like the plague, never venturing near 'Rolls' Royce's sombre dark varnished door unless summoned. It's altogether not a healthy place to be.

"Gives me the creeps, this does," Lynne mutters mournfully, kicking her heels in a little show of defiance.

Wendy nods miserably in agreement. "I'd rather have the school dentist than this any day!" she says...

Then it begins. Those unmistakeable whirring and swishing sounds from within Mr. Royce's study, punctuated by high-pitched girlish yelps. Carolyn Eglinton is being caned.

Wendy and Lynne eye each other in alarm. Lynne is beginning to turn a little pale - not quite so cocky by half as she was a minute before.

SWISH -"Eeow! Ooooohhh!"

SWISH - "Aaaaagh"

"God, I was right about him being in a foul mood!" Wendy gasps in terror. Lynne starts to fidget nervously and turns even paler as the ferocious caning nears its climax.

SWISH - THWACK!! "AAH NO MORE - PLEASE!!!"

Carolyn Eglinton is crying. They can hear her through the door. Big babyish gurgles and sobs.

Lynne looks at Wendy and sees that she's almost in tears already. Lynne begins to feel distinctly queasy. All her bravado has somehow melted away. Now she is just a frightened little girl.

The dreadful caning sounds have ceased. In their place, faint rustling noises of knickers being painfully pulled up into place around fiercely aching hindquarters..elasticated 'ping' of knicker waistband..then the muffled buzzing of a zip as the short green pleated skirt is fastened up around hips. A low murmuring of Royce's parting remarks.

The study door opens. Carolyn Eglinton stumbles out into the corridor, her freckled face splashed with tears. Her hands are up under her skirt, trying to rub away the blazing pain. She's a rather pretty, well-developed girl with auburn hair loosely flowing to her shoulders and fringing her pale-blue eyes. "Christ! That was unbearable!" she gasps. "I pity you two - you've got it still to come!"

"Thanks a whole bunch!" Lynne snaps acidly.

"Sorry, girls but don't say I didn't warn you!" Carolyn replies with the wisdom born of painful experience. "What I need now is a lovely cold flannel to put on my poor you-know-what!"

"Next!" booms the harsh voice from within the study. Wendy and Lynne are rooted to the spot. Both are suffering from the medical condition known to Burtonwood scholars as 'Jelly-legs' - a recognised symptom of pre-punishment nerves.

The door swings open and Mr. Royce's red-cheeked face juts out like an angry question mark. "Well? Which of you two young ladies do I have the pleasure of dealing with next?" he snaps impatiently, scrutinising both girls with a stare of cold appraisal.

He crooks his index finger at Wendy. "Ferguson, you next!"

Wendy is definitely the prettier of the two; doe-eyed, fragilely lissome, flawlessly complexioned, with long flowing, almost saffron coloured, hair. It's also patently obvious that she is the more petrified of the two. She's knock-kneed and trembling, whereas Lynne, with her cropped black hair, snub nose and tomboyish figure, is still desperately trying to look blase and unconcerned.

Royce scowls malevolently at the dark-haired girl. Her sulky, pouting insolence never ceases to infuriate him. It'll do her good, he thinks, to make her stew in her own juice a while longer. He's looking forward to dealing with her last of all.

He pokes Wendy in the small of her back and she walks, leaden-footed, into his study. The door slams behind them.

Lynne tries all manner of tricks to fight off the unpleasant images her mind keeps throwing up. A pale, shivering Wendy, fingers fluttering at the zip of her skirt...the soft 'whoosh' as the green pleated garment rapidly descends to her ankles...the crimson flush of shame invading her cheeks when Mr.Royce begins to walk round and round her, cane in hand, inspecting her dainty little green-knickered bottom..the 'target area' as he always jokingly refers to it. Lynne knows full well how skilfully adept Mr.Royce is at spinning out the agonising humiliations, stage by stage and step by step. He knows how to make a girl cry before he takes her knickers down - before he even produces the cane from the cupboard.

Minutes go by. Lynne's lurid imagination goes into overdrive.

Then the tell-tale sounds of girlish distress begin, faintly audible. Morbidly fascinated, Lynne puts her ear to the door just in time to catch Wendy pleading urgently with the Head: "O-oh please no! Not with my knickers down! P-Please Sir, not that!"

"Just you take those pants down this instant, my girl, or else I'll do it for you!" Royce cuts through Wendy's weeping protests like a knife through butter.

Babyish weeping, accompanied by the sound of pinging elastic as Wendy despairingly lowers her pants and subjects all her schoolgirlish charms, front and rear - to the stern scrutiny of her headmaster.

Lynne, her ear pressed right against the door, [her] imagination again works overtime as she conjures up the appalling scene within. Poor bare-bottomed Wendy being briskly shepherded into punishment position, bottom upwards across the highly polished top of Royce's mahogany desk - where literally hundreds of girls' quaking tummies have lain before.

Silence again.

Lynne can only surmise that Mr. Royce is, at that very moment, subjecting Wendy's rear end to a most minute pre-caning inspection. This is his usual custom. He claims it to be a necessary preliminary in order to determine which grade of cane to apply to the bottom in question.

The data he bases his final decision on include such factors as 'Buttock resilience' (ie the degree to which his fingers sink into the bottom flesh.Is it tautly firm or fleshly soft?), 'Buttock dimension', (the bigger the girl's bottom, the more extensively it can be caned) and 'Buttock sensitivity', (which generally means how she reacts to pinching and probing and thus how sensitive she is likely to be when whacked on the arse!)

While canings from the Head were a prospect nearly all girls feared there were a few exceptions to the rule! As Mr. Royce felt prompted to observe, on page forty-seven of his private memoirs; "Some girls make the very devil of a racket while being caned. One disgustingly perverted 18 year old pupil moaned and writhed her way through a 12-stroke caning, which left her well rounded backside splendidly striped and wealed, but she even carried on moaning and wriggling after the 12th stroke, whereupon I felt obliged to administer a further eight hearty strokes to purge the wretch of her sinful excitement. Instead of having the required salutary effect, the eight additional strokes only served to inflame her desires further, with the result that her moans rose to high pitched shrieks of sado-masochistic ecstasy, thus by the time I delivered the final stroke she was threshing her purple-striped bottom up and down in a perverse simulation of some copulatory frenzy. Greatly embarrassed, I decided to send the girl to Matron who is, after all, better qualifed to deal with female masochism than I am."

Lynne holds her breath and strains to hear even the slightest noise from within the study.

Ominous rattan-rattling signifies that Royce has at last chosen the appropriate grade of cane to use on Wendy Ferguson's bottom. Lynne shudders - not for Wendy's sake but for her own. She prays that when it comes to her turn he won't select a thin swishy rod that bends so readily on impact with her behind that its tip whips spitefully into the tops of her thighs. Cane-marks on thighs are a million times more embarrassing than on the bottom because they're so glaringly visible below the hem of her school skirt.

Mr. Royce is saying something to Wendy. Lynne can't quite catch the exact words, but it sounds like something horribly personal like, "Stick it well up now!" or worse, '"Keep it stuck right up in the air and keep it still!"

Whatever it is, Wendy obviously doesn't like it very much because she starts to cry again; a series of poignant little hiccupping sobs that end abruptly in a piercing scream as the first lightning stroke of the cane hums through the air and explodes with a resounding 'THWACK!' against her rudely exposed bottom cheeks.

Lynne's tummy lurches and once more she's beset by a violent attack of 'Burtonwood Jelly-legs'.

"And that was just for starters!" she hears Royce drawling lazily in his well-educated Daily Telegraph reader accent while Wendy blubbers pathetically.

"KEEP THAT BOTTOM OF YOURS STILL, FERGUSON!" he suddenly roars. Suddenly he is as angry as a bull.

That's the trouble with old 'Rolls', Lynne reflects bitterly. You never know where you are with him. One moment he is as nice as pie, next moment he is yelling like a madman.

Wendy's blubberings cease momentarily. She's holding her breath, waiting in dread for the next stroke.

Lynne tries to imagine how poor Wendy must be feeling. All alone in that grim oak-paneled study, green school knickers twisted round her ankles, skirt neatly folded over a chair, bottom vulgarly bare and 'well stuck up', just as he likes it - with a thin reddish-purple stripe of throbbing pain imprinted right across the plumpest, rudest part of it.

SWISH! THWACK!

Again the cane falls. Again Wendy's voice howls in shrill protest. Again it drowns in a sea of tears.

The arresting sequence of happenings repeats itself six more times. By the end of it all Wendy is howling like a baby and Lynne - awaiting her turn for a dose of Mr. Royce's stick - is nearly wetting her knickers in terror.

The door opens and a tear-soaked Wendy staggers out. Lynne's eyes are wide with shock for Wendy is half naked. She is wearing only her blouse, tie, socks and shoes. In one hand she clutches her skirt and knickers.

"My God, she's too sore even to dress!" Lynne thinks in mounting panic as her turn arrives.

Wendy manages a wry ghost of a smile. "Your turn now, Lynne," she murmurs with blessed relief that, at last, for her, it's all over. "Oh and he told me to tell you he has only been warming up so far - using me and Carrie as 'target practice'. It's you he's really saving it all up for!"

Lynne starts to blubber and snivel. No man has ever made her cry before. But there's always a first time for everything.....

"Cheer up Lynne," Wendy says sympathetically, " at least you won't have to wait any longer. I always think waiting's the worst part!"

Lynne nods bleakly, ashamedly brushing away the tears.

"I'll be in my dorm if you want a shoulder to cry on afterwards," Wendy adds, "lying on my tummy of course!"

As she turns to go, Lynne sees for the first time the awful purple streaks emblazoned on poor Wendy's behind.

Feeling very alone and vulnerable, Lynne creeps into Mr. Royce's study, dreading every step she takes.

It's quite obvious from the start that Mr. Royce means business. He has that brisk no-nonsense air about him that the girls have learned to fear.

The first thing he does is to lock the study door and pocket the key. The reason for this is not so much to spare Lynne's blushes as tho ensure there are no witnesses to the manner and severity of the punishment she's about to undergo.

Then he tells her to take her knickers off... While the petrified girl divests herself of tie, blouse, skirt, vest and knickers, Mr. Royce cheerfully places two upright wooden chairs back to back.

Lynne, halfway through taking down her underpants, watches him out of the corner of her eye. She wonder what ordeal awaits her now.

At least she doesn't have long to wait before finding out... Royce impatiently guides her into position by delivering spiteful cane-taps to her thighs. He makes her kneel up on one chair and bend forward across the backs of both chairs until she can support herself by placing the palms of her hands on the seat of the other chair.

Her small round bottom is elevated to an angle of ludicrously obscene exposure. Mr. Royce will now be able to cane not only the crowns of her buttocks, but also the soft delicate under-curve just above her thighs.

Never in all her life has Lynne felt so thoroughly abject - so helpless, so humiliated... Two big tears trickle down each cheek. She'd do anything not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry, but there's no way she can stop herself from bawling her eyes out like a stupid baby.

"Hmm now let me see," Mr. Royce murmurs, assessing the faint hint of fleshiness in Lynne's quivering, cringing buttocks. "I think cane no. 3 will be just right for this little bottom," and goes to his cupboard to select the rod in question.

Lynne hears him energetically swishing it up and down. Her heart starts to thump madly and her eyes are misted over with fresh tears. Then she feels the cane's cold caress against her taut, stretched bottom-cheeks. And as he slowly raises it to deliver the first stroke, Lynne begins to cry in earnest.

Alex Birch adds this codicil to the selection when he published it on his blog: "I reckon any Headmaster who behaved in this way would be writing his memoirs from inside a small room with a padlock on the door and a metal grille on the window, but a nice little tale from Miss King's feverish imagination!"