Corporal punishment was by no means frequent in our family, as my twin sister and I were generally well behaved and did well in school. But we did earn ourselves a spanking maybe once a year as an average till we turned 13, my sister at least as often as me.
Father always took care of our chastisements. He was strict and would not put up with disobedience under any circumstances, whereas mother was lenient. Her kindness of heart made it very hard for her to see us spanked, so she never told on us to father.
As he was a travelling salesman and away quite a lot, our behaviour was totally governed by him being home or not, and we only got spanked if we timed our behaviour badly.
Father’s spankings were always very memorable ones, and a stern look from him was normally all it took to keep us in line. He kept a ‘spanking stick about 20in long and 1in wide behind the left door of the wardrobe in the nursery – a combined children’s bedroom and playroom that my sister and I shared until the family moved to a larger flat when we were 15 years old.
If we both transgressed, he would spank us together – always with his spanking stick, and always on the bare bottom while the culprit was lying across the seat of one of the straight back chairs in our nursery. First my sister and then me. There didn’t seem to be any fixed number of whacks – he would keep going till we squealed and bawled like babies, no matter how old we were.
I wouldn’t call it abuse, because his spankings never left lasting marks on our behinds, but they stung like mad and I clearly remember standing with wobbling knees watching my sister’s ordeal and unable to think of anything else but the inevitable fact that I would be next.
Since we shared a bedroom, we were not completely unfamiliar with the opposite sex, so we didn’t mind all too much getting spanked together, although I would grit my teeth and try to hold back my squeals just a little longer than my sister in boyish pride as I grew older.
However, trying to live up to the ideal that ‘boys don’t cry’ was utterly hopeless for me, no matter how old I grew. The collective punishment had the advantage that we were equally dealt with, i.e. we got an equal number of equally hard whacks, something we were very much concerned about.
Our loveable mother never really developed any other means of punishment. She tried to reason with us, and if we were really bad, she would say: “You cannot do this to me” – which, I’m ashamed to say, didn’t have nearly the effect of father’s spanking stick.
I remember once she invited some ladies around and picked a bowl of strawberries for them in the garden. By the time she wanted to serve them in the evening, they were all gone – because my sister and I had eaten them. Nothing happened, other than mother using her usual phrase.
So I never figured out what happened between my parents that Christmas – my sister and I had just turned 12. Even father’s spanking stick had disappeared by then, and we believed we that had outgrown spankings. So when our parents arrived back from an afternoon walk with two switches, we weren’t really concerned, although we asked what they were to be used for.
“Flower sticks,” they lied deliberately, because the same evening mother suddenly appeared in our nursery with one of the ‘flower sticks’ in her hand after just one admonition about bedtime and said: “Those who will not hear must be made to feel.”
My sister was ordered into the living room, where father would make her feel, whereas mother would deal with me. Very understandably, my sister made a big fuss about the obviously unfair way our parents had decided to share the punishing duties amongst them, and she hadn’t even started lingering out of the door, through the kitchen and into the living room, when mother pulled out one of the straight back chairs, and ordered me to bare my bottom and place myself in the well known position.
So I smirked at my sister, smiled at my mother, made an elegant bow and said in a ‘masculine’ way: “With pleasure, Madam!” I was quite a tall boy and came up to her shoulder, so I honestly believed that a spanking from her would be nothing. Boy, was I wrong!
The very first stroke made me jump off the chair and rub my bottom, but mother just told me coldly that I could join my sister if I resisted. This was the last thing I wanted, so I managed to stay in position during the rest of the punishment. She handled the switch with the skill of an old school principal and certainly didn’t limit her number of strokes to ‘six of the best’. I lost count but I got at least ten, and I yelled and screamed like never before.
I was still in tears, jumping up and down in front of my mother without considering my modesty and trying to rub the incredible sting off my bare bottom, when I heard my sister being introduced to the other ‘flower stick’ by father in the living room. My boyish pride was deeply hurt, having put up such a performance in front of my sister without being able to go through with it, so when we compared the damage afterwards, I claimed that I had had the worst punishment.
Whether that was correct or not, I don’t know. My sister had some pretty red lines across her behind as well. Even my playmates in the flat on the first floor had heard me getting spanked, but I kept it a close secret that it was ‘only’ by my mother.
This turned out to be my last spanking, so by the irony of fate, I got my worst and most memorable chastisement from my lenient, loveable mother who didn’t spank her children!
Contributor: John