3. THE SCHOOLMISTRESS'S TALE

The schoolmistress seems to have been a rather callous woman...

“It’s sobering,” muttered the deity Dingleboot’s pupil, “very sobering...”

“What is?” asked his Master, rather fiercely.

“That so many apparently sensible older people can sit round a drunken table in a pub discussing slapped bottoms,” said the pupil. “It’s not the most pleasing subject for them to be occupied with.”

The Undecided Deity looked at him surprised. “It would seem that you miss the point,” he said brusquely, “it’s not about bottoms, slapped or otherwise. This is about a powerful and influential Government Minister who saw fit to impale herself, via her own reputedly very adequate bottom, on a spike, screaming in pain as she did so and stuck there until she was deader than the mythical dodo.”

“It wasn’t mythical,” muttered the pupil, and the deity slapped his bottom for his cheek.

“Ouch! That hurt!” whelped the pupil.

“So it should. It’s for your own good. Now pay attention and try to force that minuscule brain of yours to some concept of the point,” he growled. “Take a peek into the shadows of the world down below and listen hard!”

The pupil clutched both cheeks of his flaming buttocks, and stared.

The schoolmistress was clearing her throat and looking nervously around, which in itself struck him as unusual as she didn’t usually look nervous. But this, she knew, was to be her moment, and she was afraid that in the light of more humane times it could possibly turn out to be a very bad moment indeed.

“I’d like to say,” she began, “I mean, I’d like to put it to you, that there might be occasions after which a sensible and wise disciplinarian might, possibly, render slight physical harm to a bottom if a particular situation appears to warrant it.”

“Not possible!” snapped the judge, “or I’d hand down sentences to the baddies brought before me, sentences involving their wretched bottoms. I’d have some of the devils flayed on their criminal backsides until they might well bear the scars to the grave, that I would!”

“Let me tell you what happened,” sighed the schoolmistress. “I had but recently taken over the headship of a school that had part of its catchment area in the very estate where the child Edna Tomkins lived. And Edna Tomkins had two qualities that were in conflict with each other, for she was an endearingly pretty child and yet she was a very naughty child. Everyone said it. Her extreme attractiveness was in regular conflict with an evil streak which ran through her like the word BLACKPOOL through a stick of seaside rock. Her parents, and by this time they had fortunately exchanged vows in Saint Joseph's and made their relationship legal, her parents were dismayed by some of the things she did, like flushing her pet hamster down the toilet just because she thought it was too greedy and pouring sour cream into her father’s underpants when he wasn’t looking, just for fun. So those parents, seeing me as an expert in the rearing of children, came to me.

“They wanted to know what they could do about her. The child was out of control and very few people, when her pranks hurt them, could find it in their hearts to blame so beautiful a child. Instead they turned upon other kiddies, those they saw as being uglier and consequently less deserving of any kind of forgiveness and walloped them instead. So I told them that quite frankly some people are born good and others evil, and it was quite plain to me that Edna was in the latter group. In fact, and I was already angry at the child as a consequence of finding dog diarrhoea in my top drawer, the drawer where I kept the few things a headmistress needs to comfort her through her lonely day, like a flask of gin and a d***o, begging your pardon...”

“I understand exactly,” put in the prostitute, “a woman should never be without either of those things.”

“What’s a d***o?” asked the judge.

“Never mind that,” continued the schoolmistress, “it’s of no concern in this account other than to mention that dog poo on one of the things never seems to be properly washed off. I tried, I did try, hot water, soap, carbolic if you don’t mind, and it always had the taint of faeces on it until the day I disposed of it to a charity shop. Anyway, I assured the parents that I would attend to the child with my trusty cane.”

“Such cruelty...” muttered the physician, “I think corporal punishment does a great deal more harm than good...”

“Please! You wouldn’t say that if you’d met the wretched child! So let me finish!” barked the schoolmistress in a very schoolmistressy voice, one that struck fear into the gambler, who tried to sink down out of sight hoping that by some magic he had become suddenly invisible, and the physician who scowled as if he was about to operate on a very nasty and potentially smelly cyst.

“So when the parents had departed after I assured them that the child would receive a severe warning as to what constitutes bad behaviour, I called Edna into my office.” The schoolmistress was warming to her account as if she thought she was coming to the best bit.

“And she came?” asked the gambler, shaking invisibly.

“She had no choice!” The schoolmistress’s voice curdled the very air he was breathing. “I instructed her to bend over a chair and I whipped my lovely cane mere inches away from her rosy cheeks. Then I felt power surge into me as I informed the miscreant that what I was about to do would hurt me more than it would hurt her because my disappointment in her behaviour was such that my very heart was being broken by it. A lie, of course, because it was the fouled state of my personal possessions that hurt me most.

“Then I hammered her bottom with my cane. Six strokes I administered, and as each one crashed onto her rather pretty underwear she gave a little yelp of almost absolute pain.

When I had delivered the last stroke I bade her stand up and look at me. Her pretty face was pale, but not a single tear ran down its cheeks, which surprised me. Was I losing my power, I asked myself? Might I have put a little more into the thrashing? So I scowled at the child and bade her answer my question.

“Why, I asked, do you think I had cause to do that?”

“And she stared me straight in the face and her prettiest of all mouths replied, because you’re a b***h...”

“I dared say she got that right,” put in the librarian, “I knew teachers like that, little tin gods and goddesses who used cruelty as a means of self-gratification. Thank goodness such obscenities were outlawed.”

“But you didn’t know that wretched child!” almost shouted the schoolmistress, “I mean, have you ever had private and personal possessions ruined by being doused in dog s**t? It didn’t so much matter about the flask, but I loved that d***o, and that d***o loved me...”

“They can,” sighed the prostitute.

“Anyway, I gave her six more strokes for her cheek,” concluded the schoolmistress. “It’s what any reasonable person would have done when presented by the pure evil of a pretty child.”

“And it may well be why the woman impaled herself on a spike years later,” murmured the physician.

“I hanged a man for impaling his mother on a spike,” put in the judge, “back in the old days, when you could. Though a bit of me sympathised with him because she was a right harridan by all accounts. But you can’t go around spiking people just because they’re harridans, can you?”

© Peter Rogerson 22.09.18