As my hand reached out and hit the alarm clock I was turning over onto my front and wondering where the ache came from. Then with a rush it all came back to me and the sheer horror of being awake and alive came to me. I reached down inside my pyjama bottoms and felt my backside. It was still throbbing from the two spankings I had been given the previous evening. I found myself thinking, as if this was some interesting experiment on a third party, that my bottom really was warm, radiating the kind of deep heat that was not unlike the heat from a winter sports muscle rub. Yes it ached but it was not an entirely unpleasant ache and I figured that I would be able to live with it.
What I could not imagine living with was the realisation that today, if my father carried out his threat, I would be wearing shorts to school, the very shorts that had been my downfall. I just sank my face into my pillow and imagined the taunts and jeers of my school mates. It was not difficult to imagine what this would be like because I was sure that I would have joined in if it had been one of them who turned up at school wearing full school uniform but with the entirely unique substitution of grey shorts for grey trousers. It was an all boys school and pretty cruel at the best of times and I knew that today was going to be a total humiliation for me.
Nobody, absolutely nobody, wore shorts at our school. Even on the football pitch and at gym we all preferred to wear tracksuits, only ever showing our knees at school matches or maybe on really warm days. The youngest eleven year olds at our school wore long trousers even during the summer term. I had never ever seen another boy go to school in shorts since I had been in primary school. And now I was fifteen and long-legged and about to begin the first day of my absolute humiliation and unending shame of being forced to wear shorts. Today would be awful and indeed every day of the foreseeable future as my father had insisted that I would be wearing short pants every day without exception for the next six months. Unless, that is, he had slept on it and decided that this was far too extreme a punishment to be carried through.
I heard my brother moving about in his room. I would have to start getting a move on or there would be even more trouble for me. I swung my legs out of the bed and just as my feet reached the floor my father entered the room and smiled down at me.
'Come on now, hurry up and get washed and dressed quickly. I'll be giving you a lift into school today; I want to make sure you get there instead of bunking off.'
And with that, he left and went downstairs.
That was it then, there was obviously not going to be a reprieve from this ordeal. I wandered out to the bathroom and wiped my face clean. This was going to be awful. Putting on my school uniform felt like the last moments before execution.
I pulled on the socks. These were new, bought only yesterday, and had my school colours in two stripes at the top. I had seen them, or at least socks like them, in pictures illustrating school stories. There was also a row of photographs on a corridor at school. These were huge panoramic pictures of the whole school taken in the 1950s and 1960s, and in them the front rows were always of first years wearing shorts and neatly pulled up socks. I was pretty certain that nobody at worn socks like these to our school during the last ten years or more, and indeed my Dad had said that they had been hard to find. Just not the sort of thing that clothes shops had much call for in 1982. The guys in my class were going to get a good laugh at the sight of them pulled up over my calves and folded over at the top.
Then I reached for the shorts. I had left these until last as if wishing that they might turn into proper long trousers if I left it long enough. But there was two ways about it; these were shorts. And not the longest shorts either, certainly not bermudas, and could never have been mistaken for casual wear. They were neatly ironed, grey, lined, schoolboy shorts, with some elastic at the back, and a very formal crease running down the front. And they were tight and short, afterall I had bought them myself last year and I had grown a bit since then. Tight, short, grey, schoolboy shorts; these were going to be my own personal hell. And the worst of it was that it was my own pocket money that had bought them so rashly last September.
Typical, I thought. It was typical of my Dad's thoroughness and knowledge of how my mind might be working, that he had decided that he would be driving us to school today. As I descended the stairs and went into the kitchen for breakfast I could think of no possible escape from what was about to befall me. Sam, my younger brother, gave me a wink as I sat down. Not exactly a friendly, 'brother, I know this must be awful for you', type of supportive wink, but a straightforward sarcastic wink. 'See my big brother, the shortie pants little boy' was written all over his face. Well at least that would not last too long. The Easter holidays were only a week away and Dad had said that Sam would also be in shorts from then on. But Sam had obviously decided that he was going to milk this for whatever entertainment he could while he still had his knees discretely covered by his long trousers. Maybe he also had some inkling that there was going to be yet more entertainment very soon.
My mother wasn't being very supportive either, but then she had always been the first each year to suggest that it would be good for us to let the air and sunshine at our legs. So she had had to endure years of my furious refusal to wear shorts even during the holidays. It must have seemed to her that it was about time I was put back into shorts. And I guess that nearly every mother must like the idea of her sons being dressed to look like good and obedient little boys instead of the denim-clad wild boy image that we preferred. She barely said a word to me over breakfast and disappeared fairly quickly.
I should have taken that to be some sort of warning. As I said, Sam may have been expecting some more entertainment at my expense, and it came in my father's next words.
'Right Michael, we have some unfinished business from last night, and it's going to be finished off now. I let you off with only two spankings last night and you have a third spanking due, so get over here, drop your pants and bend over this chair'.
'But Dad,' I said, 'what third spanking. You said that wearing shorts would be my punishment for the magazines'.
'You obviously need to do some more work on your maths young man. We agreed: one spanking for the drinking, one spanking for the smoking, and a third spanking for cursing at me last night when I was dealing with you'.
I certainly wasn't sure that 'agreed' was the right word in this context but I didn't feel that it would be good for me to say so. And I remembered him saying that I had earned an extra spanking when I screamed out in pain and said '_f_u_c_k_'. Language was going to be yet another thing to be controlled in future. I walked over to the chair undoing the fly on my shorts as I moved. Then I pulled them down to my ankles along with my white briefs.
I bent over the chair the way I had been instructed the previous evening, with my body arched over the seat, my hands touching the floor, and my feet rising close to tip-toe. I was fully stretched and obviously presenting a perfect target. As I waited for the first blow from my father's clothes-brush I could feel my school shirt slide towards my neck, exposing yet more of my fifteen year old bottom. This clothes-brush had proved itself as a spanking instrument during my first two meetings with it. It was made of wood, and had a long handle like a hair-brush. Even with living in a household that had been free of corporal punishment until now I was aware that hairbrushes had been a favourite tool for asserting parental control. Well, my father's clothes-brush was just like a bigger version of one of those hairbrushes, and it delivered a very direct and simple message to my body. I could sense my father getting ready and taking aim, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Sam standing by to witness my pain and shame.
It just wasn't fair; two years younger than me and he was the one wearing long trousers, and he was the one who got to watch my spanking instead of being on the receiving end. I knew well that he was no angel himself and that if Dad knew only some of the stuff that Sam got up to then I wouldn't be the only one in this situation. But who ever said that life was fair? I would just have to put up with life in my new personal hell, and accept too that this was a hell of my own making. If only I had never tried to keep stuff hidden at home. If only I had dumped that vodka bottle when I was finished with it.
'Right young man, this time I want you to count out each smack, and be sure to tag on a good and respectful 'sir' to those numbers.'
'Yes, sir.'
If only I had had the sense to keep the cigarette lighter somewhere else like in the ruined chapel a few fields away from our house where I had conducted most of my illicit experimentation.
Whack!
'One, sir!'.
The force of the blow to my bottom had nearly pushed the words out of my mouth. This was going to be worse than my previous two spankings.
Whack!
'Two, sir!'.
I could already feel a couple of tears gathering in my eyes. I had been wrong to think that the pain from last night's spankings had subsided. It was as if I had continuously spanked through the entire night.
Whack!
'Three, sir!'.
If only I had given those magazines back to Jim, the schoolmate who had lent them to me.
Whack!
'Four, sir!'.
There was simply no way that I was going to be able to hold in these tears and yet I really didn't want to give Sam the satisfaction of seeing me break down and cry.
Whack!
'Five, sir!'
If only, if only, if only, I hadn't bought these stupid grey school shorts. If only I had left them hanging there in the shop. If only I could rewind time and go back to that fateful day last September. If only ...
Whack!
'Six, sir!'
My tears were flowing freely now and I was gulping in air and sobbing ferociously. This was pain and agony like I had never known. I couldn't move from the cramping in my legs. Which was probably just as well as it turned out that this wasn't going to be a traditional six of the best.
Whack!
'Seven, sir!'
Whack!
'Eight, sir!'
Whack!
'Nine, sir!'
Whack!
'Ten, sir!'
And then nothing. Nothing but the sound of my own sobbing. I was well and truly reduced to a humiliating and painful state. I gasped for air, and began to get some breath back.
I heard my father turn to Sam and say, 'there's one of the hidden benefits of the metric system, counting in tens instead of sixes.'
I could hear Sam laugh but I thought that it was one of the most pathetic jokes I had ever heard. I took another couple of breaths and recovered myself. I might have broken down, cried out like a toddler, and been in floods of tears, but I would show them that I was well able to handle this. I was tough enough to take it. I could recover.
Dad told me to get up and pull up my shorts. Then he sent me up to the bathroom to wash my face and gave me orders to be out at the car within five minutes. Sam followed me up the stairs. As I splashed water on my face he looked into the bathroom and giggled.
'I just love the way that the backs of your legs are so much more colourful than anywhere else beneath your little shortie pants, sissie cry-baby!'
With that he ran off and out to Dad. I twisted around and had a look in the mirror. He was right. My short pants were so short that they didn't cover all of the marks of my spanking. There was a good two inches of bruised flesh exposed beneath the hem. 'Brilliant', I thought, 'that's really all I need right now. Forced to wear stupid tight grey short shorts to school at fifteen years of age, and with the evidence of a thorough spanking on show for the whole world to see'.
There was simply no way I could imagine myself getting through the rest of the day. Afterall, the spanking was bad enough in itself. Being made to wear shorts was terrible and humiliating. Having to wear these shorts to school was unbearable and shaming. But having to display spanked thighs, exposed by little-boy grey school shorts, to over seven hundred laughing teenagers, was the final indignity. The only reason I was able to go down those stairs and out to Sam and Dad in the car, was because I figured that there really wasn't much room for life to get any worse. I didn't even care that Sam had taken the front seat and I had been demoted to the back. I was totally numb for that short drive to school; both numb with the throbbing pain in my bottom, and emotionally numb. I don't know how it happened, but I was away in a different world of fun and happiness in my own thoughts and I knew that all I had to do was to take it one minute at a time and I would survive.
I might be the first and only teenager to wear shorts to my school in a very long time, but I would be stoical, hold my head high, show my stiff upper lip, join the ranks of British Bulldog heroes, and live through it.
My hands massaged the bare skin of my legs and my mind drifted away to holiday adventures with the Famous Five, and school fun at Linbury Court with Jennings and Darbishire. Short pants might be a badge of shame in April 1982 but I wasn't going to forget that the kids who had the most fun in the books I used to read were all made to wear shorts well into their teens. I was in another world for that journey.
Until we drove through the school gates.
And once again fear and shame settled in my stomach and I was no longer so sure about my chances of surviving the next seven hours of school.
'Cheer up', I told myself. 'Afterall, it's Friday and you've got the whole weekend to look forward to'.
As if.
I could see crowds of boys making their way towards the assembly hall as my father pulled into a visitor parking space.
'Right, we're here'.
As if I hadn't noticed.
Sam climbed out of the car and opened the child-proof locked back door to let me out. I took a deep breath and my shoes found their own way to the gravel on the driveway. He smiled at me, gave me a light little smack on the back of my thigh and whispered into my ear. 'Cheer up shortie-pants'.
I was a totally and utterly broken and defeated little boy as the three of us walked towards the hall-door. I could see groups of boys turning to stare at my bare legs. I could see their faces crack into smiles. I could see a few younger boys actually pointing at me. I could almost hear every word of their whispered taunts.
At the door Dad put his hand on our shoulders and smiled. 'Have a good day now boys'.
As if.
Then he turned and went back to his car to drive off to work, and I was left totally defenceless. The only boy wearing shorts in the entire school. Far from my snatched moments of secret shorts wearing over the last few months, I was now wearing what had become, very public shorts.