The Choice


by Karl Gatt <Kbouwde@hotmail.>

Tom and Justin Darnley were about as close as two brothers with a five year age gap could be and the first real rift in their lute had occurred some two months before Tom's 17th birthday, when he had avoided being thrashed for a scrape in which the two of them had landed them>selves, by claiming to be 'too old' for hidings. His father had very reluc- tantly supported him and had awarded him the 'adult' punishment of being grounded for 10 days, leaving a surprised and very resentful Justin to suffer, alone, the familiar, but suddenly humiliating, fate of having to stretch, naked, across the kitchen table in front of his tribe of mostly younger siblings of both _s_e_x_es, while his small, taut bare backside was comprehensively and stingingly reddened with a short, but pliant and very effective, punishment strap made of a double thick- ness of old stirrup leather.

While Mr. Darnley had been expecting this objection from his eldest son for some time, Justin had felt betrayed and very alone, but both he and his father were sure that Tom was making a big mistake and would find that out before long. In fact, it occurred much sooner than either expected and under the strangest of circumstances.

It had been raining heavily earlier on the Saturday morning when young Justin had decided to try out his driving skills in one of the farm's trucks, on that occasion and still in a state of pique, not even consulting Tom about the venture. The rest of the family had gone off to the Market town some thirty miles away, Tom, who had been partying the night before, was fast asleep and the coast was thus clear.

So, about half an hour after the elderly Chev. had vanished down the gravel road, it was followed, initially far more slowly and cautiously, by the heavy, lumbering, Ford 3-tonner, whose pedals the barefoot Justin was only JUST able to reach with the aid of two cushions behind his back, and while peering through the gap between the dashboard and the rim of the steering wheel, to see where he was going.

The stage was thus set for disaster, which was not long in overtaking the budding Stirling Moss. On the very first right-angle bend, the slight 12-year old found that the vehicle's heavy, unassisted steering, coupled to the muddy surface of the road and the speed at which he was by then travelling, made the sharp change of direction quite beyond him and the ponderous vehicle slid slowly, but, fortunately undamaged, off the road and into some thick mud next to it.

Justin took stock and wisely did not panic, but swallowed his pride and hot-footed it back to the homestead to arouse his still sleeping brother and to beg for his help.

Tom, while very angry at his little brother's stupidity, knew that there was no way in which he could abandon him at that point. He did give a silent prayer of thanks for his new-found immunity from corporal punishment, though, as he was well aware of the short, wickedly tapering, plaited oxhide sjambok that hung behind the kitchen door, which nobody had ever seen used save to break up fighting dogs, but which, they had all been told, would be taken to bare tails for any of several 'crimes', one of which was driving a car without permission. He certainly didn't wish an encounter with that dreaded weapon on Justin and accordingly set about trying to help him to avoid it.

A powerful, four-wheel-drive Land Rover was the closest, fastest and most readily accessible towing vehicle and was soon at the site, where it proved to be quite unable to dislodge the lorry. With time moving on and the family's returm more and more imminent, the two delinquents returned to the workshop, started up the tractor and chugged back to the disaster scene where, both thoroughly plastered with mud from spinning wheels, they soon had the lorry back on the road. Nearly a mile from home, with two vehicles to get back there and with time running out rapidly, there was no alternative but for Tom to hand the tractor over to Justin, who had been using it to plough with from an early age, as he could stand at its controls, while he, himself manhandled the lorry with its mud-encrusted wheels, back to the obscurity of the dim, secluded parking shed and, they both hoped, the chance to clean it up before their crime could be discovered.

Not wishing to risk another mishap, Tom stayed in sight of the much slower tractor and, looking back, saw nemesis approaching in the form of his father's car, while the small convoy was still half a mile from home and safety. He had warned Justin to leave the talking to him if things should go wrong and, having already decided that, as he himself could no longer be sjambokked and would, in any case, have to spend the next month at his books in preparation for his pre-Matric. exams., he had nothing to lose by taking all the blame and painting his little brother as an unwilling assistant in an attempt at saving his, Tom's, hide. So he reversed up confidently and got out to 'explain' to his fuming father.

Mr. Darnley, however, had already seen the guilt clearly written on the guileless face of his basically very honest second son and had realised that he was about to be served up some tailored version of the facts by Tom. He accordingly heard the older boy out quietly and without comment and simply told the two reprobates to get the vehicles and themselves cleaned up and then to come over to his office 'for a little chat'.

While not liking the sound of that invitation, the boys had stripped and, freed of the restraint of clothing, had made short work of hosing and scrubbing the two vehicles into spotless condition, before, still stark naked, leaping into the nearest round, concrete dam, where they briskly washed the caked mud off their own and the more inacessible parts of each others bodies, before slipping modestly back into the house to don shorts and shirts and to make their way over, with bare toes by then trailing apprehensively in the mud, to 'the office' for their meeting with their father.

Having already worked out the truth of the matter, aided to no small extent by the two soiled, discarded and forgotten cushions which he had seen on the floor of the lorry's cab. Mr. Darnley, who had been 12 himself and subject to much the same sort of temptations as those which were currently besetting Justin, not all that long ago, had made up his mind to use the incident to kiil two birds with, he hoped, a single, not too damaging, stone.

He accordingly brushed aside further explanations and merely asked the two surprised boys whether they had already given him the whole and the true story. He did not miss the furtive glances exchanged between his sons before Tom's firm confirmation, or the flood of colour round Justin's collar and reflected that Tom was becoming far too accomplished a liar for his own good and that that, too, would have to be remedied.

Telling the boys that he accepted their explanations without reserva- tion, he immediately shattered their obvious relief by adding that those explanations still left both of them in serious trouble. Speaking first to Justin, he pointed out that, irrespective of his motives or reasons, he had deliberately disobeyed a standing prohib- ition on driving ANY vehicle, unassisted and without permission and that he could expect the usual consequences that evening at 6, in the kitchen.

He then ignored the younger boy and told Tom that, again irrespective of his motives, he had shown himself to be not only thoroughly disobed- ient, but also a grossly incompetent driver and that, under present circumstances [an obvious reference to the 'no hidings' arrangement], he had no alternative but to forbid Tom all use of any vehicle, save in connection with his farm work, for the next 12 months, by which time he might have learned at least SOME sense.

To ensure that the point was not missed, he added that this penalty would operate to prevent Tom from obtaining his Learner's Licence when he turned 17 and for long enough after that to disqualify him from taking his Driver's Test as soon as he was 18, with the result that he would probably have to go to University the following year without 'wheels', for the first couple of terms, at any rate.

He had to harden his heart consciously when he saw the stricken look on Tom's handsome, suntanned young face, but felt a surge of pride in the boy's stoic, at least interim, acceptance of his fate and his refusal to beg or plead in front of his younger brother; however, he felt sure that he would soon be approached for clemency, which he fully intended to grant, subject to certain painful conditions and, having curtly dismissed the pair, Justin to spend the next almost five hours stark naked and nervously awaiting his inevitable thrashing and Tom to consider the depth of the hole which he had dug for himself, he settled down confidently to his work and to await developments.

However, the rest of the day passed with no word from Tom, whose father could not know that he was waiting to see whether Justin would get the sjambok that evening, before he, himself, made any moves.

There had never been any stigma, as distinct from the embarrassment which was part of the punishment and there was, accordingly, no privacy, attached to the bare-bottom beatings which traditionally took place, when necessary, in the big, cool kitchen at 6 o'clock on the prescribed evenings. The fact that the culprit was required to go naked from the moment of sentence until the time of its execution, provided enough advertisement of an impending hiding to ensure the maliciously gleeful presence of all the non-involved children and any assorted visitors and other hangers-on, none of whom REALLY wanted the victim[s] to get hurt, but still couldn't keep themselves away from the interesting spectacle of a bare backside's being soundly thrashed.

So it was that Justin had duly presented himself, naked and to his surprise and red-faced embarrassment, fully erect, in the kitchen at 17h55 and had endured, with as much good humour as was possible, the taunts and gibes of his tribe of siblings and some of the local Bantu children, before being made to stretch, for the second time in less than a week, across the heavy kitchen table, to whose well-worn edge he clung frantically while his father vigorously applied a lithe 'kweper- lat' [quince stick] eight agonising times to the lower half of his still bruised and tender bottom cheeks, eventually drawing some heartfelt yelps of pure pain from the suffering pre-teen.

The rule against 'getting up' or 'putting hands there' during a hiding was inflexible and breaches were painfully dealt with, so Justin was more than grateful and his father raised no objection, when Tom, realising that the thrashing would be a hard one, had moved forward and, gently placing his hands on Justin's upper arms, had both held him in position and given him some badly needed moral support.

The beating did not take long to inflict and as no 'thanks' or hypo- critical hand-shaking were required afterwards, a mere few moments after the last cut had landed, twin splashes announced that both boys had leapt into to the 'home' dam, Justin to try to cool off his flaming, smarting rear end and Tom to give him such consolation as he could.

This was no doubt considerable and it was to be expected that the two boys, who shared a room and, sometimes, a bed, would discuss both Justin's fate and Tom's options at some length in between other, more soothing, activities and the next morning found Tom at his dad's office door, bright and early, neatly scrubbed and combed and, as usual, khaki-clad and barefoot, to try to salvage something from what looked like the wreck of his young life.

Mr. Darnley received the boy brusquely, but not dismissively and asked him what he had on his mind. Tom, perhaps unwittingly, then gave his father the very opening he had wanted, by saying that he felt that his punishment for the previous day's misdeed was out of all proportion to what he had done and by asking his father, with charac- teristic directness, what would have happened to him 'before all this...', meaning his refusal to accept further corporal punishment.

He was rold, equally bluntly, that he would have received a 'a VERY scaled-up' version of what had been done to Justin and his father added gratuituously, that, while he didn't believe the 'official' story for one moment, he was prepared to abide by the boys' and particularly Tom's, choices and there could be no question of his reducing the latter's punishment, as Justin's was already a fait acconmpli.

Tom, however, was not about to give up that easily and he reminded his father that he, himself, had always said that there was no point in having a mind if one couldn't change it and that he realised that he wasn't nearly as grown up as he had thought and that he really wanted to 'unchoose' over the 'hidings' issue and to go back to his 'smallboy' status and to accept ALL its consequences.

Mr. Darnley, having then already achieved his objective, nevertheless pretended to think long and hard about this proposal and eventually told Tom to go away and to consider very carefully, what he was asking for, as the results would, if accepted, this time be irrever- sible, would have to be undertsood to stay in place for as long as Tom remained part of the household and would, in the present case, have extremely painful results, which Tom took to be a reference to his being whipped with the sjambok, but, he hoped, at least in the privacy of his father's office.

The interview was then terminated with Tom's being told that his final choice had to be made by noon, that if nothing more was heard from him, it would be accepted that he had thought better of his current plea and that in any event, it was by no means certain that his father would be prepared to let him off his present hook at ANY >price.

Having already made up his mind that ANYTHING was preferable to eing deprived of his licence and his 'wheels', Tom really had nothing to think about, but he went back to Justin, assured him that he, at any rate, had nothing more to fear and recounted their father's words and his own fears about the possibility of his getting a dose of the sjambok, imagining with dread and horror as he did so, that cruel, tapering lash curling round and slicing into his naked bottom while he writhed in agony on the back of the armchair which was always used to bend over for the very rare private hidings that were given in the office.

It was, however, Justin who said that there was no way that their father would ever do anything like that to any of them and that, while Tom would probably 'get a hell of a hiding', he, Justin, was prepared to bet a week's pocket money that the sjambok would stay exactly where it was. Bolstered up by that encouragement, Tom went back to the office, wisely waiting unril nearly noon, to confirm his choice and to be told to 'be in the kitchen, as usual, at 6', from which he realised that his dad, too, had already made HIS choice of punishment.

Taking his courage in both hands, Tom fearfully asked if he was 'going to get the sjambok' to which his dad pointed out that he had already been told that he would be getting a scaled up version of Justin's hiding, that Justin had not felt the sjambok, then or ever before, so whipping Tom with it could hardly be a 'scaled-up version' of Justin's beating. He should thus use what passed for his mind and also his imagination and the fact that he was going to be thrashed in the kitchen, to tell him what to expect.

With all that to digest, Tom rejoined Justin and both boys clean forgot about the rule of going naked while waiting for a thrashing until, at about 3.30, Mr Darnley happened to see his still fully dressed eldest son and told him tartly that he had just earned himself a few extra cuts and then left the teenager, who quickly, if belatedly, stripped down to naked, to reflect on how bad things could always get worse.

The rest of the afternoon dragged interminably for Tom, until Justin, a far naughtier boy than Tom had ever been and who had, accordingly, amassed considerable experience and expertise in selecting and preparing quince, poplar and willow switches for use on his own rump, was sent to the orchard to cut 'a few really good 'kweperlatte', which confirmed what was in store for Tom and also started the rundown to his hiding, itself.

Tom had never previously felt unduly embarrassed at having his bare tail thrashed in front of the other children, but this time, having made an issue of it himself, he was very conscious of his forthcoming public nakedness, of the humiliating, vulnerable position which he would have to assume and of his inexplicably fully erect and quite substantial penis, which was already jutting aggressively up and out from his crotch and would be unconcealable while he was completely naked. At that moment and in spite of his fear, he wanted nothing more than to get the hiding over as quickly as possible.

Peter Darnley, on the other hand, was in no hurry to thrash his errant son. He had had to face up to the fact that much of his irritation at Tom's earlier objection to corporal correction had been due to his own disapointment at losing his occasional opportunities of beating someone who was regarded among the fathers in the area as the most thrashable boy in the district. This reputation was due largely to a local conven>tion which recognized that complaints about each others children could cause friction between neighbours, leading to the arrangement that if a child misbehaved elsewhere than at home, he or she could be punished on the spot, with no questions asked asked about bottoms bearing stripes and bruises which had been acquired elsewhere. On that basis, Tom had probably had at least one hiding at every homestead in the vicinity which contained a boy of about his own age. As 'pants off' was the rule, rather than the exception, his neat, firm 'bubble' bottom and his stoic, unconmplaining acceptance of some quite severe tannings, had won him the respect and admiration of many of the strict, but never cruel, fathers in the community.

Accordingly, when the time came, Tom, mustering as much nonchalance as was possible and covering his rampant _c_o_c_k_ as best he could with both hands, had entered the kitchen to find, to his dismay, that it was chock a block full of youngsters, all agog to see a REALLY boy 'get it kaalgat', a fate with which they were all only too familiar.

Confronted by the stark naked, fully erect and obviously very embarrassed teenager and hearing, in the background, one of the smaller kids pipe up, "Ag, kyk na sy stywe stert" [Oh, just look at his stiff 'tail'], Darnley, like any good father, privately questioned >his own judgment, not only in beating such a big boy, but in deliberately doing so in public.

However, the present die was cast so he curtly ordered Tom, not into the usual punishment position, with his hips resting on a folded blanket on the edge of the table, but to lie flat on the table with his midriff raised by a strategically placed cushion, his feet apart and his bare buttocks thus well spread and open to receive several stinging strokes of the supple quince stick with which his father then armed himself from the small supply which Justin had provided.

Tom was, of course, no stranger to bare bum thrashings, but was uncertain of what these deviations from the norm meant. As it had also been some time since his bare tail had last felt the bite of a stick, he was caught very much by surprise by the intense sting which his father's first stroke produced across his somewhat tender cheeks. He knew perfectly well that he should relax, rather than tense, his buttock muscles in order to alleviate some of the burning pain, but, for several agonising seconds, his body refused to obey his brain and the penetrating force of the firmly applied stick seemed to be burning its way deep into the very fibres of his haunches, setting his entire midriff ablaze and making him feel as though his rump had been sliced in two, although he knew from many past experiences that his bare backside would survive its ordeal virtually intact and would be as good as new, if very tender, in a day or two.

So, with repressed tears prickling at the back of his eyes, Tom settled his lean, resiliant body down on the hard table top and tried to prepare himself to accept however many more stinging slashes of the stick as were about to imprint themselves on his naked hindquarters.

Meanwhile Justin, whose own tail had largely recovered from its previous day's thrashing, was feeling acutely for his elder brother who, he realised, had saved him from far more severe punishment by his sacrifice. He there and then made up his mind to do his best to soothe the older boy's jangled nerves during the course of the even- ing. He had never before climbed into bed with Tim, deliberately looking for _s_e_x_, but this time he felt sure that, were he to join his brother, naked, on bed that night, the combination of throbbing weals and the intimacy of gently stroking hands, would produce enough comfort to procure forgiveness, as well as the immediate release and relief which he knew, even at his early age, Tom would be craving, but which is never quite adequate if achieved alone.

Mr. Darnley, realising that Tom was taking Justin's rap, was determined to discourage both that practice and also any future thoughts which any of the youngsters might have about rejecting family-style discip- line, for a long time.

So, watching the chalk-white stripe which the first stroke had etched across the lower curve of his son's naked bottom turn crimson with returning blood and develop into a hard, raised ridge of tortured flesh, outlined by the tramline effect of a pliant, thin stick's landing sharply on bare skin, he hardened his heart and, raising the swotch well above his shoulder, he took careful aim at a point about an inch above the clear, but presently stretched out, fold where round, muscular teenage buttocks met hard, athletic young thighs and brought the rod down, with pin-point accuracy, to sink deeply into its target, where he allowed it to dwell until, he knew, the boy's tightly braced bum would be feeling as though it had been bisected by a red-hot cleaver. That second stroke wrung a gasp of shock, followed by a yelp of pure agony, from Tom, as its sting and burn registered, first in his whipped buttocks themselves and then right through his finetuned body.

It is a charactetristic of any sound, bare tail thrashing that, instead of numbing the target area, as often occurs when it is protected by one or more layers of cloth, each stroke re-ignites the existing fires in naked haunches until, by the time several cuts have been inflicted, the victim neither knows nor cares where, on his bare rear end, the stick is falling, nor how many strokes he has had or is still to receive, and his body merely becomes a vehicle for the transmission of pain rom increasingly well-striped cheeks to desperately clutching fingers and splayed toes that search for something against which to brace, to resist the increasingly intolerable furnace which is being fanned to white heat by the repeated impact of hard wood on bare flesh.

To really appreciate what Tom was going through, one has to remember that he, the oldest of a large mixed brood, who had publicly claimed to be too grown up to be subjected to the sort of punishment which all the others took for granted, that of having his bare tail thrashed in front of all the others, was now, to save himself from the very type of penalty which he had claimed to prefer, lying stark naked on the very table which had supported all their bodies at one time or another and was submitting his naked hindquarters to a thrash- ing of a severity which would discourage any of his younger siblings from following the same route for a long time to come.

Meanwhile, all Tom could do to save some pride, was to take his flogging as stoically as possible, refusing himself the luxury of yelling out his protest against the searing, biting agony which was progressively building up in his already swelling, brightly ridged and rapidly discolouring buttocks, an act of denial whose magnitude only someone who had himself been in the same position, could ever appreciate.

Knowing exactly what he was doing both to his son's bare backside and to what was left of his teenage modesty, Mr. Darnley had to steel himself to carry on with what he knew to be a thrashing which was far more severe than Tom's 'crime' really warranted. With two already livid, sharply raised and angrily purple welts across the twin smooth mounds of creamy flesh to guide him, one almost dead centre and the second low down, but still well clear of the crease itself, Peter Darnley set about systematically filling in the gap between his two 'sighters', landing one scorching stroke after another across the helplessly expos>ed lower curve of Tom's bare bottom until, by the sixth, his target was a bright, uniform red, but ridged like corrugated cardboard and causing the boy the most intense discomfort, to judge from the way in which his naked loins were pounding on the table as each stroke bit home and the desperation with which he was clinging on to its far edge.

Because of Tom's prone position, Peter was able to finish the thrashing off from Tim's right side, allowing the flexible tip of the green switch to sink into his rather more sensitive left cheek. He intended, subject to Tom's not showing signs of escessive distress, to give the boy 16 strokes, one for every year of his age and so, having inflicted six scorchers on the lower half of his tail, he added a further two stripes across the upper curves, before not only selecting a fresh switch, but also changing sides. He then set about thrashing the naked and already well-whipped bottom just as severely and even more painfully from Tom's right side, so that, once it was emblazoned with thirteen angry, raised weals which extended from quite far down to almost the top of the cleavage between the two, by then very swollen, buttocks, Tom's bare bum was ripe for what his father intended to serve as a salutory lesson to him and everyone else present on the efficacy of a really sound thrashing, irrespective of the age of the offender.

He had accordingly selected the longest and springiest of the slender quince sticks which Justin had cut and, altering his stance slightly, aimed to use the remaining three cuts to maximum effect. Tom, real- ising that the worst was yet to come, gritted his teeth and took a doubly firm grip on the table, clenching his blazing backside as much as his spreadeagled position and his sore, beaten flesh would allow and prepared himself both mrntally and physically for some really serious pain.

This came in the form of two rapid-fire and very hard diagonal strokes, which were made to sink into and penetrate each naked pad of whipped flesh, the latest weals crossing and re-inflaming almost every one of their predecessors and forming a neat, clear St. Andrew's Cross right across the two bare cheeks, from hip to thigh and landing so fast that Tom had no time to recover from the first, before the second had ripped into his screaming flesh, pushing him right over his threshold of pain and making him howl in agony.

That attack was hardly completed before the final, sixteenth, stroke landed on the bare tail, not diagonally, but squarely in the ultra- sensitive crease between buttocks and thighs, raising the level of the agony in Tom's soundly thrashed bum yet further and to heights for which nothing he had experienced before could ever have prepared him.

Then, suddenly, it was all over. The slightly frayed stick was dropped, Tom, hardly able to comprehend that his ordeal had come to an end, gathered himself and made sure he was in control of his tears, before moving to the edge of the table and cautiously lowering his bare feet to the floor, uncertain as to how his flaming, throbbing buttock muscles would respond to taking his weight. That obstacle was quickly overcome and within seconds he was surrounded by the crowd of awed spectators, all anxious to see at close range and to reach out and touch the hard, glowing welts which were already transforming Tom's trim young bottom into a pair of dark purple, ridged 'footballs', which seemed to pulse with a life of their own.

It was not until then that Tom, or anyone else, realised just how much prestige he had lost by his refusal to accept further hidings, the only form of punishment which the younger brigade really understood, as his attitude had been seen, quite wrongly, as an act of cowardice, rather than one of maturity. Now, by accepting, virtually without complaint, by far the 'biggest' hiding that any of them had ever seen, he had rehabilitated himself fully as the one to look up to and to emulate.

Little remains to be told. As is always the case with boys after a sound thrashing, Tom's haunches went through a spell of numbness that lasted for an hour or two, before the anaesthesia wore off and whipped skin and nerve-ends came into their own, making his backside throb and ache with a fierce, burning agony, which was, however, sooth- ed by Justin's gently but liberally applying some pungent herbal ointment, made and provided by one of the old nannies and which, after a moment or two of blinding sting, calmed the battered nerves in his by then rock-hard and swollen buttocks to such an extent that, when he slid naked into bed later on, much of the fire had subsided to a warm and so far from unpleasant, glow and he was able to respond with enthusiasm and full enjoyment, to an equally naked Justin's advances, with gently stroking hands' searching out all each other's most pleasurable spots and turning the light brushing of throbbing, corrugated tails by carefully tracing fingers, into acts of the most intense stimulation, eventually leaving both boys exhausted and spent in each others arms for the night, which was how Peter Darnley found them when he slipped into their room after midnight to make sure that his eldest son was none the worse for his thrashing. He had gently covered the sleeping boys with a light blanket and neither of them ever knew that their father, wise in his generation, had seen and condoned their bond of sympathy, to which he never referred by word >or gesture, afterwards.


More stories by Karl Gatt