Summer with an Afrikaans family – Part 3
Chris and I left the kitchen and went upstairs rubbing our bums.
"Let's go down to the steam and cool off," he said. "Meet you there in five minutes.'
We went to our respective rooms to change. I lowered my underpants and looked in the mirror. My bottom was very red with some darker splotches. I change into my swimming trunks and went down to the stream. Chris had arrived just ahead of me. We found a sandy bywater and sat down gingerly in it. The cold water felt welcome running gently underneath and around us. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes.
"Why do we have bums?" Chris asked at length.
Despite the sting in my tail I had to smile.
"I mean really," he continued bitterly. "We just have bums so we can be whacked. I get caned at school, spanked at home, and in the space of less than a week I have been caned and spanked by people I don't even know!"
He leaned back gloomily in the water.
That night heavy clouds moved in over the tops of the mountains and slid down into the fields, and by morning a steady rain was falling. It was clearly a day to spend indoors. We lounged around reading and playing board games. Mrs De Jaager was still at her sister's and Mr De Jaager had gone to the general store in his truck. It was quite cozy with no adults around, a fire burning in the grate, and cold rain and wind swirling around on the outside. The conversation turned to the subject of school and, given the very recent punishments of Chris and me, inevitably drifted into the subject of corporal punishment. We started to exchange school stories and the subject moved on to severest punishments experienced or witnessed.
One boy told of a boy at his school, thirteen years old, who had received 9 strokes of the cane in the past term.
"I thought six was the limit," remarked Robert, my roommate.
"Not by law," came the reply. "They can give you more if they want to."
No one at my school had ever received more than six and I tried to imagine what that must feel like.
"What did he do?" asked Tim (my other roommate).
"He was caught scratching the headmasters car with a key. I happened to be near the office and heard the caning. It was something, I can tell you. When the door opened he came out very red in the face and just said, 'Out of way!' and ran down the corridor and outside, and I think he went straight home because none of us saw him again that day. He was back the next day, though, and charged everyone sixpence to see his bum in the boys room. It was a mess, I can tell you. The head hadnt missed an inch: stripe after stripe. He made good money that day but he said he would rather have not had the opportunity. He said he had been unable to sleep, the pain had lasted so long."
There was an awed pause while the rest of us digested this information.
Tim then offered his contribution. He said that a 12-year-old boy at his school had been sent by the head with a note to a nearby Afrikaans school to invite them to a debate. He went after school and since it was a hot day he had removed his tie, leaving him in just a white shirt and grey shorts. The uniform of the Afrikaans school differed only in the color of the tie, so when he arrived he could easily have been taken at a casual glance to be one of the Afrikaans boys not wearing a tie. And thats exactly what happened. A prefect saw him crossing the quadrangle into the building and thought he was on school property without a tie.
"Kom, seun!" he had said, and the visitor thought he was being escorted into the building. He found himself in the prefects' room and the prefect picked up a cane and told him he should know better than to walk around with no tie. He tried to protest but the prefect wasn't listening and told him to get his trousers down quickly or he would get double. Terrified, he did as he was told and bent over. He got six on his underpants and left howling with the note still in his pocket.
"What did he tell his own head when he got back to school?" asked someone.
"He was too embarrassed to say anything – he just told his friends. The head just assumed, since he never got an answer, that there was no interest from the other school in joining in a debate!"
Everyone chuckled. Relations between English and Afrikaans schools were often distant bordering on cold, so the perceived rebuff would not have come as a huge surprise to the head who had offered the olive branch.
The day drew to a close and the clouds lifted. Mrs De Jaager arrived home from her weekend at her sisters and cooked a hearty dinner that we all devoured. After dinner we sat in front of the fire and played "Murder in the dark", a game in which the game leader wrote down everyones role on a piece of paper (detective, policeman, murderer, victim etc) and threw it into a hat. Everyone, of course, hoped to be the murderer but the second-best role was victim, in which role you had a brief but dramatic moment of drama in which you unexpectedly died loudly and hideously.
All in all, a pleasant weekend drew to a close. The effects of my spanking were now a memory and I was glad to be among these friends and this family.
Monday dawned bright and clear and the English boys went down to the dining room for lessons while the Afrikaans family members went about their work on the farm. At mid-morning break we went outside, for it was such a lovely day, and while lounging out in the sun suddenly heard the unmistakable sound of cane meeting bare bottom coming from the barn. We walked the few yards and looked through a side window into the barn and there was Piet, the oldest boy, touching his toes, pants and underpants at his ankles, two stripes already across his bum, and the farmer standing over him with cane raised. A third crack as the cane lashed down deep into his shuddering haunches. This time, it produced a howl. Two more followed progressively lower and then the farmer put down the cane and the boy stood up. Or rather he jumped up. He jumped up and down clutching his bum and howling while the farmer said something in Afrikaans that I could not catch—partly because it was in Afrikaans and partly because Piet was making such a racket. Eventually the boy pulled up his pants and then picked up a pitchfork and started pitching hay, occasionally stopping to rub the sting while the farmer busied himself elsewhere in the barn as if nothing had happened.
We never did find out why Piet had been caned and he wouldnt tell us. Still, at the time it meant more stripes to admire through a skimpy bathing suit at the stream later that day, which I was looking forward to. In fact, my expectations were exceeded, for down at the stream he pulled his trunks all the way down for us to see the damage, and we all agreed he'd had a real hiding. The five stripes stood out like the ridges on a corrugated roof and Chris boldly ran his hand down each tender cheek, Piet not seeming to mind. The Afrikaners called them "suiker strepe" (sugar stripes) because of the candy they resembled.
Unlike Chris's fleshy but narrow bum, Piet had one that was perfectly round and quite small. Except for the parallel dark-red ridges, it was as pale and white as one could imagine.
He gave another rub to each cheek, then pulled up his trunks and sat down in the water.
We built another dam, and were surprised at how fast the time had gone when the gong sounded for afternoon tea.
As we walked up to the house, I reflected that as fascinated as I was by seeing other boys caned, and viewing the results, I had no desire to suffer that fate myself. My one spanking over Mr De Jaager's lap had been quite enough for me, and both the sounds of the canings I had witnessed and the resultant ridges I had viewed seemed to suggest that they were notably harder than the ones typically dished out at my school.
I again resolved to do everything in my power to stay away from that form of punishment.
To be continued......