Chapter 1: My First Day at Chatterley Hall

From the passenger seat of my Dad’s car I could make out the spires and turrets of Chatterley Hall, the prestigious boarding school for young ladies where I was to start my apprenticeship, having just finished my own - far less exclusive - secondary education at the age of 16.

A middle-aged woman was waiting for me at the end of the gravel drive. My father gave me a quick smile as I retrieved by suitcase from the boot, and drove off. I was alone, totally alone, for the first time in my young life.

“Good morning, Tom”, said the woman. “You are Tom Danvers, are you not?”

“Yes, that’s right”, I said. Well, it was.

“Welcome to Chatterley. My name is Mrs Lodenheim, the Headmistress’ secretary. I will show you your room, where you can freshen up and change into your work uniform. I will then introduce you to Mr Furzton who will have charge of you. How does that sound?”

“Fine”, I replied, and followed her, lugging my suitcase, through a maze of corridors, down some stairs into the basement, where she unlocked the door to a small, dark room with stone walls. A bed, a cupboard, a chair. That was the totality of the room’s furniture.

“There is a toilet down that corridor. The showers are communal, and this being a girls’ school, I suggest you use them either very early or after lessons have started. Now would be a good time, for example...”

I told her I had showered that morning, and the drive had only been an hour. She told me to get into my uniform and she would come and collect me 10 mins later.

The uniform was blue, and it was more like a police uniform when I had expected a school uniform, this being a school and all. But here she was already, picking me up and taking me to meet my new boss.

It was not far to go - his office was just a few doors on from my room. He was a bulky, stern-looking man, and wore a more elaborate version of the uniform I was in. He was sitting behind a desk and asked me to pull up a chair to sit facing him.

“Hello, Tom, it is very nice to meet you finally. I suggest that, for today, you just follow me around and observe. You’ll get the hang of it quickly, and I may ask you to assist me from time to time, but nothing difficult. The aim is that you will be able to work on your own in a few weeks. The apprenticeship lasts 18 months, as you know, and, if you do well, we already have a job lined up for you at one of our sister schools. Funnily enough, you will be taking over from Mr Marks, who trained me, back in the day. He wants to take early retirement.”

“Thank you”, I said, embarrassed. What else should I have said?

The school bell rang at this moment, announcing the end of what I thought would have been the fourth period. The cries of young girls could be heard as they fled their classrooms to start their lunch break. Not long after, there was a faint knock at the door.

“Why don’t you let in our first customer of the day?”, asked Mr Furzton.

I gingerly opened the door and looked into the big eyes of a young girl, around 14, dressed in a blue school blazer and skirt. She clearly had not expected to see me, and seemed surprised.

“This is Tom, Kelly. He is starting his apprenticeship with me today. Have you got your slip?”

She extracted a piece of paper from the inside pocket of her blazer and handed it to him.

“Ok, Kelly, you know the drill.”

She took off her blazer - her prim blouse was buttoned up but it was clear that she had begun to develop into a young woman. She then, with a quick, shy glance in my direction, followed Mr Furzton into the adjacent room. This looked a bit like a doctor’s consulting room, only that there were a number of wooden frames, padded benches and the like dotted around the room. Kelly was already lying on one of these benches.

Mr Furzton motioned me to stand in a corner and I did, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible as Mr Furzton opened a cupboard and selected a long, thick rattan cane from it. He took up position next to Kelly prostrate body and then started to can her bottom. Ten strokes - he counted each one. Kelly then got up, wiped away a tear (she had been silent throughout), cast me another embarrassed glance, put her blazer back on and left.

“Tom, why don’t you go and collect the slips from the girls waiting next door?”

There were three girls in Mr Furzton’s office, to my surprise, at a rough guess aged 12, 13 and 16. I introduced myself: “Hello, I’m Tom, I’m Mr Furzton’s new apprentice. He has asked me to collect your slips.”

They handed them over, more or less demurely. The oldest was clearly particularly uncomfortable at my presence.

I took the three slips into the next room and handed them to my boss. He scrutinised them with a frown. “I wasn’t expecting to see Rebecca again so soon”, he mumbled. “Why don’t you call her in first?”

I did. The oldest girl sighed and followed me. Mr Furzton looked at her sternly. “Rebecca, you were here just four days ago. On that occasion Miss Lopes sent you - I see that this time you fell short of Mrs Ross’s expectations. What escalation of your punishment do you suggest? Mrs Ross has asked for 20 cane strokes, as you will know.

“How about 25?”, she whispered, barely audibly.

“30 I would have gone for”, riposted Mr Furzton, “but if it is to be 25 you will have to take off your skirt.”

“30, then, ok”, begged Rebecca, but Mr Furzton was adamant. “Hand your skirt and blazer to Tom and no more backchat!”

She complied, took off her blazer and then unzipped her skirt at the side and took it off. Her blouse was quite long, unfortunately, so that I did not get to see much. That was to change, however, as she bent over one of the padded frames ready to receive her caning: her blouse now receded and revealed a pair of blue cotton knickers. Clearly this was going to hurt more than through the skirt, but there was still quite a lot of material between her behind and the cane.

“Please count each stroke!” Mr Furzton was brandishing the cane he had used on Kelly. He raised it high in the air and then let it swish down, making contact with Rebecca’s seat with a loud ‘whack’. “One”, from Rebecca. “Whack!” “Two!” She was clearly in pain. Clearly, her knickers softened just some of the force of each stroke - red stripes were forming where there was no material to protect her skin. After five or six strokes, she was screaming after each stroke, then had to recover in order to count the stroke properly. After 25 strokes, her upper legs were criss-crossed with red stripes and she was crying freely.

She quickly got dressed again and left, without even glancing at me.

“So you’re learning on the job, Tom. I should have explained some of the rules we operate here. Any girl that is sent to see me within seven days of her last visit gets her punishment ‘escalated’, as we call it. The first time this means we increase the punishment by one third or have her lose a layer of clothing. She chose poorly, as the knight in Indiana Jones said.” He chuckled to himself. “Things get more interesting if they are sent back within seven days of their second visit. You may soon find out - I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were to see Rebecca again soon.” “So what have these girls done to deserve to be punished?”, I asked.

“Well, down here we only deal with minor disciplinary and academic offences. Forgotten or shoddy homework, repeated bad test results, infringements of the dress or grooming code. Serious offences are brought before a disciplinary panel which has the power to impose harsher penalties - but we are usually the ones to carry them out.”

He glanced at his watch.

“No rest for the righteous. Two left to do. But they are both minor. Call in Jennifer.”

Jennifer turned out to the the younger one - I guessed she was about 12. Her blazer obscured any clues as to her body’s development.

“Left or right handed?”, asked Mr Furzton.

“Right”, came her demure response.

“Ok, stick out your left hand then, palm up!”, he ordered.

She complied, and he gave her six strokes with a very thin cane, almost a whip, across the palm. She winced, but did not cry out.

The slightly older one was next, Bronwen, a tiny little blonde.

“I see from your note that you are normally a good girl, but that you fell short in your last written Latin test. Miss Tugendhat has asked that you be given a short, sharp shock. So bend over this frame, please.”

Bronwen was trembling slightly as she did as she was told. In the meantime, Mr Furzton had got a large wooden paddle from his cupboard.

“On this occasion, just two!”, he announced, as he whacked it across her bottom the first time. She screamed louder than anyone had screamed that day.

Whack!

Another blood-curdling scream from Bronwen.

“Ok, let that be a lesson to you. Lunchtime is almost over, you better get back to class!”

As we were alone again, I asked, while Mr Furzton was putting away the paddle and cane, rather sheepishly: “So what do we do the rest of the time?”

“Well, the first thing is to prepare the paperwork - each punishment needs to be properly documented. That’s a good job for you, now that I think about it. Here are the four slips - the first three already have files, you find them in the filing cabinet next door. You will have to start a new file for Bronwen. Copy out the slip, then set out the punishment administered and any special circumstances - this really only applies to Rebecca, but you will find all about her previous visit in her file.”

As paperwork went, this was quite enjoyable. It turned out that Rebecca was a frequent visitor to Mr Furzton’s office - her file was thick. However, it seemed that she usually visited every three or four weeks - this was the first time she had had to visit twice in a week, and therefore the first time her punishment had been ‘escalated’. It was my job to explain how that escalation had come about - that she had chosen a lower number of strokes than the ‘tariff’, which called for a extra 1/3 of strokes, and therefore been obliged to shed one layer of clothing. I also had to detail, for each punishee, how she had conducted herself during her punishment. There were boxes to tick which ranged from ‘stoic - no reaction’ to ‘lost control, had to be restrained’.

I did not know if I was allowed to look at any other files - so I didn’t - but I would have loved to check if any girls ever had had to be restrained.

Mr Furzton came back into the office. “Are you done? Good!”, he said. Now, I’ve prepared a dummy for you next door - time for some practical training!”

In the other room - which I had come to call ‘The Execution Room’ to myself - he had actually strapped a stuffed doll onto one of the punishment frames.

“If you are to take on some of my duties, it is important that you know how much force to apply. Not too much, not too little. We do not want the girls to be seriously injured, nor do we want them to laugh behind our backs if the punishment does not hurt at all. So the bottom of this doll is equipped with a sensor - on this screen” - he pointed to a flat screen that I had not noticed before - “you will see the force of your stroke. You want to be in the ‘green’ zone: if you hit so hard to reach the red zone, it’s way too hard; if you stay in the white or yellow zones, you are not hitting hard enough. So have a go, develop a feel for the cane. I’ll leave you to practice. When I get back, I want you to administer 10 strokes, but with the screen off. If at least eight of these are in the green zone, and none is in the red, you can have a go at a real punishment later this afternoon.”

So I got practising. It was actually surprisingly difficult to - pun intended - hit the sweet spot. I literally missed the dummy’s bottom on my first attempt, hitting the back of its knees instead, and this did not register at all on the screen. Even when I did hit the target, my strokes were initially too feeble. So I hit harder, gradually increasing the strength, entering the green zone and getting close to the red zone. I slowly got a feel for the right level of strength, and deliberately looked away from the screen as I hit, repeatedly getting it right. I put the cane down, walked around the room a few times, looking at the various frames, chairs and other implements. There were more or less elaborate punishment frames - some just a bit of padding on a stool, others that allowed the ‘victim’ to be secured in various positions. There was also a chair that looked medical, with stirrups to secure the legs in a spread position that just looking at it got me excited. I was grateful to my dad for pestering me to learn a ‘proper’ job - I had had no idea that this was what he had had in mind!