As I assumed “the position”– the words the Headmaster used — and braced myself for what I now knew was to be a twelve stroke onslaught on my arse, I could not help but wonder why Clive had been told to resume his position against the wall and had not been allowed to put back on his shorts. This was my first encounter with the dreaded birch and I had no clear idea of what to expect; but I can tell you that the accounts I had heard of the pain which an expert hand could deliver with those fine twigs were totally correct; and one had to admit that Dr. Bellamy had an expert hand. The first stroke gives you the impression that it is not going to be too bad, as the twigs spread out across your arse and give you little more than an unpleasant sort of tingle. But then as stroke follows stroke, the pain rapidly builds up until by the time the sixth is delivered your whole arse is on fire with the pain which by then has already become practically unbearable. But in this case, with six more still to come, what could I do but grit my teeth and bite my lip in the hope that I would maintain a certain dignity? By the time the old boy had finished shredding my behind, I felt as if my two buns and flanks were on fire; it was a truly horrible experience. But in contradistinction to how Clive had reacted to his ordeal, the birch did not beat the stuffing out of me and my cock was still as firm and solid at the end as it had been when I first bent over the stool.
The Headmaster told me to join Clive, and stand against the wall with my hands on my head; I still could see no reason why we were both not allowed at least to hide our nakedness by putting back on our shorts; but that respite was clearly not to be, as Dr. Bellamy seated himself behind his desk again. Meanwhile I saw that a malevolent smile had now appeared on the Head-Boy’s face. Dr. Bellamy looked at the pair of us as he said: “Well gentlemen that is the first part of your punishment completed, so I think that we will take a pause of five minute or so before we pass to the second phase.”
Neither Clive nor I could believe our ears; we had just received the thrashing of our lives; but that apparently was not enough; Dr. Bellamy was clearly out for our blood. He then decided to enlighten us as to what was next in store: “Gentlemen, the misdemeanour you committed is quite the gravest, short of stealing, which the school recognises. (Lord knows what he wound have said had he known that Clive and I were regularly fucking each other like rabbits.) Now in case you are unaware of the fact, the school rules limit the number of strokes of either the cane or the birch or a combination of both, to a maximum of twenty-four cuts for any one offence. Only very rarely do I ever felt the need to resort to such a severe measure, but today in view your seniority and the fact that you were caught both smoking and drinking in a public house, itself a strictly forbidden venue for boys from this school — whatever their age — I feel that such a severe punishment is totally justified as it will bring home to the two of you not only the gravity of the offences you committed, but will also serve as a warning example to the rest of the boys of what will happen to them if they break the rules. So gentlemen, in a few minutes, I intend to charge the Head-Boy with the task of completing your punishment by giving each of you twelve complementary cuts with a senior cane across your bare bottoms.”
This was an unbelievably horrific piece of news; we were to receive another severe beating and the Head-Boy was to be given carte blanche to thrash what remained of the living daylights out of our arses, which had just suffered an unbelievably severe roasting with the birch. No wonder he was looking so pleased with himself; I could see from the look on his face that he was going to enjoy every minute of thrashing two of his class-mates. As Dr. Bellamy had said, this was the severest punishment the school allowed him to dish out. No one in his right mind would ever wish to take such beating and I guess if we had known what we were risking by way of such reprisals when we went off on our pub jaunt that Friday evening, we might have thought again before setting out on it. But we had not given the slightest thought to the potential consequences of our actions and there was little point in being wise after the event; we now had to face the music, which if my suspicions were correct, the Head-Boy would play fortissimo on our naked arses. But, you know, the ironical thing about the whole business was that neither of us really liked either smoking or drinking that much; we has just gone to the pub in a vainglorious, macho attempt to assert our independence; but alas we had become unstuck; very unstuck indeed.
Clive was again the first to mount the metaphorical scaffold for his execution. The Head-Boy advanced on him with the senior cane in his hand and applied the first stroke, with great force I might add, so that as I stood there, hands on my head with my cock fully erect, viewing the slaughter which was taking place before my eyes, I saw from the expression on his face that the Head-Boy was really enjoying what he was doing; and he too, to judge from the tenting of the crotch of his pants was also fully sexually aroused by the act he was carrying out. Then, with no unseemly hurry, he laid on stroke after cutting stroke in neat parallel lines running down Clive’s arse from the bottom of his back to the top of his legs.
As stroke followed stroke producing deep angry welts almost immediately, Clive let out moans of pain. His tormentor laid on ten strokes one after the other; he then paused before completing his onslaught with two final, particularly vicious cuts which he placed in the form of a diagonal cross, thereby leaving Clive with what I am sure the Head-Boy thought of as an artistically well-beaten arse. And one has to admit that Head-Boy, Gerard Oliver was an absolute expert with the cane. But one thing was sure and certain; the Headmaster aided by his current Head-Boy had elevated the Frogmore speciality, that much-vaunted, well-beaten arse, to a level of excruciating pain which one would have hardly believed possible; this surely was the solid-gold version of the ultimate punishment, bearing the twenty-four Karat hallmark worthy of a truly well-beaten arse!. As Clive stiffly managed to stand up and regain his position against the wall, still half naked, hands on his head again, to witness my caning, it was with some trepidation that I stepped forward to face my own fate.
That was the final time that I was beaten at Frogmore. Summer term finished two days later and I left the the school for ever. I went first to stay with my grandparents for a week before flying back to Chicago to resume my life in America. My grandfather ever very observant, but never the most sympathetic of men, looked at me and said: “Well young man, I see you have evidently been beaten again. But I suppose you deserved it.” And then, by way of what I guess he saw as words of encouragement and sympathy, he added: “Cheer up lad, you’ll survive!”
Thus ended my involvement with an English public school education. For the record I will just add that I have never since that date been back to England.
CHAPTER 6
But I now must backtrack to that other memorable occasion when I was beaten aged just eighteen when starting my final year in the sixth form at at Frogmore. I have reported these two beatings in reverse chronology as it is this earlier beating which radically influenced my future life long after I had left Frogmore. But first let me tell you something about myself, as I have up to this point, concentrated mainly on the school and its devotion to the cane, with which as you have seen, I was regularly intimate — I really like that word — throughout my entire school career.
When I arrived at Frogmore aged thirteen, I knew nothing at all about sex, but by the time I was approaching fifteen, I knew that I was naturally attracted towards other boys, particularly those well muscled young studs who were members of the various sports teams. I had always been a keen sportsman myself and spent a lot of time keeping fit, working out whenever possible in the gym. I became a keen rugby player, at which game I became a very adept player, so much so that I finally made the school’s top rugby team: the one which competed against similar teams from other schools. I was big for my age and thanks to my efforts in the gym, I had developed a fine muscular body of which I was quite justifiably proud. But most importantly, I was extremely well endowed by nature where it matters most; in a word I have a really big penis or cock, as we universally referred to it at Frogmore.
Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with the life of a public school boy knows that nothing ever remains secret for long. And living, sleeping, showering, playing games and so on with one’s peer group means that even one’s most private parts are regularly exposed to everyone. Any shyness which a boy might have had about his sex organs on entering the school is soon blown away by the fact that boys are naked together on a daily basis in the showers, where everything is revealed. And of course, the size of one’s male-meat is of great interest to all and sundry. I thanked my lucky stars that I was well endowed in that department; so much so that I was chivvied good-naturedly from my first year on, always with a certain degree of envy, about the size of my cock. But my cock was not only of interest because of its size but also because of the fact that as an American, I had been circumcised, an act which is very common in the USA, but relatively rare in England; so all in all my genitalia were of great general interest to my school-mates.
But lack of any detailed sexual knowledge did not stop most of us, by the time we reached fifteen, of discovering the joys of masturbation: wanking in Frogmore speak! And as we grew older, working one’s cock for sexual relief, for which you needed no instructions or partner whatsoever, became a fact and feature of life, however much the powers-that-be exhorted us to refrain from what they coyly called self abuse. And it goes without saying that some boys, by the time they reached eighteen and were in their final year, with a complete absence of female company, started having sexual relations with their friends. So although it is unfair to say that buggery was universal, it was nevertheless present and I have to admit to being one of those guilty of indulging in it. I very quickly realised that I was a gay: a homosexual; I had eyes and interest only in other boys at school and had no need for members of the other sex to satisfy my sexual appetite; so much so that by the time I left Frogmore aged eighteen after that monumental birching and caning together with my friend Clive Garratt inflicted on us by the Headmaster and Head-Boy, I was more or less a practising gay; my sexual liaison with Clive had gone on more or less continuously throughout our final years; and when we finally parted when we left Frogmore, aged almost nineteen, we were both very experienced in the art of gay sexual intercourse..
This brings me to the significance of the beating with which I opened this section of my memoirs for this was to prove one of the determining acts ever visited upon me at Frogmore: much less painful than that horrible, let us call it my, Farewell to Frogmore Flogging, but much more influential in that it pointed me in the direction which my natural latent sexual desires would inevitably have driven me; finally one simply cannot deny one’s sexuality. It was one day early in the first term of my final year when was eighteen years old that I had been picked on incessantly in class by Mr. Manners, the maths teacher: a master who disliked me intensely. It is safe to say that the dislike was mutual, for I hated him just as much as he clearly hated me. I don’t know if it was the fact that I was an American and my accent grated on him; but nothing I did in class was ever right and this character had ridden me hard for the last two years. If anyone had the aptitude to make one of his pupils feel small, this guy had it in spades.
Well this day he drove me to my breaking point and I finally cracked as he had just added that proverbial last straw; and so I inadvisably — very inadvisably — told him to piss-off, using those very words. Both he and the class were stunned. I am sure that had he had the authority to do so, he would have skinned my arse there and then in front of the class; but as I told you, the teaching staff themselves were not allowed to cane boys and had to content themselves with the much lesser pleasure of issuing them with a punishment chit, which the offender had to place in a box outside the school secretary’s office and from which she prepared the punishment lists for the Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening beating sessions.
My heart sank as I saw that he had recommended an eighteen stroke beating for my offence; twelve cuts were par for the course but eighteen were rare and I saw that he really wanted his pint of blood from me. The list of attendees expected for that evening’s punishment session was posted as usual on the notice board outside the refectory and that particular Friday, my name stood there in solitary splendour on the Head-Boy’s list and I saw that there was no list for the Head-Master; so mine was the sole arse to be beaten that evening. And so at eight, in my shorts and gym vest, the appropriate attire, I knocked nervously on the door of the Head-Boy’s study and waited to be told to enter.
The then Head-Boy, a guy called Simon Prosser, was also the captain of the school’s rugger team and a great all-round sportsman; all in all he was a very popular figure; and I have to say with my own devotion to the sport he was one of my own idols whom I admired tremendously. He and I were of the same age and both in the sixth form although he was in the science sixth and I in the arts; so we did not actually sit together in the same class room. But this notwithstanding, here was the man who in his official role of Head-Boy was about to thrash my arse to ribbons by giving me eighteen cuts of his cane as stipulated on the punishment chit.
Simon Prosser also known as the Tosser, in view of his rumoured reputation for sexual adventures, opened the door and beckoned me to enter: “Well Stevens, this is our first meeting and I see that this evening you are my only — how shall I put it — client; so I shall have lots of time to devote to the question of the tender loving care which your arse, according to this punishment slip I have here in front of me, urgently needs.” I should just say here that boys and prefects alike, but obviously not the masters, always use the word arse when referring to a boy’s bottom. He smiled at me as uttered these words and then went on: “I see I am supposed to deliver no less than eighteen cuts of the cane to your naked posterior, which really is excessive. What on earth did you do to deserve such a severe beating?”
I pricked up my ears at the word supposed and as he did not seem in any hurry to get started skinning my arse, I poured out my heart to him and I have to say that he did listen sympathetically, before he finally told me to step out of my shorts and present my bare arse to him by bending across that same beating stool with which I was all too familiar from my visit to his predecessors over the years. I saw his eyes focus on my crotch, where my cock was already rising to the occasion, stimulated by the thought of what was about to happen to me. But I also noted that he too was clearly aroused sexually I could see from his trousers that tell-tale, uncontrollable bulge as his own cock began to harden; there was no doubt at all in my mind, that the process of beating and being beaten was an erotic act to which both parties’ bodies reacted automatically; well that was certainly true in the present case anyway.
Prosser came over to me and gently ran a soft, fondling hand over my waiting buns, a totally unexpected act, which I found very agreeable in spite of the position in which I found myself and which aroused me sexually even more, if that was possible, as I steeled myself for what I assumed would be an eighteen stroke caning. Prosser very gently tapped his cane across the equator of my arse before applying a first resounding stroke. It stung like hell as it always did, but I was not unduly worried as I had been beaten so many times in the past that I took it as one of the facts of life at Frogmore. But I was not at all looking forward to eighteen strokes in all, a number which I had never previously experienced. Prosser continued and gave me five more strokes and then to my surprise stopped and said: “Stevens, you know I have been thinking that your arse is just too attractive to be reduced to shreds by another twelve cuts of the cane and so unless you insist I continue with the cane, I think that I will stop there if you agree to an alternative which I am prepared to offer you; an alternative that will move you from being a boy to the status of a man.”
And that is when that life changing act took place; not in words, but in actions. Taking my silence as a tacit agreement, Prosser revealed that his reputation for sexual prowess was indeed more than a rumour. He first rubbed some soothing cream into the welts he had created. He then went across and locked the door of his study and said: “You know Stevens, I think that aged eighteen as you now are, and in your final year, you need some introduction into the facts of sixth-form life at Frogmore. So unless you object, I propose to give you a little stimulation in lieu of the additional strokes I am supposed to give you.”
He did not specify what a little simulation, as he put it, involved; nor what he proposed to stimulate; nor how, or what with, I was to be stimulated; all was left to my imagination; so I just kept silent, which he took to mean that I agreed to what he intended to do to me. But as I was still bent over the stool with my arse naked in the air and having listened to the chit-chat about sexual matters which are the perennial topic of conversation of boys from age fourteen onwards, his suggestions left little to my imagination; in a word I knew that I was about to be fucked: an act I had heard described so many times in the interminable school-boy conversations about sex and with which I was quite familiar in theory but not in practice.
And so I suppose I prepared myself, somewhat nervously, for a different kind of assault on my arse; one in which I would surrender my anal virginity to the Head-Boy. Frankly it seemed to me that it offered an excellent and instructive alternative to another dozen cuts of the cane; so why on earth should I object? Moreover, it seemed to me that it was one of those things which just had to happen to me anyway; especially as I knew that my own awakening sexuality, until now dormant and unexplored, was directed exclusively towards other members of the male sex. I already knew that there were several older boys at Frogmore who consorted together as an outlet for their sexual tension and with my own proclivities I saw myself joining the ranks of those lads who committed buggery with each other: in theory forbidden by the school rules but to which a blind eye was turned in view of the futility of trying to stamp out an act which was, in the main, conditioned by the exclusively all-male environment of the English public school.
Writing this memoir, years after the events I am recounting, I can safely say, that legislators of all hues can huff and puff and pontificate till the cows come home, but sex, as the prime motivator in life, will never be controlled. One just has to accept that though sex is the primary source of life in both the the animal and plant kingdoms, we humans are that the only species among living creatures who find sex, in addition to its fundamental function of procreation, as a pleasurable act. Sex is a key prime mover in life; it always has been and always will be and we may as well face the facts that that is the way it is. And let’s face it it is one of the most enjoyable, if not the most enjoyable, pastimes of life. So to deny ourselves this, the greatest of all pleasures, seems to me to be stupid, totally counterproductive and swimming against the current.