“Ten minutes,” was what she said.
The girl panted in something close to a panic. She could not conceivably wait that long. She was supposed to stand to attention, like a guardsman- but her belly looked swollen above its slit. The ghastly gripings began. They made her pace in place, long to hug her thighs, and duck her knees, and gasp, and writhe from side to side, stirring her budlike breasts. The sand was spilling with such intolerable lenity.
“Please, Matron. I can't… it's coming down…”
Matron Steinkopf said nothing. Only once, when Anna's squirmings became too insistent, did she get up, unclip her switch, and very methodically deliver three lashing slices to the writhing thighs. Then she sat down again. For Anna the new pain was at least something; it was a call to her body in a new place, to endure and combat. Then suddenly she heard her release.
“Da steigst Du drauf und setzi Dich so auf die Lehne…”
She was running to obey as if her life depended on it. The girl stood on either chair-seat and lowered her pronounced “Popo” onto the backs of each, where the sharp edges bit into her and parted her bottom to splitting. With a pronounced plop the Matron extracted the now oily bung and a sturdy, gleaming turd began instantly and gratefully, to exude from the girlish gut. Arms still bound behind her, Anna frowned tin concentration as she pressed. There were tears at the edges of her lashes, but she was thankful, oh how thankful… the sensation was the greatest relief she had known in her life. The bucket beneath her thumped to two healthy, darkish sausages which looked far too big, somehow, to have come from such a girlish belly. The Matron watched them drop from between the reddened cheeks ruminatively; she was already writing out her yellow 'Zettel for the girl-this for Incontinence.
Three minutes later Anna Erland was presenting these to the Duty Mistress in her dreaded chamber. This today was Mademoiselle Bellais, the French mistress, a neat, smiling woman in her early thirties who looked fashion personified in her ultra-short white silk costume and almost crease-less leather boots. A contrast to the Matron in every way. As she surveyed the wretched expression of the pretty little underschool above her flexed cane, it was all she could do not to burst out laughing. With a bit of luck the silly thing would burst out crying in a moment.
“How would you like the first five, Anna?” she chaffed, and, receiving for answer but a finger twisting at a chain-ring, went on briskly, “Let's try them across that fidgety little bottom of yours, shall we. Come here.”
These 'Zettel were meant to be deterrent, but not intolerably severe. Each Duty Mistress could pay them off as desired, and only a lighter, or “classroom,” cane was employed. This was a flicky, whippy instrument, rather than one that bruised deeply. Its sting was considerable, however.
Anna was bent over a stool, her hands on its far edge and her legs straight behind but at an angle- her feet positioned some yard to the rear. Divested once more of its underclothing, her rump quivered in apprehension. Jacqueline Bellais was highly grateful to the Prefect who had strapped those cheeks downwards like that-the well- reddened undersides would react well.
“Who gave you those?”
“Seckendorff, Miss.”
“Good for her.”
“Hhrsss!”
“Ooooo…”
The mistress cut up quickly into the underfat. It was not a very hard stroke but it finished in a stingy flick that made the skin of her victim cringe in. Four more wristy cuts and Anna was in agony. She was given five minutes' pause and took the second 'Zettel in an unusual way. Sitting on the stool, with her bottoms over its edge, she was made to bend right forward, head between her knees. Then the French mistress cut sharply down, in a rigidly vertical stroke that bit in deeply. Anna had never been corrected like this and was squirming like a cut worm on the stool before it was over. And then her chits were signed, as effectuated, and she had to hurry back to her classroom and present them to her teacher, trying not to show her suffering. The latter made her stand for the rest of the period, and had her do so with knickers down and skirt up, exposing her weals-five nice and high, five nice and low- “Lots of room for some more in between,” as she commented to the snickering class.
And thus, it was-as little Anna was already rapidly learning. You were never free of that beastly biting cane. It hung over your head like a Damoclean sword, descending with that awful tingly dread that took your breath away and yet set you on edge and made even the youngest clit stiff, throbbing in anticipation.
At ten thirty each morning there was a break period, of a half-hour, when the girls performed calisthenics in the yard outside, under the eagle eye of Frau Dick, gym mistress elect. They did these in rows, with maximal vigor, not simply because punishment awaited the slovenly, but since for most of the year it was bitterly cold outside, certainly in the tiny tunics, and also since the girls enjoyed the exercises. These only, in any event, lasted some ten minutes or so, after which they ran back in, hugging their friends, laughing and joking, their faces red and ready for the glass of hot milk each had to take in the Hall.
It was here, daily, at approximately a quarter of eleven that the Headmistress addressed the gathered school. The girls lined either side of the Great Hall by classes, the mistresses sat in front on a dais, from which Frau Grumkow gave out the letters (already, of course, perused), made various announcements about coming activities, and in general encouraged that wholesome fidelity to duty for which the Schloss was celebrated. It was usually a moment of camaraderie and affection, for though all looked up to the Frau Direktrice they did so with an admiring glow. This period was also, however, that allotted to “Head's corrections,” namely by the birch.
So far this term there had only been one of these but it had been, as always, a salutory spectacle. It had involved a sturdily built seventeen-year-old, one Joyce Hall, daughter of the British Ambassador to Pomerania (now ceded to Prussia), and with a niece of Charles XII of Sweden one of the most distinguished foreigners attending the academy. In brief, Joyce had been found secreting cakes from the dining-table in her knickers and eating them under her sheets, after Lights Out.
These birchings were notoriously elaborate, involving much ritual, so much so that after Frau Grumkow's long lecture even the most steel-hearted were longing for the cuts to begin, and to get it over with. For the Schloss endeavored to harden and prepare their charges for life in ways both mental as well as physical. Even an experienced Senior could be reduced to a jelly of nervous emotion by one of the Headmistress's addresses. Joyce, a generally liked girl despite her nationality, endured hers phlegmatically, and stark naked in the center of Great Hall, save for high heels and smoky stockings, high-tethered by her garters. Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that German was not her native tongue. She had thin fairish hair which must have been bleached in the sun since her bush was a short crisp curly black, flattened to her belly by her wearing of panties. Her thighs were particularly well-muscled-she was a strong runner-and her arse-cheeks solid; she was a girl, most would have said, destined to grow stout later in life, altogether an appetizing specimen to flog with the birch, and more than one eye of those watching this flesh which seemed to challenge the rod was bright. But her sentence produced no less than a gasp around the hall; it was thirty-five strokes with the birch, plus five of the celebrated “master's stripes,” and three days' solitary confinement. The girl's eyes blinked unbelievingly when she heard it. After further preliminaries she was bent over the block-“All ass,” as Ingeborg Untermacher remarked to her friend Maria Daunitz after-her thick cheeks awaiting the achingly long twigs which Fraulein Katte, allotted the first dozen, drew dripping from a tub.
These branches stung like fury and it was not long before little spasmodic clenchings were visible testimony of their bite. They hissed like asps in the silence. The hands, manacled behind, fisted and scratched. But she endured her first dozen without a sound. A second mistress came forward for the second and, anxious to show her mettle, soon drew up lively wales and grazed blisters of skin. The twigs dug in pitilessly on the right as the punishment began to be worthy of the name. Each cut now drew a violent jerk and a strangled gasp. The buttock masses tightened frantically and the mistress was able to draw out the strokes considerably. A skilful bircher could keep a girl at the summit of pain with no more than four a minute, though the pace was usually faster than this in order to effect that psychological and most absolute victory of correction-when the whipped girl simply could not get her senses to believe she could take another. This final stage of utter absolution was effected for Joyce by the third mistress, who delivered the last eleven after the girl had been thoroughly revived for the ordeal with smelling salts and a bucket of brine emptied over her buttocks.
These were now, on the right at least, a hatched crisscrossing of purplish wales and weals, flecked with ruby pearls where the skin had broken under some particularly toughly pickled bud. These final strokes, of supreme severity, drove all color from the faces of the junior classes watching. They ended in a flurry of passionate tears from the victim, a sudden sobbing that broke out as much at the degradation of being made, at last, to show her
