Tanya Learns the Hard Way II

THE drive home had been a solemn journey. Tanya had been summoned from a physical education period and ordered to report to the headmaster's office immediately. She had not even been allowed to change first. Standing on the plush carpet in front of the headmaster's oak desk, the barefooted teenager was given the bad news. Scantily clad in tight maroon gym shorts and sleeveless white vest, she had listened in silence as the head articulated his decision. The headmaster had deliberately not mentioned the matter of referring to an independent expert. He had only said that "if a suitable punishment cannot be agreed upon, expulsion would be the obvious consequence." Both men had taken note of the fetching image she presented. Her size 36 breasts strained the material of the vest. That, coupled with the sight of her tanned, athletically shaped legs, firm buttocks and thighs was indeed a picture to dream about�

Arthur Barton would approve, the headmaster had reasoned. By the same token, he had felt equally confident that the girl's guardian would go ahead with whatever was recommended by the disciplinary expert.

Immediately the girl and her guardian had left his office, he had lifted the receiver of his telephone He had spoken to his secretary: " Davina, please get hold of Mr. Arthur Barton for me. His mobile number is listed on your pc in the 'contacts' file." He replaced the receiver, sat back and waited. Contrary to his stated earlier intention of waiting until Colin Maynard had contacted him to confirm the placing of Tanya under the 'disciplinary care' of Barton, the headmaster was now more than determined to put his former colleague in the picture�

Since leaving the headmaster's office, Colin Maynard had been thinking of ways not only to broach the subject of the discipline option proposed by the head but also of how he was going to get Tanya to accede to whatever was considered "suitably severe" punishment. Tanya, he knew with absolute certainty, had never been subjected to corporal punishment; at least not during the years he had been responsible for her upbringing.

He stole a glance at her every so often as he drove the short distance from the school to their comfortable home. Tanya, sitting in the front passenger seat of the BMW, said nothing. She had hurried from the headmaster's office to the P.E. gym changing room, dressed hurriedly, collected her school bag and made her way to the parking area. She had not wanted to have to explain to anyone that she had being suspended.

'The Boss' as the head was known had told her that the boys were to be caned after school. They were lucky. Why had she agreed to forge the letters? That was stupid. To make things worse, "The Boss" had now uncovered previous instances of her having bunked school. Oh, what a mess she was in. She would gladly accept a caning instead of having to be in her present predicament.

"It could well be boarding school for you," he announced. "And don't think I won't go that route," he added, by way of a threat.

"But, but he said something about me being able to go back if you can agree to some punishment," she responded.

"I need to speak to someone," her guardian said. "He is apparently an expert is dealing with excessively badly behaved school pupils. I can only hope that he agrees to help out." Maynard was laying the foundation for "persuading" the shapely seventeen-year-old to accept what he considered to be deserved punishment. After the girl's earlier insulting insinuations that he was something of a voyeur, Colin Maynard had noted the headmaster's implicit desire for the schoolgirl to receive punishment similar to that her male co-conspirators. Yes, he thought with more than a touch of vengeance, the more severe the better. He would be agreeable to whatever punishments the man named Arthur Barton deemed necessary to inflict upon the anatomy or otherwise of the anxious teenager seated beside him.

"Who are you going to speak to?" she asked, apprehensively. "What kind of punishment was "The Boss" talking about. The first inkling of what lay in store for her began to slowly make its presence felt. "Does that mean that you're going to give me a hiding?" She made such an occurrence sound almost preposterous; on the other hand, she would gladly accept a spanking of sorts, even from her guardian who she somehow couldn't imagine carrying out.

"Do you know - are you aware - of what is shortly going to happen to your friends?" he put to her.

"They'll probably get cuts; that what normally happens for serious things," she conceded. "Why do you ask? "

They had reached the house and Maynard pressed the button of the remote door-opening device. "They are both going to be severely dealt with," he emphasised. Each of your cronies is on the verge of receiving eight - yes, eight - strokes with the heavy cane; that iss one which I assume will make more impression on their backsides. " Tanya listened in silence as her guardian pulled the car through the open entrance and pulled up in front of the house. "Oh yes, and lest I forget, " he added to the load of what he hoped was an already overburdened conscience, "their posteriors will not be afforded the protection of pants or underpants."

Tanya made no movement to get out of the car; she remained in her seat with safety belt still in place. Her faced had paled somewhat, more because of the implication that the details of the boys' punishment would have on her own predicament than on any genuine concern for their well-being. What worried her was the mention by the headmaster, and the agreement of her stepfather-cum-guardian, of the need for a 'suitable punishment' for her.

Colin Maynard had already unlocked the front door by the time Tanya had gathered her composure sufficiently to get out of the car. Once they were both inside the comfortable house, Maynard told her to take a seat in the lounge. He needed to speak seriously with her. Reluctantly, in typical Tanya fashion, she did so; dragging herself, school bag over the shoulder, to the lounge. He guardian watched her plunk herself into the lush sofa, the maroon-checked school dress creeping dangerously up her tanned thighs. Seeing him looking at her legs, she hurriedly tugged the hem downwards. The rage began to resurface inside Maynard. She was doing it again; not so subtly, she was trying to make him feel that he had done something wrong.

Seating himself in his comfortable leather chair, opposite her, he asked her whether she remembered Arthur Barton. She did, and not too fondly.

"Everyone called him the 'Baldy Man'," she revealed. "He was ugly and fat. And bald. He wasn't very nice."

Maynard broke the news to her. "He is the person I am going to contact in connection with your punishment."

Her stunned silence told a story. She remembered Arthur Barton vividly. He was the sort of teacher that frequented the nightmares of school pupils. Both in appearance and conduct, he was the archetypal schoolmaster. Gowned and serious, he tormented his pupils at every opportunity. "Boy! (or Girl!) You will report to me after school today," was a phrase feared, by Barton's pupils. Especially the males. Such an utterance inevitably meant a dose of The Cane (for the boys) as well as a two-hour period of detention. He would prowl his mathematics class, sprouting forth the theorems of Pythagoris and others, all the while appearing uncover some poor adolescent wretch's omission to do their homework. If he were unsuccessful, he would adopt another means of 'selection'; be it talking in class or whatever. The boys suffered at his hand, or rather, the cane in his hand . While the girls in his class were spared the ignominy and discomfort of being caned by him, Barton left them in no doubt that he would do the same to them were he allowed to do so. Barton developed a knack for incorporating an element of humiliation into a luckless boy's punishment. It would often occur that a boy and a girl would be instructed to report to him for punishment. He often seemed to arrange it that way; male and female. Attached to his classroom was a small storeroom. The girl would be made to sit at the desk closest to the entrance of this small room and ordered to get on with whatever written punishment Barton had prescribed for her and the boy. He would then take the boy into the room, close the door, and proceed to administer the caning. The girl outside would hear everything, from the instruction to bend and count the strokes, to the actual impact of the bamboo on its target. Tanya, from her own experience, did not seek to make eye contact with the unfortunate boy when the door was re-opened. She kept her head down and carried on with her written punishment. The boy was then, despite being in considerable discomfort, required to commence his lines or whatever else Barton had ordered him to do.

In addition to his strictness, Tanya also recalled how Arthur Barton would often spend part of his free periods watching the senior girls do physical education. Girls' P.E. uniform consisted of a pair of maroon shorts and white sleeveless vest. Except where an outdoor session had been pre-arranged, pupils were required to be barefoot. As with the rest of the rules regarding pupils' uniform and appearance, P.E. outfit requirements were strictly applied. In additional to being an offence punishable by detention, forgetting to bring one's proper gym kit to school was not something a pupil was allowed to forget in a hurry - as Tanya, herself, had found out the previous year. In terms of the school regulations governing the wearing of the appropriate P.E. items, she had been written up in the detention book. Equally unpleasant was the fact that the errant pupil had to do gym in his or her underwear only. Girls did P.E. separately from the boys so the potential agitation of the hormones (and probably other anatomical parts) of a number of adolescent males by the sight of the amply developing schoolgirl performing her exercises in nothing but regulation bra and bikini panties was not an issue. Arthur Barton had been there. It was his final term at the school. On a free period jaunt, he hung around the gym for the entire period. Tanya had been embarrassed by his presence. He seemed to hover near her throughout as she stretched, bent, bounced, climbed, jumped, and vaulted through the forty-five minutes. Every so often he would exchange light banter with the gym mistress, who did not seem to object to his being there. The next day Tanya was made to sit at the front of Barton's maths class, where he "could keep an eye on her." Tanya began to assume that he had meant this remark literally. Shortly before he left the school, he also found it necessary to subject her, and a boy who had been talking to her in class, to a detention period. True to form, in keeping with his modus operandis, she had had to listen to the sound of the boy, whom she found cute, receiving a severe thrashing from Barton. The schoolmaster had obviously come to the conclusion that their mutual body language and persistent hushed conversation coupled with the smile at the other revealed more than a small degree of attraction between the two pupils. By caning the boy within earshot of his well-endowed classmate, Barton had simultaneously asserted his own authority as well as considerably denting the self image of the boy. That was the enduring perception that Tanya's had of Arthur Barton, schoolmaster and disciplinarian.

"Do you know who he is?" repeated her guardian.

"Yes, I do," she answered. "He was my maths teacher last year."

"He won't be stranger, then. Will he?" Maynard stated. "He stands between you and expulsion from Edgemeadow High; it's as simple as that."

Tanya had been fed diverse pieces of information over the past hour or so. Expulsion or punishment. Canings for other two boys on the bare bottom. Boarding school. And now, Arthur Barton to punish her. What was her world coming to? Was she in the middle of a nightmare?

She was still not entirely certain that she had made her assumptions correctly. Was her old maths teacher, who still gave her bad dreams, going to be in charge of punishing her? "When are you going to see Mr. Barton?" she asked, apprehensively.

"As soon as possible," her guardian replied. "The initial choice rests with you, however," he added.

More options to confuse her even more. "What choice?" she ventured. Why couldn't they decide what to do to her and get it over with.

"Boarding school or Mr. Barton; that is assuming he wants to help out," said Maynard. "Heaven knows why he should even bother to deal with the likes of you," he added, cruelly.

The boarding school option was not tenable. Anything but that, even if it meant having to endure the "Baldy Man". She shrugged; the lesser of two evils. "I suppose it will have to be him," she sighed.

Maynard perused the anxious teenager. Her shapely legs, extensively revealed by her school dress, which seemed to have acquired a mind of its own and persisted in creeping higher up her tanned thighs as she constantly shuffled herself nervously on the sofa, were the focus of his glances. Lower down, her white cotton ankle socks and brown leather t-bar buckle shoes completed the uplifting picture of a troubled young woman. A schoolgirl, on the verge of adulthood, struggling to come to terms with the control and regimentation imposed upon her free spirit by the rules, regulations and traditions of Edgemeadow High School. That she considered her behaviour to be 'free spirited' was a matter of considerable dispute. Her stepfather-cum-guardian, headmaster and others in the know would have used other, less complimentary adjectives to describe her transgressions. The word 'delinquent' would come a great deal closer to what these people would consider an apt description. Yes, Maynard had to agree with her choice, although from a different perspective and with reasons totally polarised to that of the girl's, as to the perceived solution to the immediate problem.

But before the discipline of the teenager could become a reality, one important phone call needed to be made.
 
 

Barton had answered his phone promptly. Despite no longer still being at the school, the former teacher still displayed the same respect for the headmaster that he had had during his teaching days at the school.

"How are you, headmaster?" he had said. He had still retained the formality of address from days gone by. The two discussed a few matters of common general interest before the real issue was broached. The headmaster, for his part, had always addressed the schoolmaster as "Mr. Barton"; everybody else, including his fellow teachers had done this. The headmaster did not know why; it was just that way. Barton had never insisted on being called 'Arthur' and, it was probably because of this, that his fellow educators addressed him as 'Mr. Barton'. Of course, his pupils addressed him as "Sir"; what they called him behind his back, even after he had left the school, to the relief of many a pupil, is well documented.

The bald mathematician (that was how he mainly described himself, professionally) had never married; some said that he had probably been unable to find any female by the name of Pythagoras or the like. Looking at the man now, it was hard to imagine him having ever being young.

Of course, from the moment he had recognised the headmaster's voice, he had known what the reason for the call was. The only question in his mind had been 'who?'.

"Can you recall a female pupil by the name of Tanya Whitfield?" the headmaster had posed.

Barton did remember; he recalled the girl very quickly. She had been one of his 'problems'. He had always been firm with her, but somehow he had always considered that she needed 'further correction'. Boys had been attracted to her and she had allowed this fact to interfere with the good order in the classroom. He had not really known what had happened outside of class or even in other classes. "Vaguely," he said; this was a gross understatement of his recollection of the teenager.

"A difficulty at the school has arisen," explained the head. "One similar to the others," he added. He went on to give an account of the latest and previous, although only recently detected, truancy episodes, Mention of the forgery matter placed elicited a gasp of disbelief from the intently listening Arthur Barton.

"Now I remember her, headmaster," claimed Barton. He proceeded to paint a not-too-complimentary picture of his former pupil, recalling the need to 'punish her persistently' because of not being allowed to discipline effectively.

"I'm afraid she needs proper discipline, Mr. Barton. Would you be prepared to help the school? And her guardian?"

"How old is she?" asked the former schoolmaster. Although eager to accept these challenges, he applied certain selection criteria to safeguard himself from possible legal repercussions. He refused to accept any pupil below the age of sixteen. In addition, the written consent of the parent or guardian as well as the pupil, to the disciplinary measures to be applied, was a prerequisite.

The headmaster knew the standpoint of Arthur Barton. "No problem on that score. The girl is seventeen years and a few months. She had to repeat her previous grade so she's essentially a year behind the rest."

"I'll see what I can do, headmaster," he promised, somewhat cynically. "Will the father be contacting me today?"

"Hopefully. For his daughter's sake," he replied. "Sorry, she's his stepdaughter; he's her guardian," he corrected himself. "It's a complicated affair," he conceded.

Arthur Barton displayed little emotion to his environment On the inside, he felt elated. He generally thrived on the imposition of corrective measures on certain problem teenage subjects. He did it well and the response from parents and the school's headmaster had always been positive. He did prefer though, if that was the correct verb, dealing with girls. He was lucky; most of his assignments involved females. School regulations permitted the corporal punishment of boys so they tended not to be referred to him. A few were, but these were the really hard cases. But the Whitfield girl. He had punished her to the extent permitted at school. He recalled making her listen to the caning of boys behind a shut door in the detention room. But his most uplifting recollection was the teenager doing P.E. in her underwear. It would be a challenge supreme, and a pleasant one at that, to impose his special brand of punishment upon her.