The Introduction to This English Thing of Ours

Including the 10 tributaries flowing into the great river of Love and Pain that rolls through so many psyches

It may seem to some that in our discussion of the relationships of love and pain we have covered a very wide field. This was inevitable. The subject is peculiarly difficult and complex, and if we are to gain a real insight into its nature we must not attempt to force the facts to fit into any narrow and artificial formulas of our own construction. 

Havelock Ellis

TO BEGIN WITH A SCHOOLMASTER

Years ago, many years ago, I found myself renting the holiday house of a retired school master. At his birthday celebrations a number of his ex-pupils came together to reminisce about his reliance on the old-fashioned method to maintain order. One eulogist claimed that the man’s daughter had not been immune from his particular discipline as a girl. Now a handsome middle-aged woman she was married to a man nearer her father’s age than her own. Hearing that assertion. that she was no stranger to corporal punishment – she blushed; her husband looked up at the ceiling; the wicked old father chuckled.

As I read through the library of 1950s novels in his holiday home, it became clearer book by book that his interest for corporal punishment was not just disciplinary.

Every novel featured it.

At the denouement of one story, a young boy looked down from his hiding place in a tree to observe an older girl, one whom he desired, flaring up at an older man. The man gripped her by the arm, turned her round, and wielding the ashplant in his hand, whipped the seat of her jodphurs twice, three times causing her to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him.

In another, the narrator, affecting unease, told of a young married couple who made joking references to being ‘stood in the corner’ or ‘It’s the hairbrush for you, young lady!’ Howard Spring was represented in the shelves, RF Delderfield, Anya Seton and others I forget, but all with particular references to this particular thing, in the particular way. A Denis Wheatley Encyclopedia of Witchcraft had a picture of a naked young woman kneeling back on her heels and bending forward, hands tied behind her in the small of her back. The caption read A young witch is prepared for ritual scourging.

The sheer quantity of the novels in my old friend’s bookshelves – there must have been fifty of them – was the first inkling I had that writers – authors, novelists – might be unusually represented in the line-up of this English thing of ours.

And here is Havelock Ellis making the same point a century ago:

A friend, a clergyman, who has read many novels tells me that he has been struck by the frequency with which novelists describe such scenes with much luxury of detail; his list includes novels by well-known religious writers of both sexes. In some of these cases there is reason to believe that the writers felt this sexual association of whipping

Why this might be so is a matter for psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists (not that they have made much headway so far). Very often – or quite often – or more often than you’d expect – references to it sparkle out of innocent surroundings. It seems to be an under-theme playing in our various life symphonies.

But why writers? Represented in the 350,000-word Miscellany elsewhere on this site are four Waughs – Alec, Evelyn, Auberon and Alexander – DH and TE Lawrences, James Joyce, Joyce Carey, Philip Larkin, Phillipa Gregory, Sebastian Faulks, Enid Blyton, CS Lewis, William Faulkner, Anais Nin, Saul Bellow, Nancy Mitford, Ronald Millar, Thomas Mann, Denis Wheatley, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Colin Wilson, Harold Pinter, David Lodge, Peter Quennell, Paul Johnson, Ken Tynan, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Stoppard and many, many others. 

Is it the case that the experience of corporal punishment is so powerful that it lays down a psychological impulse to become a writer? That is, to be able to create a world in which you who had been treated so shockingly can be the entire master. You who have been smacked, spanked, caned and lifted out of yourself by pain, shock, grief – you have needed to create an environment you can live in and yet control?

It’s plausible; it’s possible. Corporal punishment – the threat of it, the sight of it, even the thought of it – has such power it will have a transformative effect on children.

Freud wrote in his monograph A Child Is Being Beaten:

Many children who believed themselves securely enthroned in the unshakeable affection of their parents have by a single blow been cast down from all the heavens of their imaginary omnipotence.

“All the heavens of their imaginary omnipotence” – what an insight into the condition of childhood.

But then, what of those who didn’t become writers? There are very many enthusiasts out there in the world recreating the childhood experience, controlling it, processing it. The practice is everywhere – perhaps quite as much among those who weren’t punished as children.

MEDIA MISCONCEPTIONS

To some extent, it has become normalised. You find articles in magazines about revitalising your bedroom life with ‘spanking’. Articles are written about How To Spank: ‘Start slowly and build up,’ they say. ‘Use a traffic light system: green for harder’ and so forth. ‘Have a safe word for Stop.’ The articles are either written by those who don’t know, or by those who know but are anxious to conceal their knowledge. 

As a practitioner, you will probably want your partner to express distress, and for those of us wanting to take them towards their limit that presents a problem. If they are accomplished in the art of ululation, how do you know if they are actually in too much pain? If they are putting their hand back – is that to protect themself, or is it an invitation to grip the wrist and pinion it in the small of their back, with added scolding?

The fact is, if you have heard the lamentations of someone over your knee having a hand or slipper applied to them you know the song is entirely different to the Ow! or Argh! of the same person who has had enough. The difference, for instance, between Owooooo! and Ow! is more than enough to communicate, to indicate without spoiling the communion. The ‘traffic light system’ is the civil service version. It’s the Code of Conduct version. It’s an evasion of the reality it claims to approach.

This drama is far less controlled, less rational and respectable than these administrative formulae suggest. It is nothing as grand and abstract and predictable as a ‘power exchange’. To categorise it, regularise it, fit it into the conventional norms that might appear on the front of the Daily Mail – that isn’t the thing at all.

WHAT PERIL WE SENSE

To be fair, it may be the case that there are those who use bedroom spanking in an innocent way. Slapping can provide a little sparkle of pain as a palate-cleanser between bouts of ordinary sex. A few smacks help to reset the dials and prepare for yet more warm, encompassing, absorbing love-making.

It might also be used to test the water for a deeper dive. “I’m just going to give your bottom a little smack,” can be a neutral way of introducing the subject to a new partner. If she responds with, “Why do you want to hit me?” then you have an escape route. If she says, “What is it about arses that men like?” you are close enough to the exit to to make a getaway. 

“Hit you? I wouldn’t dream of it. Have you ever had a ‘butt massage’? Turn over, let me show you.” And you’re out of danger. You know never to mention it again.

But as we are alone in this introduction we can speak frankly. In normal life, it’s not easy having a conversation about it. People are evasive. They sense danger. They might talk roguishly about ‘whips and chains’ but they find ‘spanking’ altogether more combustible.

A scene in an American sit-com had a group of young people sharing their most secret sexual fantasy. One said she wanted two men. Another said she wanted two girls. Another was interested in being tied up. All were greeted with appreciative whoops from the audience. The last girl said, ‘I kinda like to be spanked.’ The group went ‘Whoah!’ turned away as one and abandoned the conversation. A scene in Friends with Ross and Phoebe had the same dynamic. She says, ‘Is Daddy going to spank me?’ He says, ‘Well that depends. Have you been a baaaad gir – No, I can’t do this.’

Daphne Merkin wrote a novel Enchantment which featured some of the same material as she later used in memoir for Tina Brown’s New Yorker.  It was there that she sensationally laid out the landscape of the fixation and the way in which she had been fixated. A large part of the article dealt with the difficulty of confessing the deep thing, the thing right down there at the core of her. She is an established, sophisticated author and writer brought up among the upper-middle-class, Upper East Side of Manhattan. She says she divides her writing career into the before and after the essay. The difference between a novel and a memoir is very pronounced.

Because in the sense that we use spanking, the waters are murky. None of us really know what is lurking. What will emerge from the depths, if you insist on exploring them? It will be different, with different people. It will always be perilous.

We know the sense of danger is real because the first real question is: if ‘spanking’ has been normalised, why do people want to conceal it?

OH, THE SHAME

The fact is, the English thing is beyond embarrassment. There is a very pronounced shame barrier to get through even among, especially among, close friends. This thing has a level of exposure that makes it surpassingly difficult to share.

And it has been ever thus. The 17th century Meibom records how absurd the practice of deriving pleasure from pain is. The 18th century Father Girard conducted his whipping confessionals in the strictest secrecy. John Cleland had the procuress Mrs Cole promise Fanny Hill prior to a paid flagellation that she would be protected by ‘the secrecy of the transaction’ and thereby ‘preserved safe from the ridicule that vulgarly attended it.’ Sigmund Freud wrote in A Child is Being Beaten: 

It is only with hesitation that this fantasy is confessed to. Shame and a sense of guilt are perhaps more strongly excited in this connection than when similar accounts are given of memories of the beginning of sexual life.

To circumvent the intimate reality, you can say in a defiant, jocular tone, as Helen Mirren has said in interviews: ‘Who doesn’t enjoy a jolly good spanking?’

But the real secret is not jocular. It is not innocent. It is hidden for a reason. It is rigorously kept out of sight. It exists in a cave. And the cave is blocked by a stone that needs a magic password to move. All the real action, the psychic dynamism exists inside and behind the stone.

Consider the difference between

A)        ‘Who doesn’t enjoy a jolly good spanking?’

B)        ‘I like to be spanked on my bare bottom, like a naughty little girl.’

Who is going to say B) on television, or to a reporter, or to their friends at a dinner party?

Oddly enough, Kitty Freud said exactly that to a dinner party. Ken Tynan’s Diaries record the occasion:

The most unexpected thing I ever heard said: after a dinner party in the mid-fifties. The host desultorily asked the guests to name the three things they loved the most in the world. The answers ranged from the predictably serious (‘Schubert’s Quartets’) to the predictably skittish (‘onyx cufflinks’) until Kitty Freud shook her dark hair and said with trembling candour:

‘Travel, good food, and being spanked on my bottom with a hairbrush.’

It is the exception that tests the rule. Tynan was astonished at what she revealed (‘the most unexpected thing’). The woman spoke ‘with trembling candour’ – she understood the risk she was taking. The word ‘spanked’ is a trigger in a way that ‘smacked’ is not. ‘On my bottom’ is beyond any social norms then as now, and with a ‘hairbrush’ is triggering.  Why did she say such a thing? One wonders if Kitty – in between marriages at the time – was actually making a play for Tynan whose proclivities were not unknown in his social circle.

We are told it’s common, it’s normal, we are not to be shamed, who is anyone to judge. The fact is, this thing of ours is a very adventurous revelation to make. And the reason is, for all the modern cant of living one’s true self, we are ashamed of it. It is something to be shared with only one’s most intimate partner, and only then at the risk of a) one’s self-respect or b) the relationship.

WHAT IS IT, THIS ENGLISH THING?

In its simplest form, our great obsession involves the striking of the posteriors – ideally, uncovered – with hand, slipper or cane. Or, in the catechism, to be spanked on the bare bottom.

Variations – and there are many variations involving every sort of fixation – have more limited effects for the particular votary of this particular thing. The interest is specific. The more a practice strays from the centre, the less it calls forth.

Thus, religious flagellation using a scourge with knotted cords (sometimes including nails, or shards of glass and generally applied to the shoulders – that strikes up nothing in the English cosa nostra.

The Scottish tawse – a forked leather strap – fails to hit the mark, especially as it was applied to the palms of the hands. The pain must have been extraordinary but makes no impact on us. The particular private part is at the essential centre of the scene.

A Singapore caning can be viewed online but the results are very terrible. For the faint of heart – and your editor here finds he is one of those – it’s unwatchable after the first two swipes. The executioner – a martial arts expert winds himself up like a baseball pitcher to swing his 40-inch rattan cane. It takes the flesh of the muscles. It skins the victim; flays him. There is no forgiveness, no absolution, no resolution in the event.

The Eton birch achieves inclusion despite its shape, and the mess it makes. With handle and bush it was a full five feet long, and it wore out after a few dozen strokes. Clearly one is mistaken in thinking the aerodynamics of it would lessen the pain of impact – but the visual effect is untidy. Also, the fact that it hasn’t been officially in use in living memory somewhat lessens the extent of its penumbra, the halo around it of associations. However, everything else about an Eton birching – to wit: the lowering of the trousers, the kneeling on the block, the holders-down, the raising of the shirt – all these add a ceremonial dimension very much to the purpose. As does the crowd of excited spectators, and the school kudos that accrues to a successful endurance of a flogging.

There is a different birch which answers a little better in the way of instruments. We see an example in a drawing of Algernon Swinburne, it consisting of four withes about eighteen inches long. They are thin, pliable and would cause astonishing pain of the purest sort.

The Manx birch – three or four thick but whippy branches bound together multiplied the effect of a single stroke. The fact that it was applied to ‘the bare breech’ also helps in our endeavours.

Nonetheless, the cane, a school cane must take pride of place. Tastes will vary, but the canes at public schools in the 1960s rarely had crook handles. They were straight and sometimes bound at the holding end. A housemaster might have an elephant’s foot in the corner of his study with canes of varying lengths and diameters. They were applied to the seat of the trousers as one bent forward, holding the arms of a carver chair.

That is an image that shimmers, giving off a glow that would, if diffracted through a prism, show how many colours it contained.

But let us not ignore the fact that if we were to follow the memories back to the actuality of it, a caning administered by an angry, middle-aged housemaster was an appalling experience. Whatever the fantasies of redemption and acceptance, a public school beating was chaotic; painful; indescribably shocking. It was like being in a car crash.

But such an experience splices into deeper memories. How they all interweave, intertwine, join their DNA with other instincts, impulses, experiences – how they modulate, metastasise and become part of one’s character.

SYMPTOMS AND ADDICTIONS

Addiction chases a dragon. That elusive, curling trail of smoke that rises from the opiate in the hot spoon. As it twists away into the air, the addict tries to inhale it. But why? My theory of addiction suggests they may not be after the opiate at all.

The idea was inspired by a friend of mine coming out of an operation after a month in hospital on omnipom, a painkiller, an opiate. Under normal circumstances, a month on heroin would create a very committed addiction in a normal person. The withdrawal would have been painful. The surgeon told my friend that she would hardly notice it. She might have “one blue day” but nothing more. And so it was.

In my theory, the opiate releases some sort of chemical in the addict’s system – let’s call them endorphins – and it is that substance the addict is actually chasing.

In the case of my late friend, the opiate was absorbed by her pain (I’m extemporising this, I have no medical knowledge). She didn’t have to search for the drug, pay for it, concentrate on collecting it. It created no addiction because the drug wasn’t releasing endorphins.

So, applying that idea to the English addiction – the primary thing here is not the punishment, the pain, the positioning, the slaps, swats or stripes. These are the outward signs, the symbols of it. Of themselves, they don’t grip us. They must signal us down into the world we hardly know, and where angels fear to tread.

From my own experience, many years ago, before the realities became apparent, I remember a partner over my knee. I remember the physical operation in progress – the nudity, the reddening skin, the slapping. It wasn’t spanking, it was the striking of buttocks. I remember my puzzlement that this wasn’t addressing the thing. It wasn’t engaging anything, calling up the thing. The surface signals weren’t contacting anything underneath. And my partner, to my mortification, was enduring it with gritted teeth. “You really hurt me,” she said afterwards. 

Her words were entirely disabling.

For the thing to work, it must take us into the cave. Somehow, the stone must be rolled away. Somehow the characters must be identified and located. They must be developed enough that they can communicate with each other. It requires the most committed exploration.

ONE WORD TO RULE THEM ALL

And it is the language that comes first. The part, the private part at the centre of the experience – it has more synonyms than any other body part – and they often begin with B: Bum, buttocks, behind, backside, breech, butt, buns . . . but all these are second-order words used to vary the diet, to prepare the appetite for the one word that rules them all.

It is the word at the centre of the fixation. It appeared in the catechism quite late, around the year 1880 when Miss Coote’s Confession was published. Prior to that the word wasn’t usable. It was an embarrassment. When, a century before, Dr Johnson said of a woman that she had ‘a bottom of good sense,’ his entourage tittered.  He was not a man to be tittered at and reproached them, saying: ‘I mean she was fundamentally sensible.’ The word must have been in common use before and beyond that, and yet a century after Dr Johnson, in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine’s famous Supplemental Conversazione of 1870, the word only appears once and is rendered B-T-M. 

It is an unlikely word, ill-suited to carry the emotional weight and resonances of this thing of ours. It has no music, no mystery, no sonority or authority. There is no romance in it. It is comic in its origins, and low comedy at that, popping its abrupt two syllables. And yet it became the most powerful word there is for those with the ear for it. Its associations carry its victims off, ravishing those who are susceptible. We hear the word and we chase it down a winding trail through the years, past all the levels and stations of life back through boyhood and girlhood back to childhood, to babyhood, into the Neverland of the nursery.

My General Theory of Love and Pain likens the flow of these instincts to a river rolling through the psyche. It has any number of tributaries feeding the mainstream, each distinct in origin but all combining in the flow in a way that makes them inseparable.

THE 10 TRIBUTARIES

I can count ten tributaries that flow into the great river, mostly originating in childhood, often from the family environment. There will be others, but here are my candidates:

1)         DECENT RESTRAINT: A reserved parent, one who has some sadistic or masochistic flaw to hide, some buttock-fixation, perhaps, conceals their essence from their children. But the children sense this. They are like dogs, and so they know everything in the household. And the child grows up seeking that deepest contact with the parent, that connection that is hidden from them. They know the parent wants to smack them, or whip them, to uncover their nakedness and concentrate on their private part. And sensing this, a dream evolves with this at the centre and the child incorporates the idea of corporal punishment into their emotional structure, even though they have never been smacked.

2)         COLDNESS: Some parents lack warmth. They punish their children by withholding affection or approval. One childish crime may be punished by days when ‘the light of their parent’s countenance’  is withdrawn. To be uncovered, gripped and immobilised over the knee and chastised may be the closest emotional contact we have with such a parent. The revealed anger of the parent is a treasured insight into a nature normally concealed. As a corollary, the guilt felt by the parent for inflicting pain also creates a warmth that the child may cherish; the release of forgiveness. So, in its perverse logic, smacking can instil the virus just as much as not smacking.

3)         SILENCE: A parent who has the urge, who is caught in it, will communicate it somehow to their children. The thing goes down through the generations, transmitted by the mystery of family culture, though it never be consciously expressed. It gets in while the sexual persona is being constructed in the years before puberty. The transmission is undetectable. Maybe the family is watching television and a reference to discipline is made with an image of bared buttocks. Nothing is said. The parent doesn’t react. The parent is lost for a moment in the solitude of the moment. And that very silence will communicate itself. That’s how impossible it is to prevent the transmission of the desire.

4)         LOGIC: The fact that the loved and loving parent has inflicted pain and instilled fear must be because – so the child’s subconscious reasons – the parent loves you. The alternative is too terrible to consider. Beating is how love is expressed. It is the sincerest expression of love because it is not trying to propitiate or ingratiate – therefore, it is obviously acting out Truth (such is the nature of subconscious logic).

5)         A TEST: In adulthood, to smack that part, to whip it may come in part from a desire to test the love of one’s partner: to answer the question, ‘How much will you go through to show you truly love me?’ To submit to pain is to give oneself up to the control of another as an act of trust. One partner may recognise the other has the need to whip or to be whipped and participates in the game in order to be close, so that there is nothing hidden from each other.

6)         HIERARCHY: The process, or ceremony, is one that recognises a higher authority. There is one who knows so deeply the value of right and wrong that they are prepared to take this extraordinary measure to instil a change of behaviour, a change of character. Submitting to this higher authority, offers security in the thought that a higher authority actually exists. Conversely, for the male principle, there is the pleasure in dominance and the facts of submission bent over in front of him, his cane, his desire.

7)         HEROISM: The victim may have an urge to test their endurance. That by undergoing the ceremony they belong to a community who have suffered under the rod. The victim finds connection with his ancestors. The suffering involved in a 19th century public school beating is transcendent – twelve cuts of a half-inch cane administered directly to the flesh is an initiation into a secret fraternity of scholars and survivors.

8)         AESTHETICS: The lovers of callipygenes (it means beautiful bottoms) will find a surging attraction to the rear end. Its curves, its shifting horizons, the depth of its flesh and muscle, the trajectory of its cleavage, down and round and underneath to where the mystery is. The fact that it is a private part, designated so from infancy, adds to its attraction.

9)         CLASS: There may in some cases be an element of class aspiration in stylised forms of punishment. The ceremonial aspect was characteristic of the upper classes, as opposed to the unstructured whacking and walloping associated with less structured or purposeful families.

10)       BIOLOGY: Maybe there is a genetic inclination to cruelty. This is the motive least susceptible to interrogation. Who does not, somewhere in themselves, take pleasure in seeing their sibling being punished? There it is and that’s the end of it.  

THE POWER OF IT

The spanking scenario is a teleporting experience that beams us back into the nursery age which is to a time when you were surrounded by larger, stronger, more powerful people. You are smaller, weaker, more sensitive. To acknowledge this as an adult – to accept and present your powerlessness is very difficult for those of us who are proud, or defensive. Not just to reveal but to display our vulnerability, our aching childish need to be loved, cared for – that may be the most private thing about us.

It may also be that the full expression of the recreated feelings ought not to be attempted. They might alienate a partner. They might easily recoil in contempt or disgust

You are saying, ‘I am still little. I haven’t grown up. I need to be cherished in the way little children are by a benign and loving parent. I need to be chastised in the way of infants, and forgiven, and readmitted to the warmth of my parent’s loving arms.’

This is no small matter.

It reanimates powerful childhood griefs of loss, rejection, loneliness, worthlessness – the feelings instilled in the growing-up process – the sense that you have done something wrong and that you need absolution. You yearn for that deepest comfort – to be taken back into the warmth and security of a parent’s loving arms.

But it is a secret thing. There is shame in it, it is the most secret thing about us. We descend into that part of ourselves we have preserved, this memory, this complex of forgotten feelings created in a time of helplessness and fear.

Suddenly, we have no dignity. It is stripped from us. And as we recreate it, as we re-run the footage half as observers, half as actor or participant, we assume the familiar postures and positions and we know that we look ridiculous. We are grown men and women, adults acting out as a child.

Except in the privacy of our scripts, we do not dare make the noises of suffering and outrage. We dare not cry and beg and sob, we dare not suffer for fear of appearing absurd.

There are those, of course, who dare. There are those with whom we are not ridiculous. There will be those who understand and in whose tenderness the secret can be acted out.

Conversely, for the other side of the equation – the dominant finds themself equally exposed. Something equally serious is going on there. He (if he is a he) has his own deep secret to reveal. He has to reveal that he has a streak of cruelty. That he will claim dominance – a position that is only sustained by the active consent and complicity of the submissive. He knows that his omnipotence is an illusion generated by them both. He is never more vulnerable than when exercising control.

And more seriously – the dominant figure is saying, “I will look after you. I know you better than you know yourself and will be to you a higher authority. You will be mine. I claim you. I will love you and discipline you like a father. And when you need to be punished I will put you over my knee and you will be spanked on your bottom like a naughty little girl.”

It’s as serious as a wedding vow. It is not to be enterprised or taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly.  There is a very great deal riding on it.