Before even I could remember there was something I couldn’t name. It was something I knew was there and wanted very much and for the longest time I wondered if anyone felt like me. Then one day I was taken out of class by my father to go on a family outing and had to miss the school play. As a result my head teacher deemed that I should miss the Christmas party or some of it and go and sit in the detention room.

I was sat down unsupervised with a self-proclaimed naughty girl who had also run afoul of the head mistress. She warned me that we were going to get the slipper, probably, something I knew was not true but she insisted. Then she told me that her mother had spanked her bare bottom in front of everyone, even boys and she thought she would die. She seemed in awe of this and furnished details.

Somehow I knew with a rare insight that she was making it up and was enjoying every facet of her little fantasy (a word I did not then know) but my unvoiced shared interest told me I was not alone. Finally I could name that longing.

The liberal world of 1960s Southern England did not allow the spanking experience to touch my life too often. Books were good, adventure stories where teens got into mischief and movies on TV routinely included spankings. That was about it.

Then for a whole school term I was packed off to the country and a village school where to maintain discipline the teachers had kids form a queue one after the other to go over her knee. It was like something out of an old movie or Little House on the Prairie, and all a bit surreal. I was in the senior class and the big girls undergoing this spanking blushed unmercifully. Sometimes I wonder, did I dream that summer?

Then there was Janet. She was 16 and my best friend’s big sister. She had a lot of time for us, no doubt we were prospects for her biker moll lifestyle of corruption. She was a bit of a wild girl who introduced me to the teenage rock scene in the next town.

She used to play Monopoly with us with her just in her dressing gown, a haphazard affair that did not quite do up in front and was woefully too short behind. I am sure she aided many a wardrobe malfunction when she knew I was looking.

Then one day she went too far. Her biker boyfriend took her somewhere forbidden. Her father saw no reason to send me home and instead took my friend and I into the garden where he chatted about roses in an amiable middleclass pipe-smoking way.

I was puzzled until Janet’s mother stopped shouting at her to chase her upstairs with a slipper in hand. My mind saw more than my eyes, but we heard it all.

There was always school of course. Back in the day the cane (bat, slipper and chalk duster) were all readily at the disposal of many teachers. My school days were not as brutal as depicted in the book Kestrel for a Knave, but not so far off it. Although I mostly ducked it, in those days the cane was an occupational hazard of being a school boy. It took a long time for me to realise that what went for boys also went for the girls. It was just that girls did not talk.

There were one or two girls who would defiantly where loud trousers to school – usually forbidden girls but allowed for those up for CP. There was always a frisson surrounding such events. Of course much later I realised that the average fifth or sixth former girl did not advertise.

In hindsight there was a succession of young women shame-faced and discreetly going to see the girls’ head of year or the deputy head. Both ladies had a secluded room on the top floor accessed only by a forbidden staircase. Nervous girls wold go up and then return red-faced and in tears. Although back then we did not always join the dots everyone knew about the games mistress, who was rumoured to wield a mean slipper. In those days PE Teachers were a law unto themselves.

My later teens saw me working for my father at the weekends; he kept a shop in my early community college years. I mostly worked Saturday’s but the job had its perks. Out in the storeroom horseplay was common and my playmates were the town beauty, the youngest daughter of the family that ran the coach and bus firm and Annie who was my confident and as cheeky as they came.

The beauty was a tall long-legged blonde with spray-on jeans. When she stopped to chat on the High Street yours truly got some kudos, but she was completely out of my league. This did not stop me looking, a fact that Annie loved to tease me about.

Annie was a teaser and if she could play a prank she would. One day I was mopping the storeroom floor when she ‘found’ a dozen reasons to cross and re-cross the wet patch. Finally I grabbed a dustpan brush and chased her into the stockroom. There she went over my knee and I gave my first ever actual spanking. Annie yelped and blushed but never held it against me. Afterwards as we were shutting the shop, Annie told the beauty about my brutality and that she couldn’t sit down, a slight exaggeration, but the reply was more than rewarding.

Looking at her watch Beauty said, “And I won’t be able to sit down if I am late home.”

There must have been a dozen incidents like this, some remembered, some forgotten.

In my twenties I worked for the county council. Again there was a little team of women, most as young as I was and the sexual tension was only broken by failed dates and brief affairs. My boss was a total spanko and had no end of stories about her adventures. We swapped tales, real and imagined, all in the name of banter; and yes it finally happened.

Another girl had a thing about BDSM in literature and its place in a feminist world. She shared a house at college with a girl whose boyfriend spanked her.

“A true feminist can embrace that,” she told me.

I asked her what she knew about such things and she became evasive. She let slip she was no stranger to a hairbrush, her father was ex-military and strict with her and her sister right up until they left home.

“You’re 24, you left home last year,” I said.

“Precisely,” she replied, but she was scarlet and realised she had said too much.

I later found out her sister moved out at when she was 27 and I remembered this slip. This was the dawn of the 1980s and another world.

The world, which my cynical self, had decided could not been as I fantasied, and yet everywhere I looked I learned different.

I went to college late, an advantage as it turned out. My spanking adventures were only just beginning.