St Trinian’s Revisited

A huge thanks to all my guests who have visited the Woodettes Storefront and purchased full volumes of the first 5 books of the Woody Back to School Unit Saga. Obviously the cheapest and quickest way to purchase these full-length books is to click on the ‘Add Download to Cart’ icon and for just $4.99 you will have the book in a matter of seconds. Note that if you click on the book title it will take you to another page where you can preview the first 2 Chapters, however to buy a Download you need to navigate back to the Woodettes Storefront main page (I have no control over that feature … sorry folks).

Yesterdays post on the St Trinian’s Connection seems to have struck a chord and attracted a rather large amount of hits; so here’s a little more information.

My thanks to the owners of the Perpetua web-site who lovingly maintain a tribute to the brilliant artist and creator of St Trinian’s, Ronald Searle (there are 4 separate sections specifically featuring the St Trinian’s cartoons). To put Mr Searle’s brilliance into perspective he actually drew some of his original cartoons while incarcerated in the notorious and infamous Changi prison during the Second World War on stolen scraps of paper.

In this extract from an article that appeared in the Sunday Times on November 27, 2007, India Knight (great name) attempts to explain the enduring popularity of the St Trinian’s books and films.

“It is also the perfect expression of the enduring appeal of gaggles of girls. If you’re female, you want to be part of the gang. If you’re male, you want to sleep with half of it – but that’s not all: there is something about female camaraderie that appeals enormously to men, stuck as they are with the rather truncated (beer, sex, sport, jokes) male version. It is interesting that films that involve male friendships seldom involve the heroes actually achieving anything as a result of their intimacy: they defuse the bomb, win the girl, save the planet despite having friends, not because of it – though, more often than not, they’re friendless loners in the first place. Films about female friendships, on the other hand, use that camaraderie to illustrate the point that, provided you have your girl friends by your side, anything is possible. Men going to see St Trinian’s to check out the eye candy may be surprised to find themselves awed into timidity by it, because while there’s no denying that the girls look wonderful – and, yes, sexy – the film’s chief concern is celebrating grounded, powerful, self-knowing girls doing exactly as they please, palling up, and triumphing against the odds.

The school uniforms may look cutely retro; what’s going on underneath is anything but.”

My Beloved Jojo says that some of her favorite episodes in the Woody Back to School Unit saga are when the Woody Gals are pitted against dastardly foes such as the Confederacy of Yoofs, the malicious Melissa Forsham-Smythe, Dark Agents of the System, a variety of international anarchists and sundry other ne’er do well’s. The Woody Gals forget their differences as they join forces to repel their enemies and like the St Trinian’s girls invariably triumphing against the odds.

I rather liked the Searle cartoon featured below and thought that it would compliment today’s extract rather nicely. The extract from Volume 29 – Get Katie is set in the Chemistry laboratory at the Woody compound and features Ms MacAllister, aka The Dyke. The Dyke was born and bred in the Scottish Highlands and has an unfathomable brogue, hence some of the stranger use of dialogue in this piece but I’m sure that you’ll get the gist. For more on the Dyke see my earlier post ‘The Dyke, George W and Reverse Defenestration’. Enjoy.

Nixdown Nixon had been less than enamored to open her account although she grudgingly admitted that it had been unwise to engage in a dueling water pistol contest with Jojo, right under the beady eye of the Dyke.

“Penny Ann got the cane this morning,” Nix told Jojo as they hurriedly removed their skirts and bumbags in the changing rooms. “She’s very grumpy so that means she’ll be in the mood to give me a really good workout this evening, but she gets all wimpy on me when I pitch up with an already swollen arse,” she grumbled.

Jojo hung up her skirt and buttoned the front of her nylon lab-coat.

“I hate to point this out but you did start the duel,” she told her best chum.

Nixdown pouted. “I wasn’t even aiming at you,” she muttered. “I was aiming at Rosemary; she gave me a lughole full of h2o during the economics lecture.”

“Well perhaps you should spend some time on the target range,” replied Jojo, “now let’s stretch or we’ll be due for extra strokes.”

Ms MacAllister was looking dapper in a pearl grey three piece suit, tab-collared white shirt and silk tie. She was wearing a pair of white Scrooge McDuck spats over patent leather ankle boots. Phyllis MacAllister had a monocle screwed into her left eye and an eight inch bone and ivory cigarette holder clamped between her teeth. She held an eighteen-inch leather two-tailed tawse in her right hand. She watched intently as Jojo folded herself across the tall lab stool.

Jojo hooked her ankles around the legs of the stool. It made her calves stretch uncomfortably and her buttocks spread tightly. It was known as the ‘James Position’, named after the notorious muff Holler James.

Years earlier Ms MacAllister had been assiduously researching the perfect manner to tee-up her victims for punishment.

She was a personal advocate of defenestration, a technique practiced at her Highland school where the victim was required to lean out of a third floor window while the sash was lowered across their backs to discourage them from leaping to their deaths. Phyllis MacAllister had been disappointed when Ms Lawton had vetoed her proposition to introduce the practice at Woodys.

Phyllis had tried out many alternatives including bending the inmates over the front bench or requiring them to touch their toes. She never felt that she had them appropriately primed.

Helen James was deeply averse to being whopped. She was not a brave creature by nature and the prospect of bending over to be tawsed by the Dyke had caused her to immediately meltdown in convulsions of tearful blubbing. Unusually Ms MacAllister did not dispatch her to the changing rooms to relieve herself of her skirt and bumbags but instructed her to bend over the front bench without further ado. Helen took some coercing but was finally positioned with her lab-coat and skirt turned back. Her fellow inmates were treated to the sight of a pair of bumbags cut from enough material to provide curtains for a fair-sized picture window.

Right from the off it was destined to be a difficult affair. The Dyke stepped in and delivered a hot one, Helen responded by hollering and kicking back and catching the Dame under the knee with the heel of her shoe. A second slap of the tawse produced a repeat response. While Ms MacAllister hopped around rubbing her wounds Helen James leapt up and took refuge in the corner of the laboratory. The Dyke had a reputation as a persistent cove and sent an envoy to the Elite chamber to engage the assistance of two athletic prefects. They were tasked with dragging Helen back over the front bench and holding her down. Despite being restrained by the shoulders Helen managed to kick back for a third time causing Ms MacAllister to reconsider her strategy. Helen was dragged over to a tall lab-stool and forced over. With considerable difficulty the prefects secured her ankles and wrists to the chair legs with Bunsen-burner tubing. Her clothing was rearranged so that her only protection was the thin nylon seat of her lab-coat.

Somehow during the completion of the thrashing Helen’s feet managed to get intertwined around the chair legs. It had the effect of spreading out her voluminous posterior to the extent that the bottom button of her lab-coat failed and shot across the floor. Ms MacAllister concluded that she had finally discovered an appropriate alternative to defenestrating her victims.

The Dyke removed the jacket of her suit and placed it on a clothes hanger. She unscrewed her monocle and set her cigarette holder to one side. She poured herself a generous three fingers of Famous Grouse and swallowed it down. Having fortified herself satisfactorily she picked up the tawse and approached Jojo.

In her ascent to the rank of All-Time Big BUTT it had been inevitable that Joanna Heyworth would become acquainted with the full artillery of the Brass. On several previous occasions she had found herself assuming the James Position and presenting her behind for sessions with the Dyke’s tawse. She did not have fond memories of the experiences.

Phyllis MacAllister was old school. “Thees ees goona hoot yoo a fook seet more than it hoots ma!” she was fond of warning her victims before she proceeded to give them a leathering.

The tawse cracked down across Jojo’s spread buttocks, the two-tails landing a millisecond apart and scraping the hundreds of minuscule nylon waffle-weaves across her naked flesh. It was a most disagreeable sensation. Jojo gritted her teeth and gripped the legs of the stool. “It’s only whops, it’s only whops,” she repeated over and over in her head.

Phyllis MacAllister favored the Highland Swing technique that had been practiced by the prefects at her school. The first three strokes would be delivered forehand, concentrating the two-tails on the right buttock. She would then shift position and using a backhanded approach lash the tawse across the left cheek.

She knew from personal experience how effective the technique was. She could still remember many occasions when she was hanging out of the window of the Ice Chamber, three storeys up, her arms and hair dangling helplessly over the outer edge of the sill with her bared buttocks still inside the room, fearfully awaiting the arrival of the tongues, as the tails were known. Often it would be freezing cold and she would be bombarded by the harsh Scottish elements. The heavy weight of the sashed window lowered across her back made it impossible to move.

The Headgirl would finally step in, larruping her right buttock unmercifully and then step back. Phyllis could remember the strange sensations. Her hair and blouse soaked and freezing at one end, her right buttock burning ferociously and by contrast her left buttock still cool, at the other. It was a state of affairs which would always shortly be redressed.

Jojo hung panting over the stool. Her right buttock was throbbing alarmingly. Phyllis MacAllister was taking time-out to replenish and swiftly empty her glass. Once she felt adequately refortified she set herself up for the series of back-handers.

Jojo pushed herself up from the stool. There was no question that the Dyke did good work. Jojo crossed her arms in front of her chest and resisted the temptation to rub her seared rear.

Nixdown glowered at the Dyke before replacing Jojo across the stool. Phyllis appeared not to notice Nicola Jane’s hostile glare and calmly replenished her glass, albeit with a slightly smaller shot.

Under different circumstances Nicola Jane Nixon would have been the first to sign up for a good lashing with a two-tailed tawse. However, despite her predilection for pain in her private life Nix deplored the concept of formal punishment.

Unlike the majority of the inmates who subscribed to the ‘it’s only whops’ mantra Nix muttered a series of obscure hexes as the tawse lashed her arse. However, according to scholars on the subject, the Nixdown Mantras can generally be loosely translated as ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’

As usual the Dyke added an extra touch of vim while she thrashed Nixdown. The Dyke was deeply aggrieved that Nix resolutely refused to extend her an invite to the late night trysts she hosted in the stables for Penny Ann Evans and Miss Suzy Scott. She had dropped many unsubtle hints but Nix claimed a moral high ground.

“It wouldn’t be right,” she told her chums, “It would be tantamount to sleeping with the enemy.”

“I had no choice,” Jojo told her fiancé over dinner at Monets. “Nixdown squirted me so I was duty bound to defend myself.”

The Grand Master smiled indulgently. “I quite understand the difficult situation you found yourself in,” he assured her. “But what on earth was Cassie thinking?”

“Apparently she was experimenting,” giggled Jojo.

Jojo and Nixdown were not the only one’s opening their accounts with a tawsing from the Dyke.

“Cassidywotthefookrudoin’?” rasped the Dyke.

Cassie giggled. “Nuffink, Ma’am. Just trying a little experiment.”

“Experiment? That’s a fookingboonsenburner you’re playing with.”

Cassie grinned. “I know what a Bunsen burner is Ma’am.”

“Weeeellwhatthefookareyoudoin’?” asked the Dyke incredulously.

“Experimenting Ma’am,” said Cassie patiently as if she was speaking to a slow child.

The Dyke scowled and bustled towards the lab bench where Cassie was working.

“Wotisthisstoof?” the Science Dame demanded. “Eetfookingstinks.”

“Tibetan yak fat,” said Cassie innocently. “I wanted to see what heat would turn it into crackling.”

The Dyke looked taken aback. “Yook foot? What the fookare yadoin’withyookfoot in ma looborootory?”

“I was worried it might smell,” Cassie explained, “and I didn’t want to stink up the kitchen.”

“Soooo it’s oookay to stink up ma loob?” growled the Dyke incredulously.

“It was an HSE decision,” said Cassie.

“HSfookingE?” barked the Dyke. “Well HSE your fooking oose to the changing rooms and I’ll shooow ya some HSfookingE decisions.”

“Oh,” said Cassie Cassy. “That doesn’t sound too environmentally friendly.”

“What the fuck were you doing with Tibetan yak fat?” laughed Jojo.

“The Bounder found a source,” said Cassie earnestly, “it’s very fucking rare.”

“I should imagine it is,” smiled Jojo.

Cassie Cassy was lying face down across Joanna’s lap. Jojo was tending her chum’s wounds with an aloe vera balm she had secured from Rosemary.

“I read in a magazine that it makes unbelievable crackling but when you first ignite it it fucking stinks,” Cassie explained, “so I didn’t want to try it in the kitchen.”

“But you thought the Dyke might not mind?” giggled Jojo.

“Well I underestimated what unpleasantly pungent might mean,” growled Cassie, “these writers ought to be more explicit. How was I supposed to know that it would smell like burnt car tyres?”

“So after this burnt car tyre smell?” asked Jojo. “This becomes some kind of aromatic delicacy?”

“I didn’t get a chance to find out,” complained Cassie, “Bitch Dyke threw my whole supply in the trash.”

“Just as an ‘oh by the way’,” said Jojo, “Who exactly were you planning on using as the Tibetan yak fat guinea pigs?”

“You guys of course,” replied Cassie. “I was going to serve it at Saturday nights feast.”

“Thank heavens for the Dyke,” giggled Jojo.

Bottoms Up! Thanks for stopping by … RH

Don’t Forget – Free Chapters of the Woody Back to School Unit spanking saga are available at the Woodettes Publications Page.