When I was small, myself and the other younger ones in my street would play a lot of games. Piggy run, hide and seek, leapfrogging, footie, kickie can – all sorts. But my favourite game was rather more illicit – we called it Smacky Bottoms.
Us younger ones would typically only dare play this game in a half-broken house on the edge of town, left abandoned since the Second World War. During the night a few homeless people slept there and dragged in various abandoned pieces of furniture to make it more comfortable for themselves, but during the day we kids played there.
Smacky Bottoms involved every one except one lying down on their tummy on a big concrete slab, while the remaining one gave everyone else a hard smack on their bottom in turn.
Then that person would lie down, everyone would shuffle along a bit, and the person at the other end of the line would get up and take the role of ‘smacker’. I loved . We mostly only played it when we were very little, , but when we did play it when we were older, we sometimes added an extra frisson.
Once, I was playing it with the Mackerly twins (two boys who lived a few streets away from me and were very funny and very poor), and a handful of girls . . One of the girls, Janet, was considered a fast developer – she already wore a top and would occasionally smear make-up she’d stolen from the chemist’s onto her face. Janet trailed behind us as we lay on our tummies, before stopping and resting her hand on the bottom of one of the Mackerly twins.
Then she said: “I think we should go toughen things up , so we can see who’s smacking hardest.” Without waiting for a response (and frankly, as the oldest and thus the leader), Our bottoms all out on display, I could feel my heart thumping in my throat. I was usually smacked like this at home, but this felt very different.
Janet’s smacks really hurt. I could feel my body slamming into the concrete as she walloped my bottom, the handprint stinging and burning. She didn’t stop at one smack, either – instead of getting into line for smacks herself, she just went back down it again, smacking us again.
One of the girls jumped up and stormed off, grumbling, but the rest of us stayed where we were. Janet continued up and down, and soon a couple of us were close to tears. My bottom hurt like it did when getting a ‘proper’ smacking.
Several years later, I asked Janet out to the flicks and was gently rebuffed. She did, however, cackle and added naughtily: “If you ever want to play smacky Bottoms, though, let me know!”
