Grandmother and Aunt Jean were hanging new curtains. My job was to find the boxes marked ‘kitchen’ and unpack them. Innocently I unpacked a box and placed it to one side. Grandmother was on a set of steps, sliding the curtains on to the pole, and asked Aunt Jean to pass something. As she turned, […]

The first time I received the cane was at my Aunt Evelyn’s house. Aunt Evelyn lived at the edge of a woods, where I would play with her son Allen and her daughter Elizabeth, who was the same age as me. On this particular occasion, it was a perfect summer day and we had a wonderful […]

Whenever I visited my friend house, I would check out his mother. She had a habit of wearing jeans or jean shorts with a black leather belt that she always left unbuckled. I am not sure if she did it on purpose but I kept imagining her pulling that belt from its loops if she […]

My mother spanked me and my younger sister when we were growing up, but while they did sting a bit, these punishments were not especially painful. She would spank us with her hand. I don’t think we ever got more than a dozen or so swats, and we would cry crocodile tears and that was […]

My parents divorced when I was seven years old. My Mother had been a stay-at-home mother since I was born, but after the divorce she went back to work and needed to find someone to watch me over the summer.So she arranged for my Aunt Janice (who was actually her first cousin) to take care of me. Aunt Janice was […]

My parents didn’t believe in spanking, in a time when most parents had no hesitation in warming their off springs’ bottoms if they stepped out of line. So that made my one and only encounter with the sanction even more memorable. It happened at my friend Craig’s Taylor’s house. I was totally in love with […]

  It was in my younger days that my maternal grandparents looked after me for a weekend while my parents were away. Although I was still quite young, there was part of me developing into a bit of brat, particularly when parents, grandparents or teachers told me to do something. The farm where my grandparents lived […]

I’m now in my early late 60s and long retired, but before my marriage and raising my own family, I spent about eight years working as a nanny both in the UK and overseas, and I thought you might like to hear of some of my experiences. In the jobs I was lucky enough to […]

    The house next door to us had been empty for some time before Mrs Ryan, our new neighbour, moved in. She seemed ancient to me but in retrospect, I guess she was only in her mid to late 40s. Mrs Ryan lived on her own – I believe she was a widow – […]

Although we did have the cane at my sweet little primary school in Wembley, London, in the 1960s, I managed to avoid it. However, at my senior school I was regularly caned and slippered as we all were, going into the 1970s. I was not spanked at home. However I did have an an ‘aunt’ […]