My mother was definitely a believer in smacking. I was by no means the most unruly child of my cohort in school but like all children, I did need discipline, and when my mother was involved, that usually meant a sore bottom. When I was very little I would most likely be smacked on the spot, most usually on the back of my bare legs, though if I had really exasperated my mother she would turn me over her knee and smack me on the seat. Nothing too terrible. Things changed, however, when I started primary school, and from then on mother would take me to her bedroom to spank me, the favoured instrument of correction being the back of an old ebony hairbrush which I gather even my grandmother had felt across her bottom as a girl, and which Mum had been given during her own childhood. It was a family tradition, I think! When she decided I deserved a spanking, my mother would do everything she could to be quite discreet about my punishment as far as my father was concerned. From a very early age, I remember being admonished to ‘come quietly with me to be smacked, because it upsets your father’. My father was a sensitive man, so maybe he was upset at the thought of his daughter having her bottom smacked. I was certainly fond of him, and a very biddable child, so although I was obviously far from happy when I was awarded a smacked bottom, I went meekly with Mum to her room, not least to get it over with quickly. Once we were in the bedroom, Mum would close the door and talk to me for a few minutes about my misbehaviour. The spanking hairbrush was kept in her drawer, I recall, rather appropriately! This would be produced once the lecture was over, Mum would then put me across her knee in the usual position. The punishment in itself hurt but it was never excessive.  There was certainly none of that ‘can’t sit down for weeks’ nonsense. But looking back, I do wonder at just how obediently I went for those encounters with Mum’s hairbrush!