My next-door neighbor Linda was a single woman who had two teenage daughters. She was very old-fashioned in her outlook, lady-like and proper in her manner. Linda always wore beautiful house dresses with a full skirt and petticoat, and over it she wore an apron in which she did her housework and cooked. Every time Linda walked by I could hear her skirts make a swishing sound. I was always very fascinated by the noise, and to me  the skirts she wore were so pretty and feminine. One day, I happened to be over at Linda’s house helping her with something when the phone rang. Linda picked it up, and it turned out to be one of her girlfriends, a woman named Mary. Linda had been busy baking, so she put the call on speakerphone while she cleaned up. I have had an interest in spanking since an early age, so you can imagine how I felt when this conversation turned out to be mostly an account of how Mary had recently given her young daughter a tanning for being naughty. I should have really withdrawn from such a private and intimate conversation, but I lurked just around the corner of the next room and began to eavesdrop on the call. It seemed that Mary had taken her daughter Dawn shopping for a new fancy formal dress and she had acted up in the shop, complaining about the style of her intended new clothes. She was basically running around the shop and crawling on the floor while having a tantrum. Eventually, Mary must have decided discipline was necessary. She turned her daughter around with her bottom to facing her, then smacked Dawn several times with her open hand. However, Mary had followed up the ad hoc discipline with the threat of a proper spanking when she got Dawn home. As soon as they arrived, Mary put Dawn to face the wall, to both think about her misbehavior and ponder the punishment which would inevitably soon follow. After Dawn’s new clothes were put away, Mary had gone to the dining room where her daughter was in disgrace. She removed the hairbrush she kept for spankings from the dresser, pulled out a straight-back chair and called Dawn to her. She put her across her lap, and went to work with the hairbrush. Dawn had apparently cried loudly as she was thoroughly spanked, and no wonder. At the end of the conversation, I overheard Linda say to Mary that she would have done the same to her own daughters if they had behaved like that. Finally, I heard the phone being placed back on the receiver. I was totally engulfed by listening to this strict mother recount in detail how she had spanked her child, and by Linda’s own sympathetic and supportive responses. I didn’t have much time to ponder my excitement, though, as Linda suddenly came into the room where I had been skulking and asked me directly if I had been listening in to her private phone call with Mary. I decided the best course of action was, to tell the truth, so I said ‘yes. Linda looked me in the eye and said: “Well, it was very naughty of you to do that.” I blushed and said: “I’m sorry, Linda.” For one heart-stopping moment, I wondered whether Linda was about to look for her own hairbrush, and put me over her knee, but she just said: “I should think so, too!” After a few more awkward seconds, I scuttled off home. But in the years which followed, I often found myself thinking of that incident and imagining how it would have been felt to be put over Linda’s ample aproned lap for a good sore bottom