I would guess it’s a spray birch – there’s a lot of sticks in there, I didn’t get to count them. It’s based on the ones that were used in Australian prisons back when boys still got birched and I don’t know how close that is to the English model, but there’s a lot of pretty sticks and they’re pretty close together. I can probably find a photo of the ones in the Old Melbourne Gaol museum – real ones – that were copied to make what was used on me. It was really painful.

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