The command “bend over the chair” answered that question for us, and there were some murmurings from the boys — “Cor!”, one of them said. He was told to keep quiet, or he’d get it, too. But that was just the hors d’oeuvre: we didn’t anticipate the performance that we were about to see.
Our school didn’t have a standard school uniform, and Barbara was wearing a yellow jumper and a dark red corduroy skirt. She wasn’t a tall girl, and her first attempt at bending over the chair wasn’t far enough. Her response to the second command “More!” wasn’t enough, either. The teacher put her hand on Barbara’s back and pushed it forward so that the girl’s rear was sticking up. And then — she looked at the thick corduroy skirt and pushed that forward, too, revealing a tight pair of navy-blue knickers. Now the murmurings couldn’t be suppressed, and there was another, louder, “cor!”; the slipper was raised, and then whacked down once on Barbara’s upturned bottom.