I remember being taken for my first time very vividly. Up until that point, I had had my legs slapped if I was playing up, but by the time I got to five years old, I was considered quite old enough to see The Teacher. I remember Mom grabbing my hand and marching me up the stairs to my doom. Until I got spanked with it myself, I had not seen The Teacher but of course my brother delighted in regaling me with scary tales about it – tales which the sound of his own crying reinforced whenever he got taken upstairs for it.
I can’t now remember what I had done wrong, but I do remember Mom closing the bedroom door behind us, then going over to her dressing table and extracted The Teacher.