I was 9 years old and one summer, while visiting my maternal grandparents on the farm, I had my best friend Hannah with me. We loved spending time together, but often it also ended in some kind of trouble.
We spent a week during the summer vacation on my grandparents’ farm, with not many other kids around to play with so we had to play by ourselves. We did well for a couple of days and grandmom did well to keep us entertained too.
Where my grandparents’ garden ended, there was a forest that we were not allowed to play in, mostly because you could easily get lost there. When we came to Wednesday, Hannah and I were bored and for some reason the only thing we really wanted to do was go and see what the woods looked like. We found an old magnifying glass and then we were explorers on expedition to the lost woods.
We did not go that far into the woods because we found a place that looked like an old camp ground and we stayed there pretending to make us a camp for our expedition to find the lost tribe of some kind of imaginary people.
While being in our camp, Hannah showed me something she had learned at the Scouts. She showed me how to make fire with the magnifying glass, so we gathered some small switches and leaves and, with the magnifying glass, we used the sun’s rays to get our little fire going. What we did not take into account was that the smoke from the fire was like a smoke signal, and while I tried to light something too we were interrupted by my grandfather who was very disappointed with us, first of all by going to the woods without adult supervision and on top of that catching us playing with fire.
He scolded us a lot and then grabbed each of us and walked us to the woodshed to administer us a spanking. In the woodshed, he closed the door to lecture us some more about the danger of going someplace without anyone knew about it, what could happen if we got lost, and then about how dangerous fire is.
At the end, he just said, “Because of your naughty behaviour, you are both getting a spanking.”
He then took me over his knee and, when in position, started to administer a very hard spanking. The woodshed was filled with the sounds of hand smacking and little girls crying. Normally, I’d get double my age in smacks, but this time, because of the danger we’d put ourselves in, it was three times age, so I got 27 hard smacks and was bawling like a little girl when my spanking was over.
It was Hannah’s turn, and it was the same. Granddad smacking up and down on Hannah’s bottom, a lot of noise from the smacking and crying.
After Hannah had been spanked, we were taken back to the house and sent to the room we were sleeping in, told to stay there till we stopped crying, and we were called down for dinner. Then granddad hugged us and told us he hoped we would behave for the rest of the week. We laid on our beds for a nap and we cried ourselves to sleep.
SJ