Caught Red-Handed

 

The physical act of writing about my work is always interesting – it makes me more self aware - and writing saucy, kinky and downright naughty fiction makes me think about my own private fantasies and fetishes. I had contemplated writing a school series but I couldn’t decide upon a first story. I had put into place certain crucial factors, what the school was to be called and the house names, but I needed a good plot to get the proverbial ball rolling.

Caught Red-Handed centres around two wayward young ladies - Kate Houston and Robyn Kelly – who sneak back to the detention room after everyone has gone to bed. 

There was nothing particularly unusual about either Kate or Robyn earning a detention, but this one threatened to have repercussions beyond the usual pair of thoroughly sore bottoms. In her haste to get back to her dorm, Kate had absent-mindedly left her blazer in the detention room and inside one of its pockets was a pack of cigarettes.

Kate would be sure to receive a fearful caning if they were discovered. Worse still, she would be sent to the Headmistress and in all likelihood suspended from school. She couldn’t let that happen because then her parents would find out about both her smoking and her shameful record of detentions and punishments, and then she really would be for the high jump.

“I thought we were done for, then!” Robyn whispered, breathing a deep sigh of relief as the yellow beam of torchlight disappeared down another corridor. It was Friday night and that could only mean one thing: the Headmistress was patrolling the corridors, searching for students mischievous or foolish enough to be out of bed after hours.

Kate had been caught like that once before and had received a bare bottom paddling in front of the whole school during assembly as punishment. Her pretty face flamed as she recalled the most humiliating moment of her life. Fear of a repeat was why she had begged Robyn to come with her and act as lookout while she retrieved her cigarettes. She could not believe she had been so careless as to leave them!

It was while watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (sorry to any American readers but I refuse to call it the Sorcerer’s Stone) that inspiration struck. As Harry (secreted under his Invisibility Cloak) enters the Restricted Section of the library, it occurred that I should start the St Abelard’s series focusing upon one or two specific characters and then zoom out to get a broader view of the school and its students in later stories. Like Harry, the girls should be sneaking around the school after hours but it must not be for a noble cause like young Mr Potter. At St Abelard’s being out of bed after hours always means that there is mischief afoot!

Unbeknownst to Kate and Robyn, Matron Frost is lying in wait to catch them red-handed. Matron Frost is the living embodiment of the school’s motto (qui bene amat, bene castigat (‘spare the rod, spoil the child’) and, after giving the girls a severe dressing down, she orders them to lift up their nightdresses and bend over the desks. With her favourite rattan cane, Matron Frost adheres to school policy and gives the two reprobates a jolly good thrashing! But when the strict Matron humiliates them further by making the girls spank each other, things really get out of control!

Everyone, at some point in their school life, has encountered a teacher who relishes giving out detentions and scolding to tears anyone who puts a foot wrong. As anyone who went to an all-girls school will testify, this particular breed of teacher seems to gravitate towards single sex schools.

At the moment, Matron Frost is the most developed character in my mind. Before the story has even started, she has found the contraband cigarettes and is waiting for Kate and Robyn to return to the scene of the crime. I also wanted to subvert the traditional idea of a ‘matron’: my Matron is anything but the stout, curmudgeonly old frump that one usually expects a matron to be. Not only is she a mere decade older than the senior girls, she is devious, vampy and has a deliciously vicious streak. Going back to the Harry Potter reference – she is like a sexy, female Professor Snape.

Now, I’m going to share a little secret with you. Hopefully some of you will agree with me on this but I can imagine that others might not … Alan Rickman is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. No offence to the mighty Mr Rickman, I don’t fancy him physically but his voice drives me wild. I haven’t ranked people by the sexiness of their voice but Alan Rickman would definitely be in my top ten. That voice has everything - the calculating, commanding coldness of an evil mastermind, a fabulously clipped RP accent and an arrogance that dares you to defy him. In some of his roles he has terrified me but that is part and parcel of his allure. He never rushes a sentence – he savours it, languishes over it … just like he would savour and languish over telling me how naughty I’d been and just how he was going to discipline me … mmm. Anyway, I digress. Matron Frost. She has to be the female version of that.

I have a real soft spot for the beloved Sweet Valley High books of my teenage years but they do fall foul of one of the biggest literary pitfalls - the cliché. A new character would arrive in the world of SVH and be heavily involved in the lives of the twins in one book and then they are never heard from again. Granted there are a multitude of pupils in a high school but the fact that characters seemed to disappear off the Sweet Valley planet used to annoy me. To avoid this, I’ve made registers for each house in each year. There are four houses, three year groups and three hundred pupils, so therefore twenty five girls per form. Technically, in Caught Red-Handed, I specified that there are over three hundred girls in the school in case I wanted to expel any particularly naughty pupils to set an example to the rest.

For those of you who have read Caught Red-Handed, I would love to hear some feedback on my stories so feel free to tell me your thoughts about it. Or if you would like to read any of my stories, I’ve put a crafty little page on my blog that links to my books on Amazon. Or, if anyone wants to comfort me and tell me I’m not alone in my penchant for a certain afore-mentioned actor … that’s fine too!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, all this talk of Alan Rickman has made me grab my Sense and Sensibility DVD, so I shall bid you adieu …