The old man had been known as a canny customer throughout his life, and now that he was widowed and lived alone in sheltered housing the thoughts of his adoring family inevitably turned towards inheritances. Those who had managed to catch a glimpse of his building society statement saw a pleasingly mounting balance year on year as he lived frugally on his pension and left both the interest and income from share dividends untouched - and then there was the mysterious locked box, stowed beneath the bed; no one had ever managed a peek inside, surely it must contain some secret treasures which he had been stashing away for decades! His eldest daughter, Shirley, had the most advanced plans, and these involved her own daughter Natasha, who was under orders to ingratiate herself into her grandfather's affections. So the young woman dutifully appeared at the flat one Saturday morning with a selection of home-cooked frozen meals in foil trays, a basket full of cleaning materials and a bright smile.

"We thought you needed a bit more help, Grandad, and perhaps you're feeling a bit lonely!" she explained.

"Oh, we did, did we?" said the old man shrewdly as he let her in. But he accepted the food offering, putting one in the microwave for lunch and the rest in the freezer.

"I can't get down to do the skirting boards, and the home help won't do the heavy stuff," he said, and was rewarded by the sight of his granddaughter's ample buttocks bulging in her ski pants as she bent to tackle the accumulating grime at floor level. She reminded him of his own dear wife, dead for fifteen years, whom, he supposed, Natasha could hardly remember. He still had an eye for voluptuous women, though the other connections no longer functioned too well.

"How did it go?" asked her mother anxiously as the girl returned home after lunch.

"Fine," said Natasha, "he wanted to rabbit on about the Good Old Days, but he was happy enough to let me come again."

"Good, we don't want him to leave all his money to the cat sanctuary now, do we?" reasoned Shirley.

The Saturday assignment began to be a regular feature, much to the annoyance of Natasha's boyfriend Dean, as it ate into their weekend leisure time.

"You're being used, you know," he warned.

"I know," said Natasha, "but he's quite sweet once you get to know him, and he speaks his mind about everybody and everything."

On her fourth week of visitation, the old man watched keenly as Natasha manipulated the Hoover around the sparsely furnished living room.

"So you've just been spanked, have you?" he said, raising a bushy white eyebrow and grinning, and had the satisfaction of seeing her jump, then blush.

"How did you know?" gasped Natasha.

"Well, you haven't got the build for a model, so in my experience mincing around like that can only mean one thing," he said rudely. "Though I didn't think Shirley believed in spanking, or was up to it, for that matter."

"It wasn't ." began Natasha, then stopped, realising she was about to betray herself.

"Oho, so it was some boy then!" he guessed sagely, and grinned. "Well, in my day, half the young people walked around like that, if they hadn't been belted at school they'd been belted at home. Didn't do us any harm, of course."

And Natasha switched off the vac, knowing that a lengthy yesteryear story was in the offing.

"Grandad knows," she said simply to Dean later that evening. "I got this huge monologue about how his mum and dad used to belt him day in, day out when he was young and that he in turn used to belt Mum and our aunts and uncles, not so often as he'd got it himself but when he thought they'd really overstepped the mark. And then . what are you doing, Dean?"

Dean had unbuckled his wide leather belt and was unthreading it slowly through the loops on his trouser waistband.

"You want to talk the talk, so now you can walk the walk!" he said, and pulled her across his knee. "I do love family traditions, you know!" She yelled and kicked her legs for effect, but they both knew that the outcome would be inevitable, and not unwelcome.

On her next visit to her Grandad's the freezer was quickly filled and the skirting boards given the briefest of wipes before they sat down together with a cup of tea. The belt marks hadn't lasted beyond a couple of days so she was walking normally and didn't have to fear sudden contact with hard surfaces. This time Natasha chose to take the initiative:

"So, Grandad, did you get caned at school?" she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be. He shot her a sharp glance.

"What kind of question is that, girl?" he said. "Of course we got caned at school, nearly all the boys and quite a few of the girls! If you walked past the head's office between nine and half-past there was a constant whack-whack-whack and often through the day too if you'd misbehaved in class."

"Did it hurt much?" she continued, already feeling the beginnings of arousal.

He then spent most of the morning describing not only the headmaster's various canes but a whole regimen of teachers' unofficial implements used to keep order and circumvent a visit to the busy head. Three strokes was a merciful consideration to the junior kids, six the norm and nine or even twelve for particularly heinous crimes and repeat offenders. The old man's eyes were not what they used to be, but he could see that Natasha sat wide-eyed on the edge of her chair as he spoke, so he made sure to captivate his audience with detailed description plus a little embellishment. When he described how the music mistress had taken a violin bow to the taut bottom of Gladys Hotchkiss for composing rude words to the National Anthem, he was gratified to see Natasha begin to move slowly and rhythmically in her seat before she blushed and dashed off to check that the bathroom was in order.

"What was it today then?" asked Dean when she went to visit his flat later that evening.

"Getting caned," said Natasha. "He talked for ages on that one."

"Lucky you this time," said Dean. "I haven't got any canes!"

"There's one in the back of the car, love," she said, "I went out and bought it this afternoon at the fetish place in the market. Would you like to try it out?"

Dean swallowed, then nodded, and Natasha slowly made her way back to the car as though it were a forbidding headmaster's study from the 1940s. But she had already composed several filthy versions of Dean's favourite Oasis lyrics in the style of Gladys Hotchkiss to ensure that he would be provoked enough to do the deed, and do it well.

"There were still kids who ran wild in my day," conceded Natasha's granddad some time later, "But not half as many as today, and when they did, they were soon sorry for it. Vandals and petty criminals and so on got the birch, and that soon straightened them out!"

Natasha, as ever, wanted to know more.

"It was always on the bare bottom," he explained; "and it was meant to be cumulative so that the first stroke didn't hurt too much but by six or so your whole behind would be on fire, and contemplating a further six would make big hard teenage thugs start to cry for their mums. Or at least that's what I've heard, it was the mere threat of it which kept 99% of us in order!"

He noticed her hand trembling as she dusted the ornaments on the fireplace.

" I was still young when they abolished it soon after the war, about time they brought it back for some of the kids round here!"

That evening Natasha drove herself and Dean out to the country park; as they arrived in the car park dusk was settling and the last remaining families were heading off home. They ambled along, talking of the revelations from her latest visit to her Grandad's, and from time to time Natasha would select a likely-looking tree branch and snap it off, whittling away the leaves and smaller branches as they strolled. By the time they reached a deserted clearing dotted with barely-visible picnic tables Natasha had a small collection of half-a-dozen whippy branches. She delved in her handbag, fastened the branches together with an elasticated hair bobble, and handed them to Dean. She then went to the gloom-shrouded picnic table furthest from the path, knelt on the bench, pulled her jeans and knickers down and bent her bare bottom across the rough table top.

"I'm not sure about this ." began Dean.

"Please!" she begged, and lay in position until he came across and brought the rudimentary birch whistling down. The pain was intense, and stunning, but Dean called a halt after eight strokes. When they returned home she was shocked to note that she was bleeding slightly, and made a mental note not to go spanking in the dark again.

On the next Saturday morning Natasha knocked at the door of her Grandad's flat but for once there was no reply, so she opened the door with the key he had given her when it became clear that she would be a regular visitor. The old man lay slumped peacefully in his favourite chair, and Natasha knew straight away that there would be no more spanking stories.

The family solicitor informed them that, in the time-honoured way, the will would be read after the funeral.

"Told you he'd have made a will!" crowed Shirley as they ferreted out suitable black garments. "There'll be something in it for you, Natasha, you wait and see!"

Natasha, puffy-eyed from crying, muttered something non-committal and her mother frowned; the old guy had been widowed and lived out his allotted life span, he'd gone peacefully, so why put on a great show of grief? Life goes on, thought Shirley. They set off for the funeral.

The first nasty shock the family received was when the solicitor revealed that the closing balance of the old man's building society account stood at a little over two hundred pounds, which worked out at forty quid apiece for each of his five children. Natasha was pleased to see her mother's face take on a sudden pallor which was still visible under layers of blusher. The solicitor then went on to explain that, in the final months of his life, Natasha's grandfather had seen fit to make large disbursements to disaster appeals, of which there had regrettably been several. However, there were also the house contents which could be sold off . this did not improve Shirley's mood, as she knew that a complete clearance of his old and battered belongings would hardly fetch more than a hundred quid. Visions of luxury holidays and conservatories began to wane.

Then the solicitor turned to Natasha and smiled.

"For you, Natasha dear, he left the mysterious box and its contents, which at the moment we cannot ascertain as we have been unable to locate a key with which to unlock it."

The box, thought Shirley, that's our last hope! Natasha was a sweet, biddable, unselfish girl, she told herself, she'd be willing to share the contents of the box with the rest of the family, or at least those deserving of it!

"Actually I've got the key, Grandad gave it to me a couple of months ago, " Natasha said quietly. And fifteen pairs of suspicious eyes followed her to the side of the room, where the old box was sitting on the floor. She knelt down, took the key from around her neck where it hung on a chain, unlocked the box and lifted the lid.

She gasped. So did everyone else.

The box was full of spanking paraphernalia - straps, canes, paddles, slippers, plus a pile of rather yellowing spanking magazines. Pride of place was given to a small birch spray, carefully trimmed and lovingly bound with a scarlet ribbon imprinted with hearts.

"The dirty old perve," whistled an uncle softly.

On top of the birch lay a letter. Natasha picked it up; it was addressed to her. She began to read:

"Dear Natasha,

I had sworn to your late nanna never to speak of this, but times have changed and I guess it won't matter so much now, what with the Internet and all these clubs and what not. It was very different for your nanna and me, we just had to make it up as we went along and not let anyone know. She loved a good spanking and more; I'm sure you know what I mean! Do you like the birch? She made it herself and gave it to me on our silver wedding anniversary; I only used it on our anniversaries until she was too old to take it any more and could only be lightly spanked. Shirley and your uncles were very different, of course, very prudish and conventional about most things except money. But I could see the kink - or, shall we call it the spanking gene? - in you from an early age, I suppose it's like hair colour in that it sometimes skips a generation. Anyway, I hope you and your young man enjoy these things as much as we did and you won't have to lock them away in a box any more.

All my love and God bless,

Grandad"

"To think you did all that cleaning for him, and all he leaves you is a boxful of kinky old rubbish!" spat Shirley, her grandiose dreams of a wealthy and luxurious middle age finally and completely dead.

But Natasha shook her head, and, weeping with joy and sorrow intermingled, clutched her grandmother's birch rods fiercely to her breast.