Edwardian England: Edna Belford has landed a job as an under-gardener at a posh girls' school. But she becomes irritated by all the interfering in her garden by the school mistresses. One day she pushes Miss Gray, an elderly teacher, away roughly, and is reported to Baines, the pompous head gardener. He instructs Belford to make a birch and bring it to his office. There, the humiliated gardener is to bare her bottom to receive a long and hard thrashing on her bottom with the birch. (SP148)