Volume 2: Blurb from Back Cover

This is the 'blurb I plan to use on the back cover and/or story-line descriptions etc. I may well have to pare it down for the book cover - we will see.

"St Mary's Hospital School - the motto: through obedience comes learning, through discipline comes obedience. Humiliating enough that it should be proudly emblazoned on the front of the gymslip, the breast pocket of the stiffly starched blouse, the little open-fronted waist-length cape - that fastened so tightly at the throat that she wore on occasion over the top - and just about every other item of clothing to boot. As a statement of intent that fine embroidery spoke volumes; the crossed crook-handled canes as a heraldic device was of particularly questionable value, practically openly stating to the world that here was a young lady subject to the kind of physical chastisement that most would have assumed had long been consigned to history. But then again, the uniform too was a thing of the past, an anachronistic throwback to long-obsolete values and the mentality of seen-but-not-heard, quite-as-a-mouse submissive femininity. Bad enough, then, that she was way past school age - worse still that the institution in question was little more than the outcome of a gleam in a psychologist's eye. Elsewhere another young woman, already resigned to the ugly green and white striped nylon dress constituting her prison uniform, was beginning to appreciate the real meaning behind the nomenclature: Victorian Workhouse. One of three such 'residential controlled environments' shut away in a secure suite within the dark recesses of an experimental psychology unit, itself embedded deeply behind the barred windows and security grilles of a privately funded hospital's secure psychiatric wing.

Both have in common that they are at loggerheads with their respective guardians, both are volunteers here having been persuaded of the advisability of having a financial buffer before starting university, but more importantly before undertaking mounting a legal challenge for their inheritances and rights... the financial return for a 90 day residential clinical trial had seemed too good to be true - perhaps it was. For both these young women it had been far easier to join then it was turning out it would be to leave - there was always some obstruction, some excuse, some extension to their stay justifiable by one clause or another. Both were now learning the hard way that freedom could be as tenuous as a spidery signature scrawled on a crumpled document."