Just a few words
of explanation: I have had a few
personal problems. But I’m back
working. I have been working on a
project with Roger Benson, the spanking and discipline artist who specialises
in setting his work in the 1950s – early 60s, and have taken a look at a
part-written piece which I originally intended for the Erotic Mind Control
Story Archive with an eye to putting together some sort of novel or book,
although I’m not sure where it will fit within my present canon, if at
all. Another activity I have been
involving myself (usually first thing, for inspiration) is cruising through the
more interesting Tumblr blog pages, re-bloging anything that catches my eye to
my own account, more often than not adding a caption inspired by the image,
which more than once has led on to exploring certain other directions in terms
of imagery and / or writing. And so I
blundered across this pic – and below is where my inspiration led me. I have also been in email dialogue with a
contributor who was responding to something I once wrote about the deliberate
induction of stuttering or stammering as a method of gaining control and
influence over a subject (itself based on real life, anything but ethical,
experimentation).
On the 24th
of this month I am going in to hospital (The Highgate – in Highgate, North London, funnily enough)
for a total knee replacement operation.
I’ll be in for three nights, but will be staying elsewhere for at least
a week after, as where I am usually based there are too many stairs to climb initially. I Hope to be back on my trusty bicycle by my
birthday in mid-July and plan (not TOO ambitious I hope) to cycle to Brighton from London at that
point (I doubt I will be sufficiently strong enough to join in the actual
organised London to Brighton cycle ride in mid JUNE).
Worse than the
Cane? A Written Imposition with a Twist: A Caption From and Inspired by a Tumblr Blog
She had never
felt so crestfallen in all her life. Line
writing was one of Aunt Amelia’s favourite impositions. But it was not the written imposition itself
but rather the effect it was having on her, on the way she was thinking, one
the way she acted, that was brining her down so.
“I must not
think myself an adult until I turn 21.
Until then I am a child and I must expect to be treated as a child. I will dress as a child. I will be seen and not heard. I will speak only when spoken to. I will do as I am told. I will do nothing without Aunt Amelia’s implicit
permission, and I will raise my hand to ask”.
It was a lot to
write out – as tedious as can be, and made more so by having to undertake the
task as if a dictation, her hand moving in time to a slow, measured, recitation,
a recording of her own voice. Aunt
Amelia had made her read the statement aloud from a sheet the very first time
she had given her those lines to write, when finally she had completed the
task. And what an onerous task it had
been: One thousand times it had been
that day; how her bottom had smarted when at first she had refused; but Aunt
Amelia had reached for the cane, and that had been the end of THAT little
rebellion. Then Aunt Amelia had set up
the tape recorder and the metronome which usually lived on the grand piano
downstairs and had her read through the imposition in time with the slow,
resonant, ‘tock’ ‘tock’ ‘tock’ of the wood-cased metronome; she could hear its
insistent rhythm now on the tape loop going round and around and around, ‘tock’
‘tock’ ‘tock’ like a dripping tap spacing out each word from the next… Then suddenly the passage would change – her
own recorded voice still, solemn and slow as if reading a prayer in church:
“A good girl is
an obedient girl – I want to be a good girl…”
Over and over.
Then it would be
back to the original. Usually it would
be 500 times for the first passage, split in to two blocks of 250 lines with a
250 line reiteration of the shorter ‘good girl’ mantra in between. When she was being punished, as she was at
present, this was a task that had to be repeated twice per day; once, before her
afternoon nap, and again in the evening before being put down for the
night. Aunt Amelia said that writing
lines before bed was the best way of fixing the lesson in the mind.
Usually it went
on for one week, although it was difficult to know for sure when one week began
and finished in Aunt Amelia’s house:
When she was under punishment she was confined to her room with the shutters
locked across the window. This time it
had simply been for not addressing one of Aunt Amelia’s lady friends as ‘Miss’
and forgetting to curtsy when that woman had enquired as to whether she was
well. “I am well, thank you for asking,
Miss” was the prescribed answer she should have given - while dropping the
requisite low curtsy of course. Sometimes,
though, it was just TOO humiliating to have to speak in that tiresome manor –
she could always see when a guest or visitor was finding it amusing; and there
was only so much a late-teen girl could take.
But Aunt Amelia
had imposed such prescribed idioms of speech for just about EVERY
activity: Asked if she had had enough to
eat, she could never be ‘full up’. Oh
no: “I have had sufficient, sir, madam or miss (depending on who was asking)”
and – if feeling particularly uncomfortable – “May I get down from the table
please, Aunt Amelia?”. As often as not
the answer would be: “Yes, you may; but go and stand in the corner please,
facing the wall, until we are finished”.
Of course if she
WAS particularly full, if she was noticeably uncomfortable, fidgeting,
wriggling, perhaps squirming a little, the answer might not NECESSARILY be in
the affirmative: “No, I think you can
wait there a LITTLE longer – until the ‘grownups’ are finished: Now, you know the rules: if you have finished
your dinner, you sit up straight and put your hands on your head and sit
quietly to let your dinner get down; there’s a good girl! Thank you”.
If the latter was the case, how agitated she would become, how long it
would be, before her hand would shoot up would just depend; and as much as
anything or whether Aunt Amelia had administered a spoon full of caster oil
before her meal.
So she’d need
the toilet, her hand would be raised in the air, and in her own good time Aunt
Amelia might deign to notice. And
despite the presence of visitors, there was a prescribed way of asking to go to
the toilet too: in fact the very word ‘toilet’ was something her aunt was
trying her best to eradicate from her vocabulary; it was NEVER toilet, nor ‘loo’ nor ANY of the
usual run-of-the-mill everyday euphemisms that the rest of the modern world
used; ‘powder room’ ‘bathroom’, ‘cloakroom’.
In Aunt Amelia’s home the word was ‘lavatory’. Who had ever heard of such a thing? ‘Lavatory’:
“Please, Aunt Amelia, may I be excused to go to the lavatory?”. It always had to be those words – EXACTLY
those words. It was something male
guests in particular seemed to find amusing – a girl of her age, old enough to
marry under different circumstances, speaking like that, in those deferential,
Victorian-child terms. Usually Aunt
Amelia would consult her watch – there were prescribed times Aunt Amelia
preferred her to use the lavatory, although she didn’t know what actual times
those were, not in terms of time of day; she had no watch of her own, and there
were no clocks she could check around the house. Of course she wouldn’t be allowed to go
alone; she was always under supervision.
Aunt Amelia had hired a nurse whose duties, among others, included
escorting her to the toilet; she would stay outside, but the door had to be
left ajar. “I don’t think so, not yet,
dear. Not everyone has finished yet;
once they have, I’ll call your nurse to take you”.
And Aunt Amelia
was right – when it came to these written impositions, and completing them just
before bed. It really did stick in one’s
head, it really WAS a lesson well learned :Yesterday Aunt Amelia - in front of
one of her friends, a buxom middle aged and well-to-do woman she had never seen
before - had suddenly turned around and said
to her: “A good girl is an…”
It had come out
of the blue – and without thinking she had found herself finishing the
sentence, answering “…an obedient girl…”.
Both women had tittered – and she had felt her cheeks go red; especially
when Aunt Amelia had patted her on the bottom, the woman’s hand lingering
longer than necessary over the frills and flounces of her knickers, a finger
insinuating itself momentarily under the taut leg elastic.
Yes, she had never felt so
crestfallen in all her life... Until now!
How long had she been in governess
Swanley’s care? She couldn’t
remember. It felt as if it had been for
her whole life. She couldn’t imagine a
life without governess Swanley, couldn’t even begin to think how she could cope
without her governess to guide her, without her governess to make all those
little decisions for her, life’s little
decisions, tell her what to do, what to wear, how to behave; decisions were so
difficult to make, so hard to make her mind up… 
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