Discipline in the Psychiatric Rest Home - Quite a Long A Snippet

It's a week since I last posted and I thought you might appreciate a - not so brief - snippet taken from something I have been working on.  It has no direct link to anything else I have published other than for some similar character names - and which may well change in the fullness of time - and is set in the early 1960s.  The story as a whole is highly derivative of something I read a very long time ago and always wanted to rewrite and adapt.  I am working on this tale in parallel to finishing off the2nd part of my last publication and a book on mad cows disease. The pic is something someone emailed to me a while back and which just seemed appropriate.  If it is yours and you don't want it used or alternatively you want credit for your work posted, then please let me know.

Discipline in the Psychiatric Rest Home

The red tramlines on her cheek had largely disappeared below a layer of hurriedly applied foundation powder and subtly applied blusher, though they smarted still.  What smarted to a greater extent was her frustrated retribution.  She had been stopped at the point when she had been about to really deal with the girl.  


She  had been about to shove the girl across the top of the school desk, hold her down by the scruff of the neck and lash her bottom with the folded leather belt until the girl lay like a rain-soaked  rag doll, broken and sobbing.  Then she’d have put the girl on her knees and made her ease the ache she now had in her knickers with that soft pink tongue and mouth of hers.   


That was how you broke a girl like that one – you put her in a maid’s uniform, put her on the end of a lead, and put her to work under the dining table at the beck and call of any and all guests.  A girl never regained her pride after that – especially if you then had her serve at the table side, fetching and carrying and filling glasses, her face glossy and damp with the sated lust of others and the laughter steadily growing in her ears.   What you did not do was pussyfoot around with all sorts of new-fangled modern psychological methods aimed at remoulding the girl’s sexual predilections – ‘reassigning’ her sexuality or whatever it was called.  If her friend truly wanted the girl out of the way - and not just around as a plaything - then her way was the way to go about it.  She was going to see to it that that faux niece of hers was put away in a psychiatric home by the time she was finished.  She had done it before, with that stupid dark haired Romanian girl, the one who had led her on for what she could get and then refused her when the time came.  


She had put the silly little pussy-teaser through the whole thing, had her do ‘the rounds’ on the end of a leash below the table at one of her dinner parties.  Then she had had that one particular friend of hers - Janice, her of the overabundance of hips and bottom, those huge pendulous udder-like breasts and that obese stomach apron - take the girl to the restroom with her.  ‘Restroom’, what an apt euphuism that turned out to be for the girl – the ‘rest’ part at least.  There was a lot a strong-willed and physically overpowering dominant woman could do to a girl in a ‘restroom’, if she were possessed of certain… unusual, perhaps somewhat… distasteful, predilections.  And Janice never dirtied the porcelain under those conditions – she never talked about it, but all could guess what Janice liked most.  


Suffice it to say that Janice had picked up a cane on the way out - and it had been well used by the time it had been replaced in the stand by the dresser.  And so had the Romanian girl, her light blue button-through serving dress saturated, the matching contrast-trimmed apron, with its blue and white piping, stained yellow across its bib and the white Peter Pan collar marred with tell-tale streaks of clay-like brown.  Her white cuffs too had been similarly marked, where ill-advisedly she had wiped her mouth and cheeks – an act that had apparently cost her an additional thrashing across her bare behind, a fact made obvious as she had emerged obliged to carry her discarded knickers between her hands out in front of her.  Janice had brought up the rear, one hand on the scarlet-faced girl’s shoulder, the other carrying the long whippy cane she had used.  The girl’s knickers Janice had clearly used for her own needs, that fact clearly evident to all, and once back in the dinning room, the cane having been put back in its home and with the place an uproar of female laughter and delighted clapping of hands, the girl was made to hitch up her dress and pull the defaced garment back on.   


The girl had spent the rest of the evening kneeling weeping in the corner facing the wall; none had been too keen on her serving them after that.  But one visit to the ‘restroom’ had been all it had taken – she was finished after that.  The very next day she was taken in at a psychiatric rest home.  Perhaps with good psychiatric care and good nursing she might one day have made some sort of recovery, but it was not that sort of place.  Bedsides ‘recovery’, ‘rehabilitation’ would have been in nobody’s interests – and there had been some quite influential women present at that dinner, women who could well do without the scandal.  As it was she went straight in to a nice bare white-painted secure solitary room, all alone behind bars and a whitewashed window.  Later they moved her on to a long-term secure ward, once she had been safely diagnosed as in need of an indefinite stay.  


She still went back to visit the girl from time to time – at the psychiatric clinic.  They made them work there, the inmates, work for their keep.  The latter always made her laugh as she knew full well that there were a couple of the women present that night who were footing the bill.  But employment, even in what amounted to a sweatshop environment, was said to be good for the patient.  They made them wear a uniform too, an old-style, calf-length button-through nylon work-dress with an apron over the top and a matching mob cap on their close-cropped heads.  The later was a shame as the girl had possessed such a wondrous crowning glory of luscious black locks tumbling to her waist.  


It was the dress she heard rustling first, long before the girl appeared, whenever she visited, the girl shuffling along with her ankles hobbled by leather restraints.  It was all in a dull chocolate brown except for the breast pocket which was decorated by a gold threaded coat of arms and the hospital care home’s name and she often wondered if the colour reminded the girl of that night and how she came to be in the place.   She sometimes brought a bag of sweets along with her or a newspaper, well aware that neither was allowed in the hospital.  


On occasion she would actually offer a sweet across the table, knowing only too well that the supervising matron would swipe it from the girl’s hand no sooner had her fingers wrapped around it, usually crushing it underfoot in a rainbow shower of shattered candy.  The latter was pretty much the only colour to be seen within those walls other than chocolate brown work dresses, dark green and cream split-colour walls - green on the lower half, cream above - and the navy blue staff uniforms, with matching elastic crepe belt and silver clasp buckle.   


She found it cute the way the girl, having been led in, was obliged to perform a deep curtsy, greeting her visitor with a cheery ‘good day’ and expressing her thanks to her visitor for coming, before sitting with her manacled hands on her head, fingers interlocked.  And the matron would think nothing of barking at her patient to ‘sit up straight’ if the girl should slouch at any point.  The rule, apparently, was back straight, elbows out to the sides and chin up.  And she wasn’t allowed to break eye contact no matter how embarrassing or upsetting her visitor’s comments might be – to do so was to risk earning a sharp slap around the face from the matron.  


The latter was usually a substantial, buxom woman in her early forties or so dressed in the uniform typical of a British hospital matron, her calf-length navy-blue dress having long sleeves with stiff white buttoned cuffs and a high, stiff white collar and covered by a starched white cambric apron.  Regardless of which of the three such she usually encountered, the woman would have her hair pulled back in a tight bun and her crown covered by a white cap with a high front.  It made for an intimidating image, especially when backed up by a heavy-looking leather strap hanging from her belt and the ubiquitous bunch of keys jangling on a chain at her side.  


It was little wonder that the poor thing would mumble her way through that humiliating formula without fail each time she visited, her curtsy seemingly lower and more respectful on each occasion.  And then when she got up to leave there would be a repeat performance, the girl this time obliged to thank her from the bottom of her heart for paying for her residence.  The irony of that part was delicious; it always made it worth travelling there, to that isolated moorland institution, no matter what other sport she enjoyed with the girl while there.  To hear the girl actually thank her for being instrumental in keeping her incarcerated in that place was priceless.  It always made her laugh aloud, which in turn always, without fail, brought on floods of tears.   Then she’d be off into the blazing sunshine and the purplish grey-green of the moors while her Romanian chum would be ushered off back to the workroom and her needle and cotton, there to labour in strictly-supervised uncommunicative silence.   


The no-talking rule was meant to allow for contemplative meditation, but it was more to do with certain individuals exerting their will over the young women they had there and little to do with any kind of ‘therapy’.  The only ‘therapy’ in that place came in the form of the strap or the cane - and the malady it was prescribed to treat was ‘misbehaviour’, this being any behaviour not fitting with the institution’s credo of absolute and complete obedience and total submission.  And that submission really was expected to be total.  There were certain members of staff in that place, she knew, that struggled with all sorts of unholy desires.  Or at least, had they been employed in the outside world they would have struggled.  Within those grey moorland granite walls and decaying, yet still secure, gnarled window bars, what reason could there be to struggle when one’s most bizarre hunger could be slated – and with only a diagnosed lunatic’s word to bear witness?   Indeed some of that ‘sport’ she on occasion had had with her Romanian chum had been vouchsafed with a little silver crossing palms in order to secure the privacy of a comfortable side room for the afternoon.  


These days the type of 'sport' she favoured on visitor's days no longer necessitated any particular degree of seclusion.  She had to be honest with herself.  The Romanian beauty's incarceration... well, that was just it, the girl was no longer all that beautiful – her incarceration had done the girl no favours, physically.  Of course the lovely shiny coal-black mane had gone, victim of the nit-comb, delousing powder and a nurse's shears.  But that had come about long ago.  It would have been one of the first things to have befallen the girl and was a standard part of the admission proceedings, along with being stripped of personal belongings, valuables, outside clothes and anything else that might tie her to her past.  


No it was not the girl's hair, or lack of it.  Rather it was the weight she had put on.  She liked her girls to be well-cushioned, as it were, but trim with it.  Her Romanian squeeze had entered as a curvy yet lithe, and vital young thing.  Over the months and years the girl had been there – and it had been at least two, if not three now - she had seen first that vitality wane and the twinkle in her eye fade and then watched as, little by little the girl's figure had filled out to dumpling-like proportions.  That was what she called her now, when she visited, if she was feeling particularly spiteful – 'my little dumpling'.  


Dimpled cheeks and a double chin just didn't do it for her.  Neither did a pendulous drooping bustline.  But with only a nylon full-slip and knickers beneath her work dress - other than for a most rudimentary bra, which offered little or no support - that was only to be expected when a girl was as well-endowed as her Romanian lass was.  Often now what passed as having ‘sport’ with the girl sometimes came down to simply sitting, silently reading a book or magazine perched on her lap and ignoring the girl in her drab institutional uniform dress sitting across the table from her with her hands on her head like a naughty schoolgirl.  


The enjoyment stemmed both from the fact that the girl was forbidden to talk unless spoken to first and the knowledge of just how desperate the poor creature was for human contact, for conversation however banal, controlled and contrived.   Sometimes she would, eventually, ask some trivial question as to the girl’s wellbeing and so on.  Or she might regale her with a description of some trip or outing she had enjoyed – always careful to subtly contrast her experience with the drab environs of the hospital.  On other occasions she might well find she had squandered the entire duration of the brief visiting slot while reading and had never actually gotten around to saying a word.  Well, these things happen!


It was just ironic that the girl had always taken such pride in her trim figure.  Once off the street and ensconced in her home the girl had proved fanatical with her exercise routines, fussy with her diet and ‘picky’ in the extreme over what she would – and would not – eat and drink.  In the charity-run mental hospital that was her home these days ‘freedom of choice’ was not so clear cut.  There she – and others like her - ate whatever was served up.  More often than not the chow came from unlabeled cans donated as out-of-date stock through the generosity of local shopkeepers and that new ‘supermarket’ place that had recently opened on the high street of the closest large town.  


Actually ‘chow’ was a good name for the fare served up in the care home.  She was confident the girls were frequently served canned pet food amongst their daily ration – she had arranged a longstanding regular donation from a famous pet food manufacturer herself.  Of course it had to be re-routed via the animal sanctuary an acquaintance of hers had set up, but that was easy enough to accomplish and everybody was happy all round.  The food was healthy and nourishing enough, full of calories and vitamins and better nutritionally than a lot of stuff young people ate today in the 1960s.  It was just that it was not particularly palatable, was all – and she enjoyed that idea, just as she enjoyed the concept in general.  


And the nuns that largely staffed the place had no time for fussy eaters.  Charity was a God-given thing; to leave food on a plate while others in the world were starving was a sin.  And a sin had to be expunged through the ‘mortification of the flesh’.  The latter translated as a good half dozen with a bamboo or rattan cane across a girl’s bottom, skirt up, knickers down and bent across the rough splinter-infested wooden dining table they all sat along.  


Where choice came in to the regimented routine of mealtime was ironically when it came to portion size.  The girls and young women were allowed to make the choice between opting for a small or large portion.  If the patient opted for a large portion they would oft times be served far more than they would be likely able to eat and if they did not eat every mouthful, then out would come the cane or the strap.  
On the other hand, should a patient choose a small portion on a regular basis, the portion size would be adjusted downwards until the point was reached when the meal amounted to little more than a starvation ration.  It usually wasn’t long after that point was reached that the more finicky eater would opt for the larger portion size.  


And the quality and palatability of the food making up these portions was routinely changed – in a very subtle and manipulative manner.  For one thing, the larger portions came with more variety, in both texture and taste.  For another; the larger the portion, the more palatable it would be made, or it would come with the addition of sweet sticky syrup or molasses.  And of course she would be consistently encouraged and praised throughout.  Combined with – and juxtaposed against - the contrasting dreary tedium that constituted the remainder of the day, the result of all this was a sort of obsessive fixation on food, meals and mealtimes.  In time even the most finicky, pernickety of eaters came to greet near whatever was placed in front of her with a crazed, wide-eyed enthusiasm.      


If there was a point – and there had to have been one at one time – it was the misguided assertion that a plump patient was necessarily a healthy patient.  But like so much of the regimen and the culture permeating the ecclesiastically-run hospital this part of the regime had been hijacked over the years to satisfy the very human need to believe in the superiority of one ideal over another – or one group over another.  It all came down to the same thing in the end; the seductiveness of power, of the authority of one individual over another, the sheer joy of domination.  


If an attractive late-teen or vivacious young thing in her early twenties was energetic, quarrelsome and intractable, then fatten her up until she is docile and plump – that seemed to be the credo.  If a girl can be manoeuvred into over-eating - tricked in some manner - then all well and good; if not, then there was always the cane, strap or tawse.   If it should take the encouragement of the latter then it was only apt that the implement used be one of leather, split and forked like the devil’s tongue – for was not defiance of the dictates of The Church a form of bedevilment?  Then there was the beguiling switch they would make to using food as a reward for obedience – it was such clever psychology, a masterpiece of manipulation.   And jiggling chubby bottoms, rounded plump bellies, fat thighs and pendulous full breasts made for far more satisfying targets in the eye of the beholder if and when physical chastisement became necessary.         


Now what she really wanted to see was to have Alison suffer in that same sort of manner, for what she had done.  Her mind was seething with the various punishments she was going to mete out to the girl once all the fuss was sorted out with the girl’s ‘aunt’.  Ultimately, though, what she really wanted was to get the girl placed in the implacable hands of those nuns running the psychiatric care home she had managed to have her poor unfortunate Romanian chum incarcerated in.