Institutional Enema Punishment and a Bit of New - Institutionalised Volume 1 goes Live on Amazon's Kindle

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Enforced Weight-Gain / Enforced Price-Hike: Avarice in Publishing and Other Chubby Subjects

Dieting and exercise had been her life - but her stepmother never approved of a career in fashion cat-walk modeling in any case!

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A straight-jacket and a box of chocs! An intriguing little pic I stumbled upon recently that reminded me of a certain section of the new volume that I have part-written - albeit in a fragmented form – and that I have neglected of late. Note to self: Get it finished!!!

The point is; the whole thing - the above text and pic – makes for a nice, if a little diffuse, allegory for the behavior of Lulu (the self-publishing bunch through whom my books are currently distributed). For a long while Lulu charged a flat per download for electronic PDF versions of books. The difference between that fee and the price charged to readers – which the author gets to choose – is the amount the writer receives as a royalty or payment. Fine! It was fine as far as I was concerned even when they upped that fee by around ninety – odd percent a while back. All seemed to have been stable in terms of charges for quite some time; i was happy with my share and did not want to charge my readers any more than absolutely necessary to make it worth my while (which strictly speaking, from a purely economic standpoint it isn't) – which is why I always encourage folk to purchase electronic downloads. As you may or may not know, I have been tweaking volume 2 for some time in preparation for assigning it an ISBN so as to distribute it via Amazon, Waterstones and the like and also to make it available to the Google Book-Search engine. To these ends, to make it more visible to the various search engines (volume 1 is near-on invisible to Amazon's search engine, which by default searches book titles for entered key-words) I have gone in for a little bit of 'search engine optimization' by way of including a rich mix of key words in sentence form (so Google doesn't recognize it as what it is – a list of key words) at the top of each chapter heading page. Having completed that task I had then to replace the existing file on Lulu's site – and all went well on that front. But lo and behold! It now turns out the whole pricing structure has changed (if I had known beforehand I wouldn't have bothered). Not content with collecting their flat fee (which is still levied), the folk at Lulu now want to take a proportion of the 'profit' on top of that fee (a proportion, mind you i.e a percentage!). The long-shot of all this is; in order to receive the same amount per download as before (not a fortune - and neither is there the volume of sales through that channel to offset that fact) I have been forced to increase the price. Not merely by the shortfall though – because Lulu takes a percentage of the profit, their chunk goes up along with any increase one instigates. The long and short of this latter point is that the price-hike is substantial – I now have to price INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 at £4.95 per download or £9.95 per print copy. This goes against all my principles and further more compromises the original intentions I had when I set out writing (largely for my own amusement but also to fill a hole in the genre). INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 remains the same price (and hopefully always will) and in addition I hope to have some exciting news regarding volume 1 next time (I'd hoped to have space to tell you this time, but I got side-tracked).

Two New Blogs, a Couple of Changes and Some News and Views

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Startled at an Antique Shop in Rye (East Sussex)...Or: A Sign of its Times?

Hi chums!

I had hoped to continue with my 'Thorn' / 'Hobbs' illustration-inspired ramblings this time but as I am still stuck with using my little 'NetBook' until I can get home long enough to make repairs to my desktop it is taking longer than usual to transfer my rough note pad work for the new volume into computer form. As I am presently making this a priority it means less time is left available to dedicate to the blog. However I thought some of you might be amused by this old sign board (perhaps recovered from an old pharmacy) that I saw in the window of an antique shop in Rye (East Sussex) during my Christmas break there. Very much a sign of its times, it instantly brought certain imagery to mind. One can imagine the dismay registering on the face of a petulant young lady of the Edwardian or Victorian era who, having already accompanied her new governess to the village saddle makers (saddler) and witnessed the purchase there of an intriguing and unusual harness contraption, not to mention a plaited leather switch – despite not owning a pony – is next led over to the village pharmacy and to the myriad unfamiliar items so categorised, discreetly tucked away in some dark corner.

Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't get both halves of the sign in the frame in close up at the same without some part of the window frame intervening and so I took a pair of close up shots meaning to piece them together later on th computer. Neither looked too wonderful and so I then intended to take a couple more, backed up by a long shot from the other side of the street. The trouble was that then the shop keeper, presumably having spotted me, began unbolting the door and things rapidly started getting complicated. This, then, is the best shot – at some point I may create the composite image as I had intended, if anyone is interested, but at the present time, limited to the tiny 'Netbook' screen, it would be difficult to do a good job on it. This thing is fine for text, but pretty crap for doing any image manipulation or art work – which is why, for the time being, I am holding back on doing any design work on the cover for the new volume, despite having come up with some really good (I think!) ideas for both it and the eventual INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 (when I eventually get around to writing it). By the way: the second, hidden half of the sign reads 'Hot Water Bags'...See y'all next time.

Enemas, Beers, Writing, Scans and History

I have noticed quite a few new faces appearing here and to those folk who have just discovered me I would like say welcome and also point out that there is over a year's worth of postings in my archive which can be easily viewed using the archive pull-down menu device over in the sidebar on the right - it's probably the best way of getting a flavour of what this little site is all about.

Yesterday I did a little scribbling in a pub in Tottenham known as 'The Elbow Room' while waiting for an old chum to turn up. Then it was off to 'The Rochester Castle' a Wetherspoons pub in Stokenewington (all these exotic locations are in North London of course) to actually meet my mate. He had been somewhat delayed which turned out to be advantageous and you will doubtless be pleased to know that not only did I manage to re-write from memory the section of the new volume that I lost - and that I spoke about last time - but I also had time enough to extend and expand upon it.

Today I have done a little experimental writing, developing a new theme entirely (see below). I have also at long last dug out an old suitcase I have been meaning to get from the attic for some time now.; filled to the brim with old spanking mags and books it is and I have just started getting around to scanning some of that old stuff for your delectation and delight. A couple of said scans are here. They are reduced in size and resolution to suit web page publication and to make uploading quicker, but if anyone wants the full size versions I will email them with pleasure. In the fullness of time I will upload all the full size versions to my various PicasaWeb albums in any case.

Aunty's Enema Discipline

(A rough first draft taken from the upcoming new volume soon to join the INSTITUTIONALISED stable - probably)

The cold nozzle of the rubber tubing inching up inside her bottom, the teenage girl felt the muscles around her gently-rounded belly tightening.
This was a procedure that had once been preceded by a few swishing strokes of the cane thrumming through the air, the harsh crackling snap of a searing flame-tongued tawse or the ruthless crack of a supple leather belt - the latter would generally be doubled over and would brand the girls naked buttocks with its outline, the broad swollen stripes being punctuated longitudinally by a raised blister-like pattern where its holes fell.
Now she unconsciously raised her swelling peach-like bottom , as if offering it up willingly to the ingress of the wide-bore rubbery enema nozzle that was once more raping her backside; as it had the evening before… and the morning before that… and as it would continue to do, twice per day, for the foreseeable future.
She had been fiercely proud, this one; learning to curb and bridle herself had come slowly and painfully to her, but it had come nonetheless. An acceptable level of obedience had been achieved - now it would have to be perfected, honed and refined. This constant and repeated submission to the soapy urging of the enema was very much part of that refinement.
The girl had been quick tempered and prone to brusque outbursts; but the tight leash of discipline she now had the girl under was doing wonders in beating down and subduing that former volatility. She had taken her time with the girl; the luxuries and indulgences she had been used to had not been removed all at once but rather gradually and insidiously replaced by the privations she knew the girl detested. At each step it seemed as if deep down inside some part of the girl’s personality and character was being peeled away and discarded along with her increasingly limited freedom.
With a rising sense of satisfaction the uniformed woman had watched the girl struggling to squeeze her somewhat overly mature curves into the tight bottom-hugging white plastic enema knickers she always insisted the girl wear for these treatments. She had smiled to herself knowingly as the girl flinched, oh so prettily. Partly that faint grimace came about through the final snap of the elasticated waistband, once the girl had succeeded in kneading and moulding the excess flesh of her ample bottom into the intimately detailed glossy PVC covering. Partly the girl’s discomfort came from the leg elastic biting into the yielding flesh around those milky thighs of hers, but more importantly as far as Julia Soames was concerned, a major part came from the sense of humiliation that the garment seemed actually designed to engender.
The sanatorium-style examination table would have seemed hopelessly incongruous in a domestic setting had it not been for the Spartan furnishing and institutional-looking décor of this roped-off segment of Aunt Julia's home. This was a self-contained home-within-a-home; the plush carpeting of the rest of the house came to an end at the foot of the stair on the floor below, becoming hospital-style white cushioned linoleum once past a sturdy door habitually kept securely locked whereupon it climbed a short flight before spreading out across a skylight-lit landing and flowing into four small but sufficiently functional rooms, each nestling behind its own equally securely-locked door. The accommodation comprised a toilet, little more than a cubicle sufficient to house the pedestal and a bidet, a shower room that also contained what appeared to be a massage table but one that strangely had been furnished with a system of broad Velcro-fastening padded-nylon straps, and the girl's bedroom. This latter was a strangely frothy and flouncy concoction of girlish femininity seemingly completely at odds with the institutional flavour of the rest of this part of the house, other than for the bed which was a standard hospital bed - but one which hid under its soft pink flounce counterpane the padded leather cuffs and strong webbing straps of a humane restrained system as might have been found in any asylum. Then, of course, there was the room in which the attractively curvaceous girl now waited bottom-up on the white leather-topped examination couch.
The glossed plastic of the seemingly sprayed-on knickers trapped light in little puddles that served to emphasise the shadowed cleft whereat the back-seam dipped sharply down and inward, practically disappearing from view, and where the cleverly contrived construction while moulding the buttocks into an eye-pleasing heart shape simultaneously drew the swelling cheeks widely and quite lewdly apart. The eye was quite naturally drawn over the perfect mirror-sheen surface of white plastic coated globes, bringing the suggestion to mind of two over-inflated balloons sat side by side, and down on, along the tightly-lined plastic valley to where the slippery fabric again pressed outwards, puckering and pulling into a glossed and detailed outline of intimate lips already moistening in the unrelenting humidity of their covering. Somehow this thin yet tough PVC sheaving managed to reveal even more intimate detail than if the girl had actually been naked - something she was only too keenly aware of and that brought colour to her cheeks even before a procedure that humiliatingly took control from her of one of her most basic bodily functions.
At the centre of the back-seam of these purpose designed knickers the plastic thickened and turned inwards for a couple of centimetres, thus forming a semi-rigid sleeve that connected with the outside world by way of an elastic-circled sphincter of plastic fabric mirroring the puckered pink flesh beneath into which the sleeve was designed to worm its way. This feature was customarily aided in its purpose by having been liberally coated with a medical lubricant beforehand and once in place it was simplicity itself to introduce the big black ribbed rubber enema nozzle into the girl's backside, from between who’s swelling plastic coated buttocks the length of red rubber tubing now protruded so obscenely. Copyright Gath P Toyntanen 2009

From Behind Stained Glass: Meredith's Tale - Part 2

As promised, if delayed, Yet Another extract from INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2: please understand, this is very much a first rough draft so if you find typo's / grammatical errors, please forgive me and, better still, point them out to me either by email or by way of posting a comment - the same goes for feedback, its all welcome, that's the point of the blog.

There's no actual spanking / caning / tawsing in this section but it develops the story. It is part of the manifesto for the INSTITUTIONALISED series that it should step away from what seems to be the convention in spanking literature of depicting an unrelenting series of beatings with only thinnest, vaguest of threads to tie it all together. The second part of the manifesto charges the series with attempting to integrate many disparate fetishes / interests rather then limiting itself simply to CP per se. (see the story ideas posted by Acid Tony - Click here). The third part states that the story arc, even though in fantasy, should at least contain some element of plausibility; some plot mechanism should be developed to explain the situation and the relationship between the various protagonists. To this latter end, volume 1 started with a fairly lengthy preface.

Incidentally, those of you who have read volume 1 may be puzzled by the characters introduced in some of these volume 2 extracts - Meredith is a new character but bares a strong relationship to the events that occurred in volume 1, as will become clear in the book. Similarly the storyline involving the characters in Volume 1 will be developed and we get to see how the two main protagonist's (Susan and Lavinia) have been coping, or not, with the strict discipline under which they have both found themselves and particularly how Susan has to learn to cope with confinement to a tiny bare (almost) cell and the humiliation of prison uniform. (There will also be a series of flashbacks during which we will learn more of the girls' pasts and come to appreciate the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, means of the psychological manipulation that has lead them to their present situation. Finally, there will be punishments and impositions for them to endure; lots more spanking and caning (of course) but also some quite delicious psychological torment - the latter will rival, if not exceed, that endured by the unfortunate pair in volume 1!

(Hope you like the little pic; yeah, I know the cane's still a bit out of proportion but what do you want?...Oh, alright then; I'll fix it later. No, honest, I really will)

.............................................................................................

Intermezzo

(Click on title for previous part - part 1)

Meredith lay lost in her thoughts, quite literally petrified and frozen in place, the bondage of her nightmares seemingly mirrored by the immobility of this new reality. This was how it always was, the dreams, the nightmares, then the awakening.

Always it felt as if a new reality had been built around her, a false reality, an illusion, a reality in which her helplessness was almost indiscernible from and as complete as in her nightmare world. Always, as if for the first time, she would glance down along her prone body and the shocking understanding of the nature of her hopelessness, the origin of her immobility, would bear down on her like some dead concrete slab. Arms set in plaster casts, modern soft resin-based casts, could do nothing but disobey her, lying straight and at 30° to her sides. Legs, similarly encumbered, rested angled toward the bed's lower corners. Even her fingers were held, each individually wrapped in its own cast, splayed out, fan-like and useless.

Memories spilled and unfurled like discarded spooled celluloid; edited dadaist highlights of confusion inter-cut with fantastical images of sojourns in some grotesquely abusive world, seemingly plucked from the mind of Poe and realised in the inflamed-red and bruised-blue pallet of chastised flesh.

Meredith Hewson; known as 'mushroom' to friends and acquaintances both, a tiny squeaky little thing – bouncy and bright as a gambolling lamb and with a smile like summer breeze nature had destined her for more. Yet, a Shropshire lass with a less than agreeable home-life to look back on, it was a somewhat hackneyed tail she had to tell.

Of course it would be simplest to lay the blame at the faux glamour portrayed in all those television shows, drawing her in, spiralling with moth-like lethality. The trends and bright fashions of Camden Market, the bars and bistros of Covent Garden; aspirationally bright beacons of such irresistible brilliance, far too dazzling for one of her innocence to see the darkness behind, far to beguiling.

To many she had been the welcoming smile behind the horseshoe bar, pulling pints with child-like wide-eyed glee; those tiny hands as pale and as perfect as porcelain - like that of the hand pumps her fingers failed to quite curl around, with their country scene decoration, all hunting pinks and running foxes.

She had brightened the day of many a jaded pen-pusher – her short stature obliging her to stretch for the ale-pumps, the effort causing those pert breasts to be thrust forward, the flesh bouncing, the cleavage distinct to the most bleary of drunken eye. Her pretty unworldly features would be moon-mist lit by the shafts of diffused sunlight filtering through the curling fern-like motifs of the Victorian acid-etched glass – the traditional public house windows and glass partitions had been retained here, along with the worn, once-red, leather seating.
She had been flirtatious, ever-smiling – then she was gone; a lover's tiff an ill-advised dalliance with her manager at that, forcing her flight.

Suddenly the London streets had not seemed so welcoming – not without money in her pocket, not without a place to call home; the accommodation had come with the job, you see…
Her mind ran back to the very first time, her first awakening to this world; it was a birth, or rather a rebirth, at least that was how it seemed now...

“The crash, sweetheart, surely you remember the crash?” The nurse's, concern had been palpable, her brow furrowing. Yet as insistent as the woman had been it had felt as if she were seeking to convince while, in some way, being unsure of her own sincerity.
Try she might she could recall nothing at the time; her immobility had almost seemed comforting in its familiarity yet otherwise there was nothing, just nothing. She could remember nothing still, at least of her history as they outlined it, nothing, that is, beyond the abuse, the beatings, something about a social worker, a friend, a young woman sworn to extract her from that hell.

Yes, the social worker; she had seemed so approachable, a woman who might care, who might believe her, who had seemed to care. The woman with the car, the woman who had promised to take her away, promised to save her from him. There was something else... what was it? A drink, a drink proffered from a flask, warm cocoa... that can't have been it! What possible significance could that have?

“You remember the crash, surely?”

In truth, she could not. There were fragments haunting her though, fragments of recollection or what seemed to be recollection; a jumble of shards, just as easily the constructs of imagination as bearing any relation to reality and feeling more like memories of what she has been told than of the actual events.

Feeling as if deceiving herself she nevertheless nodded in the affirmative; to do otherwise, to question it, would have been to risk being left starkly alone, ignored. This she had experienced many times before, being left ignored, isolated and alone in the silence of her curtain-enshrouded bed. Her inability to recall appeared to really irk the staff and as for her nightmares, her delusions as they referred to them, the merest mention was enough for the nurse or doctor or whoever was attending her to simply up and leave and many were the times she had found herself missing her next meal or diaper change after that.

And yet it was those dreams, those nightmares, that were the clearest representation of reality to her, her reality; certainly they seem more real to her than her present surroundings and the fuzzy pseudo-memories filling her head. There was a certain vivid and unmistakable clarity to their recollection, the clarity of truth and conviction.

Deranged? Deluded? Well, such were the murmurings, the whispered accusations that, on occasion, came to her from beyond the protection of her curtains, times when they were certain she was asleep and beyond caring; “…such a shame, quite deluded, poor girl”.

Yet it was all so real, so detailed, so, so clear to her: first there would come the probing wiggle of an investigative forefinger, then the thickly- gelling lubricant, ice cold, the digit urging in an out, in an out, twisting and turning, embedded to the knuckle. Then would come the sensational of building warmth, blood-flow stimulated by the mild irritant mixed in with the gel. Finally that podgy finger would be withdrawn and the first taunting rubber-touch of the nozzle would announce her imminent violation.

Every few weeks there would come the added discomfort of the first use of an increased diameter; in time she would become acclimatised, her sphincter gradually stretching to accommodate it, then would come another increment, then another and another, each adding to the soapy humiliation of the laxative the piquancy of torment that came from the knowledge that any improvement in her comfiture came only at the cost to be surely levied her in the future by way of the legacy of her stretched and weakened muscles and that it was all for the benefit of him, for his perverted pleasure.

Every detail was present there - if only in the world of dreams, if only the manifestation of her delusion, then from whence came the design, the knowledge and experiences that could make manifest the physicality of the illusion with such convincing Technicolor realism. What could a girl of her sheltered background know of such things? How could, even in conjecture, she conjure the sensation of a gently rounded belly, swollen with foully-cramping fluid, of youthfully elastic skin stretched paper-thin, of softly urging latex-covered, podgy, farmer's-wife fingers massaging, compressing, squeezing as if to exude the decoration for some filthily perverted demon cake or, perhaps, was it in some exaggerated parody of milking the beasts she once had the duty to? Then the was the voiding into the metal pail, the metallized ringing imparted to the initial fluidic-splattering fall of her wastes, the stink in the compacted surrounds of the room, the tiny skylight could not be opened to improve the ventilation, the cramping stomach muscles and twisting-agonized bowels. Finally it was she herself she saw carrying the bucket through the house so that all and any might see, she herself who would have to scrub it back to the pristine sheen of its manufacture in the yard outside in full view of the household.

He had absolutely despised the way she had been dressed, the way they were always dressed, her type, the young tearaways, the runaways that hung around the stations and the bus shelters on the cold winter nights. And it had been the coldest night of the coldest snap that most could remember, she had seemed the most desolate amongst gathering huddle, the most destitute, desperate bedraggled and forlorn. Then there were her looks, the pretty elfin face, the slight build, the short stature, the childish yet maturely curved frame, small breasted yet with hips and buttocks promisingly swelling and rounded with chubby resilient youthfulness. The denim, though, he just hated; women in trousers just left him cold, let alone jeans. He couldn't abide by anything that suggested other than sheer soft femininity, the slightest hint of boyishness in dress was an anathema to him; it is all to the more curiously contradictory and contrary therefore that the wretch so often bent and sobbing before him no longer possessed the cascades of wavy light brown locks she once had to hide her tears behind but rather a short tousled pixie cut. The latter styled around her ears and tightly tapered into the nape of her neck; the intent most clearly being to enhance that childish elfin look, the side parting, seemingly inadvertently, introducing an element of boyishness beyond anything that might be brought by even the most masculine of jeans or dungarees - such irony

The jeans and the rest of her outfit of that time had been most easily dealt with; his housekeeper, possessed of a rather traditional, if old-fashioned, outlook herself in such proceedings and not being exactly enamoured with modern attire of the like, was quite comfortable with the idea that they might simply fail to resurface from the launderette having become ‘lost’ as unfortunately things sometimes were. Mrs Veronica Merryweather-Cortez, a remarkable woman of an equally remarkable name. Herefordshire born and bred with broad hips and a buxom maturity of frame clearly at odds with her claimed thirty eight years of life and possessed of the ruddy apple cheeked complexion of a country woman, her coarse russet hair kept, on the main, beneath a plain, ‘sensible’, headscarf, she looked to more likely belong on some remote outlying farm as within the confines of the parsonage.

An ancient carved black oak chest dominated the vestry's end wall, squatting all but forgotten, despite its substantial bulk, in the dusky shadows beneath the tiny Norman-arched stained-glass window. Strictly speaking an oak coffer, it featured quite beautiful carved and arcaded front panels, each having an intricate inlay detail of flowers picked out in a variety of different woods, rarely appreciated, being near permanently under a thin layer of dust and tinted by the patina of age. The iron banding running around the sides and over the curving hinged lid was pitted and, blackened with age, was as dark as the wood itself; to the front a typical hand-forged mediaeval tongue clasp was secured by a very modern and substantial padlock.

It was from the latter, rarely visited, cache that Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was able to conjure up her singly peculiar solution to the problem of clothing the girl; if only as a temporary stopgap, for with every will in the world even she, with her archaic views, could hardly have considered such dress appropriate for, nor acceptable to, a modern girl of Meredith's age and background. It had been extracted and selected from a pile of ecclesiastical vestments dating back to perhaps the 1950s or early 1960s, if not earlier, to more prestigious times for the little parish church, to when congregations swelled to the rafters with uplifted voices and on occasion spilled out into the churchyard beyond, to when it had accommodated its own choir.

The princess-line dress she selected, despite Meredith's obviously small stature, had not appeared to the girl at the time to be the smallest there; she had felt certain she had seen at least two or three of a smaller size glanced at and then rejected while the woman was rummaging. She had stood there shivering in the thin cotton nightdress they had given her, grateful to receive anything that would provide some warmth and, more importantly, cover, even some ugly church dress as long as it was to be only a temporary arrangement. And ugly it surely was: featuring full length sleeves with overlong cuffs at the wrists, each fastening with three buttons, it was ‘easy fit’ in the extreme; indeed, it fairly drowned her small figure in its heavy black fabric.

An embroidered gold metallic Latin Cross decorated the region roughly corresponding to her left breast and was one of the few features allowed to alleviate the jet-black severity of the thing, the others being an arc of short stiff white frills around the top of the mandarin collar, matching sprays of frills around the cuffs that extended down to the upper parts of her hands when she was standing with arms to her sides and a large white button oddly sited to the rear of the collar. The latter’s function, enigmatic at the time, was to become clear in time and perhaps would have been so more immediately had she noted the matching buttonhole at the dress’s hem at the rear where it was picked out in white thread as if some proudly decorative feature of design.

Thickly-draping folds, the wetly-puddled shadows lying between even darker and serving to underline the gloss of the fabric where the light shimmered off its surface like moonlight of a black sea’s swell, hung and spread out from a point approximating her waist to the hem swinging barely clear of the floor. Once clear of her bust’s perky overhang the front hung straight and true with barely a hint of any contact with the form beneath, giving scant regard for style or flattery; seemingly dozens of small, tediously and unnecessarily fiddly, black-satin covered buttons, in reality sixteen in all, fastened it from her throat to her ankles.

The fabric, while as smooth as heavy black satin should be, concealed an inner lining of another material entirely, this having a texture approaching that of a rather coarse velvet, and therein hung the seed of another problem; not only was the whole loose-fitting ensemble ugly, heavy and hot to wear but the constant prickly-heat sensation of the inner lining quickly came to make its wearing intolerable. To her chagrin the material seemed particularly coarse in the region over her nipples and the latter's hardening in response only served to further augment their constant teasing.

She had winged and whined and bitterly complained; it had felt as if the constant grazing irritation, the prickling and the brushing back and forth, would serve to drive her quite insane, or so it had felt at the time, although she was later to encounter challengers to her sanity that would all but drive such concerns from her recall. Finally, her patience pushed to the limit, it was Mrs Merryweather-Cortez who was to yet again to save the day; it was simple, one of her own old cast-offs, a full-length slip in white nylon and as smooth as the girl's own skin.

Panelled and darted, with a seemingly hopelessly narrow waist and a pronounced tapering, beyond the curvature that allowed for the swell of the wearer's hips, so as to terminate at knee-length with a tightly-circular hem, the impression was of a garment of the early 1960s and designed to be worn below the pencil skirted fashions of the time. It clung to her hips and thighs like a second skin, the tight hem coming to rest tightly girdling her legs just above her knees.

The effect, whether intentional or not she had no idea, was to restrict her once tomboyish stride to a somewhat sedate and femininely-gentile shuffling gait that could not but reinforce the image of docility they were clearly striving to achieve for her.

Then there had been the question of underwear. The best that they had had to offer in terms of ‘underpinnings’ as Mrs Merryweather-Cortez was apt to quaintly describe the more intimate of garments was a pair of that woman’s own rather elderly cast-offs; a pair of white rayon directoire knickers, the waist far to large for her petite frame and, having been washed and re-washed into submission long ago, their waist-band had been left completely devoid of any residual elasticity in any case…

To be continued

Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen