The Perils Of Beverley (1)

 

:Psychological Punishment Techniques (2): Her 18th Birthday Present Is A pair Of Special Goggles

 

Psychological Punishment And Behavioral Modification Techniques (1)

 

The Use of Leg Spreaders In Punishment Bondage

 

Careful What You Volunteer For, Honey

 

More Than One Way To Break The Heiress

 To those who have left comments and seen no response: Please accept my appolegies; Iv'e been extremely busy with certain relationship issues of late but I'll be hard at it later today

Here we see (parden the pun) how opaque lenses can be added or removed from the 'Blind Girl Goggles' for total blindness or conventional lenses to create various levels of shortsightedness and so help to develop dependency  on her 'carers'

The Kidnapped: Feeding Time (1)

 

Brainwashed Back Into Nappies (1)

 A little bit of photo mapiulation went in to this one to repair somethings which had gone a bit amiss in the raw AI image...but not much, to be honest.

I've always been interested in the idea of sitting a girl in a nappy on a toilet as a way of overcoming reluctance to use nappies....Dunno why...It's just interesting

This one is raw AI...Just as it poured out of the tin!

This one too is a raw AI image

...as is this....Starting get some pooy nappies now!

Some interesting bondage ideas, once again, raw AI and straight ot of the tin. I love the way the body brace forces the girls to keep their backs straight, shoulders pulled back but forces the bottom to stick out...pefectly presented for the nurse's switch

Just When You Thought Dr Swanley's Girls Couldn't Be Placed In Any More Stringent Bondage...

 ...Dr Swanley's inventive and creative mind comes up withan improved design 'posture correction' device...Yet another raw AI image...Took a long while to get but then all I've had to do is add some text and crop it a bit

 

Under Dr Swanley's 'Care'

 various control harneses for use in mental regression experiments. All of these designs force the subject to shuffle around on her knees but personaly I think the type which involve the hans being fastened behind the back would have the greatest psychological imapact as I think it would make the ever-present fear of toppling over all the greater. Of course both types of design would result in the wearer relying on one of carers to get her upright again. These are raw AI images by the way, other than the text on the first image of course, so there are some problems. The pointer is supposed to be a cane of course - and on some of my other images it does appear as a cane pretty well - but if you ask the AI for 'a cane' it drives the thing bonkers and it starts making all manner of threats about being chucked off the platform

I'd be interested in peoples opinions

Inspiring Illustrations; I Search for a Paula Meadows Pic and Find a Source of Fine Bondage

Hi folks

I've at last again been visited by my muse, after an extended period of lacklustre drive during which my writing pretty much stagnated for while INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 is coming along apace. I have to transcribe onto the computer the stuff I wrote while out yesterday but I have so many new ideas buzzing around inside my head at the moment that I can't wait to again put pen to paper. What this all means is that I am fairly loath to interrupt the creative process while all is going so well so as far the blog is concerned, for while I'm going to restrict myself to updating links to various picture resources. Although this does mean of course that I will have to take time out to search the net I can do so in very short bursts, particularly as I've yet to fully trawl through the Russian website I reported earlier. But having said all that, part of what has reinvigorated my writing is having revisited the work of some of those great artists out there many of which were responsible in one way or another for inspiring to write in the first place; you know the sort of thing, you see a picture or a series of pictures and wonder…what is going on there, really? What is really been said?

In terms of the crystallisation of the ideas that eventually became INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1, at least in so far as the institutional scenarios depicted, one of the most informative works for me was an illustration by the great Paula Meadows, as was, that I had in my collection as a scan but have somehow mislaid. Basically it involve a young girl being punished in a very sparsely furnished, spot-lit and very institutional looking chamber - one just knew by looking at it that even after the miscreant is finally removed from that very secure-looking room she will be no less under lock and key. There is no ‘outside’ here for her, just layers of security nested matryoshka*-like. Unseen, but written into the atmosphere of the picture, as least as far as I was concerned, the feeling that here was a secure chamber residing within a high security area, itself residing within some high walled secure institution… it's all in that feeling of hopelessness again.

Anyway, thinking back to that image has got the creative juices working again and since I feel I have to dredge up some artwork links any way, I am hoping to rediscover the aforementioned illustration on one of my, necessarily short, exploratory expeditions… be assured that you will see it here just as soon as I can get my hands on it.

Meanwhile I've come across in a source of bondage images should bondage be your thing as it is mine, albeit not as an end in itself. I'm not really a bondage fetishist per se, you see; all those complicated arrangements of ropes, chains and things, taken in isolation, do little for me.

.....

For me there has to be some story to it, there has to be some purpose; it might be that it has become necessary to secure a young lady for her caning. Then again perhaps she is in diapers; there is a first time for everything and what better way can there be to get a young lady over this personal barrier. None of this is to deny, of course, that there is a place for bondage as a punishment in itself… perhaps the miscreant, detained in a secure ward in any case, has earned herself a few days restricted to her hospital bed, lying in silence in nice comfortable padded medical restraints, the heavy white curtain kept drawn around 24 hours a day.

.....

You see, to me bondage is something I equate more with an institutional environment; it seems more plausible there and to me plausibility is everything. It rarely works for me if depicted in a domestic situation, although under certain circumstances it might be plausible for a set of medical (humane) restraints to be seen fitted to a bed - but even then I would imagine it to be a hospital style bed brought in for the purpose and kept in a room suitably adapted and decorated, perhaps then the miscreant, if money is no object, even benefiting from having her own live-in nurse to minister to her care. Anyway, I've chosen an image that works for me from the aforementioned site... as usual just click on the picture to link to it and check out what they've got (and it is quite a lot - around 120 pages I think; blimey O'Reilly!!!).

A Bit About Face Slapping & A Very Short Extract from Susan's Cell - A chapter from the upcoming Institutionalised vol 2: Confined in the Workhouse

This weekend has been both hectic and traumatic: first revolves on Saturday I spent pretty much the whole day at The Wedding show at Earls Court accompanying my fashion-journalist partner and long-term fiancee (it's part of one way that I earn my daily crust - not being engaged to fashion journalists - doing a bit of freelance retail analysis and research). Then a friend phoned me to tell me that Bradford & Bingley (a dodgy, it turns out, British bank and once building society) was going tits-up (as we say here in Blighty when things go badly wrong). Needless to say a big chunk of my savings is tied up in said bank and I spent the rest of the day - and the whole of the next - in a state of high anxiety and near blind panic (not to mention drunk of course - how else would you expect me to handle it?). Anyway, very little writing got done of any sort - but the wedding show did inspire me to look through some old vintage pics - of which more in a later post .

.....

For now, though, I thought it was about time to offer up another little taste of INSTITUTIONALISED vol 2: Confined in the Workhouse, just to give some idea of how things are coming along. None of the work has been properly proof read as yet and so there may well be typos and odd irritating bits of dodgy grammar. I'm currently finishing off two of the chapters and at the same time struggling with the preface. This latter part I'm finding particularly difficult; it needs to be fairly concise, so as not to go over too much well trodden ground and so risk becoming repetitive and boring to those who have previously read volume 1 while, at the same time, providing enough outlining of the characters and storyline so as to make volume 2 accessible to some extent as a stand-alone novel in its own right. It is something that is probably not entirely achievable in a completely satisfying manner - and yet the non-linear time-flow of the storytelling does allow for a fair bit to be sketched in as flashbacks: even to the extent of filling in some of the holes and loose threads left in volume 1. Incidentally, I would be very interested to know reader's reactions to, an interests in, alternative forms of corporal punishment, for example face slapping - you will see why as you read on. By the way: if you click on the matron-with-cane pic on the right you can read another extract taken from elsewhere in the book (but you'll have to work your way back to the first part - I have yet to properly work out the navigation).

Susan's Cell - A small Fragment for your Delectation and Delight

They had come to a halt, the trio of staff and their wheelchair- immobilised subject. There were the two nurse-wardresses in the flare-skirted polyester-cotton ‘hospital-blue’ dresses, their trim waists smartly and sharply belted and each with her breast pocket proudly embroidered with the hospital badge, name and those damning words picked out in the gold thread; psychiatric wing. There was the Senior Wardress, the woman dressed so smartly yet sinisterly in the deepest navy blue. And then there was their charge; a wide-eyed teenage girl seated quietly in a wheelchair with the complacency that comes of learnt-helplessness, herself uniformed and seeming younger than her years in her short black braided pigtails and plastic-bib covered green and white striped dress. To their right lay a continuum of softly glowing, white plastic gloss.

To their left, a narrow alcove, of no more than two meters in breadth at most, was delineated from the corridor by an array of white glossy floor-to-ceiling bars and extended back somewhat less than that. Indeed, the space - the term room being something of an exaggeration - was only of sufficient depth as to allow for the length of an average bed; the latter being the only obvious function of the raised platform area that ran at approximately waist height for the entire length of the right-hand side. This latter elevated area appeared to emerge seamlessly from both wall and floor, as if at one with both, rising up from the latter by around half a metre and extending out from the former by one meter, thus accounting for fully half the available floor-space. Its upper surface was inset, the hollow so formed holding a mattress that rose proud of its edge by perhaps ten centimetres and that had the appearance of the rubber-covered foam construction that Susan was now familiar with and that was seemingly ubiquitous in this institution; already she could detect its latex-warmth intermingled within the sterile, disinfected-polythene ambiance. Towards its far end, where it practically butted up against the end wall, the mattress thickened markedly and sigmoidally. This latter feature formed a gently rising hillock clearly intended to perform something of the function ordinarily provided by a pillow yet its U-shaped central contouring seemed to argue for some augmentation of that function; indeed, an element of restraint seemed to be suggested.

.....

This latter theme was echoed along the entire length of the ‘bed’. Medical restraint straps lay abandoned in various random orientations upon the mattress, broad white bands held soft padded plastic cuffs of various diameters, their distal ends permanently fixed at purpose-moulded anchor points spaced regularly along the inner edge of both sides of the platform, from its foot, at those prison bars, right up to and including the ‘pillow’, at the end wall, whereupon a broad strap lay roughly corresponding to the position that might be expected of an occupant’s forehead. Here again, at the ‘pillow’, there was a sinister element that went beyond that of mere restraint, being in the guise of a three centimetre diameter circular hole in the relevant strap, neatly let-in at its very centre; its relevance was mercifully obscure to the girl and would remain so if her present docility persisted.

.....

Roughly one third of the height of the wall alongside the bed platform was presently occupied by rack of closely spaced white cylindrical bars of an appearance similar to those occupying the cell’s front but of a third of their diameter, being of perhaps just over one centimetre in thickness, and longitudinally cross-braced at regular intervals. At its lower edge its weight was taken at a broad hinge, set into the wall fifty centimetres above the bed’s surface and running the entire length of the bed and thus of the wall. Along its upper edge ran a smaller, yet still substantial, hinge from which hung a secondary array of bars; at present positioned parallel to the first, this set was clearly designed to swing out into a perpendicular orientation when the entire contraption was released from the catches securing it to the wall and swung out into position. The length of the bars, being fifty centimetres and matching the elevation of the wall hinge above the bed’s surface, this second set would then form one side of what amounted to a cage around the bed; the array’s lower edge forming a flange designed to dock with, and lock into, a matching slot running the length of the bed-platform’s outer edge. The far end wall had embedded within it, although being difficult to see from the outside being white on white, a curving channel or runner that served to locate and guide the contraption. The external bars to the alcove’s front also incorporated a similar channel, manifested externally as a curving arc interrupting the linear fall of the bars.

.....

The girl stared dumbfounded; she could do nothing but sit in her wheelchair looking on numbed with fear and incomprehension in equal measure. She had never seen such a thing outside of a flickering wallpaper of images behind an outraged investigative reporter within a report about the mistreatment of psychiatric patients in some far-off ex Soviet bloc country. Nevertheless she recognised the implications of the contraption immediately; it was designed to form, when unfolded from the wall, a caged bed. Here was a device historically employed in asylums and supposedly endowed with almost magical qualities of calming. In truth, although of undoubted efficacy, the patient tending to fall into a stupefied submission given time, its long-term use had always been morally and ethically dubious at best and its mechanism of action even more so; such devices had long ago been abandoned in enlightened, mainstream, psychiatric practice in the west. Indeed, in Britain, it was, and had been for some very long time, illegal and yet here it was, in the flesh as it were and very much extant.

.....

Any suggestion that what stood here was merely yet another of the building’s Victorian asylum-legacy fitments could only be expected to meet with incredulity; it is noteworthy that no mention was made of, nor attention drawn to, the device, it was just there and that was all there was to it. Indeed it was obvious that there had been much ‘ improvement ’ made upon the antique original; it and the entire cell, despite the apparent antiquity of the layout, had benefited from the incorporation of modern design and technology, as this, its newest occupant, would soon

discover.

.....

The wheelchair having now been turned to face the bars, the seated, restrained, girl viewed, for the first time, this new home of hers in all its limiting-entirety and did so through fear-widening eyes. Straight ahead and to her left, two chunky square blocks, each of around twelve centimetres on a side, were set within the bars, one above the other and separated in the vertical dimension by approximately ten centimetres, at the point at which the grille met the wall at that side. Mounted at approximately waist height to a standing adult, the uppermost of these was notably dominated by the overly-obvious keyhole at its centre with its bygone-age appearance. Its lower-down sibling had, housed at its centre, an altogether more contemporary key-slot; the latter being of slim profile and mounted in a raised oval section of around three centimetres at it longest axis that extending proud of the surface by, perhaps, two centimetres. Little more than one meter to the right of those locks, a floor-to-ceiling rectangular member, interleaved within the screen of cylindrical bars, housed, a hinge running uninterrupted from the floor to three quarters of the barrage's rise whereupon a horizontal square-section beam ran across to the left-hand side, interrupting the bars and giving notice that here transit was possible, while making quite clear that such movement was not to be subject to the vagaries of free will.

.....

Within moments that view had been interrupted, the navy-blue, tailored contours of the Senior Wardress’ ample, rounded, rump almost pressing into her face as the woman, having selected a key from the large silvered key ring that hung from her belt by a chain, turned away from her and bent forwards so as to better deal with a lock that was presumably being somewhat awkward in its operation.

.....

Fleeting though her first full view had been the girl had nevertheless seen enough to send her spirits tumbling in free-fall and for trepidation to turn to despair; indeed she had seen everything that was to be seen, for in truth there was little to see and that sparsity of detail, in itself, weighed her down with its leaden dread. There was nothing there, nothing at all, it was just a bar-fronted glowing white plastic-box of space; the raised bed platform and the contraption on the wall lay to the right and directly ahead, beyond the entry gate, lay a ‘living space’ comprising an open section of flooring of a similar area as that occupied by the bed platform itself. There were no other furnishings or contents to be seen of any kind save for what appeared to be a white plastic hospital bedpan. The latter squatted up close against the rear wall as if trying to merge with it, cringing back from the bars, vainly seeking privacy and to evade prying eyes as if infused with some essence of the previous occupant's fading and flickering spirit; it was a semi-successful camouflaging, an optical illusion that brought with it a strange pearly-transparent quality to the object.

.....

Simultaneously, from each side, soft-looking, velvety-pink, hands came and went and were accompanied by flashes of white, buttoned, cuffs and rustling, light blue, sleeves. The two women that had, up to that point, existed only in the rhythmically-familiar polyester-swish of their dresses and in the trundle of the wheelchair, began to tackle the various restraints and attachments surrounding her. Turning her head to the left, to the direction from which they had come, she glimpsed a concealed-button, panelled, dress-front constraining an amply-rounded bosom, a flash of gold thread on a blue breast pocket and the silver glint of a ball-clasp belt buckle against a white crepe nurses’ belt...

.....

It was shocking rather than painful as such but it was that very acuteness that punished the most, that and the shame of being struck in such a manner; more to the point it was the shame of excepting such correction without comment, as if such were simply an expression of the natural order of things. It was just three fingers of the nurse’s left hand, three fingers not particularly long yet notably tapered and slender. There was no movement at all in the arm; the woman's wrist flicked sharply but, describing only a small fraction of its potential arc, contributed little to the actual force of the blow while the majority of the travel originated in the folding of the woman's palm. The efficacy of the slap’s sting lay not in its force but rather in the accuracy of its landing, the sharpness of its delivery and in the commanding confidence of the accompanying rebuke. It was a precisely and expertly delivered sharp little sting, laid diagonally across the lower innermost quadrant of the girl's right cheek, the nurse’s index finger landing close to, but not touching, the girl's right nostril; the side-cheeks of the girl's bonnet limited the

area available to strike.

.....

“Face forward.” The nurse didn't raise her voice, she didn't have to; the requisite correcting sharpness was there in the crystal-hard crispness of that educated enunciation, her authority was embedded in the tone.

.....

For Susan's part, a surprised, shocked, exclamation accompanied an embarrassingly, for the girl, contrite compliance and a spreading blush that was already outgrowing and swamping the reddened site of her chastisement. Even then, even as, in obedience to the order she looked away, even though disorientated by the sudden numbness of shock, she knew that something was missing, had been omitted; was there still time to make amends? To the latter the answer came quickly and in the negative; this time delivered by the other nurse, the woman standing to her right hand side, her right-hand delivering a similar sharp-shocking slap to that of her comrade’s and overlapping the site of the latter's sting, her voice just as crisply punishing. There was just a single word this time, it was all that was needed; the girl's detention had already been long enough for the nurse to be confident of that. “Manners” was all she said, her voice soft yet her enunciation crisp, polished, superior.

.....

“Yes n,n,nnurse, a,at w,w,once n,n,nurse,”

.....

Immediately there came another slap, this time delivered to the corresponding position on the girl’s left cheek and coming from the left hand of the nurse on her left hand side, the woman accompanying it with yet another prompting rebuke; “what do we say?”
“ S,s,sorry n,n,nurse, I,I m,m,mean th, th, th,ank y,you n,n,nurse.”

From Behind Stained Glass: Meredith's Tale - Part 3

Another short (and hopefuly sweet) extract from INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2

I'm probably going to continue on now and publish this chapter in its entirety as it only represents a small part of the work as a whole and, in any case, is an aside to the main story arc - although its ending does fit in nicely with one of the events depicted in volume 1. The only problem is that part of the middle section is still to be completed (I've had to skip past that bit here) and the ending is still in the process of writing - and the ending is crucial to the series as a whole in that, as I have said, it links neatly from part of INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 and explores one more deeply certain aspects of the clinic's funding.

As before, I have to point out this is very much a rough first draft and there may well be typo's and grammatical errors etc (if so, feel free to point them out). I'm not a professional writer and I cock-up royally when I do - I'm dyslexic so how the hell am I supposed to know?

The pic came from a now defunct Yahoo group; I'm unsure as to its origin but it seems to have been around quite some while on one group or another. It's a nice bit of hospital-bed bondage and enforced enema procedure; not really as I envisage it carried out in the INSTITUTIONALISED series, but food for thought nonetheless. As before, you can view previous parts by clicking on the title below - a click on the icon to the right should take you to The Institute site to view some other extracts or to view more of volume 1 if you have not read it already.

On a slightly different tack, I am thinking of uploading my collection of women's work-wear and uniform catalogue scans and make them viewable via this blog (I have previously used one such as a 'governess' illustration in an earlier post). They range from nurses' uniforms, aprons and nylon overalls to maids dresses, waitress uniforms and shop-assistant wear and date from the early 1960s (some a fair bit earlier) through to the late 1980s. The, rather tenuous, link to this blog's stated purpose is that much of the inspiration behind the uniforms the girls find themselves placed in, particularly as depicted in volume 1, was derived from those catalogue pics. Please let me know if any of this seems particularly interesting - or, indeed, otherwise.

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

Aftershock - Aftercare

(Click on title to read previous part - i.e. part 2)

“Wha...?”

“…I said; we'll have to see about getting you up and about today, I'm afraid. We can't have you lying on your back all the time, now can we?”
The voice was cheery, brisk and breezy. The woman, maturely-plump, her figure somewhat over-enthusiastically filling her white uniform, was bending over the girls head almost as if her intention was to kiss her forehead.
Meredith, startled, was dragged from her reverie. Memories, dreams, nightmares, call them what you will; whatever they were, she had been lost in their thrall to the extent that she had not had even the slightest inkling of the nurse’s arrival, not even when the curtains around her bed had been drawn back. Now, for the first time, she could see beyond her immediate confines; this was her first real glimpse of the rest of the ward.

A second woman, attired identically to the first but younger and of more slender build, stood at the foot of the bed; half turned away, she was craning over a clipboard, bent necked, scribbling away furiously like some court stenographer as if recording every occurrence, every nuance and idiom of speech. Beyond her, directly ahead, a bed, the exact twin of her own, lay empty, the white plastic of the mattress catching the light where the coverings had been rolled back, presumably in preparation for the next occupant. Immediately to its left, white curtains were drawn around what she could only assume to be an occupied bed.

Twisting her head to the left as far as her pillow would allow she could see there was another unoccupied bed separated from her own by little more than a couple of metres and then, around three meters beyond that came ward’s end wall. The latter was dominated at its centre by a large window, occupying fully one third of the width of the wall, that looked as if to be steamed up or misted over in some way and that lay recessed back behind a row of vertical bars that seemed themselves to be inset into the wall.

To her right, some three meters distant, a barrage of thick glistening-white bars, running floor-to-ceiling, bisected the entire room and guarded the double swing doors that, lying two meters beyond, constituted the ward's only access. Not that this latter pair did not represent a formidable enough barrier in their own right; their porthole windows, each inscrutably gazing out from behind its own crisscrossed basketwork of curving cylindrical bars, were as reluctant as any of the ward’s windows to give way to any more than a diffuse luminescent glow at most.

Meredith blinked, then blinked again as if in double-take, as if her first impression’s failing would yet be exposed; her mouth gaped and her eyes widened -the truth remained the same. Her consternation must have been writ large across that pretty elfin face; at that very moment the second nurse, the one with a clipboard, chanced to look up:

“They had to move you here when you wouldn't calm down. They had no choice - you were far, far too disturbed to be kept on the intensive care ward any longer”.

“But what is... I, I mean, where am...”

“Shhh, hush child, there's nothing to worry about. ” Sensing the young woman's increasing confusion and impending panic the plump woman, the more experienced of the two nurses, had interjected; it was best in a case like this to be candid, to explain quickly. She went on: “This is a secure psychiatric unit, a locked ward as it is sometimes called - nothing to worry about, really. You'll be just fine here until you feel better. As soon as you show signs of recovery, that is that you can satisfy us that you recognise those fears and nightmares of yours as just that, your imagination, we'll do everything we can to get you out of here and back on to a normal ward as quickly as possible. For now, though, I'm afraid this is home for the foreseeable future.”

There was much more here then she could ever have seen, even the rare moments, and they had been precious few, that the curtains had been parted to any degree. For one thing there had never been more than a few degrees of viewing angle opened up between the flaps of that heavily-hanging and sound deadening fabric, for another, such rifts even when opened had been exceedingly fleeting; a nurse might come or go, perhaps a trolley pushed through, but that would be it.

And then there was that cushion, and the strap that went with it. The former was of white foam rubber, the softest imaginable, being U-shaped it wrapped around and cradled her head with a surprising, and initially disconcerting, firmness, covering her ears at all but rendering her completely devoid of hearing.

The associated strap consisted of a broad band of PVC, padded out with a softly quilted lining, running across her forehead, covering it in its entirety other than that at its very centre whereat a circular cut-out of perhaps three centimetres in diameter lay. The latter’s functionality, if any, remained a mystery to her at this point; its existence being known to her only from the rare occasions she had been released from that bands grip so that she might be moved. That it was aligned so perfectly with the fine-bore nozzle that emerged at the very centre of the glittering child’s mobile that hung over the head of her bed, and every other in the ward, was completely lost on her; whether it would remain so would depend solely on the whim of others - any endowed with sufficient pity and wisdom might pray for the continuation of that innocence.

The rational behind that particular immobilisation had been explained to her so many times, all too often in fact; it was a precaution against the possibility that her neck had been injured, though they continually assured her that she was fine. Additionally, on those occasions, as now, that she was released from its unrelenting clamping grip her neck seemed fine, if stiff from the prolonged inactivity. It must be said, though, that even when released her neck’s freedom of movement was somewhat limited by the latex lined neck-brace they kept her in, so she could never be certain.

Even now, her head released from that cushion’s grasp, much lay beyond her field of vision. The wall-mounted colonic irrigation apparatus to the right of the bed head of course remained out of sight, its associated plastic pipe work left coiled on the shelf below; she had experienced its work many, many times yet never once had laid eyes on it. The patient sling and hoist, too, remained for the most part out of sight, having been pushed up against the wall immediately to the girl’s right; this, of course, would not ordinarily have been present, having been drafted in for the purpose of moving her.

The wheelchair she had a fair if oblique view of, the angle sparing her the details of its restraints for now. To any outside of this very singular establishment, not privy to its detailed machinations and agenda, such precautions, even in the most disturbed and demented of cases, might have appeared at the very least somewhat excessive, if not downright oppressive. This would have seemed particularly so considering the degree of hindrance already inflicted by the plaster casts encasing both the girl’s upper and lower arms and those encasing her above and below her knees. The hinged callipers fitted on the latter, presently locked out in the straight position, did at least allow for some degree of freedom in moving her around being positionable and lockable in a multitude of orientations – not all of which were ‘usual’ or necessarily comfortable for the patient.

The gynaecological examination stirrups, presently residing at the bed’s far end, she knew only too well of course. These could be moved up along practically the entire length the bed, if necessary, by means of a simple adjustment of wheel, adorned with a convenient handle, mounted at the foot of the bed – a worm-drive, running along a slot mounted in the bed frame and duplicated at both sides, carried the supports back and forth as required.

Those hideous callipers, or leg braces as the staff were apt to term them, provided more then enough freedom of adjustment to allow for even the most open and exposed display of her person and the most intimate of examinations. On many such occasions her knees would be drawn back practically parallel with her ears, stretching the sinews of her crotch and forcing those once private coral lips to gape. This would particularly be the case on those occasions when shaving her ‘down there’ was required; it gave unimpeded access of the razor to that region and around her anus too. Regular depilation was a must, it was hospital regulations. It was all about hygiene at the end of the day and she was not a particularly ‘clean’ girl ‘down there’, not particularly ‘fragrant’; she was always overhearing them saying that about her, commenting on her ‘smell’. Her cheeks burned with shame at the thought of it; it amplified the trauma of those examinations out of all proportion.

At other times, always at a time her sedation had been increased beforehand, a small plastic box would be placed on the mattress in a suitable position, this supporting a small wheel, not unlike cotton spool, festooned all around with the softest of hand-selected eiderdown and with a row of slightly longer feathers running around its centre. Two arms emerging from either side of the box carried this device on a little axle slung between them, their positioning being virtually infinitely adjustable. Spinning madly and maddeningly, thousands of gentle feather strokes would kiss then later, once soaked and lathered with her arousal, slaver, lick, and suck at her, softly caressing all around and across her clitoris.

A nurse, sitting by her bedside, would read from a script in lullaby tones, a teeny condenser-microphone pinned to her uniform relaying her voice to the speakers built into that U-shaped cushion pinning her patient’s head. Sometimes these words ran true and ever more so in more recent times. At other times, most others in the early days, her mind would rebel; the ideas coming being just too alien to her. Swamped with strangely perverted images and drowning in her dreams, dreams she couldn’t possibly comprehend, she would strike out the safety of the shore – she would struggle against the sleep-tide, fight to wake herself. She never could of course; the sedative they used was just too heavy. Nor could she resist upon waking, for what could there be to fight if there was nothing to recollect?

And the sedative’s amnesiatic effect, albeit temporary, saw to it that there really was nothing to remember; there were just those missing hours and even those went unnoticed in the 24-hour-lit temporal distortion of that place euphemistically known as ‘the ward’. It was addictive too; it was not medically recognised as suitable for long-term use, that sedative. They undoubtedly knew that and yet they kept her on it continuously, albeit at a much lower dosage ordinarily; it kept her relaxed and her mind soothingly foggy – she was beginning to like that feeling, beginning to wonder how she could ever live without it. She would have grabbed at those little blue and gold capsules when they were brought to her, had she been able, she would have snatched at them, now; it was a deeply humbling addiction - and one encouraged by those softly whispered suggestions she knew nothing of.

The sling having been worked under her, a button was pushed and the hoist sprang into life, albeit remarkably gently. There was an almost supernatural element to that smoothness, of levitation rather than lifting; pulleys of nylon and PTFE, a rope of Dacron standing in where a chain might ordinarily have been expected, these had brought new standards to that, and a quietness of operation that belied the work done. Little more than an electric hum emanated from the crane-like structure; and even that was apt to vanish below the swish of the nurses' dresses – that soft polyester rasp she had become so accustomed to, was comforted by somehow.

The wing-nuts on the hinged mechanism at her knees, that sited between the upper and lower sections of her leg braces, had been loosened off before initiating the lift, allowing the adoption of a seated configuration as it progressed. On being satisfactory seated that adjustment would be reversed, locking the girl's callipers in the new conformation, all safe and sound.

The wheelchair's seat gave markedly under her weight despite her slightness, the white leatherette proving to have an unexpectedly spongy, resilient character. The clinical chill of the plastic came to her, even through the rubber of those awful, sweaty hospital issue bloomers they kept her in; at least it chilled those fleshy regions lying to either side of the thick incontinence towel that resided therein. This latter was a particular bane of her present existence. Affixed internally by straps designed for that purpose, positioned two fore and two aft of the gusset region, the most distal of each pair being just short of the waistband while the other sat just clear of the crotch area itself, the thing was constantly in the most intimate contact with her most sensitive flesh; it both irritated and teased in equal measure.

Placed in the chair, her useless hands now dangled over the ends of the armrests, plaster-enwrapped fingers splayed fan-like; true the resin-based nature of the casts made them softer and more resilient than had they been fabricated from the more traditional plaster, but not as flexible as might ameliorate, in any real sense, the totality of that immobilisation.

Analogous to the mechanism surrounding her knees and allowing angular adjustment to her leg braces, a plastic hinge arrangement linked the casts fitted around her upper and lower arms – this providing stability to her elbows. The similarity ran to the wing-nut and ratchet adjustment of each limb's conformation and by this means the required right-angle bend at the elbow had been introduced, making allowance for a seated posture; again a simple re-tightening of the nut by finger and thumb alone was sufficient to lock each limb in the required attitude.

Having secured an entire plethora of straps and bands around the limbs and torso of their patient, both of Velcro and those secured by buckles and all seemingly unnecessary considering the circumstances, she was deemed 'ready for transfer'.

This 'transfer', when it finally came about, turned out to be somewhat disappointing; it was not quite the lengthy excursion that all that preparation, precautions and fuss might have suggested. Indeed, this sojourn consisted of little more than the length of the ward, a decidedly limited dimension, the negotiation of a substantial, securely locked door and a fairly narrow passageway stretching all of ten metres or so, the latter requiring traversing in single file, one nurse leading the way, the other pushing the wheelchair and bringing up the rear. If she harboured hopes of some glimpse beyond the confines of the hospital, then the frosted glass of two windows that they passed in the ward, then that windowless passage beyond, dashed them in their entirety.

Their destination was, if anything, even more of a let-down; four bare white walls stared back at her as she was pushed across the threshold, unadorned in any way and notably uninterrupted by any window. They had set out in the opposite direction to the ward's security-grille-guarded exit and she had guessed from the outset that they were not actually going to be leaving the unit as such – but she had expected something more, somehow, than this near empty box of a room. Being of perhaps four metres on a side, its only occupant stood bang slap in the centre; a bench or examination table of around waist hight and having a most singularly sinister appearance glowed there as if spotlit, its white plastic top dazzling to the eye. This latter furnishing, noticeably bolted to the floor, was arranged longitudinally within the space. Hinged at its centre, it had been left with the end closest to the party folded down in a manner not unlike a drop-leaf table, the extreme edge reaching down close to the floor and the whole having the form of a horizontal 'L'. Releasing her from the imprisonment of her wheelchair, they stood her up against the contraption, her legs once again straitened, knee joints locked and her callipers pressed firmly up against that vertical section.

A short explanation followed, delivered in a hurried flurry and giving the impression of some fast approaching dead line. It flowed past her largely without comprehension; she felt muddled, foggy, as she so often did these days. It was something to do with needing to have an x ray of her back in a particular orientation and, as she was overdue for an anal exam, 'killing two birds with one stone'.

She was placed in a standing position, bent at the waist with arms stretched above her head, her elbow joints having been locked out now as had been her knees, the latter by way of the callipers. A broad Velcro-fastening band was then drawn tightly across the small of her back and another pulled across her shoulders and upper back, the latter being of some thirty centimetres in breadth and seeming superfluous considering the enforced rigidity of her extremities.

Her chin rested in a raised U-section cushion, provided for that purpose; a cap of criss-crossed leather or plastic straps was fitted over the top and back of her head, firmly secured by buckles at its sides, stabilising her head and allowing the neck brace to be released at the rear and her head to be tilted back such that she faced forward.

Despite their apparent redundancy, leather straps were then fastidiously buckled at her wrists, elbows and again close to her shoulders, the fastenings struggling to accommodate the plaster casts at those points. Her legs were similarly restrained, drawn out into an embarrassingly exposed exaggerated inverted 'V' conformation by straps positioned around her ankles, knees and upper-thighs.

There was something disturbingly familiar about it all; all that attention to detail, all that complexity of restraint while so obviously unnecessary. It was something she thought she recognised, had experienced before in some other place, long ago; there was something ritualistic, fetishistic about it all – it froze her blood, petrified her heart, near unhinged her mind.

Finally, as if in answer to an unasked question, she felt fingers toying with the broad elastic waistband of her knickers. With a concerted smoothly sweeping action a pair of hands was dragging the tacky latex from her bottom, peeling the clinging fabric free of the latter's fleshy overhang with a sound not unlike a young girl,s breath drawn softly through lips pursed with uncertainty, then away from, and down, her thighs, to end stretched wide between her knees.

The mortification was tangible; in her mind's eye she could see now the heavily saturated towel at the crotch dragging down the gusset, revealing its loathsome and embarrassing contents to all – why did it always have to be this way? Why couldn't they clean her up first, at least change the towel if not the knickers? Would it be so difficult? Didn't they care about her feelings? That these concerns remained internalised was probably for the best: Yes, they did care, her feelings were of paramount consideration, no, it would not be difficult; beyond these she would not have appreciated, nor liked, the responses – it was best she was spared the fruits of curiosity...

Suddenly they were gone – just like that. She was alone, abandoned in silent vulnerable isolation; no words spoken in explanation, no light-hearted inter-colleague banter, the only clue to their departure being the softly-padded thud of the door closing behind them. She was alone, open and secured, helpless...

How long it had been she had no way of reckoning, yet her feeling was it hadn't been very long; though what such a relative term might actually mean to one confined as she was, is debatable. Strangely, she hadn't heard the door, not even its muffled re-closing yet somehow she sensed she was no longer alone. For a while she couldn't be sure; there was something there, a slight muffled shuffling perhaps – then her very bowels twisted, mangled in fear, in utmost dread...

It was the wheezing that came first – dry, like old parchment, like the rustle of drought fallen leaves. Then the cough came; not quite a death rattle, although she had so often prayed it was. Decidedly masculine, it came in excited staccato bursts, the nervous asthmatic constriction of elderly bronchi. Then it came nearer, that unseen presence, the breathing, laboured and heavy; moist foetid breath lapped around her neck and hung there like rotting strands of seaweed, then dangled down her back, then sniffed and snuffled between and around her buttocks, bony fingers, the nails ridged with time, easing the globes apart.

Her mind had become as frozen in terror as her body had been immobilised by more physical means, her last cogent thought being one of utter disbelieve: how could it be him, here, in this place, in this hospital – how could he have got to her here? She knew it couldn't be, of course, how could it? It had to be some sort of hallucination, the sort they were always warning of, that she denied yet they insisted she suffered – had they been right all along? Yes, that was it, just another delusion, it had to be, just had to...

She waited, what else could she do; even that scream wouldn't come, it froze somewhere along her throat. That scream had always torn through the air, rang in her ears, but that had been only in nightmares; they told her that's what they were and punished her if she said otherwise. They had so many ways of punishing, all for her own good; they could withhold her meals, not let her sleep, they might simply ignore her for days or even weeks - that was by far the worst, no one speaking to her, not smiling, not even acknowledging her own smile, it was subtle but effective – so very many ways. No, she could only wait, the scream wouldn't come, the punishments had been too effective - what if it was all just another nightmare? But this was no nightmare, they were never in the here and now, never in this setting – yet how could she be certain? No, it had to be a nightmare, another derangement. That is what they said they were and she was not allowed to object, she was not allowed to question the fact; that was what was stifling her scream, slowly dismantling her reason thought by thought, belief by belief...

Gnarled arthritis-clawed fingers kneaded and prodded the flesh around her most intimate regions as so often before, exploring, teasing. Then a hesitation, the pause she knew to be the calm before the storm, an uncertain meandering countdown, time itself seemingly hanging pendulous in space, quivering before the coming tempest; a most agonising prospect for any woman. And then... AND THEN...

To be continued

Copyright (c) 2008 Garth. P. ToynTanen

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