It was an effect that had taken many fittings with the dressmaker to achieve, helped along by a longline underwired bullet bra, an old-fashioned open-bottom rubber girdle to control her waist and a pair of high-wasted elastic-fronted control knickers to further flatten her tummy. It was also an effect that was further augmented by the upper part of the dress being of a soft-toned lilac and white vertical candy stripe, the dress changing at the waist to a solid block of lilac for the skirt.
The latter was a plain, panelled A-line affair of a length chosen to just skim the floor with the girl kneeling upright and that fastened up the front with glossy plastic buttons matching those of the bodice. The skirt flared out from a remarkably narrow, fitted waist that was accentuated still further by a lilac-coloured plastic belt that was threaded through a series of belt loops and buckled at the front. The skirt front was covered to perhaps two thirds of its length by a lilac and white candy striped waist apron that was edged in lilac piping to match the bodice and that fastened behind the girl’s back by in large bow, the free ends of which hung down exactly to the length of the apron itself.
The bodice was topped off by an oversized Peter Pan collar that demurely buttoned high at the girl’s throat, extended almost as far as the shoulder seams and that was a solid block of lilac - matching the skirt - being finished off in a edging of diagonal lilac and white piping. The long sleeves, too, though candy striped like the rest of the bodice, were finished off by buttoned cuffs in a contrasting solid block of lilac trimmed with that same diagonal lilac and white piping. An embroidered crest occupied the single breast pocket and was topped off by the word ‘HOUSEMAID’ in a glittering scrolling gold thread that rivalled the few golden tresses that had somehow escaped from under the discipline of her maid’s cap.
The latter headpiece covered the top of her head in glossy plain lilac fabric, in the manner an elastic-edged mob cap might have, but rose up at the front to present the usual aspect expected of a maid’s or waitress’s cap and was edged all around by that same diagonally striped lilac and white piping that seemed to be just about everywhere, even around the buttonholes. That same nomenclature - HOUSEMAID - was embroidered across the front of the girl’s cap in large letters. Her waist length honey blonde hair had been tightly plaited and tied off at the bottom with a large lilac and white striped bow and was threaded through with a length of ribbon of the same type which had been plaited in with her hair.
What had been really surprising, though, was the coincidental discovery that not only did Mrs Larkspear happened to own exactly the same boots as she, albeit in her case for use in her rather modest garden rather than the stables, but that one of the tasks she had set the girl that day, something to keep her occupied while they were taking tea, should have been to clean them.
The woman had perfunctorily ordered her girl there and then, in front of her visitor, Karen Lamberton-Marchment, much as that same esteemed woman might have commanded her own stepdaughter, Alice - and without the slightest prompting on Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s part.
But her young Alice she had always brought to her knees and set to work in the reassuring privacy of home. This girl, Mrs Larkspear’s girl, had been toiling on her plump haunches in front of witnesses, unaccustomed visitors. That augmentation added something to the piquancy of the situation; it had made the girl’s red-faced humiliation seem almost palpable.
Of course Ms Lamberton-Marchment had commented - how could she not have? For starters she had expressed surprise as to the impracticality of those long sleeves for such a task, not to mention similar and perhaps even messier tasks such as washing up, scrubbing floors and the like. She had been informed in reply that the design was indeed as functional as the rest but that function in this particular case was somewhat different then, say, the choice of fabric. She said it was all about discipline and psychological control and to note that the girl had not even attempted to roll up her sleeves - in fact she forbade the girl to do so, it was one of her strictest rules.
Uniform was to be worn at all times, and in the manner she dictated - and that meant those cuffs and that collar remained buttoned at all times. It forced the girl to take exceptional care at all times in order not to dirty her cuffs and sleeves and in that way kept her permanently mindful of her uniform and thus of her position in life. It would be the same once she got Alice in the schoolroom in the school uniform she would devise.
“You see what I can do to a girl. Crush her, break her down bit by bit until pride is something she can barely remember having. This one’s been with me three years; she hasn’t left the house in the last two, not even for a minute, not even for as much as a walk in the garden. I forbid her to speak unless spoken to, I don’t allow her access to books, newspapers or magazines, nor do I let her listen to the radio or watch TV - and she loves me for it, loves me deeply in fact. I could make her lick those Wellingtons clean if I so wanted. And she would too, down on her knees, right there in the corner. She would lick them, slather over them, until the rubber shines if I told her to.” She smiled proudly as she addressed the girl directly, nodding towards the kneeling teenager. “...Isn’t that right, dear?”
Red faced the humbled girl had glanced shyly upwards, her eyes momentarily flickering between both her wickedly smiling tormentors before hurriedly averting, the shame of her position undoubtedly too much to bear. “Y,y,yess Miss Daphne”.
The voice had been pleasantly hesitant, endearingly uncertain and vulnerable. There had been an anxiety there, in that quavering, submissive tone, the hopeless acquiescence of a soul left eternally hanging in chains. But these had been psychological bonds the girl had been caught up in. It had been an entanglement forged of far stronger stuff than mere physical fetters, even if the latter had been manufactured from the strongest case-hardened steel. It had been the kind of entanglement she immediately knew she wanted woven around her Alice, and the thought had thrilled her to the very darkest reaches of her soul.
Karen Lamberton-Marchment could still recall forming the vivid impression that she could actually see those metaphorical heavy links, weighing down the girl’s bowed and rounded shoulders as the servant girl hunched over those boots, polishing away as if her life depended on it. She could still recall how the image before her eyes had swapped interchangeably back and forth with the one inhabiting her imagination, the vision she had had of the still - at that time at least - headstrong Alice Lamberton kneeling there in the girl’s stead. She had known then that that day would come - and who would be best to recruit to make it so.
CHAPTER 5
LATE TEEN SCHOOL PUNISHMENT
It had taken less than a fortnight to put the first part of her scheme in motion; relocating Alice’s bedroom. Of course young Alice had made all sorts of protestations about being given a room that was actually below ground level. She relented a little when it was pointed out that it was not really below ground level, in the sense that it did have a window, albeit only looking out on a dugout basement stair and entrance. She relented even more when told it was to be merely a temporary measure while her old room was ‘in renovation’ a process Alice had been led to believe would involve a substantial increase in space, her room being converted to ‘en-suite’ and benefiting from having been fitted out with all manner of confections likely to appeal to a young woman of her age group.
The final convincer had been an exasperated authoritatively voiced, “because I said so” delivered in clipped tones and backed up by the threat of the cane and a comment alluding to how quickly the time had passed since the last time her medication had been due. That latter part had done the trick and she had even had the girl bend across her lap for a quick chat with the back of a hairbrush to ‘christen’ her new room before she would hand over the girl’s pills to her. But that had been a while ago. Alice had had sufficient time to settle down in her new environment now and so it was as good a time as any to proceed to the next waypoint.
Quietly twisting the brass handle of the door to her stepdaughter’s new bedroom, the lightest of metallic squeaks accompanying the lock sliding back, the words of her ex-teacher, Daphne Larkspear, kept running through Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s mind: “I will want Alice in the schoolroom for a good while before I begin her re-education proper. Meanwhile the idea is to keep her sleep deprived, disorientated - she’ll be all the easier to handle for it”. Well, the device Mrs Larkspear had loaned her certainly seemed to take care of that aspect; such a clever mechanism.
Alice had not as much as stirred as her stepmother had entered her room, her constantly disturbed sleep pattern had seen to that. The random ‘bleeper’ had done its work well. It would sound at varying intervals throughout the night; loud enough to momentarily rouse Alice from her slumber, yet sufficiently brief to not fully do so nor tip off the sleeper as to the nature of the disturbance. The result, a mere two weeks after the ‘bleeper’s introduction into the girl’s bedroom, was a constantly bleary-eyed stepdaughter as mystified by her increasingly debilitating state of mental exhaustion as in her inability to concentrate generally and who was consequently becoming ever easier to browbeat into submission by argument alone.
Indeed it had proved a simple task to use Alice’s constant tiredness as a way of justifying to the girl ramping up - with her doctor’s co-operation - the dosage of the barbiturate tranquilizer that had been originally introduced as a substitute for the illegal drugs she had let herself become addicted to. The result of the latter intervention was a deepening of the girl’s already quite pronounced dependency on her medication, a trend her stepmother had every intention of encouraging.
The use of the cane and the strap had by this stage become firmly entrenched in the running of the household as a way of controlling Alice, the girl’s acceptance of these methods being enforced where necessary by the constant threat of the withdrawal of her medication. But in this sleep-deprived, constantly drowsy and confused state it was becoming increasingly common for Alice to submit to some new restriction or erosion of her freedom without resort to corporal punishment. Somehow Alice’s stepmother didn’t think the latter was likely to remain the case now that it had come time to put Alice in school uniform, especially given that so many features of the design had been incorporated with the sole conscious intent to increase the sense of humiliation a girl of Alice’s age would likely experience from being made to wear it.
Moving quietly around the Spartan and effectively windowless room - the latter’s glass having been newly covered by a milky-white sticky-back plastic film - Karen Lamberton-Marchment hung the hanger containing the green and white striped blouse, on a hook on the wall at the foot of the girl’s bed. The buttons were all smartly fastened and the school tie was in place around its high and deliberately stiffened collar just as it would be in wearing, the short little wraparound grey PE-style skirt flaring out from beneath it. She smiled to herself - the ensemble would be the first thing Alice would see on opening her eyes; the message would be clear enough.
The firm reinforced white corselet she decided to drape over the back of the bedside chair while the high-waisted, full-bodied bottle-green knickers she laid out on its seat. These she carefully arranged to showcase their polythene inner lining and the odd-looking hammock-like arrangement by which was strung out a thick, coarse hygienic towel, some ten inches long, slung on elasticated strings between rubber buttons sewn into the inside of the waistband and that constituted an integral sanitary napkin belt.
This latter garment she felt sure would be the straw that would break the camel’s back. She wanted an excuse to cane Alice in conjunction with her being put in uniform this first time and these knickers she felt sure would give her that excuse. Refusal was especially likely once Alice saw the metallic ‘U’ shaped hasp and clasp arrangement that emerged through the fabric at the front of the waistband. This latter construct was the visible portion of a spring-steel hoop that was hidden within the waistband and threaded through the fabric in place of the elastic that one would have expected. Once Alice laid eyes on that and the little gold-coloured padlock that could so easily be put to use, a gentle click ensuring that a simple visit to the toilet became a privilege rather than a right... well she was bound to kick over the traces to some extent.
Externally the knickers were styled very much in the form of a pair of conventional if rather old fashioned looking school knickers, being manufactured in some manmade interlock woven fibre and possessing the usual kite-shaped double gusset. Yet they had been designed to incorporate features that had been taken from the sort of ‘tamperproof’ hospital issue incontinence pants usually supplied to those institutionalised with ‘mental impairment’. The scope for humiliation was as obvious as it was seductive in its potential for stimulating the darker aspects of the imagination; it was something Alice’s stepmother intended to explore to the full. Full-fitting, the knickers were designed to fit snugly, so snugly that Alice would be kept constantly and embarrassingly aware that she was not dressed in the usual fashion expected of a young woman her age, the broad, tight leg elastic nipping into the tops of her thighs acting as a constant physical reminder of that fact.
Looking back at the misty-looking opaque white panes of the single window she smiled to herself in satisfaction. The white painted hinged diamond wire-mesh grill padlocked across it was quite superfluous given the thick, toughened glass, double-glazed construction and the vertical array of iron bars mounted externally, embedded in the stonework sill, but she enjoyed the prison cell-like aspect that the thing lent the room. The window had only ever looked out on the whitewashed wall at the bottom of what had once been the external basement access steps, the greyish light filtering down through a concreted-in metal pavement grille mounted above that altered even the relative freedom of that space into an oppressive prison cage.
The steps themselves had long ago been removed, leaving a bland rectangular space of concrete and stone, and the two external basement doors through which coal and other essential household supplies had once been carried had been bricked up and concreted over to the point at which there was no longer any evidence of their ever having existed, neither inside nor out. It had been an uninspiring view, a depressing, spirit-dampening vista, yet it had still been potentially ‘too distracting’ for Daphne Larkspear’s tastes when she had been shown the room and that identical chamber that had been set aside for her own girl’s living space next to it.
She had been right of course. The simple addition of that self-adhesive plastic coating to the glass had done more than enhance that sense of imprisonment that the room undoubtedly embodied, rather it had transformed the space into a sort of a timeless realm. It was a place now where all mental focus could be lost and where a girl’s sense of reality could become whatever her carers or keepers - for want of a better description - might dictate it to be. What would one day be Daphne Larkspear’s girl’s quarters shared these characteristics, as did a third, larger room, set up with a double bed in place of the institutional hospital style cot, in which two girls, suitably tamed, might be encouraged to form the type of bond that would undoubtedly be frowned upon elsewhere.
This self-enclosed world was one that extended up a windowless stairwell - a previously long-disused servant’s access way bricked off from the rest of the house halfway through the 20th century but now reinstated where it connected with the attic space - to that segment of the house now reassigned and subdivided into the class room, PE room, punishment room, and ‘domestic education’ room and the rest. And that carefully crafted element of isolation had been extended to all these rooms as well. Despite being mounted well above head height, the windows illuminating these areas too now shared that same permanently misted-over appearance. Alice, Mrs Larkspear’s girl and - any others that might one day be housed here - could be shepherded from their basement sleeping quarters, dressed in their school uniforms or ‘domestic education’ unif
orms of work-dress, apron and maid’s cap, to the attic ‘schoolroom’ without coming into contact with any other section of the house or as much as glimpsing the world outside.
Almost laughing to herself Karen Lamberton-Marchment pressed the button on the remote control box concealed in her pocket that would trigger the wake-up alarm. Sensuously she fingered the long, thin pliant rattan switch in her other hand: She didn’t much care whether Alice capitulated immediately to the idea of being put in school uniform or whether she objected like a bull and screamed the place down. She had already decided the girl was going to receive a good hard caning by way of introduction to this new restriction of her freedom - what little there was left of it - whatever the case. It was good psychology to underline her authority in such a manner. One thing she knew for certain was that the girl would bend for the cane when she ordered her to; it had been at least eight hours since her last dose of her medication and she would awaken desperate for it, a soul-famishing hunger consuming her being.
The bell was not quite ear-splitting, but as shrill as it should be. Alice sat bolt upright, disorientated, her mouth agape. She was dressed in her plain white polyester/cotton mix nightdress, not the one-piece green and white striped fleece-lined pyjamas she would be soon wearing and from that day forth, with their school badge embroidered breast pocket, buttoned flap over the bottom and matching plastic knickers beneath.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 6
