She would start a girl off by subtly berating her then gradually, step by step, take her through all the different stages she had developed, each stage planting further seeds of self doubt. Then she would nurture those seeds into seedlings through further sessions until the poor thing was capable of helping nurture them herself through the writing of self-reflecting essays, long sessions of mirror-gazing self-contemplation and one-to-one discussion sessions with Daphne Larkspear herself. Over time the latter would take in practically every intimate body part and every possible personal bodily function. Each would be discussed in the minutest detail in these sessions, perhaps with her arm wrapped around the naked girl’s shoulder, her finger perhaps pointing out intimate marks in the crotch of a pair of the girl’s knickers lying upturned on her bare thighs. A sound recording would be made and the girl compelled to write an account of the ‘issues’ they had discussed and what she herself had confessed to thinking about the shortcomings that had been pointed out to her - and woe betide her if it differed in any way from that recording.
Then the naked girl would be taken back down the long narrow passage way that led to her room, a blank walled windowless white box with only just sufficient space to fit the hospital bed she had acquired and closed off by a very solid steel door. She generally preferred to keep a girl naked but allowed the wearing of a hospital examination gown when in her room, a brief affair fastening with butterfly tapes down the back, and if menstruating then she would provide a sanitary napkin belt with an attached towel pad - it made for a particularly humbling discussion and essay topic.
Once placed in a gown like that a girl was rendered somehow more naked than naked, in a way; it was all about exposure and vulnerability, or rather a girl’s perceived vulnerability. There was something hopelessly institutional about it all, the entire getup - and that was very much by design in this case.
This, then, had become her Angel’s lot, shuffling up and down that corridor each day, day in day out in that fetching little hospital examination gown, seeing and hearing no one but Daphne Larkspear herself and quite deliberately bored to tears when not being compelled to learn to be ashamed of and even loath her own body and femininity. When she allowed the girl anything to read it was invariably pamphlets, some of which she had manufactured herself yet looked authoritatively professional, that went on about the shortcomings of feminine hygiene. Food consisted of a liquidised stew based on fish heads, minced offal and black beans - foods and items she knew Angel found particularly distasteful - fed to her day after day until she finally began to eat it.
When she decided to ease up on the tedium of the routine and the monotony of the room Angel had been kept in, it was by providing the girl with a large rubber dildo. It was another of her experiments; she told the girl that there were hidden cameras and that she could be seen and yet still she eventually began using it. In fact eventually she was using it virtually every minute she was alone in her room; she had gradually become obsessed with the thing, practically to the determent of all else - it was a measure of what sheer boredom could do. Of course she had had no choice but to limit access to the thing at that point, for the sake of the girl’s own mental health. At first she allowed it back only in conjunction with the provision of lesbian literature, with the understanding that if it became apparent that she was using it with looking at the images in the books and pamphlets provided, then it would be immediately confiscated. Later she went on to allow the dildo’s use only under close supervision. And later still she began letting slip the odd remark, caning the girl if she failed to achieve orgasm rapidly enough and, on occasion, interrupting her pre-orgasm with a slap across the face. These were all interventions that began the process of leading the girl down the path that gradually resulted in her becoming so sexually repressed that, to this day, she was completely unable to obtain any form of sexual pleasure. By the time she had finished with her, Angel had become the sort of repressed sexless penitent that she knew deep down inside, though it as yet remained unvoiced, Karen Lamberton-Marchment wanted her to turn the delicious young Alice into.
What it took was some form of leverage. Angel had been practically brainwashed out of her self-esteem, taught to see every aspect of her femininity and sexuality as ‘dirty’, even sinful. And yet Daphne Larkspear still doubted the girl was as dependent on her as she seemed. She still worried Angel might one day attempt to break away. What was this leverage that her employer used with Alice, despite the obvious one that revolved around controlling her access to her medication? What hold did she have over the girl that involved this threat of her doctor putting her on, or enrolling her in, some sort of clinical trial? She knew quite a lot about the world of clinical trials; many students pay their way through the world by their involvement. It certainly did not seem particularly sinister on the surface of it. But she knew that there was something else about Angel that she felt sure Karen Lamberton-Marchment wanted to see duplicated in her Alice, though this too was an as yet unspoken desire.
It had been at the point when she had forbidden Angel to wash that she had introduced the girl to ‘boot duty’. Washing herself, using the shower, she had told Angel, was a privilege that had to be earned. If Angel wanted to clean herself then she had to clean something of Daphne Larkspear’s first. Of course there were no cloths, scrubbing brushes or tins of polish or anything of that sort allowed in the girl’s quarters or the room she had the girl in each day. But the girl had a tongue and that tongue could be put to good use. It had taken several weeks for Angel to progress from polishing the rubber uppers of her boots with her lips and tongue, to cleaning the soles when relatively fresh and then finally - after a salient lesson involving a spoon and a meal of something very nasty indeed - graduating to picking out the ‘nasties’ from the treads.
How long it would take her to reduce Alice to a boot-licker she could only conjecture but suffice it to say that whatever fear this ‘clinical trial’ of Doctor Ecclestone’s and the clinic she was involved with held for young Alice it might well make for a useful stick - in addition to the cane, that is. The idea certainly appealed alright and she only hoped her employer and ex-pupil was on the same wavelength - she felt sure she was; she’d seen the way Karen Lamberton-Marchment had glanced at her mud-caked Wellington-style fashion boots when she told her about Angel’s duties. If her employer was of a mind that Alice was all too self important... well, she new the cure for that.
It was going to be hard for a young woman like Alice to retain what was left of that air of self-importance once she had become a well-domesticated boot-licker. And those rubber boots she had seen Karen Lamberton-Marchment in earlier... Well, she certainly was not someone who went especially out of her way to take care what she stepped in. It was going to do Alice the world of good: The smell of fresh horse manure would be something Alice would get to know quite well before long, if she had her way - and the taste too!
The soles in particular were going to take a long time for Alice to lick and suck clean, as caked as they typically were by the time her employer had stalked round those stables of hers. The revulsion on Alice’s face when first faced with a mouthful of fresh dung, the muck caked around her mouth and lips, Daphne Larkspear could only imagine - for now. But she didn’t doubt now that the vision would eventually be made concrete - it would just take, time and patience and the judicious application of the dressage whip around the girl’s legs and across her fat bottom.
In her mind’s eye she could already see the girl, Alice, squatting on her haunches, the embossed pattern of the plaited leather dressage whip indelibly printed across the girl’s backside and thighs, trickling red-streaked scarlet garters forming where the skin of her arse has been split, her tongue lapping obediently at the upturned rubber sole of one of Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s green Wellingtons. She could imagine already the girl’s choking sobs as urged on by the whip she nibbles and teases out the straw-woven horse muck from between the treads.<
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Then afterwards - the cane; there are bound to be a few strokes of the cane administered afterwards. After all; perfection takes time and practice and failure to achieve perfection results in correction. That would be something else for Alice to learn. Not that Alice was going to be short of practice, Daphne Larkspear would see to it that she wasn’t. In fact she was now of a mind to get Alice started some time this very first week... Perhaps a demonstration first? She would see. For now, though, she had to set the ground rules for the schoolroom, set these two schoolgirl’s’ noses to the grindstone. Ahh! Yes! A nice long punishment-style written imposition - they can copy out the ‘school rules’ she had come up with... One thousand times... In their best copperplate handwriting. That should do the trick. She cleared her throat:
“First and foremost I expect you to do as you are told, when you are told; just as you both would have, had you attended the school I used to teach at.” There came an uncomfortable shuffling of feet and a groan from both girls and the ex-teacher smiled: she was warming to this new position already. Buoyed, she went on:
“You may find my attitudes to education and my methods somewhat alien to you - even outdated - but believe you me; they are effective, I get results. I favour a strict curriculum framed within the conventions of the Victorian schoolroom and revolving around the tenets of strict scholastic discipline. You don’t need to understand what that means as yet, but you do need to understand that I am not averse to using corporal punishment and - I am speaking to you Alice - I have the full support of your stepmother in that. Now; you will also find I don’t believe in demerit systems or anything of the like. Rather, it is my belief that a girl benefits most if the penalty is immediately associated in her mind with the misdemeanour she is guilty of.”
With that Daphne Larkspear rose to her feet and turned away. Plucking a stick of white chalk from the dusty wooden ledge that ran along the bottom of the blackboard she began to write. Ten commandment-like rules - school rules of the most restrictive nature and filled out with the most petty pointless stipulations imaginable - began to fill the full width of the board. Moreover, these long drawn-out and over-wordy school rules would have to be copied out one thousand times each - that made ten thousand lines in all! Long, long lines! Hard lines indeed!
CHAPTER 8
RULES, RESTRICTIONS, IMPOSITIONS AND LINES
Having scratched up the last of her ‘commandments’ she turned back to the seated girls, momentarily smiling across at Alice’s stepmother who was leaning back against the wall at the rear of the room. Putting down her stick of chalk on the desktop in front of her, tutting irritatedly as it rolled to the edge before dropping to the floor, she drew a breath, making a theatrical show of preparing to speak.
Daphne Larkspear was entering full schoolmarm lecture mode now. Standing with her back to the blackboard and with her hands on her broad matronly hips, she was swivelling slightly to and fro as she talked, as if addressing a packed classroom or morning assembly rather than two teenagers incongruously fitted out in school uniforms and shoehorned into a pair of cramped school desks sited on the upper floor of a private residence. But this was ‘home schooling’ writ large - with the emphasis on ‘schooling’ - and this was no easy-going home tutor. This was a woman made more in the mould of the strict English governess of old - though in reality Scottish and afflicted with the sort of predilections one didn’t openly speak of in good company, neither back then or now.
“There is too much freedom of choice available to young people nowadays and ironically that brings with it unhappiness in the form of peer pressure, competitiveness and indecision. It is my aim to relieve you of all that burdensome nonsense and return you to a more contented, malleable and compliant state through teaching you the value of submission to authority. I believe that true kindness when it comes to caring for girls such as yourselves - immature for your years - comes in the form of stern discipline and rigidly enforced subordination to those in authority over them in all matters. What is required is a regime based not on laxity, but erring towards severity if anything at all and designed to bring order into your lives.
Now; through my long experience of tutoring and governing girls I have found the most efficient means of restoring discipline to a young lady’s life is through the judicial application of the cane and the strap and through her wearing a uniform suitable for - and indicative of - her station. Thus you can expect to be dressed in some suitable variation of school uniform at all times and to have your bottoms thoroughly warmed should you step out of line.
In the classroom there should not be a murmur, not one whisper, the strictest discipline of absolute silence and quiet must prevail - other than the voice of the teacher or governess, only the ticking of the clock, the scratching of pens or pencils upon paper or the squeaking of chalk on the blackboard should be heard.
Outside of the classroom the strictest standards of propriety must still be upheld: there must be instant and constant obedience to orders, a consistent sobriety of appearance and the docile acceptance of the privations that come with the type of Spartan upbringing I intend to return you to. And now you are both back in school uniform I see no reason for a letup in dress restrictions for any particular occasion or activity. All can be accommodated within the stipulations I have put in place and the guidelines I have suggested to Alice’s stepmother - a most sensible woman when it comes to such matters, if I may say so.
The regulation dress I insist on will be retained just as if you are still sitting at your desks, although augmented by a short cloak should the temperature drop. Should we have occasion to ‘take the air’ - and that’s an ‘If’ and we’d be venturing no further than the enclosed gardens and the immediate grounds - then you’ll be swapping your cloak for a proper school gabardine mackintosh, worn with the hood up whether raining or not, fully buttoned from the neck right down to the hem and with the waist tightly belted.”
Alice audibly groaned, then immediately regretted it as the woman’s pince nez spectacles glinted in her direction; she felt herself relax as the woman continued with her scan of the room. She thought probably she had already seen one of these school raincoats the woman was talking about. She had come across it when her stepmother had left unlocked the storage cupboard under the stairs in the basement, the one right next to the room that had since become her bedroom - for all that was worth.
The raincoat had been of that same institutional shade of grey as her skirt - ‘Harrow grey’, or so read the label on the inside of the skirt’s waistband. She remembered it had a disconcerting rubbery smell to it. The odour had percolated throughout the cupboard and had been what had attracted her attention to the garment in the first place. It had rustled when she’d gone to lift it off the coat hook, her curiosity having gotten the better of her, although the outer had been in some tough, tightly woven wool-like fabric and the green-dominated tartan inner lining had been of some fabric possessing a lustrous appearance and having a silky, almost satiny-smooth touch to it. She had formed the impression that the rustling came from some sort of additional fabric layer that lay between the other two and that this also contributed to the garment’s stiffness.
Stylistically the raincoat had been possessed of the sort of traditional ‘look’ that she wouldn’t have been seen dead in and that belonged in the old black-and-white school photographs one sometimes came across languishing in dog-eared old albums in second hand shops, boot fairs and bric-a-brac stores. She remembered it had had a horrible, traditional square cut schoolgirl hood that was attached at the rear of the collar by a row of buttons and that had a tab at the front that buttoned under the chin and that strangely possessed an additional fastening - Alice had supposed - that consisted of a sew-in silver metal ‘D’ ring. This latter fitment, adjustment or fastening - she hadn’t been able to determine which applied - rather oddly had had a small brass padlock hanging in from it, its clasp closed even though it ha
d seemed to have been serving no purpose. Every detail had seemed to have been picked out in a contrasting bottle-green. The hood, cuffs and lapels had all been finished off with a trim of bottle-green piping running along and around their edges. The button holes, too, had been finished off with bottle-green stitching and the buttons secured with bottle-green thread - it had seemed a surprising and undoubtedly expensive attention to detail.
But it was that rubbery aroma that had most stuck in her mind, that had been the most noteworthy attribute at the time that she could recall. That odour had been reminiscent of those expensive vulcanised rubber designer Wellingtons her stepmother seemed to love so much. The smell had taken some time for her to track down to the raincoat itself as its source. There had seemed nothing outwardly about the juvenile-looking garment that might have accounted for it and there had certainly been nothing about the fabric that had felt particularly rubbery to the touch. In the end, the only conclusion she had been able to come to was that the oddly disquieting bouquet permeating through the gabardine school mackintosh had something to do with its waterproofing and was as likely as not emanating from the slippery, rustling layer that she had been able to feel beneath the man-made fabric lining.
Having pausing for breath and to collect her thoughts at that point Daphne Larkspear scanned the sparsely furnished classroom before continuing, her eyes alighting on first one of her reluctant, coerced ‘pupils’ and then the other. She noted with some satisfaction that both seemed suitably crestfallen, young Alice in particular appearing especially demoralised, her already pale face having notably blanched at the mention of the gabardine raincoats she had acquired for the two of them. She made a mental note of the girl’s reaction and moved on.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 15
