Once she’d prised herself out from her stepmother’s clutches, gotten away from here and over to the town, she’d bring the police down on this woman and her scheming stepmother - and find proof that the cow had somehow engineered her fiancé’s jailing. Her mind a swirling maelstrom of confused emotion and hobbled to no little extent by the effects of the sedatives and tranquilizers she had been placed on, how she was going to go about any of this at present she had no idea. Her fiancé was in jail while she was locked in prison of her own. But hers was a kind of personalized prison, one composed, not of steel bars - though there were plenty of those in evidence hereabouts - but of something more insidious and not so immediately obvious to the onlooker as shackles and chains.
“This is rubbish, girl all of it - this won’t do at all! Hasn’t anyone even taught you to write properly? I said ‘in your best copperplate hand writing’ - COPPERPLATE! C.O.P.P.E.R.P.L.A.T.E.” This is not copperplate, child - this is indecipherable, nonsensical scrawl. I appreciate you’re tired, I know its coming up to time for your medication, but there is going to be neither bed nor sedatives until such a time as you get that written imposition I set finished - and to my complete satisfaction. It is no good daydreaming - that isn’t going to get it done. And I don’t care if you end up having to sit there through two nights - you will get it done before you leave this room!” Alice burst in to floods of tears as she watched the woman shred what few pages she had managed.
“I’m sorry but you are just going to have to start again! I’ll fetch you a page of Angel’s work so you can see what copperplate handwriting should look like - she’s had plenty of practice over the years. Haven’t you Angel?”
“Yes, Miss Daphne”. The voice was soft and lisping, the tone suggesting contrite, resigned docility while at the same time oozing with a kind of repressed, frustrated sensuality. Every syllable was enunciated as clearly as the girl was able given her handicapped speech, yet was still just barely understandable with sufficient practice. She returned within moments, a white sheet of A4 fluttering in her hand.
“Stand up please, Alice”
Alice struggled to her feet her knees stiff and sore from the cramped seating position. Her bottom - numb from having been perched upon the school desk’s ridiculously narrow integral seat - began to throb almost immediately where the indented impression of the bench had begun to slowly spring back, the resilient flesh yearning to regain its familiar form. The sheet of A4 was pressed into her hands: “Hold it out in front of you - both hands, please - and read through it quietly until I come back. Knees straight, back straight, please, Alice, chin up - I don’t want to see your collar crumpled.”
Holding the sheet of beautifully handwritten lines out in front of her, almost to arms’ length, as she had been positioned Alice watched as the woman swayed her way to the front. The skirt of the woman’s deep-navy-blue dress swung around her calves as she walked away, swishing to and fro against her dark seamed stockings. The deep elasticated crepe belt, that cinched her waist and that did so much to suggest the image of an old-time hospital matron, tended to over-emphasise her hips; yet in some unaccountable way it augmented the woman’s air of authority to a still greater extent. The overall effect was an intimidating one and Alice could feel the blood freezing in her veins as she watched the woman approach the rack on the wall alongside the blackboard, the ex-teacher running her fingers appreciatively along the suspended wands of pliant rattan and thin swishy bamboo.
“Hmmm... this one I think.” Muttering to herself the woman’s hand had alighted on a long length of near-white rattan that hung from a leather wrist loop and that was bound around one end with brown plaited leather to form a stable hand grip. Then she paused: “No, no, not this time... the classroom cane I think.” She stepped across to the desk she had only recently vacated, sited on the dais in front of the board, plucking the long traditional crook-handled cane from where she had left it lying diagonally across its top. Glancing across at the now shivering Alice she swished the cane through the air, smiling as she saw Angel’s head momentarily bob with concern before just as quickly bowing forward to again crane over the near-endless written imposition she was beavering away at, the scratching of her pen nib audible even from the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom.
Alice jumped as Daphne Larkspear tapped the top of the school desk with the tip of her cane. Alice was standing in the small gap between the desk and its attached seat. The front of her thighs, bare beneath the abbreviated hem of her flat-fronted grey school skirt, were pressed smartly against the edge of the desktop, yet her calves still brushed against the front edge of the seat behind her. With her arms outstretched holding the sheet of A4 up in front of her face she had not seen the teacher coming, having locked her eyes fixedly on the handwriting sample she was supposed to be studying as soon as she had seen Mrs Larkspear turning back towards her.
“Kneel up on the seat, please, Alice, with your tummy resting on the desk-top and your arms out in front of you as they are now. No, I didn’t’ say to put down the paper - I want you to keep a hold of it. Keep your head up and your eyes on the page.” Daphne Larkspear smiled pleasantly as she watched the sullen teenager comply, albeit reluctantly slowly. It was the perfect position to deal with a miscreant student. The girl’s feet extended out to the rear through the gap between the back and the seat of the up built-in chair, which kept her feet from kicking out during punishment and the girl from jumping up at any point. In addition the position kept a girl’s back nicely arched and her bottom pleasantly and sufficiently tilted skyward.
“Drop the paper, lower your head or take your eyes off the sheet - or indeed close your eyes at any point - and the whole procedure starts anew, from scratch. And if that happens, or if I have to tell you to bend back over your desk, then you’ll go without your prescription today - and you know how that makes you feel.” She had decided to take a leaf out of the girl’s stepmother’s book and see how that went - it had seemed to have gone very well indeed, given the girl’s contrite obedience. “Six strokes, one for each of the first six school rules. You will read each line slowly and clearly and at its end you will receive the corresponding stroke. You will then call out the number of the stroke, appending the words ‘thank you Miss Daphne’. Is that clear, child?”
From some buried reserve somewhere Alice, managed to dig up sufficient resolve to answer, her voice breaking with bitter emotion, her body shaking and her nerves near breaking point. “Yes Miss Daphne.” Just hearing the words stumbling from her lips was a stupefying experience - never had she felt so insignificant and powerless as this woman was able to make her feel.
Daphne Larkspear, on the other hand had rarely felt so empowered. She delighted in the way the girl’s bottom cheeks flinched in nervous anticipation as she slashed the wickedly pliant cane experimentally through the air behind the bending girl’s back. Even under the pleated pelmet of the rear of the school skirt, the twitching of the girl’s plump bottom made her lick her lips in anticipation. Putting down the cane for the moment she flipped up the brief hem of the girl’s little wraparound skirt. A rather less than attractive leer wandered unbidden across her features as the delinquent’s snug bottle-green school knickers came into view, the back seam buried from view deep within the cleft of her bottom - delinquent, yes, that’s what this was; a delinquent’s bottom. And a delinquent’s bottom had to be thrashed!
She began to run her hands over the girl’s behind, feeling the warmth of the girl’s flesh against her palms through the old-fashioned short-leg bloomer-style knickers, then cupping the heavily fleshed overhang of the girl’s buttocks. She ran her index finger along the incurving back-seam, tracing a path deep down between the half-moons of the girl’s bottom, pausing and wriggling her tip rhythmically over the point at which she imagined she could make out shape of the girl’s anal bud. Finally, almost reluctantly, she hooked her thumbs into the rear of the broad elastica
ted waistband, peeling back the slightly glossy bottle-green fabric.
Drawing the girl’s knickers slowly down, easing them over the swell of the girl’s bottom the greyish, almost transparent, PVC inner lining now gradually came into view, the girl’s skin and the polythene fabric equally slick with intimate perspiration. She rubbed the plastic lining between her finger and thumb, her heart beating faster and feeling as if set to go into palpitations of ecstasy at any moment - with her other hand she reached back to fondle the waiting cane, her fingers wrapping instinctively about its curved handle.
“Oh yes my dear! Oh yes! I am going to warm your bottom for you - and no mistake. I am going to set it on fire for you, make your bottom blaze like no girl’s bottom has ever blazed before.
You are going to rue the day you were disobedient to me. I am going to cure you once and for all of any trace of disobedience, reticence and laziness, you little tart, always wriggling that big fat bottom of yours - I’m going to give you something to really make it wriggle.” Dropping back a step or two and having risen to her full height, Daphne Larkspear drew back her arm, the cane quivering in the air in anticipation over her shoulder, her arm tensing and the muscles of her shoulder twitching excitedly:
“The first rule, please Alice... Begin...”
CHAPTER 9
A HARD DAY’S TRAINING
As she readied the equipment Daphne Larkspear glanced across at the nervous teenager standing awkwardly in the corner. In her teacher’s eyes Alice Marchment was looking particularly sweetly demure and passive today in her short-skirted school uniform. Her school tie was tightly knotted as it should be and tucked in to the waistband of her skirt, her long-sleeved bottle-green school cardigan, with its embroidered badge of red and gold over one breast, was buttoned smartly to the top and her flat-heeled bottle-green T-bar ankle strap school shoes had been polished to an almost glassy finish. With her eyes shyly averted and her pretty head bowed as much as the starched collar of her green and white striped school blouse would allow, the girl was involuntarily presenting exactly the type of image that was guaranteed to inflame the once disgraced ex-school teacher.
Of course Daphne Larkspear was an ex-schoolteacher no longer; she hadn’t been an ex anything for some three months or so now. Not that she had been rehabilitated, not in the eyes of society at least. She might well have been employed as a private tutor-cum-governess here, in this ‘home-schooling’ environment, but in the eyes of the public at large she remained just as disgraced as she’d ever been. And just as unemployable, at least insofar as fulfilling the role of a teacher was concerned.
She often mulled it over, this change of fortune - not that she had ever been short of money; she had inherited more than enough, along with the Georgian town house in Hackney, when her aunt had died. That had been long before her dismissal of course. But money wasn’t everything in any case; fiscal wealth had never figured in what this ‘change of fortune’ had been all about. What was it the school board had said about her? Unofficially of course - the school wouldn’t have been able to withstand the scandal; its reputation would never have recovered. Ahh! Yes...
She was a ‘predatory and sadistic lesbian who habitually delighted in exploiting and debasing the vulnerable young girls left in her charge who, having twisted and perverted their impressionable young minds in her own image, she left with neither a shred of dignity nor self-respect to their name’. In short she was ‘a woman who delighted in handing out the most degrading of punishments for the slightest infringement of her own interpretation of school rules, who enjoyed imposing her will and relished disciplining young girls - not for the greater good but in order to achieve her own sick ends and who was not be satisfied while a girl in her care retained a single crumb of self-esteem, self confidence or pride’.
It had been a bit of a mouthful, but... How true! She laughed a little, under her breath as she reminisced. If she had any reservations at all over what had been said it was that it had played on that phrase ‘young girls’ a little too much for her liking. She had objected to that term at the time - all the girls she had been involved with had been legally entitled to leave school had they so desired - but there was little that could be done about it by a woman in her position. What she had objected to was the way in which the verdict could be interpreted so as to give the impression that she was some type of paedophile, when she had absolutely no interest in children from a sexual standpoint whatsoever - and never had. A girl had to be sexually and biologically mature to hold any interest for her - a young woman in all but name.
Yes, in truth it had been harrowing at the time all right. But after all was said and done, it was that verdict - and her irrevocably tarnished reputation - that had put her in the position she was in today. And what a wonderfully challenging position it was, too - unique, one could say. Glancing up at the childishly uniformed girl waiting quietly in the corner she laughed again, that silky soft lilting Scots laugh she had when trying to keep the lid on it, so to speak. It was that word ‘unique’ popping into her head that had done it. It had suddenly tickled her that here she was praising her own individuality and her situation’s uniqueness while at the same time that situation itself revolved around imposing conformity on and grinding away the individuality of others - thus the school uniform she had devised and that young Alice was presently modelling so expertly. She watched as the girl coloured, delighting in the fact that it was her laugh that was contributing to the girl’s increased discomfiture, before returning to her preparations, arranging the straps and buckles that would secure the girl’s head at the front of the wingback armchair’s seat. The cunylingus chair she called it; idly she wondered if the girl had any idea what it was for.
The thought skidded through Daphne Larkspear’s mind: ‘How quickly these last few months have rushed past, but how difficult it must have been for poor young Alice, there’. Pressing one finger pensively to her lips she pondered as to how much harder it would have been to have brought a teenage girl, such as Alice Marchment, to heel to the extent she had in the relatively brief period of time she had managed it in, if not for the hold the girl’s stepmother had over the girl. The part about the girl’s dependency on prescription tranquilizers she had grasped quickly enough and very useful it had been too, as a tool of persuasion. The thing about this Dr Ecclestone’s clinic and the ‘clinical trials’ the doctor was forever trying to enrol Alice in she had until recently been a little vaguer about. Now she realised how it worked. She understood now that Karen Lamberton-Marchment was terrifying her stepdaughter into passivity using the potential long-term ramifications of being put into care in a private mental health facility as a threat. The girl was terrified of being found to be unable to mentally cope with life, to be branded with that label of being mental defective. The girl was of course quite normal, as was Angel, but her stepmother and her doctor friend had the girl convinced that such a finding was almost a forgone conclusion if she ever found her way inside the doors of an institution.
It had been a great tool for the girl’s stepmother in the past and it would continue to be even more so in hers, Daphne Larkspear’s, capable hands in the future. After all, it was going to take a hell of a lot of ‘persuasion’ to train young Alice to the point of becoming her stepmother’s bootlicker. But first she could learn something about pleasing her ‘betters’ in an even more personal way.
“Slip off your knickers please, Alice.” Hesitatingly Alice’s hands disappeared under the back of her Harrow-grey wraparound pleated back skirt, reluctantly easing down her close-fitting but full bottle-green nylon school knickers, their rubberised inner lining tackily clinging to her skin.
“Kneel here, in front of my chair - and reach your hands and arms around it. And Get a MOVE ON!” Alice was being understandably hesitant; after all a wingback armchair fairly festooned with straps, cuffs and buckles and with some sort of head harness attached to the front of its seat was not
only unfamiliar - it was downright sinister. The girl was still capable of displaying some remnant of a defiant streak - but that was so much the better, as far as Daphne Larkspear was concerned; defiance was all ‘bread and butter’ to her. But today she was having none of it - she was not in the mood to be either subtle or coaxing. The ex-schoolteacher knew how to harden her tone to extract obedience from a recalcitrant teenager; especially when that teenager had already been exposed to more than sufficient of her singularly original form of discipline to bring her to her knees.
Daphne Larkspear lowered her knickers and having plonked herself down heavily on the low seated leather armchair, the weariness of the day’s activities having robbed her of her usual graceful airs, she let herself slide forward, her thighs spread wide beneath her skirt and straddling the kneeling girl’s face. The atmosphere was electric, Alice’s face displaying an expression that was somehow simultaneously both fearful and filled with shameful humiliation, her conqueror’s face grinning and displaying a type of sympathetic yet superior triumphalism. Suddenly panicked, at the last moment Alice began to struggle against her tethers, pulling with no little determination against the leather straps that kept her kneeling form in place and her chin firmly pressed down on the front of the chair’s leather seat cushion. But it was all to no avail. The domineering teacher laughed, a mocking tone infecting her soft Scottish lilt.
“Not to worry dear; if I were menstruating, or just about to have my period, I’d have kept my knickers on; there’s to be no squelchy sanitary towels or bloodied knickers today!”
Alice Under Discipline, Part 1 Page 17
