Alice Under Discipline, Part 1

by Garth ToynTanen

  Now the way would be clear for the two of them to be together again, once more a real, true loving partnership. And what better place could there be to ‘start over’ from than with this house and the financial clout attached to the family estate and endowments that came with it? Yes there was this Lamberton-Marchment woman to contend with, the self-styled - she assumed - ‘Lady’ Marchment. But Daphne had been the woman’s schoolteacher once; she had had the woman under her thumb then, and she was already largely riding roughshod over her now. And now here she was with the woman’s stepdaughter under her cane and about to give the little trollop’s pretty, fat ass the tanning of a lifetime with a school plimsoll!

  Given the option she’d condemn the girl to the same fate planned for Angel and have the girl’s stepmother here in her stead, the haughty cow bent over and touching her toes for the cane. Or perhaps she might have the stepmother and her stepdaughter restrained in cuffs and straps side by side over the vaulting horse, both of them thoroughly broken and wailing in harmony, their bare bottoms convulsing under the sting of her riding crop... Better still - the woman’s own riding crop!

  Ultimately she’d like them all out of her and her Daphne’s lives, for good! She could just imagine the picture; the three of them side by side on a secure psychiatric ward. Thick bars on the windows and sturdy bolts on the doors, nurses bustling to and thro in their blue uniform dresses and white aprons and the three of them lying there, just lying there in adjoining hospital beds, Angel to one side, Alice to the other and the girl’s stepmother in the middle, all in full four-point humane restraints. Perhaps the stepmother might be in a straightjacket, her hair having greyed over the years - the other two she could imagine gently drifting into middle age; and all three unaware of the presence of each other, the curtains being kept drawn between their beds to deepen their isolation.

  Having the stepmother under her cane or crop; that was the thing. How she’d love to get the woman bent over the bench where her stepdaughter would be in a trice. If she had her way with the girl’s stepmother she’d have those business suits and showy designer equestrian costumes of hers whipped off her in seconds. She’d have the woman back in school uniform and sitting at one of her own school desks in that ‘schoolroom’ of hers before she got her breath back. But it wasn’t all up to her - it was Daphne who called the shots where planning was concerned, she was the chess player of the pair. And Daphne had said they had best bide their time.

  As always Daphne was right of course; left to her own devices she would go off half-cocked, shoot her bolt too soon, and it would all come tumbling down around their ears. No, she would have to content herself with the woman’s stepdaughter and trust that the rest would eventually be delivered into both their laps given time - but she’d make the little minx scream enough for two. There was no harm in taking it out on the woman’s stepdaughter in the interim; after all it was what both Daphne and her ex-pupil, the girl’s stepmother, wanted to see. But then again, there was also no harm in indulging in a little prospective anticipation either:

  The woman’s house had everything going for it, everything she had ever dared hope for, just sort of built into the fabric of the building as if her deepest desires had formed part of the architect’s brief. That basement area she had been shown around, even that part that had not been pressed into service to house the girls and was still just as the architect had intentioned, naturally presented itself as a wonderfully and exceptionally austere environment. As bare as it was soulless and frigid, it was only a few iron-clad doors, white-tiled rooms, workshops and work benches away from the sort of institution she had always dreamed of.

  Even the windows, the few there were, were set way above head height - other than the couple that gave out on to the two external stair wells, and all had a parade of iron bars standing guard outside. Secondary double glazing fitted internally would save a fortune in heating bills while blocking all those noisy distractions intruding from the world beyond. A thick layer of whitewash would deal with the rest - and then she’d have the whole kit-and-caboodle tucked well away from harm behind an additional internal wire mesh security grill, a big, fat unpickable padlock on each of its corners, just to hammer home the point.

  There were occasions when it was positively advantageous if an inmate happened to catch the charm of distant bird song or hear the rattle of rain and the howling of the wind. On other occasions it might suit if an inmate was perhaps to overhear the distant carefree happy chattering of others of her age unthinkingly indulging their freedom, gossiping with pals, perhaps flirting with boyfriends. Either way such ‘slips’ should only ever be under the control of those in authority and serve to reemphasise the depth of an inmate’s isolation in her mind. Flora McBainstone believed an institution such as she had in mind would be all-encompassing; it should and would come to represent the totality of an inmate’s experience and world.

  Yes, it did good to remind a young woman from time to time that there was indeed another world out there somewhere, a world in which a girl such as herself might come and go as she pleased and not be stifled by pedantically precise rules and petty regulations, an existence in which she might visit boutiques and fashion houses, dress in the latest styles, rather than be regimented in uniform and set to task seated at her needlework. It did good to remind her on occasion that ‘out there’ time was passing her by, even as internally her own sense of time marched to the beat of the institution’s own rhythm and dictates and had been all but extinguished.

  What she was envisaging now she must have imagined a million times in fantasy, but seemingly within her grasp the vision was that much more concrete - it all suddenly seemed to drop into place. She knew now exactly what it was she wanted, what both she and Daphne wanted, what they had always wanted.

  It had always been some sort of institution they had had in mind but not one in the mould of Daphne’s school, nor the ‘young offender’s institution’ she had actually taught ‘physical education’ at - that had been a well-meaning institution, for sure, but it had never been allowed to go far enough, nor she at it. In fact, now she had come to think about it - really think about it - the sudden realisation had struck her that dealing with delinquency, as deserving a cause in terms of reformation as that might be, was not the true heart-felt focus of her being. In fact the complete opposite was true; the less blame might be attached to a girl or young woman the more appealing her incarceration appeared.

  Those old church-run homes and the nuns that kept the discipline with an iron rod had it right. There were many reasons one might morally cite to justify detaining a well-developed or precocious teenage girl or young woman under supervision than having perpetrated what society at large might understand as crime, even if those reasons were not necessarily appreciated in law, at least not at face value. In those days, too, there had been the prison system awaiting the real, true criminal delinquents; the ‘incorrigible’, ‘refractory’ girls the nuns chose to take in were those they saw as more amenable to religious discipline rather than in need of reformation per se.

  These originally secular homes for wayward girls had been designed with the aim of reform and education in mind, to take ‘fallen women’ off the streets and return them to society as useful, educated citizens. Once they fell under ecclesiastical governance, though, these ‘asylums’ slowly mutated into little more than prisons for young woman thought too ‘forward’, sexually adventurous, behaviourally outrageous or in any way deemed ‘unchaste’ by the church fathers.

  The work the inmates were put to turned out to be extremely profitable and not all that went on behind those high spike-topped walls was a model of propriety with the result that far from being released upon reaching her twenty-first birthday, many such young women found themselves effectively undergoing what amounted to permanent incarceration. Inmates were brutally beaten for the most minor of offences and under the strict and watchful eyes of nuns seemingly purpos
efully chosen for their authoritarian predispositions.

  These girls were under the exploitative control of women who seemingly were instinctive expert behavioural psychologists and many of whom were quite capable of reducing even a headstrong girl to tears by mockery and humiliation alone. Over time the young inmates would be broken down completely, both emotionally and psychologically, in this strange punitive ecclesiastical behaviour modification facility until in the end their total submission to the will of the nuns and overseers could be the only outcome.

  To most it would have seemed like a particularly exploitative gothic horror; to Miss Flora McBainstone and her ‘friend’ Mrs Daphne Larkspear it read like something else entirely. A particularly provocative and flirtatious girl could easily have been considered promiscuous and found herself, as a result, placed under the guardianship of the nuns and put to work behind locked gates and barred windows of one of their ‘asylums’. Alternatively the parish priest might have decided that a particular girl was ‘in moral danger’ with a similar result. Then there were those tales told of ‘precautionary incarcerations’ of orphaned teenage girls thought be simply too attractive or pretty for their own good - whatever that meant. Either way what it came down to was that whether or not a girl had anything to atone for, either legally or morally, once interned she could be held under lock and key without access to the usual processes and rituals of law and with no pathway of appeal nor even the means of contacting any person able or willing to speak on her behalf. It was a singularly Victorian torment, almost a form of cultural pathology, yet it was a system that had persisted well into the mid twentieth century - some would say later still - and it was a system that could be nurtured still, with care, coaxed back to life in the present.

  This then would be the credo by which her ‘home’ or rather their ‘home’ - Daphne Larkspear’s and hers - would be run. And this house would be the locus for the enterprise. And what an enterprise it would be! The word ‘home’ was one of those euphemisms used by the nuns in charge of what had been in reality, back in the day, a sort of church-financed prison system - the term seemed equally at ease applied to the kind of unofficial private prison she had in mind. A prison not set for the criminal or delinquent but rather for those runaways and stray nymphets she and her partner might merely consider criminally attractive - and the more blameless the better. And if they happened to issue from wealthy or privileged parentage - as some undoubtedly would, having run away on some pouty, petulant whim - then even better still, just so long as they could be relied upon to have covered their own tracks sufficiently. Once spirited away, even the latter, with care, could become just another statistic. The others wouldn’t even rate that much interest - the big cities were full of them and all deserving; from big-breasted northern mill-town girls to blond haired Scandinavians and newly-arrived eastern Europeans.

  There would be a long, long corridor, winding and convoluted to disorientate any would-be escapee. Chopped into shorter sections by securely locked bisecting iron security grilles, the passageway would be a windowless maze peppered with keyholes and the peep-holes set in non-descript iron rectangles that merged near seamlessly with the institutional beige walls. There would be a small room for each inmate, each sealed off behind its own locked and bolted iron door. But this would be no damp, dark loathsome and infested cell: She could envisage the scene in each; the glaring white walls, the disinfected sterile institutional smell, the instantly recognizable plain iron-framed hospital bed. There would be cushioned lino flooring and some sort of soft, yet featureless and near textureless, cladding on the walls and around the bed frame to prevent self-harming and perhaps a rubber or soft plastic chamber pot - what else could a teenage girl need.

  Nor would there be the sort of coarse, thick blue cloth uniforms of the kind the Sister’s of Mercy would have insisted their girls wear in the days of the Madeleine laundries or the Magdalene Asylum for ‘fallen women’. Some sort of uniform was de rigueur of course; stripping an inmate of her own clothes and putting her in some sort of institutional uniform was the first best step in exerting one’s power over her - after, that is, stealing away from her the individuality of her hairstyle and replacing it with the depersonalised austerity of the prison cut. This was where the thorny issue of admission procedures really bore fruit. The psychology of incarceration was every bit as important as the physicality of locks, bolts, restraints and bars.

  By the time a girl was put through a well thought out and systematic, step-wise, admission procedure - if properly carried out - mentally she will have already become a prisoner, even before being introduced to her cell. Miss Flora McBainstone believed that one should begin conditioning a girl’s mind from the moment she crossed the institution’s threshold, so that by the time the girl was handed her prison uniform, on perhaps the third, fourth or even fifth day, the girl would don the green polyester prison work dress she favoured without complaint.

  She had it all thought out; a couple of years or so locked away under captivity in this ‘Home for Troubled and Wayward Girls’ she had now mentally engineered and any girl would be reduced to an automaton, totally unable to function outside this or any other institution. Yes, she could see it all: Lady Marchment had all the right connections - on the surface of it, every effort would be made to try and locate these girls. But in the type of semi-official demimonde institution she had in mind the only way out would be for a runaway waif to be claimed by a relative or other willing to take responsibility for her. But they’d see to it that there were vanishingly-slim chances of that happening.

  She recalled what she’d once read about one of those historic so-called Magdalene institutions; located in Cork, Ireland, as she remembered it. An eye-witness account it was - a survivor’s account; she would ensure no such account would ever emerge from her institution: “My mother didn’t know where I was. My sisters didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew where I was”.

  Those girls in those places were watched over 24 hours a day by the nuns. They were literally browbeaten into submission, to the point where they probably came to believe they belonged in ‘care’. But even if any of these girls had retained the mental wherewithal to as much as attempt to abscond it would have been difficult in the extreme, confined as they were behind a convent’s six-metre high stone walls; especially when the latter were topped with shards of broken glass embedded in the mortar and concrete. Yes, those Magdalene laundry homes of old made the perfect template for something to rise from their ashes, as it were - and given the present financial climate, the time was ripe!

  Some part of the house could easily be adapted to form part of a compound, screened from the outside world. Her vision had now expanded to become a live-in ‘rehabilitation’ facility for ‘runaways’, structured in the mould of a re-secularised version of those Church-run ‘Magdalene laundries’ of old-time Ireland - an entire complex. Saying that; she would still include a church or chapel along with the school, work house and ‘domestic training’ buildings - there was a lot to be said for religious discipline and training, even if for highly cynical and manipulative purposes. The whole was already effectively walled, in but an extension could easily be added to the top of the already high wall at the rear of the area to ensure the girl’s containment.

  The girls could be taken to the schoolroom or the church or chapel in their school uniforms or to the work house in their work dresses and pinafores and the entire walk would be within the fenced in area - it would become their entire world, their entire existence. Of course there would be a hand-picked all-female staff to guide them along the way between one building and the next, ensuring strict silence, decorum and perpetually downcast eyes be maintained throughout. All gates and doorways would be securely chained and padlocked before and after their passing; and a great show made of that fact. And there would be very prominent - and very obvious - cameras surveying and guarding every inch of the way. There would be no discreetly tuck
ed away modern sub-miniature marvels here; the perception of perpetual surveillance was as important as the actual facility.

  But under the regime she had in mind, underpinned by the sort of measures that currently served so efficaciously to detain young Alice and Angel, she doubted any girl would attempt absconding even in the absence of many of those security provisions. Indeed, the day-to-day control wielded by Lady Marchment, aided and abetted by that Dr Anne Ecclestone woman, over those two girls lives within the facility represented by the household as it stood at the moment was exemplary. Never had she seen the twin tactics of humiliation and psychological pressure employed so skilfully, nor so unrelentingly. The subtle psychological bonds that held those two girls under their control were stronger by far than any of the bars Lady Marchment had had bolted across the windows or the locks she had had put on the doors. Both were hamstrung by neuroses, corralled by phobia and tethered by dependency - one for her mistress’s approval, the other on her need for pharmacological solace.

  As for the schoolwork side of it; she did not see education for the girls she would house as a priority, at least not traditionally academic education, even if the backdrop and trappings would all be in place, from the uniforms to the desks and blackboard, to the teacher’s gown, mortarboard, and - of course - cane or tawse. The focus would be more on a girl acquiring a sufficiently submissive demeanour and attitude in all things than on academic achievement. The schoolroom and its regimen she saw more as a tool designed to concentrate a girl’s mind on the former through the culture of strict discipline and obedience such an environment naturally fostered. It certainly wasn’t about ‘improving minds’, ‘building self confidence’ and ‘encouraging independence’ - quite the opposite in fact, especially where the latter two factors were concerned.