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 had 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.

“Ahem! For physical education - or PE, as I prefer - I have sourced a perfectly adequate style of school leotard for dance-based activities and what used to be referred to as a ‘gym suit’ for more, shall we say... robust pursuits. The latter shall include - but not be limited to - military-style drill and vigorous callisthenics and hopefully, more often than not, will be taken by a good friend of mine, a woman of some considerable expertise when it comes to inspiring lazy and recalcitrant young women, having been employed as gym mistress at one of the ‘short-sharp-shock’ young offender’s institutes the UK trialled some years back.” She paused, adding as if an afterthought: “...with Lady Marchment’s permission, of course!”

Having caught Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s raised eyebrows she was now indulging in a little damage limitation. She had been counting on her employer’s reluctance to undermine her authority and standing in the eyes of the two girls, but as much as anything else on the notion appealing to the darker aspects of the woman’s otherwise impeccably respectable self. But it was a gamble. She hadn’t mentioned it in advance and she wanted the atmosphere she had now created in this room to speak for itself, to set the scene and spark the tinder she felt sure was waiting in her employer’s psyche to be ignited. Nor had she mentioned that this gym mistress she had in mind had enjoyed - if enjoyed was the right word, perhaps endured - no little public notoriety and outcry at the time of her dismissal.

Whereas her own - Daphne Larkspear’s - discrediting had been largely confined to behind the scandal-muffling closed doors of a famous private girl’s boarding school, this other woman had had her face spread far and wide on the covers of both broadsheets and tabloids. The allegations of abuse and sexual exploitation still hung about her friend and one-time lover like a bad smell that refused to wash off and that potentially threatened to taint all those around her. Or at least that would have been the state of play had she not invested some of her late Aunt’s estate in helping the woman start again, changing her appearance through surgery, acquiring a new identity, national insurance number and passport to match. That too had been a gamble. The woman had been put on the sexual offender’s register - her disappearance from view had done more than just raise eyebrows. But this too, assuming she had read Karen Lamberton-Marchment correctly - and she felt confident that she had - would likely gel with her employer’s tastes; at least once her ex-pupil, with her help, came to realise her own potential. For now though she would keep her not-so-tame gym mistress friend’s... indiscretions, close to her chest.

She tried not to display the relief on her face as she saw Karen Lamberton-Marchment’s head slowly nod in acquiescence at the back of the room, her eyes meeting that of her employer and ex-pupil and communicating an unspoken understanding written in mutually exchanged smiles. She was elated even if doing her best to deny it to herself - and why not? Her judgement had been sound, the gamble had paid off! She couldn’t help but lick her lips as her eyes once again alighted on the woman’s stepdaughter. The girl was looking exquisitely sweet the way she was sitting there so contritely in her school uniform - her ex-pupil had already got the girl quite well tamed, even without her help; albeit with the complicity of a medical doctor. Young Alice would be positively domesticated once she had been put through a few of her old friend’s drill sessions.

She could already see the girl in the nineteen-thirties-style ‘gym suit’ outfit her friend had come up with. The girl’s bottom was going to look succulent in that, bouncing and quivering under the heavy leather Victorian reformatory strap her gym mistress friend favoured - the genuine article that was, too; a true antique. Judging by the groan the girl had let out when she’d mentioned it - the second she’d picked up on Alice uttering - she guessed that the girl had somehow seen an example of her friend’s take on the gym suit, or at least something like it. Either way it was as clear as day that the girl could already see herself in it, just as well as she could. Staring down at her employer’s stepdaughter, at the distaste and dismay written across the girl’s pale face, delighting in the girl’s uncomfortable fidgeting under her gaze, she took another mental note: She’d have the girl try her gym suit on, sooner rather than later, just for her own enjoyment. Not that there was likely to be any problem regarding its fit. It had been hand-made to the girl’s exact and detailed measurements - most detailed measurements; certain dimensions had been of the sort that had had to be acquired under the guise of a medical examination.

The ever more despondent Alice Lamberton had indeed seen an example of what Mrs Larkspear had meant by a ‘gym suit’. She had immediately recalled coming across a singularly odd garment in the same cubby hole as she had the school gabardine. It had been on top of a pile of things and had had a tag sewn to it carrying the description, ‘customer sample’. Had it not been for the drawing and photograph rolled up with it she would have been at something of a disadvantage.

As it was the photograph was from some mid-nineteen-thirties ‘health and fitness’ catalogue labelled with the moniker: One piece, bloomer-style, gym suit. Whereas the garment in the photograph was not particularly inviting to her teenage, fashion-conscious eyes, the drawing that had presumably been made from it depicted something worse, as if someone had gone out of their way to select all the most detracting features. The actual garment had been quite hideous in its realisation, a bizarre thing indeed. It was as if the design had somehow become an exaggerated, corrupted version of that drawn out on the paper pattern in its execution, as if someone’s imagination had been put to use on the fly - with needle and cotton in hand - and had got carried way out into the realm of some austere, utilitarian fantasy.

At the time she had decided that it must be something from the past that had, perhaps, lain there undiscovered for decades. But even with that in mind - and taking into account the era it represented - holding it up by its shoulders her eyes had taken the detail in with no little incredulity: It had been sized for an adult - albeit a small one - but the thought had run through her mind that surely no adult or adolescent young woman would have been seen dead in such a thing, even back then...

Mrs Larkspear’s misleadingly disarming Scots ascent cut through her thoughts at that point, intruding, drawing Alice Lambert’s attention reluctantly back to the already near-on unbearable tedium that this ‘schoolroom’ had so soon come to represent. How she was ever going to be able to withstand hour after hour and day after day of this level of monotony, she didn’t know - already she felt at the edge of despair.

And that bloody clock! She was beginning to dread each metronomic tick. It filled the silence between her teacher’s proclamations with an irritatingly unvarying cadence that seemed to underscore the sense of detached isolation that permeated the room. It jarred on her nerves, as if pointing out that time was passing, that out there in the real world, real people were leading real lives, getting somewhere, progressing. She feared it would drive her insane - but what if that was the point? Was that what her stepmother was trying to do, with the help of this bloody governess woman? Were the two of them trying to drive her mad, to get their hands on her inheritance by having her ‘put away’?

Handing out the sheaves of paper and a pen each to the two uniformed girls Daphne Larkspear smiled thoughtfully, perhaps wistfully: A total of ten thousand lines each would take some time. Setting out at the time of day they were, she doubted that either girl would see her bed that night - or even the next, if their work proved of insufficient quality. A little sleep derivation would do no harm to her task. Chronic tiredness combined with the cane and unrelenting discipline: it made for a great recipe when it came to breaking a pretty filly’s spirit.

“Ok! Start writing girls.” Once again she exchanged those like-minded knowing glances that said so much with Alice’s stepmother as the latter left the room, smiling contentedly and swinging her keys like the jailor she had become - at least in her own mind.

Fingering her cane, the fine ridged length of bamboo that presently lay across her desk she wondered how long she would have to wait to put it to good use. Not too long, she wagered. The girls would be tired, they would make mistakes. They would grow irritable and fidgety. But all that was fine. There was nothing like having a throbbing bottom to help a new girl through the process of settling down in the classroom. And she wouldn’t have long to wait...

Pen in hand and just a few pages in an Alice Lambert’s mind had begun to wander. The beige check pattern of the Formica desktop went in and out of focus, blurring and merging with the featureless beige flooring beyond its perimeter, the bare walls doing nothing to relieve the monotony.

Only the blackboard was capable of drawing the attention, and the words scrawled across it; the humiliating stipulations she was supposed hitherto to adhere to and live by. And arranged alongside it, as if to prove the point that she was now well and truly under the thumb of her much despised stepmother, there was the wall-mounted wooden rack with its suspended display of thin whippy canes and leather straps of varying weight and length - what Mrs Larkspear liked to call ‘corrective instruments’. From the mirror to her side a timid uniformed girl caught daydreaming engaged the corner of her eye; looking up another identically attired school child stared back, pale and blank-eyed, from the mirror pinned to the wall alongside the teacher’s dais.

Her fearsome stepmother stepped back into her mind, the implacably stern woman dressed head to foot in silk blouse, riding britches and those shiny calf-hugging rubber boots of hers and tapping her customary plaited leather switch against her thigh in time with every step. In her imagination she would have sworn she could actually hear the rhythmic crack, crack, crack of that wicked crop - why, she could almost smell the pungent vulcanised rubber of the woman’s boots.

The latter seemed to hang in her nostrils, even in imagination, just as had had the rubbery aroma of that gabardine she remembered so vividly or the odour that had hung about and around that horrid ‘gym suit’ thing she had come across in that cupboard that day. In common with the gabardine raincoat, that too had proved to be exuding a rubbery odour, although not of a comparable pungency. But in the case of the ‘gym suit’ she had been able to unimpeachably ascertain the cause.

All in one piece and buttoning up the front from the waist with notably chunky rubbery buttons, the ‘gym suit’ had consisted of a loose fitting front-buttoning sleeveless blouse conjoined at the tightly elasticated waist to a pair of puff-legged bloomer-type shorts. Alice could clearly recall how the blouse-like upper part or bodice had been possessed of a childish Peter Pan collar that buttoned demurely high at the neck, and had puffy, buttoned cuffs that fastened just below the shoulders.

She remembered how the latter provided a delightfully juvenile soft puffball effect but how that feature in of itself seemed guaranteed to extract maximum blushes from any possessing the sort of buxom teenage frame the garment had clearly been sized to accommodate.

Although she hadn’t yet considered it she was fast acquiring exactly that sort of frame, given the tedium of the school room, the inactivity inherent in sitting at a school desk day after day and the welcome distraction provided by eating the increasingly calorific and flavoursome meals she was nowadays being offered. If she balked at the sweetness, the fattiness or whatever, then all sorts of liquidised horrors could - and would - be offered in their stead; there would be a scaly fishiness suggestive of pilchard or mackerel heads or an offal redness having an obnoxious smell and iron-nail overtones to suit or a sickly cheesy vomit-yellow mash possessing a pungent odour that suggested exactly that. If all else failed then the ultimate sanction, as always, as in all things, was the withdrawal of her medication, the tranquillizers and sedatives she was becoming evermore dependent on; she could be made to bend for the cane, lie across her stepmothers knee, wear school uniform and sit meekly at a school desk - such was the humiliation inherent in addiction.

Indeed, such was the humbling power she was now under that even when actually told, quite clearly and overtly, that she was to be placed on a new medication, one having even stronger addictive side effects, she had been powerless to refuse to take her prescription, given a day or two of withdrawal symptoms. This had been so even though she had been told outright that these new drugs were capable of developing a real and near-unbreakable physical craving, whereas her previous medication had only led thus far to a psychological dependency. It has to be said, though, that the latter dependency had been somewhat surreptitiously encouraged, even augmented, through the power of suggestion and other psychological means that were mediated through the one-to-one psychotherapy sessions she regularly underwent with her stepmother’s tame psychotherapist.

The gym suit’s lower part, Alice remembered, had been styled like a pair of short-legged bloomers and was continuous with the blouse-styled top while delineated from the latter by the gathered elasticated waist band. These bloomer-shorts had had broad elastic running around their leg openings whereat the fabric had been gathered giving all the appearance of a pair of frilled baby rhumber pants, albeit minus the frills. The whole outfit had had an appearance that had been somehow half way between a scaled-up version of a toddler’s romper suit and some sort of sauna suit in that the fine harrow-grey serge had been teamed with a soft satiny inner lining with an additional layer of soft thin rubber incorporated, sandwich fashion, between the two.

She had been able to ascertain the latter with some degree of certainty. As what was apparently a type of ‘manufacturer’s sample’, certain of the inner seams had been left unfinished, presumably deliberately to allow someone’s detailed inspection of that very feature. In particular, internally along the line of the crotch the inner lining had been left incomplete, drawing up short of the gusset whereat the rubber intermediate layer intruded. Seemingly malformed in some manner during manufacture, the rubbery central seam at that point, she remembered, had arched gently upwards and was fringed like a bobbly, curved wedge-shaped comb with a lumpy protrusion at the front that had the appearance of the pad of a small thumb.

All in all the costume had made for a strangely contradictory mix of modesty and exposure. Modest, in that one’s person would be covered from the upper thighs to the neck - exposing, in that the trim-fitting bottom-hugging lower section featured a back seam that curved inward and upward with such acuteness that one would have been forgiven for forming the strong impression that the babyish shorts were already fitted to a particularly curvaceous young female bottom. Held up by the shoulders, the lower section’s seat naturally took on the form of two sharply delineated tight half-moons. How humiliating it would be to have to...

“Alice Marchment! You’re daydreaming! Is that all you’ve written girl?”

That wasn’t her name - she was Alice Lamberton, always had been, always would be! She heard her own indigent voice ring out from the far distance, as if she were still half-submerged in her daydream, the bare classroom walls echoing it back to her, the acoustics of the sparely-furnished space painfully ‘live’. “That’s not my name; I’m Alice Lamb... Owww!”

There was a different sort of ringing in her head now. The slap around the face had been sharp, hard and unexpected and left a fearsome numbing sting in its wake. “Alice Marchment... say it!” Slappp! “I said say it...” Ssllappp!!! “I said... SAY IT GIRL - ALICE MARCHMENT... M.A.R.C.H.M.E.N.T” The stony faced dour Scots woman spelled out Alice’s stepmother’s maiden name slowly, letter by letter, as if speaking to an idiot or a retard, simultaneously drawing back her palm like a serpent drawing back its head and about to strike. Your father’s dead, girl. “What’s your name, girl... Say it...” The slender wrist flexed rearward like a spring winding up, the long fingers coming together and stretching to their fullest, the skin across the soft womanly palm tautening...

“Marchment... Alice Marchment... Miss Daphne” Even as she blurted it out Alice could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks. A shame-filled blush was rising to meet the challenge of the rosy-red hue that had just been hand-slapped and painted across her delicate high cheeks. The outline of the woman’s fingers - visible along both sides of her pretty face - were fading fast now as the paler spaces between flooded with fresh colour.

Daphne Larkspear was standing before her, looming over her, the sheaf of paper Alice had been writing on clutched in one hand, having been summarily snatched up from the diminutive school desk’s top. The domineering woman teacher shook the wedge of papers threateningly as she spoke. Her spectacles, sparkling in the naked fluorescent light, reflected a red-faced, shattered Alice, the red and gold diagonal stripe of the school tie for some reason appearing particularly prominent to the stunned girl.

“That’s better, good girl.” Satisfied that her message had been received loud and clear Daphne Larkspear’s voice had immediately lost its outraged edge, regaining once again its cultured soft-spoken Edinburgh intonation that so often came across reassuringly, almost motherly.

“If that silly empty-head ‘lesbianised’ little boot licker, Angel, can come to terms with her identity change I’m sure you can. Lady Marchment is the only legal family you have now, or will be once you’ve come of age and added your signature to the documents that are being drawn up. And if she wants you to take her name, then that is what you are going to do.”

‘Lesbianised’ - what did that mean? Did ‘lesbianised’ even exist as a word? And that term ‘boot licker’? What exactly did she mean by that? Alice’s head was spinning, partly from shock, partly from the physical impact of the viscous face-slapping she had just received and partly through the sheer enormity of the nonsense the woman was spouting.

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 elasticated 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...”