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!”

So saying the domineering woman flicked her skirt and petticoat back down over her knees and the head of the restrained, kneeling figure cringing before her. Alice now found herself suffocating in a perfumed petticoat tent of lace-edged nylon and delicate dark tan stockings. A suspender clip was pressed against her ear, nylon stocking tops abraded her cheeks.

The woman’s body odour was intense, almost overpowering. Alice spluttered, trying to move her face and mouth from the woman’s crotch but prevented from doing so by the leather head harness and the chin strap and cup arrangement that kept her very much in place. The woman smelled of sweat and urine and Alice desperately tried to move her nose away, gasping for fresh air under the heavy tent formed of the woman’s draped skirt and petticoat. With one hand Daphne Larkspear reached down and gripped Alice’s head, pulling the girl’s face even more firmly into her writhing crotch. With her other hand she fished around for the riding switch she had left propped against the side of the armchair in redness.

It took several stinging flicks of the switch before Alice could bring herself to part her lips and surrender her tongue to its sticky probing fate. Urged on by the constant demands being communicated through the leather tongued kiss of the supple riding switch Alice found herself battling with her disgust while at the same time concentrating on redoubling her efforts, tonguing away at the woman’s wet crotch and becoming ever more desperate to provide the pleasure this Mrs Larkspear demanded. She was being forced through the goading sting of her new schoolmistress’s riding crop to explore the woman’s inner labia and clitoral area ever more vigorously with her tongue, all the time being breathlessly reminded that failure to do so would result not only in this session being repeated from the beginning but also would result in a long, hard session with the cane across her bottom.

In short; this torment would cease only upon Alice’s tormentress achieving climax. Not only that; it would only cease when this ‘Miss Daphne’ was well and truly sated, spent both emotionally and physically. And she was virtually insatiable; the woman had practically told her so. This woman between whose legs Alice was presently secured had long ago become jaded through countless successes in reducing ‘normal’ girls to slathering lesbian playthings; and far stronger-willed examples than Alice, too.

How long it had continued for Alice couldn’t be sure, but suffice it to say that a time came, at long last, when Daphne Larkspear had slumped back in her seat, her eyes rolling with sated, exhausted cruel lust. Not that Alice could know any of that, tucked away as she was under the claustrophobically humid layers of the woman’s thick nylon petticoat and the heavy skirt of the schoolmarm or governess’s dress or whatever it was that one might describe as constituting the woman’s favoured attire. All Alice knew was that after several ‘false dawns’ - all too often preceded by a quickening of the goading lash of the woman’s riding crop - the woman’s demands had tailed off, the respites growing in length as time went on.

This last, final, respite had been by far the longest. Alice’s exposed thrashed-red buttocks, protruding obscenely from under the heavy draping skirts of her ‘schoolmistress’.

The resilient plump girl-flesh was still quivering and quaking in fearsome, conditioned anticipation of a resurgence of the horse-whipping it had taken to finally overcome what had, until this day, been a taboo beyond imagining as far as Alice had been concerned.

Then the darkness was suddenly lifted, Daphne Larkspear wearily lifting her skirt and petticoat and pulling herself upright in her seat, drawing together her legs as she did so and flattening down her dress. Alice, for her part, now knelt exposed and exhausted and spent emotionally beyond even the ability to cry any longer. Still strapped in position, her chin pressed firmly into the ‘chin-cup’ indentation at the front of the armchair’s seat cushion, her face framed by the leather head-harness that held her there, her arms cuffed around the chairs exterior as if in a lover’s embrace and her knees strapped to the chair’s front legs, she could do little else. In fact she could do nothing else - but such was the intent behind the design of the ever-resourceful Miss Daphne Larkspear’s so-called ‘training chair’; it rendered a girl, no matter how resentful, in the perfect position to offer up what Daphne Larkspear thought of as ‘oral worship’.

Indeed, her imaginative mind had conjured up another design, based on an adapted footstool but using the same concept of a cup to steady the miscreant’s chin - mounted within the upper surface - and a leather harness to hold the head in place. This latter, though, had been conceptualised with the idea of the miscreant lying prone along the floor with her arms raped around all four legs and her wrists secured by cuffs. A little empirical investigation had soon revealed the drawback that a determined and particularly defiant girl might circumvent the device’s intention by the means of twisting her torso and in that manner upturning the footstool. The equally simplistic expedient of providing a means of connecting this adapted footstool to a chair placed before it by means of two flange plates extending along the floor from the latter’s front legs soon dealt with that eventuality.

The ‘footstool’ now made for an indispensable accessory when it came to training a young thing like Alice, as far as Daphne Larkspear was concerned. Though in the case of the footstool it was enforced ‘boot-worship’ that was the theme. Not that a girl such as Alice - or young Angel before her, for that matter - might not be successfully encouraged by way of the judicious application of the strap or cane to their young bottoms to polish until gleaming the rubber of a nice clean pair of rubber boots, using her tongue and lips. But when those boots had been in wear, and if there happened to have occurred a little... soiling, shall we say? Well, a once-proud teenage girl’s reinvigorated reluctance under such circumstances perhaps becomes understandable, however tamed’ she might have appeared to have become up to that point. But it was in overcoming such vestigial expressions of pride that the ‘footstool’ came into its own - that was why it waited in the corner; ready for the time it would undoubtedly be required in order to take this ‘young Alice’ down to a still lower peg. And there was always a lower peg one might lead a girl down to; however degraded she might already feel.

It was with the thoughts of this ‘footstool’ of her previous devising rising in her mind - in concordance with her slowly recovering libido - and of this diabolical device’s undoubted utility in further humbling this young thing presently kneeling between her thighs, that Daphne Larkspear once more brought her gaze to rest on the focus of her gently subsiding ecstasy.

It gladdened her to see the girl’s reddened, face wetted with her intimate juices and glistening with so pleasantly in the soft light, Alice’s appalled expression adding a certain sensual piquancy to her triumphal satiation. More than that, though, it was... reinvigorating. Looking down at that kneeling, secured, girl her mood seemed instantly to have been elevated, dragged from the remorseful doldrums of the aftermath, the guilt - however short-lived - of the ‘afterglow’ and brought back to the sparkling, effervescent ‘live-and-kicking’ certainty of ‘drives’ and ‘needs’.

She was smiling almost pleasantly as she looked down and stroked the secured girl’s sweat-matted hair before squatting beside her to release her from her bondage. Her voice, though, gave little away of any affection that smile may, or may not, have been betraying: There came just the usual clipped tones; terse, yet coloured as always by that disingenuously soft Scottish lilt: “Come along young Alice; let’s get some knickers back on you, you disgraceful young hussy” she barked at her thoroughly humiliated charge. “The whipping drawers for you, I think.”

Had the underwear being proffered at the crestfallen teenager been the self same school knickers she had previously removed she would undoubtedly have been relieved to have been able to cover her blushing nudity - as it was, Alice was not so certain. What she was certain of, though, was the implication - her initial reluctance was not going to be allowed to go without ‘correction’, despite the way her poor bottom had been flayed throughout the ordeal she had just undergone.

The sheer magnitude of this unjust exploitation beggared belief and yet Alice felt buoyed at also being passed the cap, apron and brush at the same time. She was being given the chance to rehabilitate herself, to ingratiate her way out of further chastisement by means of a demonstration of her newly acquired, but as yet un-honed, ‘domestic skills’. Alice was aware that as yet she did not posses the finesse of a well-trained ‘domestic’ - and was not even sure why she should be so keen to debase herself in such a way on hands and knees - and yet...

There was some sort of pride to be had from a floor scrubbed clean and polished until one could see one’s face in it. And it was not the boot brush she was being handed this time, the one she used to scrub the stable waste from the soles of her stepmother’s favourite ‘wellies’. Nor was she being given the tin of wax polish and the duster with which she had now spent so many hours of her young life on her knees, buffing up the often already stupendously glossy green rubber, only to see her work ruined within a few minutes of her stepmother having wandered aimlessly around the stable yard. No, she was being handed the nailbrush, along with the nylon overall and the other accessories that went with the ‘domestic education’ segment of the curriculum instigated by her private tutor-cum-governess.

She understood well enough by now that the provision of the nailbrush meant the floor needed scrubbing in this, the ‘domestic training room’. It was a tedious task, designed to crush the spirit and based on principles employed in the so-called - and less-than-ethical - ‘harassment therapy’ infamously utilized in psychiatric ‘care’. To Alice, though, the hours of kneeling and scrubbing with her nose to the floor, in terms of being a torment, had long since become somewhat blunted through familiarity, and in any case lacked the bitterness of humiliation attached to anything personally and directly linked to her much-despised stepmother.

The floor was something impersonal - and in any case its cleanliness was linked to the task of maintaining what was, after all, one day destined to be her own home - or so she still fondly imagined. Viewed In that way, being put to work in such a debasing manner could be justified in her mind - just! On the other hand, being made to scrub and polish her stepmother’s rubber fashion designer boots was not only such a dispiritingly pointless and soul destroying task in and of itself but was something personalised by association with her stepmother - it was like dropping down on her knees to the woman herself, prostrating herself prone in the filth, murk and muck of the stable yard at the woman’s feet.

But there was no boot brush, no polishing cloth and no tin of polish in view anywhere in the sparsely furnished room, so she was at least freed for the moment of the worry of that singularly disturbing torment. On the other hand a pair of her ‘home tutor’s’ muddied rubber boots - extraordinarily similar to her stepmother’s other than in size and having a tab at the rear - stood in a corner. Even more worryingly she thought she had glimpsed a pair of her stepmother’s rubber Wellingtons as she had been ushered in. An until-recently-favoured red pair possessing a mirror-like finish, she remembered noting how they tended to cling to her stepmother’s shapely calves in wear - there was no mistaking them, nor the yellowish-brown straw-strewn horse dung streaked and caked around the soles. True, it had been but a fleeting glimpse of something tucked in the shadows behind her tutor-governess’s wing-backed chair - her ‘body worship chair’ she called it - but the image had resolved itself over time in her mind, even as she had been struggling through her ordeal.

Then - and not totally unconnected with that vision - there was that comment that her tutor-cum-governess had just made, as if in passing, while passing across the first of the debasing garments being handed her. What had it been? Something about needing to use a “little spit and polish” wasn’t it?. And what did that hellion mean by “you’re going to have to pay more than lip service to extricate yourself from this one - but we’ll see a little later, once you’ve got this floor scrubbed... if you can polish-up your image”? The woman had laughed hysterically at that one, just as she had finally handed over those knickers, the ones that made Alice’s heart automatically turned to stone at the mere sight - and she had been glancing across at her filthy, yet exclusively designed and equally extravagantly expensive, Wellingtons as she had done so.

These so-called ‘whipping drawers’ Alice was in the process of being passed at the time were not something purely of Daphne Larkspear’s own invention but rather the design drew heavily on certain somewhat ‘specialised’ areas of historical research encountered when training as a teacher of socio-political. Almost unbelievably close fitting, embarrassingly snug in all the wrong places and as tight as a drum skin, they had been inspired by the kind of ‘modesty garment’ that recalcitrant young Victorian workhouse girls and the like had been obliged to wear for judicial prison-yard chastisement.

In that era such a sentence would more often than not be carried out with the heavyweight prison cane. The drawers - fabricated of some specially woven thin white cotton with the strength of canvas - were supposed to provide for the retention of a modicum of decency while subtracting nothing from the efficacy of the punishment and at the same time providing some element of protection against any permanent marking of the flesh. The irony, in so far as the latter protective function was concerned, was that the design so often ensured the complete opposite of the supposed intention. Capable of being incredibly tightly laced up both sides until the skin of a girl’s bottom would be compressed to the point when it looked set to split of its own accord, the drawers ensured that when then struck with any force with a whippy implement, such as a pliant rattan cane kept pickled in brine, the flesh could practically be guaranteed to split.

Of course, though Daphne Larkspear may have been a traditionalist, often sporting the bespectacled twin-set-pearls-and-tweed schoolmarm look that went with it, she was also every bit the pragmatist. For one, she knew that ultra-fine-ultra-strong high quality fabric was near impossible to obtain economically nowadays. Secondly she was well aware that, since that time, cheaper, modern synthetic materials had become commonly obtainable that were even more ‘fit for purpose’. In addition, up-to-date manufacturing methods had come into existence that now made it economically viable to have ‘one-off’ or ‘small batch’ orders made up. A little research and Dacron had become the fibre of choice, in so far as Daphne Larkspear was concerned; its reluctance to stretch made the original cotton fabric seem positively elastic by comparison. Introduced in the mid-fifties Dacron had continued to develop as a sail cloth since that time, a testament to its potential strength.

An extremely fine denier fibre coupled with an equally extremely tight weave provided for a handkerchief-thin cloth that felt as smooth as satin to the touch and that could be tightened around her pupil’s bottom cheeks until the tiniest of creases were ironed out and it shimmered white, glass-like and blemish-free. Two rows of nylon ferrules ran up both sides of the drawers and were laced together with nylon cord that could be pulled taut and locked off with a sliding metal tensioner once the girl had wriggled her way into their grip. A narrow nylon strap, welded to the centre seam at the front of the crotch, provided the final touch. This latter refinement could be drawn back between the wearer’s legs and up between her now widely separated bottom cheeks, after which it could be secured and tensioned by way of a buckle arrangement sewn in to the rear of the waistband.

This, then, was Alice’s private teacher’s ‘improved new model’ modern take on the Victorian whipping drawers of old. And this pretty much summed up tender Alice’s present attire, albeit with the addition of a strange looking long-sleeved - yet short-skirted - button-through bottle-green work dress that was covered over by a white nylon pinafore apron that looped around the neck and that tied with a huge shimmering bow at the waist.

The whole ensemble drew to a halt at the hem of a skirt cut far too brief to have any hope of ever fully covering those drawers that engendered so much shame in their wearer. It made for a frightful uniform in Alice’s eyes, one designed for strict utility, sobriety of appearance and to foster the feeling of submission to authority - the latter it managed in spades.

Alice squatted on her heels, hands on her knees, as she was and was topped off with an über-lacy Edwardian parlour maid’s head piece. Re-garbed, red faced and shaking, Alice resumed her ‘all-fours’ kneeling position, this time with nailbrush in hand. With the departure of her nemesis she began scrubbing - and with all her might. Her eyes filled with silent tears at the shame that attended the level she now found herself reduced to.

The real shame though was as much due to those drawers she knew were now showcased beneath her shamefully abbreviated skirt as the menial task she had been set. Not so much the way in which the knickers delineated every nook and cranny - though they did so in so lurid a manner as to make nudity actually seem preferable - as the rationale and purpose behind their design. Whipping drawers, real Victorian workhouse whipping drawers... “Perfect for the birch!” - that was what she had been told... The birch...THE BIRCH! She sat up momentarily, beginning to softly cry at the thought of it, of what she had been reduced to. Then, catching sight of herself in the mirrored wall to her side, a shame-faced mishmash of girly French maid frills and utilitarian sweat-stained nylon, she bent again to her task, breaking out in shuddering sobs as she did so...