The institutionalised tr.., p.84
The Institutionalised Trilogy, page 84
Diaper - Nappy
Gymslip - A sleeveless tunic once worn by English school girls as part of their uniform. The USA Jumper definition is probably the best guide to what is meant here, though: A one-piece, sleeveless dress, or a skirt with straps and a complete or partial bodice, perhaps bib-like, usually worn over a blouse by women and children.
Jumper - See gymslip
Lyle - As in lyle stockings; thick old-fashioned cotton stockings, once worn by schoolgirls.
Knickers - (Here used fairly interchangeably with pants panty or panties or even, on occasion, bloomers) women’s underwear. British, informal. Women’s or girls’ short-legged underpants.
Napkin - An abbreviation for sanitary napkin, a pad of absorbent material, as cotton worn by women during menstruation to absorb the uterine flow
Pad - Panty liner, a more modern slim-line or low profile version of the old fashioned Sanitary napkin or towel.
Pants (Rather than trousers) - An abbreviation for panties, i.e. women’s underwear.
Parsonage - The official residence, sometimes known as a rectory, traditionally provided by the church or parish for a member of the clergy.
Ribbon - A scalloped edge Rayon, ribbon often used in the manufacture of the belt forming part of a nurse’s uniform in days gone by and particularly in Britain.
Skivvy - A female servant, particularly one charged with undertaking more menial tasks.
Slip - A petticoat: can hang from the waist, skirt-like (half-length), or be long-line (full-length) with shoulder straps.
Speculum - A speculum is a device designed to gently open up the vagina or anus for examination.
Tampon - A plug of absorbent material, typically inserted into the vagina during menstruation to absorb blood or secretions.
Tap or Taps - A Faucet or Faucets (USA)
Tor - A rocky peak or hill (usually a granite outcrop in the case of the moors of Devon and Cornwall such as Dartmoor or Exmoor).
Towel - An absorbent cloth or paper for wiping and drying something wet here used as an abbreviation for sanitary towel, British : sanitary napkin.
Wimple - A nun’s headdress
Foreword
Welcome to this, the third in the ‘Institutionalised’ series, an ongoing adult saga exploring the domination, stringent discipline, corporal and psychological punishment and exploitation of certain vulnerable young ladies in both institutional and domestic settings. It is strongly recommended that prospective readers first read the previous two books in this series - namely Institutionalised volumes 1 and 2 (by the same author) - although a brief synopsis is provided below; along with a little ‘scene setting’ for those whose memories need refreshing and/or appetites whetting.
The Story So Far
Sharing similar personal circumstances if separated by time - though not to such a great extent as to prevent some degree of overlap of their fates - two teenage girls, Susan Stringer and Lavinia Vitesse, have been persuaded to join a residential behavioural psychology study being run in a clinical unit discreetly buried away deep within the bowels of a private psychiatric hospital.
A third young lady, Meredith Hewson, has regained consciousness in a hospital bed, by all accounts following a road traffic accident. Harbouring apparent recollections of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a church official in some sort of charity run ecclesiastical home for ‘wayward young women’ she too has also somehow been persuaded to join a sub-section of the same study.
What ties together the life paths of these three - other than their passage through the above mentioned institution - is that each has spent some length of time living with a woman going by the name of Julia Soames: one being the woman’s actual niece, one whose stepmother is a close acquaintance and one given room and board under the auspices of the woman’s position as an ‘outreach social worker’.
At the conclusion of Institutionalised volume two we saw two of the above young ladies being hurriedly moved from the institution, apparently in response to a pending police investigation triggered by the ex-boyfriend of the car crash victim into her disappearance.
Continuing on from Institutionalised volume two, here we track the progress of one of our characters - one Lavinia Vitesse, a lovely, lively young thing with hair of glossy Whitby jet, the deepest violet eyes and pretensions to acting, catwalk modelling and harbouring a passion for ‘dance’. Having remained in the institution and having been ‘rescued’ by two female police officers, she has been examined by a trio of eminent psychiatrists.
On the surface of it, all might have gone well had she not immediately begun making allegations regarding the department of experimental behavioural psychology - the very existence of which is vehemently denied by the hospital management - the department’s use of corporal punishment and the other discipline methodologies in place, such as the enforced wearing of prison uniform in one section and archaic school uniform in another. When she then goes on to claim that the document she has previously signed consigning her to the institution as a voluntarily admitted psychiatric patient rather than a volunteer clinical study subject was under duress, under the threat of a caning, and that her continued incarceration is part of a conspiracy involving her guardian and a renown psychiatrist her fate is sealed.
Condemned as a ‘delusional psychotic’ and ‘sectioned’ under the mental health act - a process involving her compulsory admittance to the hospital as a mental patient - she panics and makes a dash for a door at the rear of the room she is in, believing it to be the one the panel of psychiatrists had entered by and thus expecting it to lead out in to the main part of the hospital. Instead she unaccountably finds herself back in the department of experimental behavioural psychology from whence she had been taken and confronted by ‘Matron’, a stern faced woman dressed in the navy blue uniform dress and starched white apron favoured by the British hospital matrons of old and who habitually wears a strap or cane hanging from a loop on her belt... As the story opens she has been told in no uncertain terms that she is to be returned to the discipline of the ‘Schoolroom’; a section of the non-existent department of experimental behavioural psychology configured as something approximating to an extremely strict past-times English boarding school for girls.
As the story unfolds we also get transported back to the events preceding those of Institutionalised volume one. We learn more of how the bright, outgoing Lavinia came to be so dominated and browbeaten by her aunt, Julia Soames, that not only did she become subject to that overbearing woman’s petty rules, regimented routines and regulations but also subject to corporal punishment - and placed in her aunt’s idiosyncratic take on school uniform, to boot, despite being of marriageable age. We learn a little more of the beginnings of the ‘institution within an institution’ that is the department of experimental or investigative behavioural psychology and of the origin of young Meredith Hewson’s various deficits alluded to at the culmination of volume two, both psychological and apparently - though not necessarily so - physical.
Prologue
St Mary’s Hospital Reform School - the motto: Through obedience comes learning, through discipline comes obedience. It was humiliating enough that it should be proudly emblazoned on the front of the gymslip, let alone that it should be repeated on the breast pocket of the stiff, starched, high-collared blouse, the little open-fronted waist-length cape that fastened so tightly about her throat and that she was obliged to wear on occasion over the top - and just about every other item of clothing to boot.
As a statement of intent, that fine red and gold thread embroidery spoke volumes. The pair of crossed crook-handled canes, as a heraldic device, was of particularly questionable appropriateness. It practically openly stated to the world that here was a young lady kept subject to the kind of physical chastisement that most would have assumed long consigned to the pages of history or - given her comely, pert-breasted profile - the fevered slavering imaginings of pot-bellied middle-aged men. But then again, was not the uniform, in itself, a thing of the past; an anachronistic throwback to long-obsolete values and the Victorian mentality of seen-but-not-heard, quiet-as-a-mouse submissive femininity.
Bad enough, then, that she was way past school age and by rights should have been half-way through her first university year - indeed more than that, well into her third trimester by now in fact. Worse still that the institution in question and in which she was presently ensconced should be little more than the outcome of the gleam in the eyes of a misguided, if not downright twisted, psychologist and a woman whose wealth, power and political and financial connections rendered unassailable certain aspirations most would think best left to languish in the realm of fantasy.
Even worse - if indeed there could be a worse aspect to this unholy incarceration - was the knowledge that she need never have been in such a situation in the first place; she was her own woman now, she could make decisions for herself. Yet she had somehow let herself be talked into this - it had even seemed an attractive idea at one point. She could so easily have been taking a sabbatical and off backpacking somewhere, as, she knew, were several of her old school chums. Or at least that had been the situation when last she’d heard. But it had been so long since she had heard anything at all of the world outside of these cloistered, institutional surroundings, let alone of her once friends.
How long had it been since last she had slipped out of the unfashionable blazer, blouse, polyester skirt and opaque black tights that her high school had laughingly termed its ‘uniform’? Why laughingly? Simply because the place had been so lackadaisical over such matters that it had hardly constituted any kind of uniform at all. Indeed, the powers that be had only fussed over whether or not the colour was correct and then really only in so far as the skirt was concerned - long, short, pleated or not, tailored and close fitting or relaxed and full, it had apparently mattered not one iota so long as it was the right colour. The more senior girls, of which she had been one of the oldest, officially could - and so universally did - discard the blouse in favour of the informality of a sweatshirt. The leeway allowed the latter as regards what constituted an acceptable hue was remarkably broad. As for the tights; any sober shade was deemed acceptable. With a little judicious accessorising, playing around with the skirt length, cut and style and so on - without too much pushing of the boundaries, a fashion-savvy girl could quite easily bring to the whole affair a thoroughly modern feel, something at least approaching the sophistication of adulthood.
Even the requirement for a blazer had been dropped for all but the most formal of occasions soon after she had started and abandoned altogether by the time she left - excepting for that last day. And even then it had been largely at the insistence of that woman, that manipulative harlot who had somehow wormed her way into her father’s affections - as far as the school authorities were concerned it was merely a suggestion, intended to foster a sense of occasion.
She had been told over and over, time and time again that it would have been what her father would have wanted, if he could have been there, if he hadn’t gone, if that car had not careered into his path. So many ‘ifs’ - yet he would be there she had been assured, he would be there, at her graduation, and so she had a duty - somehow even more onerous a duty than had he any real physicality. For one reason or another she had bought into that; though in hindsight it seemed absurd.
Also seemingly absurd had been the notion of her wearing that ridiculous blazer, when she had known for sure beforehand that vanishingly few of her peers were going to be doing likewise; though that some had turned up so bedecked had come as a relief. As had the knowledge that it would be the very last occasion, for any of it; the sweat shirt, the skirt, the dull opaque tights, all would be gone forever - or so she’d thought at the time.
A seat had been reserved for her father - and pointedly left unoccupied, despite the number of the congregation, less fortunate in not possessing influence, forced to stand throughout. The harlot had sat to one side and the creature’s best friend to the other, as if bracketing her life - all that she had been, all she would become; or would be allowed to become. She was a stately woman in any case and as was her habit, she had been dressed in the extreme of fashion, presenting a personal appearance and projecting a manner calculated to excite respect and deference from all who might be privileged enough to set eyes upon her.
Back then there had been distrust lurking at the back of her mind, a certain sense of disquiet. It was only later - much, much later - that her hatred for that woman had truly crystallised. But then, somehow, that woman’s self-appointed, hypocritically-concerned guardianship over her became officially ratified. She had grasped at the time that this change of status had come about in some nefarious way through a convolution of legalese woven around certain phrases contained in a well-intentioned, if less well-advised and even less precisely-written, stipulation of her late father’s. The detail however, had been - and remained still - incomprehensible, and probably always would.
How she had grown to detest that woman since that fateful day; her cloying, suffocating saccharin smile, the way she seemed somehow to sap her will. Indeed there were some days when she felt that the hatred she still felt for her guardian was the only thing keeping her going - not that there was any choice here, in this place, but to keep going. Slacking certainly wasn’t an option.
Uncomfortably perched on the narrow bench seat of a modern copy of a cramped Victorian-styled school desk, its plastic tackiness adding to her discomfiture, a furtive glance up and to her right and those dulled eyes would meet with the equally soulless gaze of the window, one of three identical lining the wall. But she daren’t - and besides, there was no relief to be had from monotony there, only whitewashed or frosted glass cowering behind a guard of similarly whitewashed steel bars. To the front, no more than a couple of meters or so away, hung the reason why she daren’t.
A single glimpse of the supple rattan, its heavier bamboo cane sibling and its leather-strap cousin and her eyes fluttered quickly back to her schoolwork; already she was falling behind with the dictation. Tears welling in those pretty deep violet eyes, the realisation was finally dawning on her that no matter how hard she tried there always seemed to be some sort of obstruction to her terminating her tenure, some excuse, restriction of protocol, regulation or reason they could cite to justify extending her residence.
Discipline prevailed in this establishment, rigid, repressive, personality stifling control that threaded its way through every aspect of an inmate’s existence and insinuated itself between every fibre of a girl’s consciousness. Here a small cohort of girls in their late teens - and some, perhaps, older - sat erect and attentive in polyester and rayon school uniforms underpinned by longline open-bottomed rubberised girdles, full-bodied and long-legged interlock cotton knickers, thick woollen stockings and ungainly bottle-green plastic T-bar shoes, fastened with white nylon buckles.
Girls that under other circumstances one might suspect prone to petulant sarcasm at the drop of a hat, or a smile from the wrong man - one who may have had the temerity to have aged, be balding or have become fat, say - now responded contritely when addressed and curtsied prettily with knife-pleated hems between finger and thumbs.
Here several teenage girls one might once have categorised as fractious, sulky and belligerent - almost certainly viewed as rebellious in some manner - waited in compliant silence in cramped Victorian desks. Here hair was firmly plaited, scraped back from pale carbolic-scrubbed faces with nary a single curl left untamed to relieve the severity but tucked away beneath Victorian-style bonnets tied with bottle-green ribbons to match their prim uniforms and fastened in strictly prescribed bows beneath their chins. Here lessons commenced with fingertips on shoulders and elbows out to the sides, heads held attentively erect above high, stiff and stiflingly tight school-blouse collars and backs ramrod straight - and today was no exception.
Half their number were saddled with the additional encumberment of a plastic card hung around the neck on a thin, silvery chain-link lanyard spelling out the label ‘STUTTERER’ in glossy raised gold capitals. Not, ironically this violet eyed specimen, despite having developed a most debilitating nervous stammer even before beginning her tenure in this place. They were berated for the tiniest slip, while she would simply be told to take her time, to avoid long words and those she knew she couldn’t’ pronounce. Her stammer would be met with a condescending smile and the patient, resigned advice to try again avoiding this word or that or to find a shorter, simpler term - it was an insidious process she worried was making her worse not better. The others would simply be ignored, while any of that subgroup marked out by one of those placards balanced across the bustline of her gymslip would receive a stroke or two of the cane, strap or tawse across an outstretched palm for something as innocuous as a repeated word or simple stumble.
But this was not even a school, not a proper school. It was a sham, merely something set up as a ‘behavioural psychology investigation’ in the bowels of a privately run psychiatric hospital and sanatorium. Not that the place was ever referred to as such - it was a ‘retreat’ where one might undergo ‘rehab’; if one could afford it. Nor were any of these cowed ‘schoolgirls’ actually of school age, at least not the stage suggested by their appearance. All would have ordinarily been starting at university or just entering the job market.
Here sat a group of volunteers who had harboured hopes of making more in a three months tenancy than in lord knows how long in any other manner. Except that once in place, no one seemed to leave - three months became six, became a year... even longer. But then this small group had been hand-picked to become ‘long-term’ from the start, their backgrounds investigated, their circumstances probed and cover stories put in place should anyone ‘come knocking’. Most had been runaways, grateful for a bed for the night let alone a respite from a winter that seemed to go on for ever.
