You see there is another type of storm brewing; and everybody (almost) whose home this is knows it. Some might say it is long overdue coming ashore; after all it struck everywhere else long ago: Why should this remote stronghold of ‘traditional values’ be immune? Everything and everybody is increasingly coming under scrutiny. Even to the most self-denied denizen of this remotely-sited, high-walled private world it is becoming clear that this establishment’s days are likely now numbered. In particular there has been all that harping back in the press, resurrecting in the public’s collective mind the uncovering of the so called Magdalene Laundries scandal and how the last of those had only been closed down in the 1970s. Some claimed it was in the 90s... Opinions varied, arguments raged, films had been made and books written... But the fact remained... They were all of them wrong, the pundits and the investigative journalists; all of them.
You see, despite the fact that the only ‘laundering’ going on nowadays has more to do with taxation and the shuttling back and forth of ‘charitable’ funds than cleaning grubby dresses and grimy jackets - and although it is now the more labour-intensive side of fashion-industry manufacturing that is the money-spinner, (together with that more sinister industry known as ‘human harvesting’) - despite all of this, all these specialisation changes reflecting the march of time (and the sheer remoteness of this establishment) one single irrefutable fact remains:
This is the last of the Magdalene Laundries, in all but name and detail... the very, very, very last of the Magdalene Laundries!
CHAPTER 2
TWO MAIDS GO A-WEEDING
Karen Marchment was feeling smug: The woman she had employed as governess for her late-teenage stepdaughter, Alice, had proved an efficient and stern, no-nonsense disciplinarian, ruling over the girl by the paddle, cane, switch and strap. An undoubted expert when it came to instilling rigid discipline into recalcitrant young women, she had had no trouble in quelling the once rebellious and troublesome young Alice, so much so that she now had the girl eating out of her hand like a housetrained puppy. Lady Karen Marchment, as she now termed herself, having reverted to her maiden name, was also becoming all too well aware of the mysterious psychological effects engendered by the sight of a pretty and wholesome girl being severely thrashed across the fleshiest regions of her bottom. But the scene that she had witnessed, not more than a couple of hours previously, had left her feeling unsettled Or rather it was the effects that scene had had on her that had left her disconcerted. She was bedevilled with the sort of thoughtful sentiments a lady of breeding did not express before respectable company; intimate, private thoughts that needed serious justification to as much as relate to herself, let alone others. A stroll was her response, to take ‘a refresher’ in the late-summer breeze.
A walk around the grounds allowed her to reflect on the fact that as much as any other factor she had the legitimate aid of a health professional to thank for the hold she now had over her darling stepdaughter, Alice Lamberton - or Alice Marchment as she and those around her now addressed the girl. In fact the girl had only herself to blame, for having dabbled in pharmaceuticals while at her high school -an altogether too liberal institution - albeit with the admirable hope of improving her academic achievement. The tipping point had come when the girl’s trifling with certain more addictive prescription drugs inexorably led on to a reliance on the more commonly available and more easily obtainable street drugs. Karen Lamberton-Marchment herself - Lady Marchment as she had now reverted to signing herself - had dealt with the dealer, and with him the poor young thing’s boyfriend; both of them dealt with by means of an anonymous tip-off, the latter’s conviction helped along by her having planted both cash and class-A drugs about his car and apartment.
The boyfriend’s fate - twelve years for possession with intent to deal - had been something of a shame as in truth he had been entirely blameless in the matter.. But once she, Lady Marchment, had seen the opportunity, realised her plan, it had become imperative that he be removed from the scene as completely as possible. The presence of a boyfriend hanging around in the wings would have made everything too complicated. There would have been too great a danger of his interfering or raising concern in others, busybody social workers and the like who would more profitably use their time where they were actually needed, in the inner-city estates and tower blocks. The other thing was that a boyfriend was a potential support in adversity - as were close friends of her own sex, although few as they had been they had easily been removed from the picture simply by moving the girl away; she hadn’t wanted Alice to have a crutch to lean on of any sort.
But of course the girl did need a crutch, something to help her through the pangs of breaking her addiction. And that was where her medical friend, Dr Anne Ecclestone came into the picture. The first step had of course been to whisk the girl away from that school. At her age Alice was no longer legally obliged to stay in education and indeed was of marriageable age in the eyes of the British legal system - at least with parental or guardian’s consent - even if still disqualified by law from drinking alcohol or viewing certain films. As it was they had plucked her from the school just prior to those all-important final exams, success in which had been the driving force behind her experimenting with psychoactive drugs in the first place. There was a delicious irony there.
An even more delicious irony was the fact that here, in her own home and away from the normal scholastic environment, the poor thing was obliged to study harder than ever, work at academic achievement as she had never done in her life. The school her stepdaughter had been attending had not been worthy of the term; liberal, progressive and lackadaisical the establishment didn’t even insist on a school uniform. Instead the place had been populated by pompous, pampered little princesses who addressed their teachers by their first names and strutted around with their haughty upturned noses in the air. Here by contrast, back home, poor little Alice had quickly discovered she would be expected to give herself over to ‘traditional discipline’. And that included school uniform, despite her age and not withstanding her physical maturity. It also meant submitting to behavioural correction by the good old traditional means of corporal punishment, in addition to line-writing, corner-standing and other impositions of that nature. What a shock that must have been to her system.
A school room had been put together so that Alice might continue her education and not be cut completely adrift, and a suitably zealous school-mistress-come-governess employed to oversee it all. But what had really caused the girl to knuckle down to the regime - that aspect traumatic enough to cause a rebellious girl in her late teens to submit to touching her toes to receive the cane across her bare behind and allow herself to be put in a juvenile school uniform specifically designed to shame her - was her ever-increasing reliance on the prescription drug substitute she received from the doctor.
To be truthful her stepdaughter’s addiction to the illegal variety had not been all that severe. The series of substitutes, tranquilizers and sedatives in the main, prescribed by Dr Anne Ecclestone by contrast were potentially far more damaging psychologically. Graduating slowly from the mildest that would ameliorate the girl’s initial, genuine symptoms upwards and onwards, the latest incarnation of the girl’s medication rendered her near permanently woolly headed and quite apart from the psychological dependency, came with a gnawing physical craving that once initiated could only become more acute with time and dosage. Many times there had been pouting episodes of stamped feet, weeping, screaming and all manner of expletive-riddled objections to the various restrictions and impositions heaped on her. But when push came to shove, and the tablets or capsules were hidden away, those knickers would come down and that chubby bottom of Alice’s would be bared for the strap or the cane.
Together the twin prongs of humbling dependency and judicious corporal punishment - operating within a framework of strictly imposed discipline, rigidly enforced rules and petty restrictions - had no
w all but totally eradicated her stepdaughter’s arrogance, impudence and defiance. Several months on and the girl was now well aware of the need to show respect, of the constant need to obey her betters - even when those ‘betters’ included such lowly types as the housekeeper she now employed. And all this had been so much down to Dr Ecclestone. A research psychologist by training, through her one-to-one psychotherapy sessions with Alice, not only had the woman encouraged the girl’s early-stage reliance on both her and the medication she prescribed but she had also managed to convince the girl of all manner of psychological problems, all of which provided for a greater hold over her. But all this time on - where was it going now? That was the question.
The section of the property she was presently walking through was bound on one side by a tributary of the river Arun on its way down towards the Sussex town of Arundel but otherwise gave out on to an open vista that stretched miles; certainly as far as the nearest village. In the far distance, just shy of the fenced outer boundary of the grounds, she could make out an angler skimming a fly lightly over one of the deeper greenish pools that gathered beneath bends seemingly universally overhung by weeping willows. There, she knew, away from the froth of the central swim, there would be lilies lying here and there and deeper holes more likely to be occupied by dozing carp with their backs to the sun as the trout - or perhaps chub, they took flies too - he would be after. All this was legally her stepdaughter, Alice’s, she reflected, or at least it was supposed to become such once the girl had come of age. But there was ‘many a slip ‘tween cup and lip’ - as the saying went. She smiled at the thought.
Thousands of small flowers adorned the grass verges of the drive, daisies and clover mainly - the gardener called them weeds, but she let them stay nonetheless. The poppies that had dominated the furthest reaches - just beyond the obsessively symmetrical, almost trigonometric, formality of the hedged gardens - had given way to tall brown thistles from which ‘charms’ of goldfinches plucked black seed. There the grass had been allowed to grow in the style of the traditional English meadow, allowed to yellow ready to take for hay; this would be fodder for the horses come winter time.
Smallish fields lay to either side of the mud-splattered, cambered, tarmac drive. These in their turn were subdivided in to a series of segregated paddocks by well-weathered wooden rails and fences. Some were occupied by sturdily-muscled horses, others lay empty. A larger, more distant, fenced-in clay surface area was filled by a variety of flakily-painted jumps, poles, five-bar gates and all the other paraphernalia that went with show jumping and gymkhana events. Here an imposing woman, her gender made clear by the form-fitting tweed jacket she was dressed in, was cantering a trim-looking horse slowly around in a circle, practising dressage.
Riding straight-backed and tall in the saddle, the woman’s glossy red-blond pony tail trailed from a high, domed black riding hat. Her head was bowed and her concentration very much focused on the beast’s leading foreleg, her white-gloved hands held high as they clutched the reins. That, Lady Marchment thought to herself, was typical of Flora McBainstone ex-gym instructress, late of ‘Her Majesty’s Correctional Centre for Young Offender’s - Cheltenham’. The woman loved nothing more than schooling and breaking in a fresh young filly - that was why she’d hired her to help care for her stepdaughter and legal ward, Alice, and that other late-teen confection she now shared her life here with, Angel.
The latter had come as part of the package along with Daphne Larkspear, the woman she had hired as governess for her Alice and whom had actually been one of Karen Marchment’s own teachers when she herself had been at school. The girl, Angel, in her late teens herself like Alice, had been under the ex public school schoolmistress’ wing for some years prior to the pair’s arrival and presented the enjoyable impression of having been expunged of all initiative, thoroughly cleansed of willpower and relieved of any semblance of self-esteem, confidence or indeed pride. In short the girl made for the perfect example for her Alice to mould herself upon, given suitable guidance. And when it came to guidance one could do little better than employ Daphne Larkspear. It had been she, wielding that heavy split-tongue leather strap or Scottish tawse of hers across her errant stepdaughter’s bare backside earlier, which had led to this reflective interlude. Her heart pounded at the thought.
The trail she was now following was a constantly meandering one and it was almost a surprise to find herself wandering alongside the old crumbling wall. The latter, practically an ancient monument, was all there was to show for the fact that an abbey had once stood here. In all fairness it was only the weathered brick surface that was crumbling. Patches of lighter hued crumbly orange stood out patchily amongst the deeper red of brick made of sterner stuff, looking like flaky sloughing diseased skin between the twisted ropes of ancient ivy.
The wall itself, the deep-set internal structure, was sound enough - or so the county surveyor had said when brought in the previous winter to examine a particularly bowed sectioned. The scabbiness was the work of frosts over all those winters, and the rains in summer. The mortar was sound if sandy looking and powdery to the touch but the two-meter-plus high wall stood solid against all and sundry, aided in its security by the nineteenth-century addition of what had since become gnarled and twisted iron spikes and the more recent addition of cameras, sensors and a single raised strand of electrified wire that stretched from insulator to polythene insulator, the latter threatening to take on all-comers and apparently punching far above its weight.
The cobwebbed wooden stone-arched side-gate was most definitely not original, but had been manufactured to appear so; to remain in keeping with the historical perspective. Through that pseudo-venerable portal the property was laid out along the sides of a great rectangle in the centre of which rose the type of country house rich industrialists of the last century had a taste for building. Though not ‘grand’ in the manner of the great stately piles one associates with the term, the main house did possess a columned and somewhat preposterous pseudo-classic, almost Italianesque, porch. The latter rose above a double flight of brick and stone stairs, one flight of which curled down in the direction of the far river, where the beautiful lawn - no wild flowers dare intrude here - descended in a gently curving slope terminating at a ‘ha-ha’, a sort of hidden wall that served to keep the waters at bay, and then the river’s edge right where it was.
Within the central cluster of structures that went to make up the residence nestled a central courtyard reached from the rear through a pair of huge heavy wooden gates. Each of these possessed a proportionately massive iron ring, inset at around shoulder height, although it had been some years since one had had to struggle with all one’s weight tugging at those, or rather a coachman had. These days the gates were electrically operated and it would more likely be diesel driven horse transporters passing through or the family’s four-by-four than the house owner’s carriage. This was where the stables were sited - and, yes; there was still the occasional horse-drawn carriage that passed by.
Further in, closer still to the main house, and there was a sort of sanctum-within-the-sanctum, an enclosed quadrangle garden overseen on all four sides by only the upper windows of the main house itself. Here they could indulge in all manner of outdoor sport involving the girls in the sure and certain knowledge of the absolute discretion afforded by the garden’s enclosed location. In addition the area was just enclosed enough to ensure that their two poor unfortunate sad little agoraphobics would not get the ‘screaming abdabs’. Not that she much cared if they did get the heebie-jeebies. As far as she was concerned such a response to a little taste of outdoor freedom could surely only serve to reinforce the condition in the pair’s minds. Surely it could only go to underline in each of their silly pretty little heads that they were going to be running nowhere - they were under lock and key, and it was staying that way.
That, however was not the way the pair’s doctor saw it. Dr Anne Ecclestone had now additio
nally taken charge of young Angel, the girl under Alice’s governess, Daphne Larkspear’s, wing, as well as treating Alice herself. An eminent private practice psychotherapist and research behavioural psychologist, Anne knew what she was about. If an expert of her stature said that too frequent repeated exposure to such symptoms in the absence of concomitant negative consequences could lead to something she called ‘extinction’, bringing about a cure for the pair of them, the woman obviously knew what she was talking about. And the last thing she wanted was a cure: Karen Marchment smiled to herself at that last thought - “...a prison without chains... a cage without bars...” Wasn’t that what Anne Ecclestone had said, that time?
Strolling with her gloved hands folded nonchalantly behind her back, she had circumnavigated the house, passed through the great gates of the stable yard, nodding her approval to the two relieved-looking stable lasses labouring there in their matching blue-and-white check work dresses, and negotiated the small passage way that ran through the centre of the rear of the great house. Plucking a very modern silvery key from the small chrome ring hanging from a tab sewn in at the waist of her beige jodhpurs she passed through into that inner world that was the private central courtyard or quadrangle garden.
Here the windows, furnished elsewhere with a diamond shaped network of leaded lights which lent the house a rather pretty, antique aspect were also furnished with greenish-black finger width bars. The crystal-like miniature panes that provided such clarity elsewhere were here white and opaque like the sightless eyes of the blind, yet were darkened and grubby as if whitewashed long ago for building or renovation work that was for some reason abandoned. At least that was the case with those that looked out across the moat-like sub-ground level, the drop to the basement level safeguarded behind black-painted iron railings and reached by a stone staircase through a hinged iron gate that was presently secured by a large rust-stained padlock.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 4