Chapter 7.
Laura finds her Pasha - part 2.
This is a good time to tell about my toys, stored for years in an old canvas travelling case on top of the wardrobe at Aunt Hilda's.
Three years or so before I met Philip I had been wandering down Wharf Street looking idly in the shop windows. I came to a shabby small shop called Geo. Abbott, surgical supplies, and, glancing into the dusty window, I saw a selection of puzzling surgical goods including hernia trusses, flasks and mysterious lengths of rubber tube with nozzles.
Then I froze.
Hanging almost out of sight on the corner of the window was a long, black, sinister two-tailed leather tawse. I stared at it open-mouthed for some time and then, unable to get up the courage to go into the shop, I finally turned and walked dispiritedly away.
I suppose I stood and stared that tawse three or four times in the weeks that followed, to be frank, I cycled the twelve miles into Leicester a couple of times just to look at it again. Finally I thought of the young Queen Elizabeth's riposte to Sir Walter Ralegh:
If thy heart fail thee, do not climb at all.
Just as I nerved myself up to pushing open the door, an elderly lady, rather fat and shabbily dressed with grey hair in a bun, came waddling out of the shop and spoke to me.
"Coom in and have a coop of tea me duck".
I followed her in to the ill-lit, dusty shop. There were two cups of steaming black tea on the counter, a sugar bowl and a milk-jug sat on a small round metal tray alongside.
"Hope you like it strong. Sugar and milk there if you tek 'em".
"Thank you", I said weakly adding condensed milk from a Nestles tin to my tea and stirring.
"I know what you're about me duck. I remember only too well how you feel".
She reached down the tawse and placed it in my hands. I stroked the smooth, stiff, fine-grained leather sensuously. Someday, I knew, I should put it in the hands of my Pasha.
"Mrs. Abbott", she volunteered, "but you just call me Ada."
As we drunk our tea, Ada told me that she came from Ilkeston, and that she had just gone into service there when the Boer War broke out.
She knew that she was different from the other servant-girls she knew. Their stories about the boys they walked out with sounded hollow and unreal to her. As she explained it to me, she just kept on waiting for lightning to strike.
Then one Sunday afternoon, she was walking with a friend in the Forest Recreation Ground; a popular place for young men and women to do the monkey walk; when she saw a particular man, and the lightning struck.
He was a wounded soldier, a corporal in the Sherwood Foresters, not long back from South Africa. He looked very deeply tanned; fit and strong until she saw that his left arm was missing from just below the elbow; his empty sleeve pinned up to his tunic He saw her looking at him and they were drawn together like a glass rod and a pith ball. She was sixteen and he was twenty-four. They married a year later, in 1902 and had been together ever since.
"George said on our first walk together that he could see I was a girl who needed a firm hand. I knew just what he meant, and I said,
"Yes, and you look like the man to give it me."
We went to a caff for tea, then we walked, arm in-arm along the canal bank. Then he sat down high up the bank, put me across his knee and gave me a good walloping - of course I had to help him, with him only having one arm. I asked him if he wanted me to take my bloomers down, but he said no; what was in there was his private business, not for every Tom, Dick and Harry to gawp at. Some couples came by and giggled at us as he were doing it – but he didn't mind and no more did I. When I asked him what the walloping was for, he said,
"It's joost to show you that Ah'm tekkin care of you now." That's all he said – but it were more than enough for me.
Now I'll tell you sommut. Them was Victorian times – just; but girls were the same then as they are now. I was wearing my prettiest bloomers with a bit of lace on, and every girl on the monkey walk was doing the same – them as were wearing bloomers at all. We were all waiting for the right man to come along and tek' 'em off us.
"Any road oop; watching you these Saturdays peering my window makes me think that you are another girl who needs a firm hand – is that right Ducks?"
"Yes Ada, I think it is".
"Well, why don't you go and have a look in my back room and see if there's anything there you fancy whilst I tyek the tawse out o' the window."
The back room was at once exciting and deeply sinister. On the back wall hung row of canes, straps and riding crops, including a really frightening lunging whip. There were handcuffs and chains, gags and blindfolds. In the centre of the room stood a whipping bench that looked well used.
My overwhelming thought was that I was no longer alone in the world – there were clearly other people out there who felt like me; women who had their Pashas, men who had their Dark Ladies. Fear fought with happiness within me and happiness won.
When I got home I went to the cupboard under the stairs, and found what I was looking for.
Years before, when they were just starting out in life, Dad had the sort of home cobbling kit that so many families had. A cobblers last a bit like a caltrops, with four different faces, for man's, women's and children's shoes; a pair of Whitcher pincers, a tack hammer or two, some heelball, and what I was after; a complete men's shoe sole of cow-hide, never used; narrow at the heel, wide at the sole and pointed at the toe.
I put everything away tidily, sure that Dad would never look at it again. I carried it to my bedroom, bent over the bed, raised my skirt and gave myself a couple of hefty swats across the bum. God! it stung.
"One, day..." I thought to myself. "One day...".. I hid the tawse and the shoe-sole under my bed, and transferred them to Aunt Hilda's at the first possible moment.
I bought the tawse that day and, over time, went back and bought canes, blindfolds and a pair of shiny chrome handcuffs, keeping them under the bed at Aunt Hilda's. In the shop there were silly handcuffs covered with fur fabric in pastel shades, and blindfolds with lacy trimmings, but I knew straightaway that they were not for me. Somehow they lacked potency.
When I bought my first cane, trying to choose between dragon cane, rattan or just plain bamboo, Ada startled me.
