Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Read online

  To make things easier for me, I tied the male submissive to my whipping bench and strapped Lorraine to my bondage throne, a convenient arms-length away. Each had their bare feet raised and perfectly presented for the blows to come. The winner was to be the one who lasted longest before having to use his or her safeword (as described earlier) to bring the contest to a close. As always, I began the session gently and then steadily increased the torment they were required to endure. I have found over the years that this gradual progression through any form of play or punishment is essential to get the best from my slaves. Many novice Mistresses – and, I am sad to say, some experienced ones as well – seemingly fail to understand the importance of that rule. Given that the purpose of the game is to help the slave explore to the full his or her own sexual desire, there seems little point in steaming in so hard that limits of endurance are reached within moments. A little patience pays considerable dividends.

  To that end, I began my bastinado Olympics by employing a light flogger with multiple strands of soft suede which sting but cause no serious pain. Both of my contestants knew me well enough to have realised that this was but the first stage of this unusual type of podiatry. Indeed, as is my wont, I had laid out a small selection of different instruments on the bench where both contestants could see them. Anticipation is all. We progressed to a more punishing riding crop, moved up a gear through one or two of the lighter, whippier canes and then onto the heaviest cane which I was confident would sort out the men from the boys. So it proved to be. The first few swipes across the sole of his foot soon dragged the safeword from my male subbie’s lips. Lorraine had a little smile of triumph on her face as she heard her male companion cry out ‘for his mummy’ – the particularly humiliating phrase that I make him use as a safeword when he truly needs me to stop.

  It had proved to be no-contest, with my female champion easily dispatching her opponent inside a few rounds. The loser was sent from the room and I decided that Lorraine’s prize was to be a session on the medical bench with multiple needles through various tender parts of her body. This was new to Lorraine and although she tolerated a few needles through her nipples, I soon discovered her limits as the first metal tip touched the skin of her labia majora. With real tears of fear running down her cheeks, Lorraine begged me to stop but I knew she could take more if she tried. I had already laid out the exact number of needles ready to be inserted and in such cases I work on the same principle as those governing the Samurai warriors of ancient Japan. Legend has it that a Samurai sword, once unsheathed, cannot be put away without being used: and so it is with me. Once the needles are ready and waiting they have to find a home. In such situations I have found that a calm but utterly determined tone of voice can encourage any slave further along the path of complete submission than they may have expected.

  ‘You are going to take more needles, young lady,’ I insisted. ‘I know you don’t want to… and I know they hurt, but you do want to please me, don’t you? That’s why these needles are going in now… then we can get this nasty stage over and done with and move on. That’s what we all want, isn’t it?’

  My script may sound ineffective when viewed in cold print, but whispered close to a slave’s ear, with the correct tone of voice and the authority that I’ve spent decades perfecting, it works every time. I backed up my words with actions by popping my half-a-dozen remaining needles right through her outer labia lips to accompanying squeals of pain from my now-quiescent client. Even now, Lorraine’s fun was not over. I pointed out that the unsheathed needle points were now resting gently on her inner vaginal lips and that any movement from her would likely result in a fascinating but unusual self-piercing experience. ‘I suggest you lay very still,’ I instructed as I left the room. ‘Don’t move and I’ll be back in a while to set you free.’ Still nervous, still shaking a little and still crying, Lorraine had little choice. She meekly accepted her fate.

  Examining the enjoyment I received from ill-treating my slavegirl, I realised that I do get a thrill from imposing my will over her, from making her obey my commands, with appropriate discipline and encouragement if required. There is, however, a huge difference between the reward I get from dominating a woman and the sexual charge I can get from dealing with a man. As a heterosexual, I still get my own sexual kick out of sessions with any male, even after two decades of practicing just about every imaginable form of domination game. I’ve never been one for self-reflection or for analysing why I am the way I am, so I don’t know why it is that I relish submission from others in both my professional and personal lives. The debate between ‘nature and nurture’ seems to me to be a mystery with so many variables that no answer will ever be found.

  Even so, I do recognise that my life has taken an unusual course and that this might well be related to my somewhat unusual childhood. It was a happy childhood, running smoothly for years… until the day I discovered that all of my happiness was built on a lie.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘YOUR MUMMY ISN’T REALLY YOUR MUMMY’

  As is the case for many of us, my life thus far has been an ever-changing mix of joy, happiness, sadness and occasional despair. Yet, looking back over the decades, one day in the spring of 1983 stands out as one of the worst moments of my entire life. I’ve never forgotten the cold, sinking feeling in the pit of my nine-year-old tummy as my best friend at school uttered words that broke my heart.

  ‘Everyone knows – except you of course – your mummy isn’t really your mummy.’

  Seeing the words in print cannot convey the sheer, ice-cold fear that gripped me as I struggled to absorb and understand the words my friend was speaking. What on earth could she mean? What a silly thing to say, what a stupid lie to tell. Or was it a lie? Of course I loved my mummy dearly: as is the case for all young children, she was the heart of my schoolgirl world. How was it possible that the certainty of such a relationship could now be threatened? I was fighting back the tears as I ran home in a daze to what I believed was the emotional safety of my parents’ home.

  Bursting in through our never-locked back door I found my mummy in our tiny kitchen, fresh from work at another local school and still dressed in her dinner-lady uniform of grey skirt, pure white blouse and blue tabard – a necessity to protect herself from the soup splashes and chaos of serving lunches to scores of secondary-school children. Although my friend had upset me, I was sure that Mummy would soon take the scary feeling of uncertainty away… wouldn’t she?

  How wrong can one be?

  I had been a blissfully happy little girl until that afternoon when my loving childhood world fell apart. It was the day I found out that all the adults I knew, and all the grown-ups I loved and I trusted, had been lying to me throughout my young life. It had started like any other, with my normal lessons at school, and with me trying my hardest to please my teachers. One teacher always joked that if she set me one page of writing to do, she would always get back five. I remember people telling me I was ‘a bright little thing’, and so lessons were easy and fun. It was an ethnically-diverse school set between two huge West London council house estates, and I was always the tallest and skinniest girl in my class. I usually came near the top of the form in any tests, which was enough to make me a favourite target for the school bully, a little boy, no older than me, who would call me names and who sometimes waited after school to tease me, push me across the path and try to make my cry. It was simply schoolyard stuff and never a serious problem but the man I knew as my dad was angry when he found me sniffling into my hankie one day after my classmate bully had teased me outside the school gates.

  Strong, wiry, handsome, always loving, and totally dependable, my grandfather – who I had grown up knowing as my dad – was one of the two rocks on which my young life was built. He had a great sense of humour and was always laughing and joking. His naturally wavy hair smelt of Bryclreem and was a source of considerable pride. ‘You know all you girls want hair like mine,’ he would tell me, an unlikely supposition
given that my own hair was so long I could sit on it. After years of service in the Royal Navy, my grandfather had been made redundant and was at home a great deal as he struggled to find another job. Although I did not understand his unemployment at the time, his house-husband role meant that he and I grew even closer. I felt I was lucky to have a daddy always at home, while other friends had to wait until almost bedtime before their fathers came home to play.

  For my grandfather, the bullying incident was easy to deal with: ‘You just have to stand up for yourself, darling. Push the boy back; you’re bigger than him anyway. Punch him if you have to. I’ll teach you how you can fight.’ To my mum’s – or rather grandmother’s – horror, she walked into the house after work to a scene in which Granddad was play-fighting with me in the living-room, teaching me a flat-handed chop to the side of the neck that he guaranteed would win any fight. ‘Don’t teach her things like that,’ she pleaded. ‘She’ll go and kill the boy, instead of stopping him bullying.’ In the event, the lesson worked a treat. The very next day I turned the tables on my previously-feared tormentor. Although never utilising the much-hyped ‘Navy Death Blow’, I did walk up to the boy after school, full of the confidence my grandfather had given me. I pushed him as hard as I could; he fell on his back, picked himself up… and ran away crying. Looking back now, I feel (just a little) ashamed of the way that my new-found power over him developed from that point. I was now the one who waited for him after school and teased and tormented him to the point of tears. On one memorable afternoon, I made him kneel down on the path and kiss my school shoes – the first of the innumerable times that men have since literally worshipped at my feet.

  Being bullied was to play no part, however, in the awful day when I first learned about what I have always thought of as the BIG LIE. After school that afternoon I had walked home, as I often did, with my best friend, Susie. She was a plump, friendly, but always-naughty little girl of my own age, who lived near our small, semi-detached house on a London suburban council estate. I think at the time she qualified as my ‘best, best’ friend. It was cold, cloudy April weather and, as usual, my house was chilly and damp.

  One of my abiding memories as a child is of always being cold in that house. It was an old council property; the type now euphemistically termed ‘social housing’. It was a form of social housing in my day too; so cold in winter that huddling together for warmth in a highly ‘social’ way was the only means of keeping warm. The house is now long gone, and good riddance too, with its lack of any cavity walls, no insulation, no double-glazing and no trace of anything that could remotely be described as central heating. I remember visiting friends in the winter and desperately trying to eke out my stay for as long as possible in order to avoid returning to my own freezing bedroom. There were times when the house seemed colder inside than out and I hesitated to get into bed because of the chilled, clammy feeling of the sheets. I have long suffered from, thankfully mild, asthma, probably not unrelated to the fact that mould grew unchecked on the damp bathroom walls of my home. My friends now are well aware of my constant need to be warm. That lust for heat comes from growing up in a room where, rather than wipe condensation from the windows, one sometimes had to scrape ice from the inside of the glass before being able to see what the weather might be doing outside.

  Because her house was always warmer, Susie and I settled down in her small bedroom to play. Whatever our games were on any particular day, we two seemed always to be talking; silly conversations about childhood things, and make-believe games of being grown-up and what we might do, who we might marry, and where we might live. But this afternoon was different. Susie had a secret to share.

  The night before, Susie’s mummy had been chatting to an elderly neighbour who lived in our street. I still remember the woman well; she was the local busybody, shrew-faced, always a bit miserable and with rarely a kind word to say about anything to anyone. Susie had overheard their entire conversation, and was desperate to tell me her news: ‘Your mummy’s not really your mummy,’ she said. ‘And your daddy isn’t really your daddy; your real daddy lives over the road with your real nan and granddad, and your big sister isn’t really your sister, and it’s all what my mummy calls “a God-Almighty mess”. And you are… a bastard little girl.’

  Susie was just excited by her news; blurting out her new secret with words that were never meant to be as harsh and unkind as they sound on this page. And neither she nor I had any real understanding of what a ‘bastard’ was. But we knew it was a naughty, nasty name that grown-ups called each other. As each new revelation tumbled from her lips, I found myself struggling to understand, overwhelmed with a growing sense of horror and disbelief, and fighting a losing battle as I tried hard not to cry. Finally, with tears now streaming down my face, I ran, as fast as fast could be, down Susie’s stairs and straight out of her front door. Hurrying across the road and into my own house, I rushed past the two people I had always known as mother and father in the kitchen and took the stairs two-at-a-time. As I threw myself, sobbing, face down on the bed in the sanctuary of my own little boxroom bedroom, my horrified mum was hot on my heels.

  ‘Miranda… darling… what on earth is wrong? Why are you crying? Are you hurt? What’s the matter?’

  It took many minutes of her cuddling, holding and reassuring me for me to find the strength to stop crying and give her some sort of answer. I knew that my mummy would make it all better: Susie must have been making-up stories, must have been repeating nasty lies about me, she must have been mistaken. But, when I told my mum what my little friend had said, there was a horrified, and horrifying, silence.

  ‘I thought you knew darling; we did tell you before, when you were little. Don’t you remember?’

  Looking back now, more than 30 years later, into the depths of my memory, I still am not sure if I do remember any of their babyhood explanations or not. Apparently, I had been told as an infant, perhaps just two years old, that my ‘real’ mother was leaving home and that I was to be looked after by my maternal grandparents. I was told that I had been ‘adopted’ by my nan and granddad, and that they would care for me now that my real mummy had moved away. My family then assumed that, with duty done, there was no point in repeating the explanation when I grew a little older. ‘Least said, soonest mended,’ seems to have been their watchword without ever considering that such traumatic news would have been blanked out of my little-girl mind as though no words had ever been spoken in the first place.

  It may be that I had retained some sub-conscious worry that all in my family life was not quite what it seemed. I remember being puzzled that other children knew more about the time and the exact circumstances of their own birth. That uncertainty was perhaps the reason why I would occasionally ask my mum gentle questions about it: ‘Oh, how much did I weigh when I was born, Mum?’

  ‘Well… I just don’t remember exactly now Miranda. That’s a silly question… I’m not sure… it was a long time ago because you’re a grown girl now.’

  How odd it was that my mum couldn’t remember my birth weight, I used to think. Naturally, I can recognise now that whatever she did or did not remember, such issues were always brushed aside and my attention quickly deflected on to other things. Then again, perhaps I never had the courage to ask the direct questions that might have proved both more illuminating and more painful: ‘Susie’s mum tells her all about when she was born. If you had me then why don’t you remember?’ Might it have been that even at that young age I was colluding in my own childish way with my family’s conspiracy of silence? Might I have been unwittingly conspiring to keep myself in the dark?

  Whatever the truth of my own complicity, the fact is that from the moment I was originally told the story of my adoption, ‘the scandal’ was never spoken of again. And, even if I had once heard what the adults thought they were telling me, the memory had been utterly lost in those seemingly-endless years of early childhood – till the day when Susie revealed her big secret. It was thus a de
vastating moment when I realised that her fantastical story was true. My mummy was not denying it and so many things were falling into place: an instant explanation as to why my mother and father were older than all my friends’ parents, why Dad had so much grey in his handsome, dark hair, why Mum dyed her hair blonde to cover up her roots. I remember, vividly, lying face down on my bed and crying till I thought my heart would burst because I realised that I was the only one who did not know the truth. Yet, how could Mummy and Daddy not be Mummy and Daddy any longer? Why had everyone lied to me? Why did everyone else know all about me when I did not even know myself? Even my best friend, her whole family, and, as it later transpired, most of the people in my road, knew intimate secrets of which I had no knowledge. I was far from being old enough to vocalise such thoughts at the time but I did feel an overwhelming sense of betrayal and deceit.

  Many years later, my grandmother – whom I still called ‘my mum’ till the very day she died – told me how terrifying that afternoon had been for her and my grandfather. ‘I suppose you might want to go and live with Eileen [my birth-mother] now?’ she had said.

  ‘No of course not,’ I had tearfully replied. ‘Why would I ever want to do that?’

  But later, as I lay sobbing on my bed, they were crying in each other’s arms in their own bedroom next door. Having failed to find any way of comforting their precious little ‘daughter’, they shared a fear that must be common to many adoptive parents. Now I knew who my ‘real’ mother was, and now I knew that she still lived less than an hour’s drive from my house with a new young family, might I demand that we all be reunited? After years of caring and raising me as their own, this loving couple were scared that the girl they thought of only as their own little daughter might suddenly vanish from their lives. It was to be a long time before they lost that particular fear.