Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 7

  I have a confession to make: ‘My name is Miranda – I am a secret spheksophobic.’ I have a morbid fear of wasps.

  Now, every good dominatrix loves uncovering a client’s secret phobias, their deep-seated fears that one can exploit to weaken their will, bend them to their knees and generally scare them half to death. Facing one’s fears is a major part of why my clients come to visit me in the first place. They may outwardly be asking for a spanking, a caning, public humiliation and degradation, or to be wrapped up in multiple layers of latex: inwardly they are unknowingly facing their innermost, and most secret, fears. I always think that when a man or a woman confesses they are claustrophobic, for example, that a spell in my dungeon ‘coffin box’ will suit them just fine. It is a person-sized box in which I may bind you immovably, with multiple leather straps securing your wrists, forearms, ankles, calves, thighs, tummy, chest and forehead tight to the wall. When the coffin lid closes shut, just inches from your face, you are unable to move a muscle, unable to see through the inky blackness and even the sound of the outside world will be muffled. How long I leave you in that state depends on me. The skill, of course, which I have honed to a fine art over the years, is to know precisely when your rising terror is almost, but not quite, at the point of true panic. The whimpers you make, the sound of your breathing speeding up, the note of desperation in your voice all tell me precisely when you have suffered enough to have pumped-up adrenaline levels and your sexual desires to the max, whilst leaving you (just) on the right side of sanity.

  Having praised the therapeutic benefits of facing one’s fear, it will surprise you not one jot to know that I would not possibly follow my own advice and face up to my own phobia: spheksophobia… the fear of wasps. Given my total terror of having wasps anywhere near me, it was perhaps not the wisest move to accept my new job in a baker’s shop. Attracted by the ever-present scent of jam doughnuts and cream cakes, the shop was wasp central station throughout the summer months. I was paranoid about being stung and once fled from the shop, abandoning an open till full of money rather than face up to a massive wasp that had chased me round the room. We are talking about a big wasp here; so large it could hardly fly… a doodlebug of an insect, probably a hornet, and maybe worse!

  It is never easy to understand where such irrational fears come from but I do remember one childhood incident which may have been to blame for turning me into a manic wasp-a-phobe. I was perhaps five years old when I saw a young girl in the playground who had two wasps caught up in her long blonde hair. She was screaming and slapping her hair trying to stop them buzzing round her ears and everyone – especially me – was too scared to help her. I can remember thinking, ‘Oh God, thank God that isn’t me.’ No way on earth could I have helped her. The connection is that my reaction now to wasps follows a similar pattern. I throw up my hands to cover my ears and look around for something with which to cut off my hair if it flies in my direction. Better to have a rough and ready urchin haircut than a wasp in my ear.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘A GOOD EDUCATION…’

  From an early age, my loving grandfather drummed into me the importance of a ‘good education’.

  A highly intelligent man, Granddad was of a generation for whom a university education was outside of their wildest dreams. Instead he had left school early, joined the Navy and had later worked in a frustratingly modest job at a West London factory. Finally, ill-health forced him into premature retirement and led to a life in which we all existed on State benefits and the tiny sum my grandmother earned as a school dinner-lady. Perhaps spurred on by the way that good schooling had been denied to him, he was determined that I should not suffer the same fate. ‘A good education Miranda,’ he would tell me. ‘You must get a good education. That’s what will get you a good job, good money and a good life. Get a good education.’

  With his words ringing in my ears, it was I who selected an all-girls’ school for my secondary education. It may appear to be a decision more mature than my years might allow, but I was already aware that schools differed in their respective performances and also that girls almost always do better when the distraction of boys is removed from the educational equation. My home was just a few hundred yards from a mixed High School to which all of my friends were going; you could literally look out of our front door and see the school gates. I knew, however, that it was not a particularly high-achieving school. That knowledge came not from some in-depth study of educational league tables but from far more down-to-earth data – my grandmother worked there, and she didn’t rate it at all.

  My chosen alternative was much further away in Acton, the more highly-regarded Ellen Wilkinson School for Girls. Getting there involved a lengthy bus ride and then a walk of more than a mile but I knew it was the only way of keeping the faith with my granddad’s dream. I never quite gathered who Ellen Wilkinson was but I did know her school was my best shot at that all important good education.

  I always did well at school and working at weekends and in school holidays didn’t stop my progress in the classroom. I could perhaps have done better, but life was always so busy with work and sport that I found I could leave exam preparation to the last moment and still pass with flying colours. Even for subjects such as English Literature, I would often get by without ever reading the books we were supposed to be studying. I would pick up instant study guides and flip through the summaries they provided, gleaning enough information to fake my way through the required essays and discussions. The one area that I could never fake, then or now, was my inability to spell. Often the simplest words can leave me stumped. The problem was that my teachers put all of the emphasis on skills such as being able to structure an essay and took no account of spelling. I would get top marks for an essay and receive the comment ‘obviously the spelling needs more work’, but I was never marked down for that weakness. On top of that I was always bursting with ideas that I wanted to get down on paper and I would write 20 pages when other kids were writing two. That sort of urgency leaves no time for proof-reading or worrying if one’s handwriting can even be deciphered.

  My other problem in gaining the education that I hoped would lead to a sparkling and fascinating career was the lack of parental support. My grandparents’ tiny home, where I wrote on the kitchen table, was hardly made for undisturbed homework and my grandparents, deeply caring though they were, had no idea of how they might provide an environment conductive to study. Their lack of supportive skills was even more noticeable when it came to careers advice. I can remember saying to my grandmother: ‘How do I know what job I should do and what courses there are? I don’t know what to do.’ She had no idea of how to help. She was a good dressmaker and had done menial cleaning work, so had not the faintest idea how to look for a job in an office. My grandparents’ knowledge of the careers market came from jobs such as working in a shop or on the factory floor. They could never have guided me towards being a doctor or a lawyer or any profession like that. Yet when I look back, I bear no resentment: their lack of knowledge was their limitation, not a lack of willingness to help.

  I could get slightly more guidance on the occasions when my birth-mother came to visit us. Knowing that other parents at the school often set their own children private homework, she would give me writing tasks to complete and sometimes we would talk about what career I might follow. But such advice was thinly spread and infrequently offered. In retrospect I can see that my life might have taken a very different direction if I had been raised by my younger birth-mother rather than by elderly grandparents. She could never have loved me more than they undoubtedly did, but perhaps my ambitions might have been channelled in other directions. And maybe the good things my grandparents gave me – a strong work ethic, a drive to succeed, a desire to make my own way in the world – would have been lost.

  There is however one part of my teenage life that could have been very different if I had been raised by my mother rather than my grandmother. The larger than natural generation gap betw
een me and my parents was having an effect. My unstoppable desire for increasing independence throughout my early teens was coming up against the immoveable object of my elderly grandparents’ rules of behaviour. It was a clash beyond the normal generations: it could only lead to trouble.

  CHAPTER 10

  SPREADING MY WINGS

  Just 13 years old, I was a tall girl for my age and even on my limited budget – and even though I say so myself – I looked pretty sexy when I was dressed up for a night on the town.

  My closest friends and I easily got into clubs where the bouncers were more interested in the cleavage we were showing than in checking our IDs to ensure we were the requisite 18-plus. Distracting the doormen was not the reason I wore clubbing clothes revealing a lot more than they concealed, but it certainly helped at the entrance.

  One favourite haunt was West London’s biggest club, the famous Hammersmith Palais, sadly now demolished but in its time a great place for dancing. We rarely paid to get in because on many club nights entry was free before ten o’clock and we would slip in a few moments before the deadline, clutching handbags in which were hidden small bottles of gin, for me, and Pernod-and-Southern Comfort for Jennifer, still then my closest friend. The doormen were only really interested in searching the guys for anything dangerous, like knives. We had so few clothes on that they would have had trouble searching us anyway without being accused of indecent assault, so we invariably got away with our mini-smuggling operation. It meant that a few soft drink mixers were our only expense for the evening. Jennifer was always keen to get guys to buy us drink, but I was rarely interested in the men: I was there to drink and dance and, with the exception of the occasional kiss, I was always well behaved. The club had box-like, raised platforms on which you could dance and Jennifer and I would monopolise one of these for the night and dance our hearts out. One picture taken around that time shows me in tight black shorts and wearing a gold bum-bag: all the rage at the time. I’m not sure I was ever a great dancer but I just loved those nights, dancing for hours and eyeing up the talent, even if I was not particularly interested in the talent taking things any further.

  In fact, I rarely got chatted up at the club nights. I immodestly thought I was the prettiest girl in the group but I must have been giving out ‘I want to be alone’ signals because I was so shy. I just got on with the dancing, fending off the occasional bad chat-up line from unattractive guys whom I would never have wanted to be with in a million years. I always seemed to attract the weird ones. I’ve been told many times since that I do have an ‘unapproachable’ air about me that deters men from trying to chat. If that’s the case, it’s ironic that I spend my days now surrounded by men who kneel at my feet, profess to worship the ground I walk on and constantly crave my attention. Perhaps ‘treat them mean… keep them keen’ really does work after all.

  If you’re going to do the job properly then clubbing takes a lot of energy and long, long hours late, late into the night – just the sort of energy levels we possess in our early teens. I was unstoppable when I was having fun. The downside, of course, was that dancing till the early hours isn’t conducive to waking up bright and breezy for school in the morning. On top of that, at the age of 13 or 14, I was often trying to get home late at night from some pretty seedy parts of London and it is no surprise that my desire for independence was giving my elderly grandparents nightmares. The irony is that, at least at that age, I truly was not doing anything naughty on my nights out and they really could have slept easily in their beds. Both Nan and Granddad were however convinced that I must be meeting men and would undoubtedly end up being raped or worse – although I was never quite certain what the ‘worse’ might entail. It was a typical clash of the generations, with me testing their boundaries and my grandparents struggling constantly to rein me in. The only difference in this case was that the game had skipped a generation; where I should have been pushing against someone of my birth-mother’s age, I was struggling against ‘parents’ of a generation once removed. It was a recipe for seemingly endless conflict and eventual disaster.

  As my rows with Nan and Granddad escalated they began to despair of having any control over me. Looking back on it now, I must have been a nightmare for them. I was no longer listening to anything they said. I was rude, disrespectful, had a tendency to slam doors on my way up to my room where I would pump my music up loud in the certain knowledge that the noise would drive them crazy. I’m not proud of my behaviour then and I am so glad that when I had eventually matured enough to realise what a shit I had been, I was able to apologise to them before they died for putting them through the hell of my teenage years.

  Through it all, as I think they always understood, I did carry on loving them. It was just that they were of such a different generation that their rules seemed stricter, their curfews earlier and their ideas more outdated than those of any of my friends’ parents. Although I had long known that they were my adoptive parents, rather than my birth parents, I’ve never believed that was a deciding factor in our relationship; the related age gap that went with that situation seems to me to have been a more relevant concern. But, it may well have influenced the way that my grandparents thought of me and their responsibilities to bring me up as a decent girl who could be trusted to be safely in her bed each night rather than gallivanting around in clubs. Having willingly embraced the role of parents, could it be that they felt even more duty bound than ‘real’ parents to keep me safe?

  Apart from the relatively harmless drinking, nothing happened on those club nights that would have worried my grandparents anyway if they had come along with me. But just on principle my nan worried incessantly about me being out with friends late at night. After endless rows that were getting us nowhere, my birth-mother and her husband got involved and actually tried to act as peacemakers. Her husband would sometimes drive over from their home, 30 miles or so outside London, and stay the night in order that he could pick me up from the club in his car and see me home safely. I think it was my birth-mother’s attempt to help me, because she privately felt that my grandparents were just too strict about everything. But, having legally given me away to them in the adoption, she had no authority to control what I was or was not doing.

  My case to be allowed to go out late was also helped by one particularly kind taxi-driver who would make a point of waiting for me and my best friend on club evenings. He refused other fares just to take us home and told us, ‘I’ve got a daughter of my own and I want to know that she gets home safely.’ He always undercharged us for the fare and had no ulterior motive of any kind for helping us: just a genuinely nice man.

  For a while the compromises calmed down the situation between myself and my grandparents a little but the rows over my independence continued. Over the next 18 months, as I grew ever more determined to lead my own life, the arguments were scheduled to get worse – much, much worse.

  CHAPTER 11

  FIRST LOVE

  From my earliest teenage years, about the time I discovered that I could get really fun feelings in my ladybits if I wiggled my fingers in just the correct way, I grew more and more interested in all types of fetish imagery.

  I think Madonna – the singer, not the religious icon – has a lot to answer for in turning a generation of young girls onto rubber, leather and conical bras. I was drawn to her music videos and to magazine images of her outfits. I found I was browsing through any newspaper stories that dealt with fetish items, whether they were on the fashion pages or from a sex story in the News of the World. It was clear that from this early age I was interested in such fetish material although I’ve never really thought to ask why. I’m not a reflective, self-analytical person in that way. I’m more the type who will think: ‘Well that worked for me… now what else can I find?’ My own fashion sense was limited to what I could afford, which was never much, but from about the age of 13, I seemed to always be the girl wearing the shortest, tightest skirts in any group. My dress sense may have been outra
geous but I was still shy and retiring and despite the occasional sexual foray, I was soon approaching my fifteenth birthday relatively chaste and certainly with no regular boyfriend. I knew I wanted to explore some of the sexually exciting fetish imagery I enjoyed, but had no one with whom I could play. Then I met my first love and my sex life exploded in all sorts of fascinating new directions.

  Tom was 6 ft 2ins tall, dark-haired and must have inherited some of his good looks from his attractive mother. He was from a distinctly middle-class family, living in a posher part of West London. I fancied him like crazy from the moment I saw him. With that overwhelming passion of young love, I immediately thought, ‘He’s tall, brown-haired, stocky but fit, a nice guy from a nice family. This is the man I will spend the rest of my life with.’

  Tom was the first guy I really fancied, as opposed to the few other guys I had slept with, where sex had just sort of happened with little thought or desire on my part. I met him through a friend who was going out with his brother and then spent an afternoon after school with him and some friends in his bedroom. Nothing happened between us but I was really impressed with the fact that he had proper graffiti sprayed all over the white walls and that he and his friends were smoking ‘puff’. I think I had taken pills at clubs before but that was my introduction to any sort of drugs culture.

  When I got to know the family better I learned that his parents had split and that since then his mother had rather lost control of her sons. It was odd because I remember thinking that they were from a middle-class background, in a posh house, and were spraying graffiti on their walls and using drugs whereas I was poor and from a council estate but would never had dreamt of behaving like that.