Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (4 page)

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’

A
s 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 devastating 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.