Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (6 page)

‘That’s not funny Miranda, it’s just rude’ scolded my nan. I still have the picture – complete with the replacement caption words with which I calmed her anger: ‘God Save the Queen’ was my slightly surreal attempt to get back into her good books. My grandfather loved children and when family came to stay he would welcome my cousins with open arms. He called us all ‘bairns’, a hangover from his upbringing in the north of England.

Much of the advice my granddad gave me throughout my childhood did stick and has been of use to me in my business life – even though I cannot always follow his golden rules on never getting into debt. ‘Never borrow money Miranda; never lend money; do not get seduced into asking for credit; don’t spend what you do not have.’ It was a reflection of the fact that he was probably the most honest man I have ever known. In his younger days he passed examinations to be a police officer but the starting pay was then so low that, with a young family to look after, he could not afford to take the job. His grasp of mathematics was excellent and family legend has it that he was offered a grammar school place as a child but his parents had to turn it down because they couldn’t afford the school uniform.

Much though I loved him, I cannot deny that among all of his good traits of forbearance and honesty, he did have a couple of faults. He could not let any argument end, other than on his terms. When we argued – as we did more frequently over the years – he would listen until I had finished every possible argument… and then jump in one last time with a little jibe in order that he had could be sure he had had the last word. He was also an obsessive hoarder, possibly from
being short of material of all kinds in the post-war period. My favourite item among the treasure trove of junk which sat untouched for years in his garden shed was a wooden dining room chair with only three legs.

‘Why on earth are you keeping that chair?’ my nan would demand.

‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ he would retort. ‘All you need do is stick a piece of wood on to replace that leg and it’ll be as good as new.’

‘But you’re never going to do that, are you?’

‘Maybe not… but I just might.’

He and my grandmother thought the world of each other and there was a joy about growing up in a household where so much love was in the air. They were never openly affectionate towards each other – the idea of kissing in public would have shocked them to the core – but after a drink or two he would sneak a sly cuddle, only to be told: ‘Johnny stop it right now, the children are watching.’ Children were very important to my grandmother. In addition to loving me she would care for other children after school, earning a tiny extra bit of money to supplement the pittance she earned working part-time as a school dinner-lady. That income was the only money coming into the house, although I presume that there was some kind of sickness benefit payment for my grandfather and that their ‘real’ daughter, my birth-mother Eileen, and her husband helped out financially on a regular basis.

Beyond money, there was one legacy which my grandfather passed to me while I was still in junior school and which has had a value greater than anything else in my later life: he
taught me to stand up for myself, to be independent and strong and not let anybody push me around.

Those were valuable assets, I’m sure you’ll agree, for anyone planning to become a dominatrix.

CHAPTER 6

SEXUAL AWAKENING

I
t was the chilly touch of colder air on the skin of my bare legs that aroused me from the depths of my early-hours-of-the-morning sleep. Then just 11 years old, I could sleep for England, and so I was still barely conscious as I felt the weight of the bedcovers slowly lift from my thighs. I was certain, at first, I was dreaming; albeit a somewhat sexual dream for such a little girl. Perhaps the then love of my life, Tom Cruise, had decided to pop in to the bedroom and make all my prepubescent dreams come true? The Hollywood actor was much on my mind at that age. I was enjoying a sleepover at a schoolfriend’s house and we had been giggling all evening about how much we would all love to kiss him. As I came fully awake, however, I realised that someone – most certainly not the infinitely desirable Mr Cruise – was gradually drawing the sheets off my half-naked body. I shot bolt upright in bed,
barely stifled a scream and came face to face in the dark of the bedroom with my friend’s father, crouching at the end of the bed and peering intently down at the schoolgirl white pants which were pretty much all that now covered my body. Chaos was about to ensue.

The year was 1985 and the evening had started as one of the most giggly, fun times I had enjoyed for a while. In the long summer holidays I had agreed to go and stay at a friend’s house for a sleepover party with two other girls. None of us were yet at an age to be sexually active but all of us were besotted with celebrity idols in a way that only young girls can truly understand. My passion then (as now, if truth be told) was for the actor Tom Cruise who had just shot to sexy stardom in the film
Risky Business
and whose forthcoming role as a raunchy Sex God in the movie
Top Gun
was already being trailed in teen magazines and television shows. I loved Tom with a passion and had spent a good part of the evening proving my devotion by engaging in a kissing contest, competing against the smooching abilities of my equally-besotted friend. The game was simple: we each had a photograph of Tom Cruise and the winner would be the one who could kiss his image for the longest time. It truly was ‘no contest’ and I think I can still claim that 21 minutes is the world-record for ‘Cruise-kissing’ if such an achievement ever enters the record books.

The competition in my friend’s bedroom was followed by all of us sharing a whispered, graphic account of what we thought we might do to attract Tom’s interest were he to stroll in through the bedroom door. We none of us knew much about sex but could all imagine a few of the sexy delights we
might offer him. (With the experience I’ve since gained in the adult industry, I could offer him an even better time now, should he ever wish to take up the offer.)

With Tom’s, lip-dampened photographs safely put away for the night, all three of us had settled down to sleep on a couple of mattresses spread out across the bedroom floor. The house was already quiet: my friend’s mother had gone to bed and her father was in the habit of staying up alone until the early hours downstairs. I snuggled down under the sheets in the middle of the group and, with our bedtime much later than usual, we must all have fallen quickly off to sleep. I don’t really have any idea of what time I woke up, but I was conscious of this sudden, freezing cold sensation on my legs; it was utterly ice cold. I woke up with a thudding heart, which is a bizarre experience to have, and was aware of someone else in the room. I was wearing just a short nightshirt and knickers and, kneeling at the end of the bed, lifting up the hem of my nightie and staring intently at my pants, was my friend’s dad, Ian. Even more disturbingly, he was wearing nothing except his underpants.

He looked more terrified than me when I spun around and saw him. He was mouthing the words ‘sorry, sorry, really sorry’ as he jumped up and sped out through the bedroom door and off down the stairs. By then I was screaming; it was such a shock and it took me a moment to realise that he must have been looking under the covers for a while before he disturbed me by actually touching my clothes. With my friends now awake and asking what had happened, my would-be voyeur’s wife came sleepily into the room.

‘He was going to touch me, he was going to do something to me,’ I gasped.

‘What on earth do you mean? Touch you? Who was touching you?’

‘Ian. He was lifting the quilt up and looking at me; he was looking at my pants, he was going to do something…’

The words tumbled out in a jumble because I was truly upset and frightened. It was the first time that I had ever thought that somebody was going to touch me like that. It dawned on me that I could have been raped and I was shaking with fear. My friend’s mum looked shocked and called downstairs to her husband: ‘Ian, Ian, come upstairs would you?’

He wandered in to the room as cool as a cucumber, and by now fully dressed. ‘What? What’s going on, what’s the matter?’ he asked, his face all puzzled innocence. He listened, and did a good job of appearing to be horrified, as his wife explained that I was ‘making accusations’ that he had been in the bedroom.

‘But I’ve just been downstairs watching the telly,’ he protested. ‘What’s she on about?’ And then he turned directly to me, still cowering under the bedclothes: ‘What are you talking about; I haven’t been near you.’

Faced with a blatant lie, I pleaded to be believed: ‘But he was here, honest… he was just wearing his pants.’

‘What colour pants did he have on?’ asked his wife.

‘Black… he was wearing black pants and nothing else at all.’

‘Well, that’s odd because he doesn’t have any black pants anyway. You must have been dreaming. You’ve let your imagination run away with you. It’s naughty to say such things… Now let’s say no more about it and get you all back to sleep.’

I was pretty sure that his wife believed me about what had happened but had decided to protect her own family, whatever the truth of the matter. Then the guy’s daughter also joined in the attack. ‘It’s all that Tom Cruise stuff, isn’t it?’ she declared. ‘We’ve been talking about kissing him and then you must have dreamed it and blamed my dad!’

‘No… I’m telling you, I’m telling you… he was in the room and looking at me.’

‘Well my dad wouldn’t do that. And we were here on either side of you and I didn’t feel anything.’

And that was that. I was left, basically, accused of being a liar and nothing more was mentioned about the incident. I knew I hadn’t imagined what had happened but, in the face of such united family resistance, I had no way of proving it. My last thought as I finally drifted back to sleep was that it had been dark in the room and perhaps those pants had been blue, not black.

That was the end of my summer trips to stay with my friend. Although I had spent lots of time there in the past I never stayed in that house again. Nobody said a word about the covers that had moved in the night-time, the incident was never mentioned in any way, but I was never invited again. I wanted to tell my grandmother about it but I thought, ‘his wife doesn’t believe me, his daughters don’t believe me, why should anyone else believe me?’ Not long afterwards, however, the next time I saw my biological mother, I told her the story of what had happened and why I was no longer staying with my friend. I was still angry and upset that nobody had done anything about it.

‘I believe you Miranda,’ my mother said, ‘but don’t tell your
grandmother, she won’t understand how anyone could do that and it will upset her dreadfully.’

My mother said that my story had not come as a surprise: ‘I know the family and I know him, he’s a creep and he’s tried it on with women before. I know one woman who was pinned up against the wall in their kitchen and had to fight him off.’

It was yet a further shock to me that she could have been so naïve. I was shocked that my mother had never warned me of the dangers I could face, even though she knew some of that family’s history and that I had stayed there often in the past.

Looking back now at what happened, I think my fears of rape and sexual assault were probably an over-reaction. Knowing men better as I do now, I guess that the guy was little more than a frustrated voyeur and that he would have been unlikely to do more than look whilst two other girls slept in the same bed and his wife was next door. But it was hardly conducive to making me trust the adults in my life. Not long afterwards I was to lose my virginity to another predatory adult – in fact to two predatory adults, twice my age, in the same sexual adventure… on the same afternoon.

CHAPTER 7

SEX EDUCATION

I
t is perhaps unsurprising that I never received any form of sex education, or information about my own sexual development, from my grandparents because, although I did not realise it at the time, they were of a different, older generation who found it deeply embarrassing to talk about sex in any shape or form. In our house, if anything remotely sexual ever came on the television, there would be a muttered word or two such as, ‘We don’t want this nonsense, do we?’ and channels would be switched as fast as my granddad could find the remote control. That meant that I was fast approaching my teenage years with little more than playground gossip to prepare me for the emotional and physical changes that were beginning to affect my body. I had, of course, picked up a pretty good idea of the general mechanics of reproduction from friends and the occasional
television glimpse when parents were out of the room, but it was certainly never explained in any authoritative way.

What I did get from my grandparents was a subtle, though continual, pressure to avoid any possibility of teenage pregnancy; hardly surprising when you consider what had happened to their own 15-year-old daughter not so many years before. Nothing was ever said directly but the thought was always there. I must be careful not to have a child as my mother had done. The message was drummed in by implications with small comments such as, ‘You know you have to get your education Miranda’ or ‘You’ve got to go to university to do well. You want to live your life to the full, perhaps go travelling before you settle down.’ The idea that I must do well at school and get qualified with a good education was a constant theme.