From the Top Shelf - In a Mist, Chapter 19

The story so far:
Chapter 1	Chapter 12
Chapter 2	Chapter 13
Chapter 3	Chapter 14
Chapter 4	Chapter 15
Chapter 5	Chapter 16
Chapter 6	Chapter 17
Chapter 7	Chapter 18
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

Here is the chapter we have all been waiting for. Arthur Lennox miraculously returns to Lymchurch House under very different circumstances. You all must be eager to find out how, so without further ado, read on.

Chapter 19 - In which Lennox comes face to face with the past

Shortly after the outbreak of war, Lennox enlisted as an officer in a tank regiment and saw active service with the British Expeditionary Force in France.

He fought valiantly, risking his life again and again as the British army vainly tried to halt the advance of Hitler's invincible war machine. Wounded in the chest by a German shell during the British counter-attack at Arras in May 1940, he was sent home to convalesce. It took many weeks of his mother's doting care to nurse him back to health. Even then he found himself plagued with minor respiratory ailments that took years to go away. He was awarded a medal for his gallantry and discharged honourably from further military duties. Reluctantly, he found himself, once more a civilian.

By no means an easy patient, he soon grew restless with nothing to do except play his cornet, which his doctor recommended as an excellent means by which to improve his breathing, and go for gentle strolls on the moors. He began to find home life depressingly dull and, craving excitement, started looking round for interesting employment.

Like many country houses all over Britain during the war, Lymchurch House had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Education to be a turned into a small boarding establishment for young girls evacuated from their homes in the towns and cities. Lennox got to hear about it from a former teaching colleague.

In a wild impulse he applied for the post of Headmaster. He was short-listed together with three other candidates.

At the interview in London the Appointments Committee briefed the applicants on the particular function of the new establishment. It was to be a Special School for wayward girls, therefore maximum security as well as strict discipline would be essential.

Lennox gave a sparkling interview, for he felt the ball was in his court. Not only was he the best qualified among the contenders, especially when it came to discipline, but he was also a gallant war hero - a prestigious factor which virtually assured his success. Prudently he refrained from alluding to his brief tenure as tutor at Lymchurch House all those years before, and as it had been merely an obscure private post the Appointments Committee would have no record of it.

He was offered the Headship and, in a glow of euphoria, returned home to pack his bags and break the good news to his parents.

Meanwhile the owner of Lymchurch House, Elizabeth Montague, was informed both of the plans in store for it, and the identity of the man designated to carry them out. She felt a sharp pang of wistful nostalgia and tears came to her eyes. How strange are the twists and turns of fate, the sudden unexpected ironies of life, she reflected with a sad smile.

At Chatsworth House in Derbyshire there hangs a painting by a local artist entitled "Chatsworth in Wartime". It depicts the state drawing room turned into a girls' dormitory, for when war broke out in 1939 a girls' boarding school in North Wales was taken over by the Ministry of Food and the school was moved to Chatsworth.

The painting, which is reproduced in the official guide book, offers a fascinating insight into boarding school discipline for girls.

In the foreground of the picture, a pretty adolescent schoolgirl is standing by her bed brushing her waist-length blonde hair. Her navy-blue gym tunic is short, well above her knees, barely covering the tops of her black stockings.

A companion, her mousy-brown hair plaited in pigtails and tied with dark blue ribbon, is seated nervously upon an adjacent bed, her arms clasped around her knees which are drawn up so revealingly as to expose not only the tops of her stockings but the white elastic straps of her garter belt.

The second girl is clearly in trouble and is about to be punished because, standing by the open doorway a severe looking schoolmistress dressed in black, is severely regarding her. Behind her, hanging on the dormitory wall, can be discerned the sinister presence of a crook-handled school cane....

Lymchurch House was to become, not so much a conventional boarding school for the daughters of the well-to-do as, what was termed a 'closed unit' for 'problem girls' from the big cities who had either been in trouble with the law, persistently truant from school, or generally fallen into bad company while their fathers were away serving in the armed forces and their mothers working long hours in the munitions factories. Some of the girls were orphans, their parents and relatives killed in the bombing raids - for the Germans had intensified their air attacks on Britain since March 1940.

Under cover of war, with Britain in a constant state of crisis, many moral irregularities went unnoticed. Lennox, with his little flock of a dozen or so naughty girls, whose bottoms - as well as goodness knows what else - had to be frequently attended to, was left alone to get on with the task, untroubled by tiresome inspections by nosy Ministry officials.

Once his girls had arrived and things were well under way, Lennox was kept extremely busy. Some of the girls responded to their regular diet of corporal punishment in strangely demanding ways. The girls whom he'd caned in the classroom or in his study by day were the very ones who by night pestered him for sexual favours, tapping persistently on his bedroom door in their flimsy nighties and tight pyjamas.

Amorous passions and erotic fantasies ran high in Britain during the wartime years. Despite the introduction of clothes rationing, spicy lingerie adverts began to appear on the front pages of national newspapers like the Daily Mirror. "Modern Miss buys her undies with care!" proclaimed a daring advert in the Mirror on June 12th displaying a saucy young Miss clad only in a pair of flimsy cami-knickers decorated with heart patterns, proudly showing off the barely concealed cheeks of her bottom. Never before had the male population of Britain been left in so little doubt as to what pretty young girls were wearing beneath their dresses.

The famous Jane strip cartoon featuring a shapely scatterbrained heroine had been running in the Mirror since 1932. But by 1940 occasional glimpses of her stocking tops had given way to blatant displays of her just in bra, panties and stockings - and more shocking still, naked poses of her stepping out of the bath or undressing for bed.

By September the universally popular but incredibly dizzy glamour girl had been recruited to Naval Intelligence. The cartoon strip which appeared on the 16th showed her being very soundly spanked over her rugged commanding officer's knee for some rather minor infringement of naval discipline.

Also popular at the time were several photos appearing in the magazine Picture Post showing a group of nubile "landgirls" - girls specially conscripted to help bring in the harvest - dressed in shorts and volunteering, as a publicity stunt, to be photographed while being spanked "for the war effort".

"Lennox's girls," as they became known in the village, began to arrive clutching their bags and packages, gas masks slung over their shoulders and identity labels flapping from their button holes. They were met at the station by the indefatigable Tomms who cast an appreciative eye over their charms and drove them back to Lymchurch House, where his wife Florence, in bustling cheerful motherly fashion, stripped them of their garments, which were then boiled rigorously in a large copper tub and disinfected for parasites, then rife in the bomb-torn cities.

As for the girls, they were bathed and scrubbed furiously with a formidable brush until they gasped and squealed with pain and their tender pale little bodies were red raw.

Daisy Potter, an olive-skinned seventeen year old with long jet-black hair, almost gypsy-like in appearance, was the first girl to arrive several weeks before the others.

Plucked from the burning London streets where she'd been found wandering waif-like among the strewn rubble and gutted buildings, she'd stubbornly refused to tell the air raid wardens where she'd come from. For her own safety they passed her into the hands of the police who questioned her rigorously, suspecting that "Daisy Potter" was a false name deliberately invented to throw them off the scent.

One thing she was unable to conceal was her middle class accent and good grammar school education. Wherever she came from, from whatever background, she clearly wanted no further part of it.

On her arrival, after being attended to by Florence, Daisy Potter was ushered into Lennox's study where he gave her a lecture on the type of regime she could expect at Lymchurch House. He spared her no details when it came to explaining matters of discipline and, when she emerged from his study half an hour later she looked anxious and ill at ease, already wishing she'd never been sent to such a horrid place where bare-bottom spankings and canings were to be dealt out unsparingly for the smallest misdemeanours.

Daisy Potter seems destined to be Lennox's next conquest, but where is Elizabeth? By the way, I was unable to spot the school cane hanging on the wall in the picture of Chatsworth House at the top of this post. Can you see it?