Room 2D

From Whispers 4 It was Mr Ashford who had sent her there, Pam knew that. Well actually it was her mother but it would have been Mr Ashford telling her mother to do it. In fact she had heard him through the half-open kitchen door. ‘What that girl needs, Mrs Stelling, is a touch of discipline, otherwise you don’t know where she’ll finish up.’ Pam’s mother had said apologetically, ‘I’m really sorry, Mr Ashford.’ What she was sorry about and what Mr Ashford was annoyed about was that Pam didn’t want to go and work in his house. She had left school and started training as a typist but Mr Ashford wanted her to go round to his place part-time. Mr Ashford was very keen on pretty girls of about Pam’s age which was 16. Two of her friends did part-time work at Cranley Hall, where Mr Ashford lived, and they had told Pam what he was like and the sort of thing he liked to do to you. So Pam said she wasn’t going. The trouble was that her d...

From Uniform Girls 32 She arrives in a taxi. They almost all do, though occasionally one may be delivered in a private car, by a relative, a husband perhaps. Usually by taxi, though, as this one: a pretty young woman, dark hair, early twenties. Her pale face has a rather dazed or possibly anxious expression as the vehicle rolls in through the open gates. Her eyes perhaps catch the little plaque on the weather-beaten brick gate pillar. It says Greenfields Health Centre . The fields around are not so much green as golden: it is September and the crops are mostly harvested after a hot summer. There are green trees, though, scattered about the countryside and clustered here in the grounds to provide a pleasant shade. Yes the grounds are green. Tranquil. That is what the brochure says. Tranquillity . Though this young woman’s eyes do not register tranquillity as she alights from the rear of the taxi. The driver’s eyes, not tranquil but...

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A Chastising Service of the 1880s laid bare Historical recreation researched and written by  Richard Manton,  from Janus 38. On 26 July 1889, an advertisement appeared in the  Church Times . It was addressed to the parents of unruly daughters, to teachers of delinquent schoolgirls, to masters of female reformatories, and to those employers whose young women treated their superiors with insolence and contempt. BIRCH RODS. — These useful articles, for which there is an increasing demand, may be had from the depot. Of different sizes. — Mrs. CLAPP, St. John’s-road, Clifton. Mrs Clapp’s surname might have raised a smile, but it was as real as everything else about her. She ran a thriving business in the regency elegance of Bristol’s most prosperous suburb. Her advertisement might cause a flutter in the press of the 1980s but not a century ago when Victorian Values were firmly in the saddle. After all, if girls were to be birched, the birch-rods had to come from somewhere....