08 - LISA'S PRISON FLOGGING

"What's all this, Sammy?" asked Lisa.

The girls had just got back to their shared cell - their second night there after being moved out of the dormitory - after a hard day at work, in the course of which Lisa had found herself challenging a new prisoner  to a fist fight, which Hatchet-Face had agreed to. She still smarted from the grazes her unprotected body had suffered as it had slid on the sharp gravel and wanted nothing more than to rest. But Samantha had other ideas for Lisa. Where had she got that rope from? She surely wasn't thinking of escaping with less than a year now to serve?

"It's a skipping rope, Lisa. Go and work out in the corridor! There's bags of room and you need to work on those legs and it's good for co-ordination. GO ON, Lisa! You want to win against that cow, don't you?"

Lisa obeyed and was soon dripping sweat and attracting an admiring audience as she kept up a skipping rhythm until they were all ordered into their cells to be locked in for the night.

"Now do I get some rest?" she asked her self-appointed trainer.

"Push-ups! One hundred. Then a hundred sit-ups. I'll hold your feet for you. Even if they are dirty and smelly!"

Samantha counted up to one hundred as Lisa did her push-ups and then leapt off her bunk and held her feet until she finished the second exercise. By this time Lisa's body smell filled the entire area of their not too large cell.

"Is that all?" panted an exhausted Lisa. "Can we go to bed now?"

"Yes. But not together! You're in training now and sex is bad for you!"

"Maybe, but I won't be fighting all the time between now and August!"

"Yes you will!  So we'll have to wait until we get that lovely country cottage!"

"We'll probably have found ourselves a couple of men by then, Sammy! Never mind, it's just so lovely being this close to you."

"Isn't it, though! You smell gorgeous, Lisa, my darling sweaty friend. Absolutely wonderful!"

In the morning the sound of a bell wakened them and they started a new day. Lisa shaved her head carefully (she wasn't in love with that cane, still less with the kinky Hatchet-Face) and Samantha checked it for her, running her hand over every square millimetre.

"You missed a bit, darling. Give me the razor and I'll soon zap those naughty blonde bristles and save those adorable buttocks from another thrashing! I bet you're glad you're not a man! Fancy having to do this for the rest of your life and not just a few months!"

"A man only shaves his face as a rule. And I think it might be great!  If I were one, the first thing I'd do would be ask you to marry me!"

"And I'd accept! And we'd better hurry or we'll be late on parade. We'll be marching on all that nice new fresh gravel we laid yesterday! Your poor feet!"

Samantha giggled at this. She had a great love for Lisa but absolutely no sympathy for the discomforts her nakedness and continuing punishments brought her. Lisa wondered about this at times, but she wouldn't have her friend any other way than she was. The morning drill session following the inspection, in which Lisa's shiny skulled perfection brought her a rare word of praise, was as tough on Lisa's feet as Samantha had laughingly predicted. They were marched up and down and then double-marched around the parade ground until some of the older women dropped from exhaustion. The barefoot prisoners were all fine at the end, except for Lisa who limped beside Samantha to their assignment for the day. Lisa was not anxious to walk too quickly but a prod in the back from a rifle butt soon livened her up, eliciting yet more giggles from Samantha.

"Come on, slowcoach. We haven't all day!  We need the points. At least I do! So hurry up and don't be such a baby! Just forget about those silly feet and think what a lovely day it is!"

"It's a horrible day. I thought it was warm all the year round in this country! It's nearly as cold as it was in the hole. It is good to be outside, though. I just wish we could get a bit of sun. I want to get broken in to it gradually before it gets too strong. This bloody cloud is not helping at all."

"It never shines till March and after that it burns like Hell. You WILL suffer Lisa. But I'll be there to soothe your poor old body at night. Seriously, I hope they give you some sun cream. You'll be really ill for a while if they don't."

"I'll be ill. I can't see them making life easy for me. That's not the point of stripping me, Sammy."

"When you go home will you always wear clothes, darling? I think it would be a shame! Grow your hair, though, but not too long. I like you to have nice short cropped hair" But be naked a lot, all round the house and in the garden and anywhere you can get away with it!"

"I don't know. It gets terribly cold in the winter, so I will be dressed then - outside at least. I thought when I started my punishment that nakedness depersonalised me, but I still feel like a human being and just as good a one as I ever did - better in fact - and I don't need clothes for anything other than warmth. So the answer is that I will continue to provide my exposed body for you to admire just as long as I don't freeze and sometimes even if I do!"

"I'm looking forward to seeing your home and settling into our special one together. I met your father. I wonder what he'll think of you living with a girl!"

"Don't worry about him! He does as he's told! And anyway he's too polite where our sex is concerned. He puts women on a pedestal. Like he did with me, which in a way wasn't good for me, but if he hadn't I'd never have met you! So it's all for the best, darling Sammy!"

Today's task involved removing the turf from the sports field and replacing it with an artificial covering. Lisa doubted very much that this would be complete much before her release, if at all before. After the grass had been removed by dint of spadework, the field would be levelled with heavy rollers, all pushed by prisoners. Finally the artificial turf would be laid. Why the authorities should be wasting time and money on such a pointless exercise, Samantha and Lisa were unable to fathom. This first day of the enterprise saw four women engaged on stage one.

Lisa and Samantha were working together, Samantha trying to give Lisa all the really heavy work to build her up for the fight, whenever it might be. But it was pretty heavy work for both, especially as it was raining again, and the whole field was like one large bog. Lisa looked down at her legs and feet and wondered despairingly how she was ever going to present spotlessly clean toes and soles to the eagle-eyed inspecting officer next day! It was this aspect of the inspection that gave her most cause to fear. Whereas failure to shave her head properly got her six strokes, there was no upper limit where feet were concerned. Three days ago, one of the ex-solitary women, a forty year old had been bent over the trestle to receive an eye-wateringly vicious twenty. Lisa felt sorrier for the older woman's loss of dignity that anything else. Whopping a twenty year old like her seemed less offensive, somehow. She did not seek to query such crazy logicality, but knew that she must look after feet with great zeal!

One of the other toilers in this muddy waste was Prisoner 10343, as her soon-to-be opponent was known. Lisa called her Queen Kong, which was a bit of an exaggeration, but did emphasise that she was bigger and far uglier that Lisa. Smashing that face in might actually improve its appearance, Lisa thought as she stole the odd searching glance, trying to size up the problem she was going to have in a few days. Judging from the way she was loading up the cut turfs onto the barrows, she was pretty strong, but Lisa noticed a certain breathlessness about her after she had been working for twenty minutes. She wasn't in such good condition as Lisa, who would be skipping tonight and every night until the sweat poured off her and made puddles on the floor! She saw that if she could only survive for a half dozen rounds, she would still be fresh and this woman would be tiring rapidly. She grinned as she saw Hatchet-Face give her a rifle butt in her back to encourage her to keep up her work rate which was visibly slowing. She redoubled her own efforts and soon sweat was mingling with rain as she showed 10343 and the watching guards just how good aand tireless a worker she was.

Hatchet - Face came up to her and watched her slaving away for a few minutes.

"Happy little thing today, aren't we! I saw you sizing up the opposition! Give the cow the lesson of her life, Lisa. Knock her so hard she meets herself coming back!"

"I'll do just that, Ma'am! Oh, Ma'am?"

"Yes?"

"Would you be my second, Ma'am? Sammy thinks you'd be better at it that she would. I'd account it an honour, Ma'am!"

"I'd be proud to, Lisa. Now get on with it. I've seen what you can do, so keep it up. Got that, Lisa? Don't you dare slow up or I'll find a way of caning that arse till your eyes water!"

Lisa wondered, after this exchange, if it was such a good idea to enlist Rosanne as a second. What with her and Samantha between them she wasn't to get much rest in the days to come! Correction! She wasn’t going to get any. But she kept up her work rate all day and then got marched back to a long hot shower, evening meal and more bloody skipping followed by one hundred and fifty push ups and the same number of sit-ups.

"You must like the smell of my sweat, darling!" she said wearily as she got into bed.

"It's just heavenly, Lisa. Just heavenly. You'll sweat even more tomorrow!"

But Lisa was dead to the world long before her task-mistress had finished talking!

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"Big day for you tomorrow, Lisa!"

"Nice of you to remind me!"

Tomorrow was to be Lisa's first public flogging. She would be told this evening after supper how many times that strap would descend on to her ever naked back on this occasion. She wondered how they determined the number. Was it a random selection of a number between twenty and sixty or had her conduct over the weeks since her release got something to do with it? If it was the latter, then her only failure had been not shaving her head properly one morning and she had been punished for that. And there had been the passage of words with Rosanne which had cost her eighteen strokes. But she had worked well and knew full well that her output was way ahead of most other women here, with the possible exception of Samantha. So why was she so frightened and why was Samantha so sure she was going to get the full works? She would know the worst tonight and then have to sleep on it. Fortunately Lisa was so tired these days that she could sleep through anything!

It was one of those rare days when work was going so well that Sammy and Lisa were given a short break mid-morning.

"You seem to think I'll get the max tomorrow, Sammy. Why?"

Samantha grinned. "It's your whole attitude, Lisa. I know you work hard and are doing your best to put on a great show against that ugly cow whenever the fight happens to be. And you always call the screws Ma'am. But you aren't humble with it, Lisa. You forget you're a convicted criminal. I know you didn't do it, and so do they by this time, but they can't take any notice of that. You are here to be punished. Not only punished for your original offence but for getting sent four times to solitary. By the time you leave they are determined to beat that pride of yours well and truly out of you. And you are just as determined not to crawl on your belly. So sixty it is, both tomorrow and every other first of the month! 'Cause you won't knuckle under. Even if you wanted to, you just don't know how and I love you for it and they respect you for it, but they'll make it bloody tough for you all the same!"

"I guess you're right, Sam! I do obey all the orders they give me. I keep myself clean and my head shaved (with a bit of help from you). But I can't feel inferior to these guards because I know I'm not. I respect Rosanne, because she's good at her job and keeps her lust for my body under control - thank goodness! And I've come to respect the governor in a  way because he's a decent man working for a bad system. But you're right. I'll just have to accept it's going to be a hard eight months. But with you with me it won't matter."

Samantha looked serious. "Lisa! About me helping you shave. I won't do it any more. I love helping you, darling Lisa, but you've got to do it yourself. If they knew I was helping it wouldn't look good - not for you and not for me either. Sorry!"

"Don't be sorry, Sammy! You're quite right. A few canings and I'll soon perfect the art of having a nice shiny head every morning! Starting tomorrow, then!"

By the end of the day, the field was looking like the site of a major battle. Most of the turf had been removed by now but Lisa could see that the uncoordinated effort was getting exactly nowhere. The guards were doing no more than watch the toiling prisoners like hawks and the only one of them who seemed to share Lisa's exasperation was Hatchet-Face.

"We need a proper foreman to organise this lot! It's a shambles!" she said as Rosanne passed.

"Did I hear you say Ma'am?"

"Sorry, Ma'am. But this field's about as level as the Himalayas and not getting any better!"

"You are right, Lisa. It's getting worse by the second. I'm putting you in charge as from tomorrow. Straight after your flogging you come and sort this bunch of wankers out!"

With that unwanted reminder of the coming public humiliation, she left Lisa to carry on working.

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Where did you get this from, Sammy?" said Lisa, looking at the punch bag hanging in the corridor outside their cell.

"Your second got hold of it. We saved it up as a surprise. She says you've got to practice kicking and punching and if you break a bone in your foot she'll personally kill you with her bare hands - if I haven't got there first! hat are you waiting for, Lisa. Get stuck in. The fight could be only days away!."

Lisa had been practising for an hour when Rosanne turned up, told her she was doing it all wrong and  sorted out a few problems of technique. By the time she had put Lisa through her paces both of them were perspiring. As she turned to go, she handed Lisa an envelope.

"That contains your instructions for tomorrow. I'd turn in now if I were you. You've a long and very painful day ahead of you! First the flogging and then getting that awkward squad working together. I think you'll find the flogging by far the easier challenge. Goodnight Lisa."

Lisa opened the envelope and took out the single sheet of paper. She read it and Samantha could see her face go pale as death. Her hands shook and she silently handed it to her best friend.

Samantha read it and handed it back.

"Poor old Lisa. I never thought it would be that bad. But this time tomorrow it will all be over. So cheer up and get some rest. As Hatchet-Face said. Boy! Are you going to need it!"

The instructions were as follows.

"Lisa Griffiths, convicted thief and former solitary inmate still under punishment - You will receive your first formal public flogging at six tomorrow morning, the First day of January. You must be ready to be given a full inspection by the Inspecting Officer at four thirty. This will be a particularly thorough inspection and any failure to be in impeccable condition will be severely punished by thirty strokes of a rattan cane on your buttocks in addition to the six strokes, if appropriate, relating to unsatisfactory head shaving. On completion of the inspection and any necessary physical chastisement you will be taken to the reception area in the Solitary Confinement Block and be prepared for your flogging. This preparation will consist of your hands being manacled behind your back and both ankles being manacled, the foot manacles being attached to a three foot long chain.

All prisoners will be lined up to witness your punishment and you will be paraded in your chains past each and every one of them, your head bowed and your eyes looking at the ground.

You will receive the maximum number of sixty strokes of a heavy leather strap. The flogging will be performed by three of your fellow inmates, all of whom have been given the strictest instructions to show you no mercy.

Both before and after the flogging you will thank each of your floggers in a loud and clear voice, kneeling in front of each as you do so. Failure to obey will result in your immediate return to solitary confinement on reduced rations for the remainder of your sentence. After your flogging you will return to duty and have no meals until supper."

"You won't be silly, Lisa, will you? Please, Lisa!  Just grin and bear it. Don't get sent down there again!" Samantha was almost in tears.

"Don't fret my love. As you say - this time tomorrow it will all be over and we will be together again!"

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