Under the Radar E-Book

Madam Rattan

• Herausgeber: novum premium Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 263

Beschreibung

Dominatrix Madam Rattan, named for her preferred instrument, has a wealth of experience in the BDSM community – and a desire to share it. This is a Mistress' memoir, demystifying an often-cagey community. From a questionable early relationship to a career meeting the needs so often hidden from the world, Madam Rattan tells all; norm challenging , anecdotes, explanations of customs and protocol, and, most importantly, her MO: Under the Radar.

Leseprobe

Contents

Imprint 2

Chapter One 3

Chapter Two 20

Chapter Three 26

Chapter Four 33

Chapter Five 41

Chapter Six 50

Chapter Seven 58

Chapter Eight 63

Chapter Nine 70

Chapter Ten 75

Chapter Eleven 80

Chapter Twelve 85

Chapter Thirteen 92

Chapter Fourteen 97

Chapter Fifteen 103

Chapter Sixteen 110

Chapter Seventeen 117

Chapter Eighteen 123

Chapter Nineteen 127

Chapter Twenty 132

Chapter Twenty-One 137

Chapter Twenty-Two 144

A Note from the Ghostwriter 150

New Beginnings … 151

The Next Step … 153

And Other Subs’ Stories … 155

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2022 novum publishing

ISBN print edition: 978-3-99130-130-1

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99130-131-8

Editor: Ashleigh Brassfield, DipEdit

Cover images: Sergeybitos, Starast | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, layout & typesetting:novum publishing

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Chapter One

Let’s Wind Back the Clock; A Monster Stops By; #MeToo;

The Start of the Adventure

It’s quite hard to pinpoint exactly how things started. When I look back on growing up, I remember I always used to like watching television, and some of the things I saw on television really made a huge impact on me. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was subconsciously storing all sorts of information that I took on board in a big way. I always felt some of the images on television were intriguing, some extremely thought-provoking, and others very interesting. They definitely piqued more than my curiosity. They struck a chord – though at the time, I didn’t know why!

We’ve all got a certain curiosity for different things. Some people are interested in haunted houses, while some even go to extremes, such as having an interest in murderers, zombies, martial arts, all sorts of things! Some people enjoy activities such as chess, quizzes, bingo, that type of thing; some like to push limits and get an adrenaline rush from mountain climbing, rock climbing, parachuting. Such a diverse cross-section of different things; but my curiosity, my interests, often seemed to involve things of a sexual nature.

When I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I remember seeing a Dominatrix torturing somebody. I think she had him on a step ladder. Anyway, I saw she’d hooked up this pulley system contraption and had his genitals tied up to this rope/braid pulley system, while tugging at these weights in a bucket. I can’t remember much else about it, but that scene just stuck in my head and stayed with me. I’d love to know which programme it was. There were other programmes where I used to watch people doing ‘naughty’ things to other people, which also held my attention.

I always watched TV programmes that had an interest or element about the sex industry. I found them really fascinating – I couldn’t peel my eyes off the screen. There was one series in the nineties I particularly remember called ‘The Vice’. Every episode was filled with various themes of sex-related escapades and predicaments that really opened up my thirst for knowledge about alternative sexualities. I absorbed it all.

In those days, as I remember most, if not all, programmes were about male/female, never about male/male or female/female. How things have changed; thank goodness. People are more open minded, less misogynistic – a politician might say, “the direction of travel is going the right way.” And it certainly is. About time.

My parents were amazing, but poor. They were very hardworking, never smoked or drank, and saved their money to buy bricks and mortar. They were from an era where that was the most important goal to them; both from poor families, the pressure to succeed with the material possession of a house, their castle, was great – that and bringing their children up to have freedom of choice without pressure and to believe they could do whatever they believed they could do.

I loved horses. It all started when we used to drive through the New Forest when we drove down to Bournemouth to see my grandparents; the New Forest is one of the UK’s national parks and is full of wild horses, which are owned by the commoners, who have automatic grazing rights. I loved it. It fuelled my dreams and fantasies on the long, boring car journeys.

It’s an expensive hobby.

Was that going to stop me? No! With luck, determination and ingenuity I bagged a volunteer job at the local riding stables in exchange for rides – lots of rides. I was so hardworking I was even allowed to give others lessons; I was a lovely child and got on so well with just about everyone.

I was even allowed to take a pony to a horse show that was being held locally and sat next to Princess Anne and chatted to her. I had lessons from the daughter of the owner, who was really mean to me and made me have all my lessons bareback, which was extremely hard but so good for my riding technique.

My dad used to transport me and a car full of helpers to and from the stables; my parents were just pleased I wasn’t bored and playing out on the street. In the then-freezing winters my feet would be frozen from morning till I got home; one Saturday a horse trod on my toe and I didn’t realise it was damaged’til I got home, took my boot off and found my damaged and bloody toe! And I loved every minute, I was so innocent. So naïve. So young and so not streetwise.

And then the stables closed down. We were bereft.

I wasn’t about to let that stop my passion for horses, so my mum and I devised a plan. My father had opened up a bank account for myself and my brother; he ran it and called it ‘instant banking’. He paid interest, and I divided my pocket money into all sorts of different projects; presents, horse, holidays, etc. It really encouraged me with the power of saving for something bigger (I am sure that’s why I am good with figures & bookkeeping).

We saved up (pocket money and housekeeping savings). To help boost our savings we went to the supermarket at the end of the day and bought the marked down purchases; Christmas was best, the shops shut for a few days then and all fresh food had to go, and it went cheap. My dad went round the back of the fruit and veg market stalls, not the fronts, and did deals on boxes of damaged fruit. We ate like kings, sometimes.

Savings, well, we were good at that.

And so, in time we had saved about £ 50 and we went to Reading Horse Sales (my favourite place every month; 50 horses and 700 lots of saddlery, I was in heaven) and bought my little pony. Several moves of stables to keep him in ensued and after much determined study of the locality, I managed to find an unused, huge field which was a few hundred metres from my house! It was the most beautiful pasture, old oak trees, little copses and spinneys, and alongside the local golf course. Bliss: I managed to find a few young lasses who owned ponies and we shared the cost of the rental. We were in heaven.

After a short time there, a disagreeable neighbour found a loophole in the lease; it stated the field was only to be used for livestock, or some such rubbish. We were all evicted at the end of the month. My dream came crashing down, so once again the sheer determination kicked in and the search for a new home for my pony started once more.

I managed to find a stable and small paddock on Mr Podberry’s chicken farm, a few miles away, a bike ride. A lovely old farmer, he had retired but still wanted to remain active and kept chickens. There were hundreds of them, and they loved him and followed him everywhere; he would reach into his brown warehouse coat pocket and sprinkle some chicken feed around for his girls! What a character. I was very lucky to find this facility.

The other girls found a small farm on the main A4 and they moved there.

Of course, we all kept in touch. If I hadn’t been so friendly with them, I often wonder how my life would have gone.

How significant that desire to maintain friendships was.

I was at the most significant junction of my life and had no idea.

The owner of the farm was a young man called Hans. He was charming and fun, and encouraged the girls to play in the straw and have potato fights in the field; he joined in, of course, and when I visited, so did I.

Slowly a relationship formed. He was 24 and I was 10 years younger, 14 years old. In those days, it wasn’t thought of as strange. My parents were poor, and his parents were rich; he dangled riches before me, and I felt unable to refuse.

My parents felt awful they could not provide the means to further my hobby, but they supported me in whatever way they could. They came and helped on the farm and with the ponies there. I was a good rider, good at showjumping; not the best, but I had promise.

He could provide the very thing I had craved, access to a lifestyle I had dreamed about, and that was exactly what he did. He was flashy, with his Lotus sports car and brand new Range Rover. His parents were so rich, their house in Jersey on the seafront, that they would send their Rolls Royce to pick me up from the airport – me, flying! It was unheard of unless you were from a privileged class. The farm they bought him in Henley-on-Thames when the land on the A4 was sold for building had neighbours like Lord Heseltine and record producers; even George Harrison lived down the road. The possibilities for my future and the temptations were too great for an impressionable and ambitious young girl.

I had spent my younger years dreaming about owning a stable full of horses, planning and drawing the layout of the stable yard, pretending to buy the saddlery, circling adverts of horses for sale in the magazine Horse & Hound, even naming them! Scouring pages of adverts for wooden stables, sheds, showjumps, horse boxes; you name it, I had dreamed it and planned it.

To have someone who tempted me with the fulfilment of that dream, that fantasy; for a young and naïve, unworldly girl, that temptation was impossible to refuse. He took me leaps and bounds closer to achieving my dream, I had all the ideas, he had the cold hard cash – or rather his parents did, and they kept on drip-feeding it to him, bit by bit, and he drew me in, bit by bit.

And yes, then there was the sex. Of course, he held off for a while – when I met him I was only 14 – but once I was on the pill, the situation developed. He had regular sex with me when he wanted; I thought I was being really grown up and clever, being the first girl in my class to have a ‘proper’ boyfriend. Sex education at home and school was non-existent. I had bagged a rich and generous man, and I was way under 16. How easily it happened, and I concealed the sexual part from my parents. I didn’t know much about sex, but did I know deep down that it was wrong?

Lots of kids have sex underage, of course. Had it been just the relationship with sex, well I wouldn’t be writing this and my journey in life would have been very different. But he took pictures – he developed his own pictures, he had a special room and we always went there to take the pictures. Until recently I never thought anything about this.

And I thought I was so clever.

In the very early 1970’s He took me to seedy Soho sex shops and bought me outfits. He loved taking pictures of me in my school uniform, in mini skirt poses while I walked up the stairs, meanwhile drawing me in further and further by dangling the means to a future I had dreamed of.

Still, I thought I was so clever.

When I think back, I also remember that he used to drive past me most days when I was walking to school along the A4; in my naïveté I thought it was fate that had brought us together. Was it?

Did I subconsciously realise this was wrong? Not sure. I thought I was living an exciting life; missing school a lot, my schoolwork suffered, my attitude changed. I was enjoying a life I could not have had under normal circumstances, so if I had doubts, I buried them and continued living a life of which my family had no idea.

A double life, a secret life, an exciting life, a seedy life; a life that was to be buried in my mind for 40-plus years and only surface due to two specific things that happened.

The main reason is the lockdown. It gave me time to slow my mind, to sit and think, to process the past, something I had steadfastly refused to do apart from the occasional flashback.

The other trigger was an account of a shocking act from an abuse survivor who was reaching out to me. Rushing to my thoughts came details I had buried but not forgotten.

For all these years I have been quite a workaholic, burying myself in either work or study. I had either worked a 60-hour week or had two jobs, or had a job and studied hard for formal exams to make up for the way I missed school while under the influence/spell of Hans and his riches and sordidness.

I did all this while being a single parent family for much of the time, with two children and two marriages. I made some truly awful choices in men.

When I had problems with people I would either cut them off completely, or get stuck in a superficial groove, going over and around the issue again and again like a stuck record, keeping myself busy and getting hung up on my day to day problems. I avoided delving into my formative years; maybe it was just too painful. Our minds have a way of protecting us. Maybe I just wasn’t ready or didn’t want to deal with the consequences of what had happened.

The consequences were mental, not physical. Mental scars can be buried forever, or they can be dwelled on daily, enough to prevent people from moving forward.

Or, like me, they can be buried and come back to haunt you at a later date; for me it was when my mind stopped working overtime. It all started to come together and make sense when it was stilled and rested.

I began to feel able to talk more freely about it.Because while I didn’t tell anyone, well, it hadn’t really happened, had it?

Of course, I had never forgotten about this (I had even referred to it a couple of times in the last 10 years); I had refused to be a victim and refused to let it destroy my life, as it can so easily do, though of course it had shaped my life, even though I refused to admit it.

I found a coping strategy that worked well for me: keeping busy and refusing to become a victim that was stuck in a rut of memories, unable to break out. We have all seen that happen, people spending so much time looking back that they fail to see the life they could be enjoying.

But I do think, in some strange way, it eventually allowed me to be open minded about anything to do with sex. How? I don’t know. Maybe because this happening in my formative years, well, I thought taking provocative pictures was the norm; it didn’t occur to me that I was a child of course.

Sex was something adults did, and as a teenager, I probably liked to think I knew it all. I do know that I was troublesome at school; I made some teachers lives unbearable, being unruly, cheeky, and missing a lot of school. My exams suffered and I left grammar school with a meagre O level and a CSE.

Was the journey I eventually took in the world of Female Domination a way of letting go of my anger, though I never felt angry?

Hans taught me a lot about business; his parents had made lots and lots of money, so much they became residents of Jersey. I looked after his farm accounts and did his VAT.

It became apparent he wasn’t as nice as I thought he was; he was cruel to animals. The RSPCA visited him regularly and they even took him to court for cruelty to pigs, and, if my memory serves me correctly, he was banned for life for keeping pigs. He didn’t feed them. He was ahorribleman, and feeding his animals, well, that often became my job.

When his parents bought him the farm at Henley-on-Thames, he bought lots of very young calves to fatten for beef. Calves need a lot of milk to grow, but he kept them in a big shed with no water. I had to carry the water every day in five-gallon containers, filled from a standpipe. When he used to go and visit his parents in Jersey, he never left enough food for the animals. One visit, I had to bag up a ton of barley (harvested from his fields) into 1cwt sacks, load them on a tractor and trailer, and take them to the corn and seed merchants to put a credit on the account so I could buy feed. I was strong and very fit then, plus I was very determined.

Later on in our relationship I also had a part-time job in a bank.

Another Jersey trip I managed to get a bank loan of around £ 500 in order to buy the animals their food; he never paid me back, of course. It was a constant battle to feed the animals he insisted on buying. And yet he kept buying me things; he bought me an ex-hurdler from the famous trainer Captain Tim Foster. I loved that horse. When we split, he took him away and shut him up in a stable.

So much happened that I now look back on and wonder about.

I got a job at a bank that he banked with, as he knew the bank manager.I didn’t even have an interview,his influence with the bank made for a job offer for me. I was 16 and had left school with minimal qualifications. My mind had been elsewhere. The first day I started work the manager wasn’t there; the rumour was that he had been sacked for having smutty magazines in his office. Who knows? Just how did Hans wangle me a job?

At Hans’ house, why were the photos always taken in the same room?

I remember one evening we went round to someone’s house, I can’t remember what for; to be friends, I think. I remember that the man was a policeman. Why was he friends with a policeman that he had never mentioned?

I didn’t make sense of all these seemingly insignificant actions until other high-profile cases came to light. I was a naïve child who thought she was a woman who had control and was getting what she dreamed of; was I the one being manipulated and used? Or was this just a catalogue of unrelated and innocent coincidences?

Driving by me on my walk to school;

The bank manager who liked smutty pictures;

The policeman;

The trips to Soho for sexy outfits;

The photographs developed himself;

The one room that was always used.

They could be coincidences, but do the photographs and the room make them something far more sinister altogether?

You decide.

I do think that he loved me, but his personality was so dark (and spoiled) that I started to resent the way he treated animals and people; I started to argue back, he started to become physically violent.

After the second incident of physical violence, I decided to quit the relationship.

Then followed one of the most emotionally difficult times in my life. He tried to get me to come back to him.

He was angry, threatening to take back every single present he had ever bought me.

He was distraught, begging me to come back.

He even resorted to threatening his own wellbeing.

He promised me the world, said we would get married.

His mum bought him a red Ferrari, a supercar; she did what she always did when her son was upset, spend money on him to soothe his feelings. Did it work? For a little while, maybe. He even insured it for me to drive it and attempted to blackmail me into coming back.

He was still distraught. He would turn up at my house in the evenings begging, crying, shouting, screaming for me to go back. This lasted weeks; it was really hard to stand and watch a grown man cry and beg like that.

The easiest thing would have been to go back, for so many different reasons. But it was too late. When he eventually realised I wasn’t coming back, he turned nasty, as he often did when he didn’t get his own way, and took back every single thing he had bought me, as he had previously threatened.

I didn’t care. I was free of the toxicity of that relationship. Had I stayed, I would have been a possession, that’s all. In a gilded cage, yes, but a possession nonetheless. I learned a lesson that I will never forget:money cannot buy you happiness,and money doesn’t always buy you what you want – sometimes it just buys you a load of trouble. Yes, I know it’s an old cliché, but I can say it with experience of what money can do to people.

Nowadays, the lasting legacy is that I still cannot cope with emotional pressure of people constantly asking for something; I just cave in. I vowed not to get involved with anyone who was emotionally manipulative. I tried anyway.

So, I did all the things we all do; settled down, married (twice), had children, had jobs, was self-employed, moved around. When I needed stability for my children because I was a single parent, in the 1990’s I joined the Civil Service and eventually moved north on promotion and stayed there until my children had both gone to university.

My exploration into an alternative lifestyle started in the last couple of years that I was still in the CS. My son, a very sensitive young man, concluded I was a free spirit and told me to leave the CS and be free, and so I did.

I feel sure that this bad relationship affected and moulded my feelings towards the alternative lifestyle.

Time moves on, and when I reflect I remember one of my husband’s friends saying to me, “Why do you always talk to me like you are a school teacher?”

“Do I?” We had a great friendship, he made me laugh a lot and he used to like helping us with decorating the house when I was around. This was the writing on the wall and I still had no idea!

Fast forward and I don’t know exactly how my journey into BDSM became a reality. I guess the nearest I can think of is when online chatrooms were still allowed, and you could write something about yourself online. You could click onto other people’s profiles and find out all about them. I used to love doing that. I find people really fascinating and, on this particular site, you could find out all about their sexual interests. It was so diverse … and I was excited & interested by the whole thing.

One guy’s profile in particular really stood out for me. I remember it really well. He was gay and he’d explored his sexuality with men, as a male companion. He described it in great detail; all about his travels all around the world and what an amazing time he’d had! He made it sound so fantastic, and it caught my imagination!I want to do that! I want to travel the world and stay in fantastic hotels! Exotic travels, exotic lifestyle, interwoven with sex! Yes! That’s for me!I was sure of it.

I loved to travel, and I loved to stay in quality hotels. Another seed was sown. I remember at the bottom of his profile there was a link to a site called‘Alt.com’. It was a sex site covering all sorts of genres. It intrigued me so much, I joined the site right there and then!

It wasn’t a dating site. It was a site where you promoted yourself. So, while setting up my profile, I figured,Well, I’ve got lovely breasts,as I sized them up,let’s focus on these. My breasts have always been my best asset, I’ve always hidden them away, so let’s celebrate them!So I focused on my breasts and then, lo and behold, people were writing to me! Loads of them! It was bizarre! It was fun! It was enlightening! So many people were interested … in me! It gave me a renewed sense of confidence. It left me on a high.

It was on this old‘.com’site where I met this guy from London. We struck up a chord and started having regular online chats. He said he could never come up and see me because he lived with his wife. They were both retired.

“That’s okay,”I said to him, “perhaps we can just chat?”I gleaned a lot of information from him. It gave me an incredible insight of a completely different lifestyle. He was submissive and interested in submission. He was the one who gave me a new and different perspective that soon took on a whole new life of its own.

I also met up with other people who I’ll mention later on in the book. There was Terry from Manchester; Steve from the north; and Peter.Everyone I was in contact with was always male. I wasn’t interested, nor was I looking, for females at that time.

Peter, who I’ve just mentioned,was trying to “dip his toe in the water.” I remember he’d always said he had feelings that he wanted to submit to a powerful lady. He wanted to try it out but was scared. His fetish was for high heels; it had begun when he was a child of six or seven. One day, he told me, he’d come home from school and brought a friend with him. They were playing with their Dinky toys on the wood parquet flooring in the dining room when his friend’s mother came to pick his friend up. He remembered he could hear her ‘tip-tapping’ across the floor in her high heels, then picking Peter up by his ear, saying sternly, “And what do you think you’re doing!” Well! That, he said, was enough to set his mind wanting for a long, long time. That was his pivotal, defining moment.

I should mention that all names have been changed unless they are an alias/alter-ego’s name – I have permission to use alter ego names.

I made friends online with a lot of people, including ‘bbc-boy’, who was a huge caning enthusiast and would travel the world to get his ‘fix’. He just loved to be caned! He was the one who taught me how to cane. He was so patient. He lived in Scotland and used to come down to my base in the north after having picked fresh birch and made a ‘birch’ for me to cane him with. How considerate! We had a spanking bench in the dungeon, and he just bent over that bench and let me practice and practice and practice … it was glorious! And so was his backside by the time I’d finished!

In the beginning, when I was practicing my caning skills, I used a feather pillow to hone my technique, covering it in talc so I could see where the strokes were. I became quite adept and was able to cane quite accurately, partly because of practice and partly, I think, because I used to ride horses. I was familiar with wielding a whip, you see. Not that I used to go around whipping the horses! I was just used to how it felt and knew about the different weights and things.

‘bbc-boy’ used to let me practice on him to my heart’s content – and his heart’s content! He loved it. We had fun in all kinds of ways, like the positions in which he’d stand. If I stood too close, he’d get ‘wrap-around’, which means that when the cane hits, it flicks to the soft part of the outer thigh and marks very easily. It didn’t matter really, but it all helped make me accurate at caning.

He remained a friend for a good number of years. We had all sorts of escapades and experiences together. He was a hard-core masochist. He was along the same level of masochism asJustinStripes, who I’ll introduce a little later in another chapter. Yes, bbc-boy was definitely hard-core. He travelled the world for it. He went to Thailand regularly to visit Mistresses he had read about or seen caning online. He went all over. That’s how serious he wanted it, needed it, in his life.

I used to meet and talk with lots and lots of submissives. When I was meeting submissives for the first time, we would often meet at a coffee shop in the train station. I always arranged to meet in a very public place. I used to tell them to stand underneath the clock and look them over, checking them out from a distance. If I felt uncomfortable in any way, I could turn away. I am always thorough in my research; so much so, that in every rendezvous I arranged with a potential sub, I did always end up meeting them face-to-face. Never once did I feel uncomfortable.

On the initial meeting I would chat to them for about an hour. We’d have a really good chat, just so I could find out all about them. For me, it was all down to chemistry. I had to have that feeling; the feeling that I could talk to them, and they could talk to me – that they were open and honest. If they didn’t have that certain something, then I didn’t pursue it. I used to tell people most of the time, there and then, “You know, it’s been lovely having a chat with you but I just don’t think we’re compatible enough,”looking them straight in the eye, “sorry, but we haven’t got the same interests.”I would finish it there and then, and that would be it.

There were lots of people I continued to stay friends with over the years, including a sub I met who lived in Carlisle. He had MS. I spent a lot of time going to see him. He bought me the most lovely gifts, he really did. When I used to drive to Carlisle, he used to make me afternoon tea, get me my favourite biscuits out and wait on me hand and foot. He used to like to dress up as a maid; that’s what gave him his enjoyment. He bought me some beautiful, beautiful whips. A lovely person. I kept in contact with him for many years.

All these different people that I had relationships with, they taught me a lot about the way people tick, what they think and what they do; how things start; how things lie dormant in people and why people want to do different things. Everyone has their own fascinating story to tell.

It’s like a jigsaw. When you find that missing piece, suddenly the whole jigsaw makes sense. For me, I think some of the biggest pieces that made up my jigsaw were all the films I used to watch – and all the documentaries too! They just fuelled my imagination. And, of course, my experiences in my teenage years gave me a whole, entirely new and completely different perspective of alternative preferences.

All these things that happened in my life, yet I still can’t put my finger on what the trigger was that joined all the pieces together and started me on my journey. Was it my teenage years, when I was so impressionable? They call it a journey. It is a journey, because it’s a journey of exploration to find out about yourself; about myself; to dig deep; to see what makes you tick; to be honest with yourself. And it was time for me to be honest with myself.

Being a Mistress ticked many boxes for me. In my opinion, it’s all about indulgence on a long-term scale. It’s never about a ‘quick fix’, or to make a ‘quick buck’! It has to be with the right person. That’s why the chemistry has to be right. For me, it has to be a win-win situation. But for many Dommes it just doesn’t matter. There are those who believe it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter; I can only surmise they may simply believe they are fulfilling other people’s long held fantasies rather than their own.