Chapter 4

Their second morning was a repetition of the first, being wakened by the rapping of the cane on the table. As they tumbled out of bed, their wardresses' eyes flitted from one to the other, hoping to find an excuse to crack a cane across a bare bottom.

Margaret had gone to bed in all but her panties, which she quickly stripped off. Naked, the six women lined up in front of the veranda, to be turned and marched round to the end of the hut for the water treatment.

Then came the cries which became all too familiar: "Stand still; open your legs...turn round...bend over" -accompanied by gasps and squeals from the girl under the hose and threats of sadistic beatings from the guards.

As soon as the last girl had had her hosing, they were made to line up in single file and trot once round th compound, during which time, they saw the girls from the other huts getting their hosing.

As they staggered, panting, into the hut again, Sylvia cupped her large white breasts in her hands and groaned.

"Whew! My tits ache with the bouncing around they got-they mean to keep us fit for market, don't they?"

"My feet ache!' exclaimed Margaret.

"You whites are to wear suspender-belts and stockings from now on," interrupted the negress guard, who seemed to be the spokesman for the two. Then they both stood watching while the four white women struggled into their full underwear.

They watched voluptuous white breasts being forced into flimsy bras, hips and bottoms into evn flimsier panties; watched until the last suspender was clipped to stocking top and the bare feminine charms were covered by dresses, then they went out.

"Well, at least you don't have to go through all that business, Lala," said Sylvia disgustedly. "In fact, I'm not so sure I wouldn't prefer to go bare-flesh-naked in this heat!"

When they had eaten, they were taken to an annexe of Hakim's quarters. This was what the guards were pleased to call 'the hospital', but which the inmates had nicknamed 'the anti-beatal clinic'. It smelt like a hospital and there were two typical guard types dressed up as nurses in the waiting room. Through glass topped swingdoors could be seen a row of beds, some occupied, with a nurse bending over one of them, tending the occupant.

In the waiting room, two African girls sat on a bench, both a mass of thin, painful looking weals across their brown backs. One of them was receiving treatment to her back from one of the 'nurses' as she sat with bowed head.

The newcomers were lined up outside a door and taken in one at a time by the negress. The two Island girls were taken first, each one being inside about five minutes. As Lala came out, the girls from the other two huts arrived with their guards and they, too, were seen separately, leaving the four white women until the last. Those seen were given no chance to warn their companions of what to expect, being lined up under guard against the opposite wall and forbidden to talk.

Cynthia went in and came out, wooden-faced; Margaret followed and came out, pulling up a zip at the side of her dress. She tried to whisper something to Julia, who was going in next, but received a shove from behind, sending her staggering towards the growing line of those who had already been in.

Julia found herself in a room equipped as a doctor's surgery and felt she could have been somewhere in England, except for the big, armed negress at her side and the African youth in khaki shorts and flowered shirt sitting beside the desk, a pen poised over a ledger.

The young African looked her up and down, then bent over the ledger, his eyes still on her from under his eyebrows. "Name?"

Julia hesitated and had her bare arm prodded with the guard's cane.

"Dawson-Julia Dawson."

"Married or single?" He was obviously making a special effort to sound bored and professional. "Divorced." "Your age?"

"Twenty-seven." Julia glanced nervously round the room as he wrote down the information and caught sight of a light-skinned woman in a white coat standing beside an examination couch, eyeing her cautiously, lhe couch was in an alcove on one side of the door and not visible to anyone coming through.

"Height?"

"Five feet six."

"Five-six." He wrote it down, then looked up with a brief flash of white teeth. "Take your clothes off!"

"What!" Julia felt her face go hot.

"You've been told to strip!" rapped the guard, her cane poking painfully into Julia's hip. "Quickly now!"

Julia took a quick look and saw the cane being drawn back for a cut at her bottom, as the negress turned towards her. She stepped back and reached behind her for the zipper of the dress.

As she stripped, she felt the hot eyes of the African youth on her the whole time, as were the eyes of the guard. She turned sideways to the desk as she removed her bra and exposed her lush, coral-tipped breasts, and looked at the guard.

"Do-do I have to take everything off?"

"We want you naked for weighing and examination."

It was the woman in the white coat Who answered her. Julia didn't argue, having seen the state of the backs of the two girls out in the waiting room. She slipped her panties down quickly and unfastened her suspenders, trying to ignore the presence of the watching youth. She forced the suspender-belt down over her hips, holding her breath and keeping her head up as she went through the unavoidable wriggles, in an effort to keep her breasts taut and stop them from shaking about.

When she had rolled down her stockings and kicked off her shoes, the white-coated woman beckoned her over. Leaving her clothes in a pile on the floor, she went through the ordeal of walking across to the examination table, almost feeling the two pairs of eyes on the heavy jiggle of her buttocks and the voluptuous undulations of her wide hips.

Julia saw that the woman was Eurasian and probably in her late thirties; she was not bad looking, but had a hard set to her mouth and a cold, calculaitng look about the eyes.

She drew a stethoscope from her pocket and sounded Julias' chest, turned her silently, with a hand on her shoulder, and listened to her back. Professionally, she took the earpieces from her ears and let them hang from her neck, while she placed a hand here and there on Julia's chest and back and tapped.

"On the scales, now." She slid the weights along the bar and read off to the youth. "Hundred and thirty-six." She took a tape measure and passed it round under Julia's armpits and across her breasts: "Thirty-eight"; the tape went to her waist:' 'Twenty-four, waist; hips, thirty-seven."

Julia had her teeth inspected and her breasts lifted and pressed all round the perimeter of the nipples. "No lumps?" "No-I don't think so." "Lie on the couch."

Julia climbed on to the couch and lay back to have her stomach pressed and prodded. "Had any contagious diseases?" "Only the usual measles and chicken-pox." "Any of a venereal nature?" "How dare you!"

The woman smiled faintly, slotting obstetric stirrups into place on the end of the couch. "I do dare-that's what I'm here for. And I happen to be a doctor." She finished tightening up the screws securing the stirrups to the couch. "Put your legs in the stirrups."

Julia lifted her legs and placed them in the stirrups, letting them bend where the padded fitment caught the backs of her knees. She glanced quickly over at the desk, suddenly remembering the youth and the guard, squirming with embarrassment as she saw their eyes glued to her nakedness.

Her attention was brought back to the woman doctor as she felt her legs moving apart. She was turning a handle at the bottom of the couch and ratcheting the stirrups apart, forcing Julia's legs open wider and wider, until she gasped with the painful stretching of her thighs. Her legs were as wide apart as they would go by the time the doctor stopped turing the handle.

Julia now lay with her sex laid completely open, her bottom lifted slightly from the leather couch, the cheeks spread. The doctor drew on rubber gloves and Julia was put through a thorough, if shameful, examination.

She lay with her thighs stretched wide, while the rubber-covered fingers probed her vulva; she kept her face to the wall as the labia was pulled open, laying bare the inner tender membrane, clenched her fists as a finger slid into her vagina and twisted.

"Any soreness?"

She shook her head and the examination went on. She even had her buttocks spread wider; a finger-tip touched her anus and she tensed herself, fearing she was going to have a finger pushed up there, but the tight opening was merely pressed gently.

"No piles?"

"You may get down now."

As Julia removed her legs from the stirrups and climbed down from the couch, she was asked the approximate date of her periods, her face flaming when the information was called out to the youth, to be entered in the ledger. She was then allowed to dress.

"You must tell your guard when menstruation starts and she will supply you with sanitary articles, if you are still here."

Julia was ushered out of the surgery and could do no more by way of warning Sylvia of what to expect than wrinkling her nose and raising her eyes to the ceiling.

Their medical inspection took up the whole morning and lunch was brought to them as soon as they returned to the hut. It was brought by the first two African girls.

"I'm told they caned you," said Sylvia sympathetically.

Instead of answering, both girls unashamedly turned their backs, leaned forward and drew down their tight knickers, baring their full-blown, dark-fleshed buttocks. Sylvia clucked her tongue in pity. They had both received a number of strokes which had broken the skin in several places and still looked desperately sore.

"You poor things," murmured Julia.

"Oh, we were lucky-we were only caned."

"Lucky?"

"Three of us were ordered to be punished -the other girl is going to be whipped this afternoon."

"You mean at that triangle affair across the compound, I suppose?"

"Yes-ten strokes."

"What happens about these punishments -do the guards decide a girl is to be beaten and just go ahead when they feel like it?" asked Julia. "That's awfulwhenever they felt they..."

"No. The guards are allowed to give us anything up to six strokes of the cane, but if they think that wouldn't be enough punishment for what they call crimes, they report it and the girls are taken before Hakim and he decides. Then he and the doctor are present when the punishment is carried out."

"How about that! They have our welfare at heart!" exclaimed Sylvia sarcastically. "What about those girls in the hospital-is that where they take up afterwards to heal our torn skins?"

"If the punishment has been very severe. Sometimes a girl is given fifteen, even twenty strokes of the whipwe have even seen twenty-five lashes being given." The African girl shivered. "Once, they gave a woman thirty lashes; she fainted after twenty-five and the doctor had her carried into the hospital. They brought her out an hour later and gave her the other five. She was in the hospital for three weeks and the day she came out, one of the guards found an excuse to give her six strokes of the cane on her buttocks."

"What happened to her eventually?"

"Oh, she was sold like all of us will be. Well, we'd better go, before we get another beating."

"Well, at least we know what to expect," said Sylvia, trying to keep her voice light. "Is that woman a real doctor?"

"Yes-or she was. She was-er-what do you call it when a doctor is forbidden to heal?"

"Struck off the register," said Sylvia. "That figures."

The African girls went out and left them to their meal.

"Didn't mind a chilli dish now and again back home," Sylvia pushed her plate away. "But that stuffs too darn hot for me!" She lit a cigarette. "So our doctor's unfrocked!"

"I nearly died of shame going through that 'medical' with that young African." Julia, too, pushed her plate away and took the cigarette Sylvia offered her. "I'll bet he knows nearly as much about women's bodies as she does! Did she ask you what date you had your curse and call it out to him?"

"She did!"

"But why do they treat us like this? Why all this brutality and humiliation? Isn't it enough that they're going to make money out of us? Couldn't they just sell us and leave it at that?"

"No-I think they have two reasons for treating us like this. One: we are being indoctrinated at the moment, we haven't got the slave mentality-we need taming. We have to be beaten and cowed and humiliated so that we face up to the fact that whoever buys us are our masters; so that we come to realize that there is no escape and that the only way we make our existence at all tolerable is to knuckle under and jump when we're told to jump."

"And the second reason?"

"Because they're a bunch of sadists and just love treating helpless women this way! And I'll tell you something else-if we don't give them an excuse to give us a thrashing before long, they're going to make one!"