VICTORIAN ALICE 1888

BY CHRISTOPHER TOILKIEN

[ part 3 ]

Step One; getting a sweat up.

After lunch, this was actually a formal dinner, in an actual dinning hall.

The school brought in different chefs of different nationalities who cooked foods of their homes, in order the little girls learn how to eat different foods.

Vicki had the girl's strip down to pinafores. The white lace undergarments proper little girls were supposed to wear in polite Victorian society. They were still covered from ankle to neck though. Actually, the girls were never nude, even taking baths in all encompassing light cotton nightgowns.

Vicki had the girls assemble in the gym. Up until now, it had only been used as a place to gather the entire school body together . They dragged out a vaulting horse, released the knotted climbing ropes from the one horizontal wooden bar climbing wall and laid out soft leather clad mats around each.

Connie and Alice simply bounded over, swarmed up like rats or swung through the air like Tarzan on everything. Annette did not perform to badly, and Vicki observed Akasha pulling back her athletic abilities in order not to outshine her stepsister. Their schoolmates falling over, fell off, or tumbled onto the mats. Be bounced off each other trying to play catch and even skipping rope was just a tangle of legs and ropes. Vicki avoided giving them tennis rackets or a heavy ball. Athletics was going to be a long class. But the girls had worked up a sweat.

"Boys can strip down to their skivvies when they get sweaty" Connie informed Nancy when she complained of almost passing out from the heat. Illustrating her advice, by unbuttoning and stripping off her all encompassing neck to wrist top followed by her sweat drenched cotton undershirt next. At first her school chums stood aghast, but after Alice quickly followed suit, then Connie, Annette and Akasha.

Soon they were all just standing their, defiance read on every face.

Vicki could not believe her eyes. First day and she had them down to their lace drawers already. To say Annette stood out among her peers was a great understatement.

"Do they hurt when you walk or dance?" Nancy inquired. And the "Can I touch them" that followed from the still relatively flat cheasted girls surrounding her, had Vicki smiling like a Cheshire cat.

"If I had only known molesting pubescence girls was this easy, I might not have gotten all the really important things done" Vicki thought to herself as she set up the camera. "I was hoping to acquire them one by one and gradually collecting them all"

"Now you should take our pictures" Connie said, and after looking around, everyone nodded agreement.

Stand together as you did before" Vicki instructed, and they grouped themselves into three compact rows.

"Pick your pals for paired shots" As they paired off, Vicki observing Annette and Akasha's hands slipping under the others lace drawers, grabbing each others firm ass cheeks. "Those two deserve to be carefully guided down the correct path" Vicki reminded herself.

"Individual shots by last name alphabet" Vicki ordered.

The girls expressions while she took their pictures were as windows into their souls. Most of them were wild eyed and apprehensive. Alice nonchalant, Connie as bold as brass, Dusky skinned Nancy strikes a pose showing she had posed before. And Annette blow a kiss at the photographer that almost made Vicki ruin the shot. Akasha's wide smile bared her long incisors.

But the biggest shocker was the change in mousy little Mary. The ultimate, hide in the back, never asked a question, please do not notice me girl was transformed by their tiny rebellion against "Victorian Proper Society" this day had become. She had loosened the drawstring holding her drawers up. Slipping them down to belly dancer level, slipped her left hand down the front, obviously fingering herself, right hand extended, index finger crocked back pouty lips glistened by a sweeping tong. "Come get some" written all over that pose.

"Vicki would watch this little human shadow blossom into a woman unhappy with the limits society placed on her. She would marry a young officer stationed in the Middle East and fall in love with the peoples and lands. Mary would undertake trips into the far reaches and deep deserts, earning acceptance everywhere from poor Arabic desert tents to lavish Arabic palaces. She mapped places even the Arabs rarely went and brought back articles and objects from the entire range of armies that had swept through the region. Eventually ensconced in her Cairo palace, everyone and anyone who wanted to become someone came to pay homage. For British Imperial policy of the entire region was decided over High Tea at her home.

From there, Lawrence and his kind received their orders and her own hands drew the boundaries of the counties that were and were to come. The Highest ranking British officers and government officials came to hear from her own lips, who to trust, whom to not and who really could deliver what they promised. It was her advises that raised the Saudi to Kingship and the Fascil to oblivion.

And in the fifties, when she died in relative obscurity, The entire Arabic world sent their best to pay homage, and her own country that she had worked so hard and so long secretly for, just ignored it. Vicki herself walking behind her casket on its military carriage, as the only family that came. Crying tears one of the few times in her life she allowed herself to in public.

There became two versions of the first class pictures ever taken showing the students in that very special private school for girls. The ones that adorned the wall in the trophy case and the ones only those students involved ever saw, and Vicki kept close. {It was quite a shock, all those years later, that day in the leather shop she used as a hideout in Soho, to see another Alice, identical to the first standing there at the counter}