The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story Read Free

interest in writing started young – I remember writing and illustrating stories in little A5 booklets tied with treasury tags. My stories were usually based around children’s TV shows, books and films I enjoyed. The standard of my writing was considerably better than my drawing, although at that point that really wasn’t saying much. I dabbled in art at an early age, having seen something on the news about some precocious child somewhere whose art was selling for thousands. Sadly, when I knocked up a couple of coloured pencil and felt tip mixed-media works my mum was pleased to accept the first picture I gave her, and even stooped to giving me 50p for a second original. But when I upped my price to a tenner – I felt this was reasonable under the circumstances – she gave me a firm but kind ‘no’, scuppering any further plans for a life in the arts and returning me to producing my mini books and comics. Given half a chance I would pull myself, my friends and family into the worlds of Narnia, Middle Earth or, slightly closer to home but somewhat more obscurely, having discovered it via cable TV, the city of Newcastle as depicted in
Jossy’s Giants
, a TV show about a school football team.
    My love of
Jossy’s Giants
and football in general camevery much from a tomboyish streak a mile wide. I was – and still am – quite a way from the girlie stereotype. I have a pathological dislike of pink and never developed a love for make-up, expensive clothes or fashionable shoes – to this day put me in a pair of heels and I walk not unlike Bambi trying to get across the ice, although what I don’t spend on shoes I more than make up for with nail varnish and handbags. Growing up I definitely didn’t have much interest in worrying about boys, a fact which, ironically, meant I had lots of male friends at school as I’d quite happily play football with them in the lunch hour and didn’t bother with anything much like small talk. If you asked me my favourite things when I was ten, I’d have said reading, roller skating, riding my bike and climbing the tree at the end of our garden, which gave me a view of the nearby allotments – a source of endless fascination for reasons that seemed very important at the time. The tree was my private place – my sister had no interest in the inevitable scrapes and dirt borne of making the initial jump up, even with my cunningly engineered skipping rope pulley system, which provided a boost to the first climbable branch. I was quite a solitary child in lots of ways, very comfortable on my own, reading or daydreaming, which is probably a bit unsurprising bearing in mind the picture I’ve just painted of myself as a bit of an antisocial bint.
    Of course, no woman is an island – even if they do spend time hiding up a cherry tree given half a chance. My sister was a constant companion and co-conspirator at home, while at school – a mixed primary school until I was eleven and then an all girls’ school after that – I had a mixedcircle of friends, many of whom I’m still close to. While I wasn’t one of the popular group – I tended to veer towards the geeks, of music, drama, technology – I got on with everybody, using humour to smooth over any problems when they did occur. I was, by the time I’d settled into secondary life, very much a mid-range student. It took a while to find my feet as I’d gone from being one of the cleverest of my primary school class to mid-class at most subjects in secondary, which suddenly meant things weren’t coming so easily and took effort. It was a culture shock in lots of ways, but probably not a bad thing in that it burst any precociousness that might have seeped in from having the kind of supportive home life where everyone thought I was some kind of genius because I liked reading. I wasn’t the prettiest or the brightest in the class, although I soon realized this worked in my favour because it seemed to me that the smartest and prettiest