The Compliant Personality Type

Chapter Twenty-Three - Lessons for Life

On Monday mornings, after our coffee break, we had our 'Lessons for Life' class with Madame Pembridge. In this, we were now starting to realise, she was teaching us everything we needed to know to become the perfect wife of a rich, powerful man...

The perfectly compliant wife!

We learnt about clothes and personal styling, the effective use of make-up and thinking about how you present yourself and how others will perceive you.

We learnt about 'managing your husband'. How you could, mostly wordlessly, negotiate rôles within your marriage. How your husband would probably be grateful if you took on much of the responsibility for organising domestic matters - but how you should do so in a manner that didn't undermine his feelings of authority.

She also talked to us about how important it was to let your husband know if something was making you seriously unhappy. This, she pointed out, was particularly important for girls like us who were of a 'compliant personality type'. We tended to bottle things up until there was an explosion.

I mean... I hadn't really talked to the others but I knew that none of us really liked the whole 'compliant personality type' thing. But none of us had really said anything about it.

There's probably a lesson to be learnt there!

We learnt how to negotiate with the tradesmen and professionals that we would need to employ. She even told us something about working with lawyers though that sounded a bit scary and I wasn't sure I would ever be able to do that.

Then there was pregnancy and childbirth - yuck - and how to organise your children and to work with childminders and so on.

I mean... in a way, it was outrageous, of course. It was as if we had gone back about a million years and the whole women's liberation thing hadn't happened.

But, of course, we didn't have to sit there and listen to it. We always had the option of asking them to send us back to England.

But none of us chose to take them up on it.

I suppose that's another hint that there might just be something in the whole 'compliant personality type' idea after all!

Then, on the Monday morning following the big announcement, we arrived in the classroom to find that each of us had a black cardboard box on the desk. The boxes didn't have any writing on them, just a fancy, gold embossed pattern - like an expensive chocolate box.

"You may open your boxes," Madame Pembridge announced.

The lid folded up to reveal a... there was a series of gasps from around the room...

It was a man's... thing! A really big man's thing!

There was, of course, a fair bit of nervous giggling and Britney, because she's Britney, pretended to stick the thing into her mouth.

"That, young lady, Madam Pembridge said, about as severely as she ever said anything, "is not how it is done."

She looked around the room. "Who can tell me what fellatio is?"

A couple of hands went up. Harley was still holding her thing and that looked pretty weird! When she realised what she was doing, she changed hands and turned an impressive shade of red!

Madam Pembridge nodded at Ashley who said, "It's where you put a man's thingy in your mouth." Of course we all sort of giggled!

"Girls," Madam Pembridge said, using her best stern voice, "for the next few weeks, our lessons are going to be addressing sexual matters. Naturally, this will require us to address some distinctly indelicate themes. We are going to discuss them in a mature fashion, using the correct technical terms. Amongst ourselves, there is absolutely no need for embarrassment and there is certainly no need for all this silly giggling."