Granger 06
- This article is a Biography
- Chapter 06 - Little by little
It was not long before she was cooking me a meal then up to the bed, which looked so inviting. I stripped her and she did so to me, then our naked bodies were soon together enjoying the pleasures of the marriage bed. I could already see that her breasts were beginning to enlarge and so improve her figure, some thing which I hoped would not only continue but would endure. Her ears now had a well formed piercing in each lobe, quite permanent and hardened to take anything. In our home, as we called it we now had the advantage of a private address to which mail orders could be sent.
I had brought my corsets with me, but I had left my high heeled shoes at Mary's the last time I was there, so they were gone. Ethel was aware of my fad, and would help to lace me in tightly, for I had grown to enjoy the firmness and support they gave me. Also she did not object to my putting earrings in my cars at times. As I missed the high heels, at a later date we saw a pair of black court suede shoes in a shop with 3 1/2 inch heels, and so I ordered a pair, added two lifts, and could just squeeze my feet into the size 8s. These gave me the correct stance. When I married I was still very tall and thin, so could wear corsets with a 22 inch waist. Actually, as it turned out later, I had a weakness in my back, and this was nature's way I suppose of helping me along. Even the high heels I found helped an attack of fibrosis in my foot.
As I have said, I was now reading LONDON LIFE pretty regularly, and started to purchase a copy every week. There was a special double number every month and a extra large one at Xmas and Summer, and in those were a larger number of letters, and often an article from a corsetière of the old days, and those were especially attractive for I read these out to Ethel, especially the letters on corset wearing and tight ┬¡stiff corsets, pipe stem corsets, hour glass waists and even corsets of metal, with metal training belts and torture belts too. These long letters encouraged me and let Ethel know that there were other people with the same ideas as my own. It was most important to find that my particular fads were not completely exceptional.
Many claims for small sized waists I took with a pinch of snuff, for very rarely did they substantiate their claims with photographs. Nevertheless I did get proof that tiny waists were being cultivated and did in fact still exist, if only in a great deal of wishful thinking. For if enough people actually wish for a thing it comes to pass to moat the demand.
As for high heels, here photos were plentiful. Towering heels of 6 to 7 inches, long boots - laced or buttoned to the knees, or even the thighs - were shown in its pages. And most useful of all, there were advertisements from those willing to supply goods to meet these eccentric demands, where boots, shoes with high heels, and tiny-waisted corsets could be obtained for those in need of these items.
How I have regretted the fact that during this period of our experiments, financial stringency prevented us making progress, except in a slow and limited way. For even prewar prices of corsets and high heels required careful budgeting for wages were also low, as was the cost of living, for one could live reasonably for food, on ££6 per month and petrol was one shilling a gallon. For soon we had furniture to buy, a bit later also a house.
For our first idyllic raptures of married life was soon shattered. We had been in our furnished flat for only a week, when the landlady told us she had sold the house, so by the next week end we must get out. We looked around for furnished or unfurnished accommodation being lucky enough to get two furnished rooms, quite reasonably, with an old maiden lady. It was clean, for she was very particular, but it was not in such a nice neighbourhood, but we could not choose much so we took it. There was a shed in which I could store my motor cycle.
On the Saturday morning we were awakened by a knock on our bedroom door, and the landlady asked us to get up as she had sold the bed and the removal van was outside. So we got up, packed up our few goods and chattels and transferred them, bit by bit, on the carrier of my motor bike to our new lodgings; finally taking Ethel over as well.
Within a short time we were again installed in a home. Here we lived and loved for about 5 months. By this time Ethel was getting morning sickness, and it was obvious that she was pregnant. So the dear old soul, was so worried about it that she said we must go. So we looked around for unfurnished accommodation and we found two rooms not far away, with some nice people. We bought a few necessary items of furniture, and I was making some other items at work, one was a table, but meanwhile we used a large packing case. As it was only 200 yards away, we borrowed a handcart and moved what few items we had down the road. We wished our old landlady 'Good Bye' and she said she was sorry to have us go, but she hoped we would call in and see her when we could. She hoped the baby was what we wanted.
So again we moved in, and soon added a couple of kittens from home, Fluff and Smutty, a grey tom and a black female, with white feet and bibs. But this move did not last very long, for soon after our daughter was born the house was sold, but as we were in unfurnished rooms we had some legal rights, so the estate agent, to get us out, said he could fix us up with a house if we were interested. This is what did happen. We saw the house, liked it and got down to borrowing the money, some from my aunts, and the rest from a mortgage at 4 1/2%, so I became the owner of my own house at a price of ££600. Within less than ten years I had paid it all off. It was a struggle, which left little room for luxuries, so you see why we had to go slowly on what we wanted, but we did it. Even my motor cycle was put away in a shed, where it remained for over 30 years. I was always going to take it out but I never did, and it was sold later as a vintage machine.
If we had been in a better financial situation I am certain we would have gone further and faster. But we did what we could and even if we made slow progress at times, we always had the pleasures of anticipation, and often, that is better than the realisation of a job accomplished. But I was determined to get Ethel started on the right path at once, as she was in the very early stages of pregnancy, but this had had no effect on her body as yet, other than on her breasts.
Corsets were required right away. Real ones, to tight lace her and support her, to push up her budding breasts and shape her waist before nature took a hand and she began to expand.
A large mail order firm up in the north, sent me, at my request, one of their catalogues, and in it there were pages of corsets and corselettes of various types and styles and sizes, in various colour and materials, all looking very attractive, and very cheap too. There were many of the low waisted kinds with elastic tops, such as Ethel was wearing, but there were also several of the old fashioned straight front lines, high under the bust and short on the hips. Many of them I could see were copies of advertised models, including one of the Twilfit reducing model I had myself, only cheaper. There was also a pair of high busted, Diagonal Seam corsets in black town, and another pair of high bust form, with elastic inserts over the abdomen and hips, which I thought would be ideal maternity wear for later on. They could be got with waists as small as 19 inches and also on approval from the book, but in addition, they offered to make any dress, costume or garment to the customers wishes and measurements.
Shoes, too, were coming into fashion with higher heels, and we saw some in the Dolcis shop with heels of 3 1/2 inches an inch higher then the normal 2 1/2 inches, which at that time were the highest commercially sold. Naturally I bought her a pair. At that time I thought the height was extreme and the heels looked amazingly slender, but when I compare them with the stiletto heals of the 1960s they really look very big and clumsy Indeed. I was not satisfied with the 3 1/2 inches, so I quickly added an extra lift with a rubber heel on top of that, which brought the height up to nearly 4 inches. An Ethel takes only size 3, they arched her insteps delightfully and looked very high compared to the usual heights of the heels other women were wearing at that time. One difficulty we found, was that Ethel, having no pronounced heels on the rear of her tiny feet, it was impossible, or so she said, to ever wear court shoes - which I personally like. Therefore we had to fit the court shoes with laces or bars over the insteps to hold them on. This has always been a trouble, when, as mostly court shoes are the only ones offered with slender high heels. It is not generally known that high heels are the best cure for those with flat feet, as I found myself. Also that high heels improve the way one walks, as well as the carriage. How often does one see a woman with low heels run over on one side, but rarely so with high heels, for it would be impossible to walk on them it they are run over, and as one must walk carefully, with the heels as upright as possible, they do not tend to get run over either. However, if there is any tendency to run over on one side or the other, and most people do so, Ethel being no exception, I found that the best answer was to build up the soles slightly on that side to tilt the foot correctly.
From the mail order booklet I selected carefully the corset that I would like to see her wear, some of the old fashioned, high busted, short hipped styles they had in their catalogue pages of which there were several from which to make a choice. One I selected, was the Diagonal Seam style in black sateen, over coutil. It was well boned and nicely cut to show off the waist. It was also an added attraction to me to get it in black, for I thought the idea of black undergarments against the womanly white flesh would give added feminine allure to any woman, especially Ethel, and to further that end I also got her a complete range of feminine underwear, vest, knickers and petticoat in lacy black, and very sexy they looked too. I also liked the idea of black silk or gunmetal stockings, which showed off her legs and ankles, down to her feet, all so much in view.
I ordered all these, including the corsets, for Ethel without her knowledge, and the corsets were with a 20 inch waist, a regular listed size. (They could be got down to 19 inches waist without need of a special order.) I thought 20 inches would give a very nice reduction for a start. In fact I also ordered a pair of the elastic inserted ones for her maternity wear in the later stages of pregnancy. Both pairs had high bust lines, a good 5 inches above the waist.
In a few days they arrived and I rushed to open the two long oblong boxes. Ethel said, "What have you got there? Corsets! Who are they for?" I told her that I had said before we married that I wanted her to wear real corsets and that she had promised to give me what I wanted. She picked them up, took one look at the colour, shape and size, felt the boning, then flow into a rage. She had never worn anything like that before, and wasn't going to begin now. They were so high that she thought it would give her a high prominent bust, which she thought was disgusting. They were the sort of things that she had seen gypsies or women on fair grounds wearing, and she wasn't going to come down to that level and show off her breasts for everyone to see.
I could understand this, for the accent of the 1920s was the flat-chested female, with a sack like shape and dress, with a short skirt, exposing plenty of legs. Women did everything possible to repress and flatten out their busts and many have regretted it. It would appear from Ethel's case, (she had very small breasts) that unless they are cultivated and left free to develop in the teens and early twenties, they will not develop properly later in life. Besides which, the repression of the breasts develops a mental outlook of antipathy, even antagonism and revulsion against what is a natural feminine asset, which reacts against their physical development in after years.
Be this twenties outlook as it may, here I had to fight it in Ethel's case, something that had been implanted into her mind during the past 10 or 15 years. Even when I broke down her resistance to the exposition and development of her bust, I found we could make very little real physical progress. She had been brought up to think that small breasts were the ideal and what she wanted, and so brain washed, small they had to be, as invisible as possible to the outside world.
Now I pointed out that she had promised to dress to please me, and I had told her that was one of the attractions I had given up when I came to her from Mary who had worn corsets of that kind for years without harm, at least she could try. In any case she should not condemn anything until it had been properly tried. That she might and probably would, find them quite comfortable if she came to wear them, for many woman had worn such corsets in the past, and many still did, or they would not be made. She could at least try them out. So we threaded in the laces, leaving a gap of about 4 inches open at the back, so they would go on easily and she would teal no undue compression in the beginning.
So I did at last, with plenty of kisses, fondling and wheedling induce her to try them on. Clasping the busks together on one of the lower studs I lifted her budding breasts over the upper edge, then brought the busks together from top to bottom. The new corsets were round her body so after squeezing her waist, pressing kisses to her lips, I turned her round and gently pulled the laces, bringing the edges at the back to within 3 inches apart.
Even then she stormed and wept, as she surveyed herself in the glass, saying that she could never go out like that, for she felt imprisoned and rigidly confined, so unable to bend, and what was more her figure was a sight. She said, "You don't expect me to work in these things do you?"
They were in fact, quite heavily boned, compared to anything she had worm before, having long stiff busks and back steels. But as they did not come down over the hips she could bend in that part of her body, even it not so easily as before at the waist ­line. which was held rigidly stiff and straight, but above, her chest was free, from which she now found herself breathing, so that her breasts jutted forth, well erected and blatantly outlined.
As I looked at her new figure, I was delighted with the improvement and had no hesitation in telling her so. I clasped my arms tightly around her waist, lifting her from her feet against my chest and kissed her passionately on the lips. My memories of Mary began to fade from that moment. I said, "This is so much nicer to hold you now. I love the feeling of firmness and stiffness. Besides, your waist is now so well defined and your breasts supported in the right position, I can feel them near me. You said it made you look a.sight. You are. A sight for sore eyes. Enough to send any man round the bend. At last you look like I hoped you might."
She said, "Do you love your little Effie now she has given in for you?" I said "I do, and I will." And I did.
What links here • References and Sources • Help • Contact info