On a Saturday evening, shortly after tea, in the first week of May you would have been hard pushed to discern any enthusiasm for a new and brighter future from the sorrowful figure of Alice Pendleton. Indeed, her immediate future, such as it was, appeared to look very grim indeed. She was, at this time, stood to attention before a disciplinary hearing being chaired by Greenwood, ably assisted by the head of house keeping, Mrs Moorhouse and the senior secretary of the Hall's administrative section, Miss Cooper. Alice was facing this grim accusatory body in the austere surroundings of the Hall's vast library and not enjoying the experience one bit.

Exacerbating her discomfort was the fact that Alice was facing the disciplinary committee in her underwear; the standard chemise and French knickers which were the obligatory undergarments for all the Hall's maids. It had been, for some months now, a standing order that anybody called before a disciplinary hearing be obliged to do so in their underwear only. It was a requirement designed to underline the penitent's humility and culpability, adding humiliation to the lesson and serving as a reminder of their submission to authority.

In truth, however, parading in her underwear was the least of Alice's problems at that moment. The hearing was not going well. There was a long litany of negligence, lack of application to duty, insubordination and misconduct laid before her and even the most sympathetic of witnesses would have shaken their head sadly in realisation that there could be only one possible outcome to the whole sorry affair. That outcome stood in waiting, a few feet away from the table at which Alice's accusers sat, in the shape of the library's venerable old caning stool over which generations of the Hall's domestic staff and family had come to rue the error of their ways. Alice's eyes flickered nervously back and forth between the disciplinary panel and the caning stool, and, as her misdeeds were related to her in ever increasing detail, she was miserably certain that, whatever future the spring might hold in store for others, her own future was destined for an intimate acquaintance with the frightful, wooden apparatus.

Greenwood sighed deeply and, finishing his perusal of Alice's personal file, removed his spectacles with enormous dignity. Turning to his colleagues, he solicited their closing remarks. "Well Miss Cooper, do you have anything to add?"

Miss Cooper shook her head. "No Mr Greenwood. I'm afraid I have little to do with Miss Pendleton in the normal course of events but it would seem that the evidence we have been presented with covers the matter adequately."

"Thank you Miss Cooper, and you Mrs Moorhouse? Do you have any further observations to make?"

"Only to say that Alice here has been a great disappointment since she came to the Hall Mr Greenwood. I'm afraid to say that a stern lesson is well over due."

Greenwood nodded in apparent concurrence. "Well in that case, since we appear to have all the facts at our disposal, it is time to consider just what that lesson should properly be. Miss Pendleton...I would ask you to step outside for a moment while my colleagues and I decide upon a verdict." Greenwood pointed to a small hand bell on the table. "You will be summonsed back in to hear that verdict with the bell in due course."

Alice managed a clumsy curtsy. It was a newly reinstated custom. In former days, junior household members had been obliged to curtsy in deference to senior members of the Hall staff but the formal gesture of obeisance had fallen out of general use in the later part of the 20^th century and reserved only for greeting members of the Castlebridge family and guests at the Hall. With the recent erosion of respect for senior staff members so much in evidence however, Lord Castlebridge had issued an edict requiring all house maids and other lower female staff to curtsy to their ranking superiors when being addressed by them or when wishing to address them.

By this way His Lordship had hoped to restore a culture of respect and subservience among the staff but the edict had not been without its problems. Confusion had arisen as to just how superior a staff member had to be to one in order to merit the curtsy. Should, for instance, junior maids be required to curtsy to senior maids or those of their colleagues older than they or with longer experience. As was usual with one of Lord Castlebridge's enthusiastic initiatives, it had been left to Greenwood, in consultation with other household heads, to clarify the details of the order. Generally therefore, the curtsy was defined to be reserved for senior members of the staff, which meant heads of departments and their equals or anybody acting in their stead in which case they were considered to have the authority of that person. Largely speaking this meant that anybody at the Hall whose superiority carried sufficient authority to punish you was to be afforded the formal compliance of a curtsy.

One of the immediate effects of this reform was to expose just how woefully inadequate were the skills of many junior maids were when it came to performing a curtsy. Many young girls at the Hall had hitherto had performed functions that brought them only rarely into contact with Lord or Lady Castlebridge or their social equals. Scullery maids or laundry maids, for example, might consider themselves privileged to be addressed by Lord Castlebridge more than about twice a year and even the average house maid might only encounter His Lordship or his wife infrequently. As a result of this, few of them knew how to perform a curtsy at all. Only those girls, such as those called to wait upon their superiors personally, whose duties brought them into daily or regular contact with Lord and Lady Castlebridge or their guests, were at all habituated to the curtsy.

It was a classic example of how Lord Castlebridge would frequently issue such an order, on a whim, with nary a thought for the far reaching consequences of his latest brain storm, for the edict had caused unwarranted disruption to the Hall's routine. Greenwood and the other household heads had been obliged to order immediate training courses to correct the performance of the curtsy among the junior staff. A visitor to the Hall might have been surprised therefore, to come upon a room in which a dozen or more maids were to be found bobbing up and down incongruously under the barked orders of a senior staff member and having their posture and demeanour corrected with the judicious use of a leather strap on their bottoms.

To those people who have never been called upon to curtsy in their life, it often comes as somewhat of a surprise to realise just how tricky it is to perform a curtsy correctly. To execute a curtsy with the right combination of submissive servility and pretty elegance is a knack few girls are called upon to master in this modern age of greater social equality. It is an archaic anachronism relegated to the upper echelons of aristocratic society or, for that matter, such medieval backwaters as Castlebridge Hall.

The curtsy comes in different forms in different cultures but the form adopted at Castlebridge Hall conformed most closely to the customary obeisance of English society. To execute such a curtsy you must lower your head submissively and take hold of the sides of your skirt with both hands. The material of the skirt must be clutched between the thumb and first two fingers with the little fingers of each hand extended. Then one foot is extended in front of the other, slightly crossing at the ankle, with the feet slightly offset at an angle to each other. There is some confusion as to which foot should properly be the one extended forward. In English society generally it is not considered important but other cultures insist that it be the right foot that is extended. The weight must be placed on the forward foot and rested on the ball of the foot. Then the knees are bent, more outwardly than forward, and the body lowered smoothly and gracefully. The back must be kept straight at all times and, under no circumstances, should the bottom be allowed to protrude. How low one bends at the knee or how long the position is maintained is a matter of custom and circumstance depending on who you are making obeisance to. At Castlebridge Hall, a quick bob might suffice when greeting a senior staff member. Lord Castlebridge and his immediate family would merit a lower curtsy held for a second or two and very important visitors or very formal occasions required a deep curtsy held for three or more seconds before straightening up with grace.

It is by no means an easy gesture to accomplish and a poorly executed or awkward curtsy can look for all the world as if the person in question is having some sort of muscular spasm and is about to collapse at the knees. Alice's effort on this occasion wasn't quite that bad but pretty dire nonetheless. In truth, however, it wasn't entirely her unfamiliarity with the obeisance that was the cause of her dismal attempt. She had, in common with all the other girls at the Hall, now received basic training in effecting a curtsy but that training had been deficient in one important aspect. At no time had it been considered necessary to teach the girls how to curtsy while dressed in nothing other than their vests and knickers! It was the general opinion, among the girls of Castlebridge Hall, that it was impossible to perform a curtsy with any degree of daintiness or elegance in your underwear or, for that matter, in any fashion that didn't look downright silly!

Having performed her curtsy, such as it was, Alice stepped out into the hallway, outside the library, to kick her heels as her fate was decided. She didn't anticipate a long wait. It was plainly obvious from the remarks of her disciplinary panel that her culpability was already decided and that the only matter left open for discussion was the question of a fitting retribution for her misconduct. Alice had no illusions as to what that retribution was liable to be. Nine times out of ten, a disciplinary hearing was a mere formality; an admonition of the guilty party and a chance to formally confront them with their sins. It was rarely a committee of inquiry for, in most cases, the guilt of the accused was well established before they were even called before the panel and the hearing merely a ritual prelude to the inevitable punishment.

The punishment would not be a routine chastisement either. It would be no mere quick sharp lesson administered on the spot that was such a part of daily life at Castlebridge Hall with the penitent merely required to lift her dress and petticoat, lower her knickers to her knees and bend over to present herself for the attention of whatever instrument of chastisement lay to hand. A formal disciplinary hearing was inevitably the precursor to a formal punishment in the library and that usually meant the cane, applied to the naked miscreant, stretched and bound over the caning stool. In such cases the sentence was never less than thirty strokes and usually more.

Such was the doom hanging above the desolate head of Alice Pendleton and a further confirmation, should she have needed one, that her sojourn at Castlebridge Hall represented the worst days of her young life. She had never been formally caned in the library before but she had experienced lesser punishments. Mrs Moorhouse had strapped her on several occasions and twice she had been obliged to bend over for the cane from Greenwood. On the first occasion she had received ten strokes and it had been double that on the second. The pain of those canings had engraved itself on her memory and yet they would pale beyond significance compared with the coming ordeal, the exact details of which were now being solemnly determined beyond the closed doors of the library. On the basis of the accusations against her, the more experienced of her working colleagues believed she faced a minimum of forty strokes and more likely fifty. Alice shuddered at the thought of fifty strokes from Greenwood and, as she stood there trembling in the hallway, she was quite frankly terrified.