10 - The Lamp Post
Story index at the bottom
By Gillian B
Mon Jun 22 00:21:51 GMT Daylight Time 1998
The Lamp Post (Part 1)
Ash's last story brought to mind an incident that I'd forgotten. The details are rather hazy, which is why this is a short posting.
I must have been 10 or 11, so it would have been 1964 or 65. I was about the youngest of a bunch of 7 or 8 kids playing together in a quiet street a few hundred yards from my house. They weren't the usual crowd I played with, but I can't remember the reason I was with them.
The game was a Wild West adventure of some kind. One of the younger girls and I were both tied up at one point in the game. We weren't very well tied up - just a rope round my wrists in front of me. I was free in about 30 seconds - it just wasn't tight enough to prevent me pulling my hands out. There was a certain amount of surprise amongst the boys. They re-tied me, with my hands behind my back this time. It took a little longer, but I was still free in a few minutes.
The game degenerated into "let's-tie-Jill-up" after that. They re-tied me with more rope (ankles and round arms and chest), but the weak point was still my wrist binding, so I still escaped. There followed a whispered conference between the boys. (Except for me, all the other girls - 3 of them - were tied up at this stage.) One of the boys went off and came back with his older sister (a girl of maybe 15 or so) and several long skipping ropes. (Standard 'long' skipping rope for us was an 8-foot (2.5m) length of sash cord from the local ironmongers - 2 girls would swing it and anything up to 4 could jump in between.)
The older girl seemed to know what she was doing. The skipping ropes (3 or 4 of them) were tied together end-to-end to make one long rope. I was positioned against a lamp post. The lamp post had a tubular steel mast. Up to about 3'6" (1.1m) off the ground, it was about 10 inches (250mm) diameter, then tapered in sharply (like the shoulder on a bottle) to 4 inches (100mm). The thick part had a door in it for getting to the timer. The centre of the joined skipping ropes was tied round the lamp post just above its "shoulder" with a clove hitch or an overhand knot. The ends were then brought down over my shoulders, crossed over on my chest, taken round behind the lamp post and crossed, brought round to the front again, a little lower down my body, and so on. This continued until I had been roped all the way down to mid-calf level, when the two ends of the rope were finally knotted together.
My wrists and ankles were not bound, but because I was so tightly tied to the lamp-post, I couldn't move at all. My arms were straight down by my sides and slightly behind me, trapped by the lamp post, my own body and the ropes securing me. My legs were similarly immobilised by rope going round them and the lamp post. I only realised later why the tying stopped where it did instead of going all the way to my ankles - it finished just below the door on the lamp post, and that stopped the rope working upwards to give me any slack.
I couldn't move at all and the boys looked very pleased with the result. The other girls were just sitting on the grass with their wrists and ankles tied (one was gagged). They looked horrified as they wondered what was going to happen to them next. What happened next was gags for me and the two other as yet ungagged girls. The boys then disappeared from the scene. After a stunned pause for thought, the other three girls set about trying to untie each other. After about 10 minutes, they had managed to get one girl's hands free. It only took another minute or two for them all to get loose. They tried to get me free after that, and they ungagged me immediately, but the knots in the rope were all too tight for them to get undone. One of the girls finally went off to fetch her mother to help. The mother arrived clutching a kitchen knife and cut me free in matter of seconds. I had "pins-and-needles" all over after I was untied and it was a few minutes before I could walk home.
I don't remember playing with that group of kids again!
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Gillian B's stories
- 01 - Jill's Revenge (fF/mm)
- 02 - Murder at the Vicarage (ff/f, f/F, f/ff)
- 03 - Gillian's Birthday Present (*/mf)
- 04 - Peter and Paul (mm/F, F/mm)
- 05 - Tying Myself up in Knots (f/self)
- 06 - The Magic Show (f/f)
- 07 - Tying Myself up in Knots (Again) (f/self)
- 08 - Trouble with Tim (f/m, f/self, m/f)
- 09 - The Great Biscuit Robbery (mf/F, F/mf)
- 10 - The Lamp Post (m+f+/f+)
- 11 - Teacher Torture (or: Ol’ Soggy) (ff/FF)
- 12 - Anna's Story (ff/f, F/ff)
- 13 - A Game of Soldiers (mm/f, Ff/mm)
- 14 - A Good Old Fashioned English Hanging (f)
- 15 - Kidnapping Cathy (f/m, m/ff, ff/m, f/f)
- 16 - A Surprise Party (fff/f)
- 17 - Challenging Mum (F/mf, mf/F)
- 18 - Getting Tied Up in my Studies (f/f, ff/F)
- 19 - Money for Old Rope (M/F)
Index of all stories in the "Archive for Everyone" section