Chapter 10

It was a little after ten when the apprehensive, and soon to be very wet and even more cold, trio of Darlene, Tracy and Kylie arrived at the scene of the small town's festivities, and their misery. As with the two earlier arrivals, Julia and Beatrice, they had decided to undress at home and parade through the village barefoot and swimsuit clad. They had collected an enthusiastic retinue along the way. Particularly vociferous, if crudely expressed, appreciation was voiced regarding the two thong clad ladies as their fine young bottoms rolled from side to side in sweet co-ordination with the walking motion of their long well-muscled and shapely legs. Mrs Jenkinson, who was anxious to get things started as soon as possible, clucked disapprovingly at their tardy arrival.

A crowd of eager young and not so young men soon gathered around the booth. The three scantily clad and pretty young ladies sat in a demurely delicious row at the foot of a ladder leading up to the platform from which they were all fated to be dropped with great regularity and frequency throughout the next few hours. A second ladder led up from the tank back to the platform. The process of changing over from one girl to the next promised to be both complicated and lengthy, but at least this would give a few added seconds for them all to warm up before the next icy and heart stopping plunge.

Darlene bravely elected to go first and climbed up the rungs, turning frequently as she did so, with a bravado she was far from feeling, to smile enticingly at the assembled citizenry below. She felt inwardly very much as a French aristocrat in his ascent of the steps of the guillotine, must have done, and it least it would all have been over quickly for him, rather than being but the start of a day-long ordeal by cold torture.

As the observant and pessimistic Julia had all too accurately predicted, the very first shot to be aimed at the lever, a piece of wood the size of a barn door, sent poor Darlene straight down into the water. A mighty cheer went up from the callous spectators and the hearts of the other two girls sank into their boots - or would have if they had not been barefoot and thus bootless. The hapless and shell-shocked Darlene gasped as she dropped the ten feet towards the water, seemingly leaving her stomach suspended in mid-air above her. She then sank right to the bottom of the deep glass tank and emerged gasping with cold. She could not remember ever having had such an utterly shattering physical experience in the whole of her life so far and she had been to the seaside last year and had swum when the water was still far from warm. She was unable to suppress scream after ear shattering scream as her head finally emerged and after she had shaken the water from her face and hair.

As she climbed the ladder, it was only only a mixture of her own defiant courage and fear of letting down her two companions in misfortune that cut off her hysterics before they got the better of her. Darlene climbed back down to her friends and took her seat, shaken and almost sobbing, next to Kylie. "Oi bloody warn you - it's 'orrible, really 'orrible. Oi've never known anything so cold - it's so cold, it's painful, just like a knoife going through you," she whispered to the frightened girl at her side. "We'll never last all day. Thank God Julia's going to help out, bless her! Oi hope the people who dreamt this up get their just desserts - that's all Oi can say! Oi don't mind a bit of a ducking for a good cause - that's just a bit of fun, but this is something else altogether. That fucking bitch and that sick bastard of a Brigadier are going to pay for this! It's roight out of order, what those two are doing to us."

As Mrs Jenkinson had realised earlier on, the warm weather had proved to be a very mixed blessing. The contrast between the high air temperature and near freezing water was likely to be nearly lethal to the poor girls' physiology. It would be some time before they were even half way adjusted to their torment.