The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story by Sophie Morgan Read Free Book Online

deadlines – essays, work for the university paper, and then far too quickly and yet oh-so-inevitably, the avalanche of exams. I crammed desperately, focusing on the next exam, memorizing facts and figures, reading and rereading texts and then regurgitating them on endless blank sheets of A4 in, I hoped, a semblance of sense before moving on to the next subject to rinse and repeat. Three weeks after finals had finished I pretty much forgot everything I had ever learned, and while this would have horrified my parents, I didn’t mind so much. The most important thing university taught me, I think, was confidence. Not necessarily confidence in myself over all things – who’d want to be that kind of ego on legs anyway? But more a sense that I could cope with anything life threw at me with a fairly calm head and a sense of humour. My next task was to find my place in the world. I knew I wanted it to involve writing, but I was realistic. People worked for years to try and become novelists, and since I had the attention span of plankton and the longest thing I’d managed to write was a dissertation I decided the first thing to do was get a job.
    I moved back with my parents shortly after graduation and gave my CV to temp agencies for admin andtyping jobs (a handy side effect of writing as much as I had through university was that I could type really fast). A recruitment consultant showed me how to use a foot-operated Dictaphone machine and tested how fast I could type things played back on it. When the results pinged back at 75 words a minute even with my clunky two-fingered typing she was thrilled, and over a period of months began sending me out to various places to work, typing, filing and generally being a professional office minion, all the while saving money as I figured out my next move.
    Returning to my childhood home – with all the associated roast dinners and fussing that entailed – was a wonderful feeling, but by Christmas I knew that I needed to be making plans to move out. I’d become accustomed to my independence and despite the comfortable routine I’d fallen back into, I missed having my own space, eating cereal for dinner at 10pm if I fancied it, or having a bath at 3am if I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Around about the same time I began to find my temporary job was feeling distressingly permanent. I didn’t mind the work, but there was a point where I worried it was just a matter of time before my brain would start seeping out from between my ears. It was repetitious, often dull, and at one particular office where I’d been asked to transcribe a letter that could only really be described as word-babble I found myself almost despairing. There had to be more than this. I needed to figure out what I was going to do and start doing it soon – and since my vows to start writing a novel had been scuppered by commuting, internetgaming and trips to the cinema it needed to be something achievable sooner rather than later.
    I went to my local paper. I had a long and really helpful conversation with the news editor there about what life was like as a hack. Looking back without the wide-eyed optimism of youth, I realize now she was mostly warning me of the terrible pay, long hours and interminable council meetings. But then she suggested I go out on a job with the paper’s photographer, come back and write it up. I stopped long enough to borrow a notebook before I was trotting down to the photographer’s car.
    No one has ever taken a primary school harvest festival picture story as seriously as I did that day. I wrote down the names and ages of all the children – it sounds simple but is akin to herding cats while keeping track of them all. I asked the slightly nonplussed headmistress probably a dozen questions, some of which seemed to actively confuse her. I was Woodward. I was Bernstein. I was both of them at once, albeit with a particular interest in tinned goods. As we walked back to the car