Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (30 page)

The childhood memories that hurt me the most relate to the differences between life with my grandparents and the life of others in my family. There were small but distinct differences which together added up to more than the sum of their parts: many subtle slights which hardly would have been noticed by my birth-mother but which highlighted the constant divide between ‘my’ family and ‘her’ family. Without trying to sound like a poor, downtrodden, pantomime Cinders, real divisions did exist between me and my half-siblings. Many of my clothes were hand-me-downs from neighbours, and I knew that major items such as a smart new dress, or a new set of trainers, were only for Christmas. In fact, I always did rather well at Christmas because my birth-mother and other relatives would ensure I had toys – but the rest of the year was less fruitful. I had the warmth of my grandparents’ love but my room was as cold as an icewell. Perhaps affecting my day-to-day life more than anything else, my birth-mother’s family and all of my friends’ families had the amazing luxury of a car. My aged granddad couldn’t drive. He, Nan and I could only take the bus.

Some childhood memories can hurt more than others. When I was about nine years old, not long after I had learned of my birth-mother’s existence, I was hugely impressed to hear that she and her husband and her other young children had gone on holiday to Spain. To this day I can remember wondering at the amount of money it must have cost to go on an aeroplane to a foreign country. When they got back, my birth-mother came round to my house with tiny, trinket presents for my grandparents and for me. I have no idea all these years on what those present might have been but I can still recall Eileen showing off her tan to my grandmother in the kitchen. I had never been abroad and wanted to ask: ‘Why didn’t you take me?’

By the time I was just a little older I was already self-censoring my financial demands. On one occasion, all of the children in my class were offered the chance of a short cruise as an educational trip. I knew it wasn’t for me; Nan and Granddad would never be able to afford it and so I didn’t even ask. ‘It’s not nice for them to have to tell me they don’t have that money to spare,’ I thought. ‘It’s not right to upset them.’ When my grandparents later heard that everyone but me was going on the ship they asked my birth-mother if she could help, which I instinctively knew was awkward for them to do. I think Eileen and her husband did offer the money, but by then all of the places had gone.

One last example which springs to mind now seems so trivial that I hardly dare to mention it. And yet, it was important to me at the time: ‘The Tale of the Nat West Piggies’.

The pigs in question were a set of souvenir, ceramic, piggy-banks
given free to children who opened a savings’ account. The more money you saved, the more members of the piggy family you could collect. The bank advertised the offer on television (an advertisement which I watched so often that I can still sing the tune). An aunt gave me a few pounds to open an account and collect Pig Number One of the set, a little nappy-clad piglet called ‘Woody’. Other children at school were collecting not only Woody’s sister Annabelle but also the more expensive figures of the Mummy and Daddy pigs. I innocently asked my nan if I could put more money in the savings account to get the next pig in line. There was the most dismissive of answers: ‘Sorry Miranda, you know we don’t have the money for silliness like that. Just be happy with the little baby pig that you’ve got; he’s adorable isn’t he?’

I resolved to put the piggy family out of my mind and soon enough the craze died down at school. I probably had forgotten by then that Woody still sat in glorious isolation in my bedroom cupboard. I would never have thought any more about it except that some months later I visited my birth-mother and played in my baby half-sister’s warm and cosy bedroom. I could hardly believe what I saw. There, arranged in two neat rows on her bedroom window sill, sat the entire Piggy family group. She owned Woody, Annabelle, big brother Maxwell and even pig-parents, Lady Hilary and Sir Nathaniel. I went home that day with nobody having the faintest clue why I was feeling sad; I couldn’t tell anyone what had hurt me. The truth is that, however silly it was, I’d been gutted by her having the entire set. The tale had a postscript many years later when I jokingly mentioned my childhood disappointment to a friend. Days later I opened a package
delivered to my dungeon and found a complete Nat West Pig family, in pristine condition, carefully wrapped and given as a present.

Looking back now I can see that none of these things really mattered, but at the time they were quite crushing. It’s hard once in a while not to look at family life from my perspective and question why some of the choices were made in the way they were. I truly believe my birth-mother loved me; I truly believe that she acted in the way she thought might be right. And yet her actions, her rejection of my position as her first-born child and her unwillingness to accept me into her second family, must have influenced my life in various ways. My birth-mother and I are now the closest of friends. I love her and I know she loves me. Neither of us would ever wish to hurt the other. From talking to her many times since my grandparents’ passing, I know that she did what she felt to be right at the time. And how can I ever understand the position she was in? I will never be an unmarried, 16-year-old girl struggling to cope in the 1970s. I will never be able to fully appreciate the pressures she was under when that happened. Who am I to sit in judgment upon her?

All that I can try and judge is what effect nurture had over nature in shaping my life. Did childhood envy and my grandparents’ relative poverty make me more money-conscious than others might have been? Did my older-than-usual parents lack the empathy and control which might have led my teenage self along a different track? Did being homeless and thrown onto my own resources at such an early age shape the independence and the drive that has characterised my business life? Did
teenage erotic adventures set my sexuality on a course that still determines my own adventurous sex life and the profession I follow to this day?

You may have your own opinions about those questions and your own opinions about my admittedly unusual lifestyle and career. Truth is, I cannot know the answers, and perhaps I shouldn’t ask.

My working life brings men to my feet and offers endless excitement and fun; my filming career scratches the itch of my urge to be creative. I’m reconciled in a loving friendship with the woman I can finally call ‘Mum’ and, above all, my loving partner has filled in the final missing piece in the jigsaw of my particular life.

I am a happy woman. What more could anyone want?

AFTERWORD

I
n recent years there has been a concerted effort by many sections of the UK adult film industry and by the Government to seek ways to safeguard children from the dangers of the internet.

Even though many people reading this will correctly believe I am myself responsible for a considerable volume of internet adult material, I am also the strongest possible supporter of every effort to safeguard children from accessing such sites.

Members of my immediate family have young children of their own and, despite my profession and my hard-core film work, I would hate them to see the material I and my fellow dominatrices produce. Don’t get me wrong: I have not the slightest problem with the availability of the strongest possible adult material, as long as it is only viewed
by
adults.

That stance in defence of the freedom of all grown men and women to see and hear whatever turns them on, and my distaste of the narrow-minded, often church-based opposition that attempts to stifle that freedom, does not prevent me from trying to protect children. No child under the age of 18 should be allowed to access adult content websites and I have tried to campaign among my fellow film-makers to ensure that safeguards are in place. My own film business is registered with ATVOD (the UK’s regulatory authority for television and video on demand) and I’ve worked closely with them to ensure that nothing on websites under my control conflicts with their strict code of conduct when it comes to access by minors. The only way of viewing over-18 material on my sites is if you can pay by a safe debit card – not credit cards which even children may obtain.

I am yet to be convinced that ATVOD is the correct vehicle for this work – they are independent of government and seem to be primarily interested in collecting registration fees as a first step, rather than their far more important role of safeguarding children. However, they are at the moment all that we in the UK have to enforce this work and I’ve been delighted to see them taking steps in the right direction.

The worry is that responsible producers, among whose number I count myself, are outweighed on the international internet by those who seem not to care who views the hardest of sexual material. Some of my direct competitors with UK-based operations appear to be immune to interference and make no attempt to build child-proof firewalls to protect their sites.

Only the creation of a level playing field in this fiercely
competitive area of commerce can truly bring about a situation where parents can rest easy in the knowledge that children are safe from internet harm. That’s an aim I work towards every time we film and upload our most sexy material to the web.

– Miranda

‘Now I had graduated… it was time to put “Dominatrix Mistress Miranda” back in her box.’ But real life didn’t quite work out like that.

‘In the depths of my memory I have the tiniest snippets, like snapshot photographs in my head, of [my birth-mother] being there’ – baby Miranda already charming the camera.

‘Many families have secrets; the skeletons of long-forgotten mistakes or indiscretions lurking in the cupboard for years…’ Young Miranda, still innocent of her family history.