Houston, We Have A Problem

It’s 1960s Texas and the Space Race is in full swing – a liberating and exciting time for many of NASA’s women, including one Mrs. Blake from England whose mathematical genius and impeccable Oxbridge qualifications have had her shipped over to work away from home for a few years.

Of course, the Apollo Project wasn’t the only thing the state of Texas was known for at that time. It also gave us the infamous Texas Prison Strap, so often doled out to women for various misdemeanours alongside or in lieu of a prison sentence.

Our heroine thought herself immune, of course. Protected by NASA, by her work visa, by her own good behaviour. Well, maybe she was having an affair with a married man. But adultery isn’t illegal any more! This is the 60s!

Illegal or not, it’s enough to get you horribly framed if you happen to pick the wrong partner. And that’s how she’s found herself here: stripped down to her underwear and waiting on a hard, cold wooden bench outside the public auditorium of a Ladies’ Penitentiary. The strapping, when it comes – and she dwells on it in fascinated horror, bent over the bench as she waits, toying with the thick leather of the strap – will be almost impossibly severe, a hundred strokes over flimsy underwear and another hundred on the bare.

Will she be able to take it? Will the anticipation itself simply make it worse? And how will her husband – the headmaster of a girls boarding school, and known himself for his prowess with a cane – react when she’s sent home in such disgrace?