The sound of horses walking into the stable yard snapped me back to reality from the day-dreaming memories of the old world where Jane Robinson had been able to walk normally on her own two legs. Had it really only been 18 months since I had come to work on the James' estate as an eager young 19 year old, hoping that working in the stables would help soften the painful memory of my parents recent death in the car crash which would have claimed me as well, but for the argument which had resulted in my staying with a girlfriend instead of going back up to London with them?

Although the insurance payouts had meant that I was financially secure, I took the lowly job of stable girl so that I could be around strangers and work with horses and the mental scars could heal at their own pace, and I wouldn't wallow in self pity. Mr. And Mrs. James owned a small group of companies ranging from electronics to PR, and whilst each company had its own M.D., they both took pleasure in a 'hands on' style of ownership. In spite of the fact that they both had what most people would call disabilities, their life-style was hectic, and it wasn't long before my growing friendship with Mrs. James led to her offering me a position as her personal assistant, which I jumped at. Soon I moved into a small flat attached to the main house, and I was spending more time socially as well as at work with them both, even to the extent that Mrs. James often confided in me about any troubles she was having due to what she referred to as her small problem, and, since we were about the same height and size, letting me have free run of her extensive and expensive 'cast offs' wardrobe.

As I said they were both disabled, although it didn't seem to worry either of them unduly. Spending time in the main house I had become closer to the two of them and was used to the sight of them walking almost normally in the morning, and then using crutches or other aids in the afternoon. I just thought of them as a thirty-something couple who were both my employers and my friends. Before long I was accompanying them on business trips, and it was on a fateful trip to a German city that I looked the wrong way before crossing the road and walked into the path of an oncoming tram, and my life changed forever, taking a path much closer to their own.

Turning round to face the entrance to the yard, I winced with pain as the shattered bones of my left knee and shin, held out straight in front of me in the external fixing brace, were jolted as the electric wheelchair caught on the uneven cobbles of the yard. Still that pain would soon be replaced by a different and hopefully short-lived pain, and my left leg would be a problem of the past I reflected glumly.

Mrs. James, or Maggie as she liked me to call her, came in first, and from the right hand side you wouldn't have suspected that she was anything other than an attractive woman on a fine chestnut mare. It was only when she swung around to the dismounting steps that you could see that she was not as normal as she at first appeared. Her saddle had been modified on the left hand side, and no longer had leathers and a stirrup hanging down. She had lost her left leg above the knee in a car crash some six years previously, and she had explained to me that after attempting to ride wearing her artificial leg she had been frustrated at not being able to feel what the horse was doing through the hard plastic of the thigh socket, and had had a saddle specially built to cater to her needs. A slightly padded leather socket now accepted the remaining 9 inch stub of her leg, lightly laced onto the stump to hold the socket in place over the uniquely tailored jodhpurs she wore. The socket was only fixed at the bottom and it allowed her to rise in the saddle as she would have done with two legs. Now as she dismounted she slackened off the laces and gently eased her stump out of the encasing leather, twitched and shook it a few times to ease out a bit of soreness, and sliding her stump over the saddle, elegantly swung down off the mares right hand side, and, balancing on her one leg in it's polished black riding boot, tidied and smoothed herself down before tucking a pair of full-length dark wood crutches under her arms. She handed the reins to the new stable lad and after moving easily down the steps, swung smoothly across the yard and into the house, calling a greeting to me as she went. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I would look that graceful and be as self confident after my surgery next week.

The orthopedic specialist that Maggie and Robert, her husband, had called in to take care of me after the accident, had explained to me a few days ago that as the bones had shown no signs of healing in three months, it was unlikely they ever would, and as well as needing a permanent external support for the leg, it was probable that an infection would set in sooner or later posing a serious threat to my life. He suggested that it would be wiser to amputate under controlled conditions than in a panic with infection in my system, and that for ease of using a prosthesis in future an amputation at about 5 or 6 inches above my shattered knee would be most suitable. I had almost choked when he uttered the phrase 'most suitable'. What did he imagine I thought a 'suitable' amount of stump-leg for a pretty 19 year old girl would be? It wasn't as if I didn't know that life after a leg amputation wasn't worth living, Maggie amply demonstrated that it was, or that there weren't people who found a one legged woman attractive, as Rob (who was a double above knee amputee himself) also proved. But it was MY long leg he was blithely talking about reducing to a small scarred stump! And as an attractive and previously active young woman I was having difficulty adjusting to the idea that soon there would be another permanent monopede on the James estate, and that it would be me!.

Now there would be no swift return to normal two-legged walking after I had indulged in my fantasy role-playing, imagining myself as either Maggie or Rob, going about their daily lives as amputees. As Maggie I would dress in some of her clothes and use her crutches around the house as she sometimes did. Since I was still in the throes of having a severe but private crush on him, my fantasy play as Rob was a lot more complicated and involved 'becoming' him far more than I acted out being Maggie. One morning when they were away on business I had gone into their room to tidy things up as usual and had noticed a pair of Robs favourite old peg-legs lying beside the bed instead of with the rest of his prostheses in his dressing room. Usually when Rob used these old pylon style legs with aluminium walking sticks or elbow crutches around the house instead of his full height modern legs, most of their length was hidden under long shorts or cut down trousers, and I was curious to see what they were like.

They were not made with hi-tech plastics and composites like his proper legs, being mostly leather and steel, with wooden blocks for feet. The two 10 inch long sockets for his thigh stumps were of well worn and polished tan coloured leather with an arrangement of laces, buckles and belts to fasten them securely to his two stumps, open ended at the bottom and with a rigid padded cuff around the top which I imagined would support some of his weight as he walked. For 'legs' there were just a pair of side steel bars with a simple lock release mechanism to let the normally fixed knees bend for sitting down, and the feet were slightly curved wooden rockers at the end of short wooden shaft calf sections, a far cry from the realism of his day to day limbs with their complex hydraulic knees and flexing foot and ankle joints.

These old fashioned pylons made Rob about 9 inches shorter than his 'normal' height of about 6 ft, but there were times, Maggie had told me, when he preferred using them around the house to give his stumps a rest from the closely moulded suction sockets of his modern limbs. The more I handled those pegs with their fascinating buckles and laces and ran my hands up and down the inside of those leather stump buckets polished smooth by years of wear from his sock clad thighs, the more I found myself wondering what he really felt like stumping around the house on them, and since I had the house to myself I decided to try them on to find out for myself.

Sitting on the bed I slipped out of my jeans and trainers, and with my heart beating fast, I eased my bare thighs into those smooth sockets of his and pulled them up so that the padded cuffs were snug up against the tops of my legs. His large and muscular thigh stumps seemed very close in size to my own legs and I laced up and tightened the two stump buckets onto my new pretend thigh stumps with no trouble at all, and adjusted the leather straps and buckles so that the waist belt was down on my hips, and the suspension straps held the sockets close up on to my new stumps. Using a pair of wide leather belts I held my lower legs bent up securely out of the way with my feet tucked up behind my bum.

I lay back on the bed for a while just enjoying flexing and moving my new 'legs' in the air, touching and patting my 'stumps' through the sensuous polished smoothness of their leather sockets, experimenting with the knee joints, making first one then both legs end at the knee, enjoying playing with the automatic locks which clicked on and held the peg rigid whenever the leg was fully extended. My imagination started to run wild, thinking of Robs stumps in those peg legs that now tightly held my two thighs, and, although my feet were becoming numb, after a while I felt that I was ready to try and stand up on them.

My first problem was turning over onto my front as the pegs, although rigid, were quite light, and I didn't have the counterbalancing weight of my feet and lower limbs, and with my feet up behind my bum the pegs didn't want to lie flat on the bed as I knew they would if my own legs just ended in stumps like Robs. As I now had no real backwards leverage from my legs below the knees all the effort had to come from my arms, but after a couple of attempts and with a kick from my right 'stump' as I rolled over, I finally managed it and realised that life as a double amputee must take some getting used to if even simple tasks like turning over were to prove so difficult.

Now that I was on my front I tried flexing my two stumps and raising my bum up in the air by pushing up with my arms and my peg legs, and again I was surprised when I realised how much extra effort was needed to overcome the leverage caused by the stiff inert pegs. It seemed that my 'stumps' now ended where my awareness of the smooth leather of the sockets on my skin stopped, and the rest of the length of the pegs had an odd sense of both being but not being fixed to, and a solid part of my new 'legs'. It was the same sort of feeling that I had had the first time I wore a very high heeled pair of platform boots, with the supple black leather snugly zipped up to my knees, and an odd feeling of 'something solid' 4 inches under my feet and 7 inches under my heels. Now though the 'heels' were 3 or 4 times as high and I wouldn't have any knees or ankles to transfer my thigh strength to my feet or help me balance on or feel the ground if I did try and walk on those fascinating pegs of Robs.

Gently I moved myself to the edge of the bed and, bending my 'legs' down, tried to feel where my 'feet' were to place them in a stable and secure stance on the floor. Pushing with my arms I eased myself up to a standing position and as my weight transferred on to the pegs my thighs slid down in the smooth polished leather, settling a little deeper into the sockets, and I felt the padded cuffs at the top take most of the weight on the pelvic bone below my buttocks and at the tops of my thighs. With a giddy rushing sensation I began to feel a little of what Rob experienced every day of his life and I felt a mixture of pity and sorrow, and an even greater admiration for the way in which he managed with such apparent ease on his prostheses. Very carefully I swung my pelvis forwards and backwards a little to get used to the leverage my stumps could exert on my peg legs, and shifted my balance from side to side, transferring my weight from one peg to the other to see what my full weight felt like on each 'stump'. I was almost caught out by the odd sensation of my wooden feet seeming to want to twitch forwards on their own as my weight came off them, even though I was not aware of kicking my stumps forwards at all.

The whole change in my feeling of balance and the sensation of floating above the ground, although 8 or 9 inches shorter than my real height, and being unable to feel what my 'feet' were doing was really weird, but in an odd way my peg legs, firmly held up on to my stumps by their straps and laces, began to feel really safe solid and secure. I had lost all feeling in my lower legs and feet by now, and I started to enjoy the feeling that it was just my pretend thigh stumps being firmly encased by those smooth polished leather stump buckets, and the sensual creaking of the leather and mechanics of the pylons as I shifted my weight from one peg to the other, slightly moving each rocker foot and then settling my stump down onto the peg again became a very pleasurable sensation. I now felt confident enough to try and turn myself around and attempt to walk with the aid of Robs elbow crutches, which I had already adjusted down to what I thought would be the right height for me on his peg legs.

This simple act of turning round proved to be really difficult as I had to shuffle my legs in alternate small steps to try and move because I had almost no ability to rotate my stumps to make my feet change direction and it seemed that all I could do was to splay my legs outwards to move my wooden rocker feet in a new direction, but the pegs then wanted to carry on moving outwards and I found I had to make much more of an effort to get back up to a stable upright stance again. What must it be like turning round on two full length prostheses on uneven surfaces and without the security of crutches I wondered?. Even when upright and steady I was still in danger of losing my balance at times because of the tendency for my pegs to kick forwards on their own if I shifted my weight even only by a slight amount.

Soon I was consciously holding the leg back as I took my weight off that foot and I learnt to hold the thigh stump that was bearing the most weight in backwards extension to stop my body leaning too far forwards and further unbalancing me. Next I experimented with keeping all of my weight on the crutches and just one peg, kicking my other stump and leg forwards and backwards to get used to the stump action I would need for walking, and then taking my weight on the other stump and repeating the motions. Facing out towards clear bedroom floor, sweating slightly with the exertion and with a growing feeling of tension in my groin due to the use of so many thigh/stump and pelvic muscles, I thought I felt ready for my first adventure of walking as a double amputee.

To start with I only took small steps, moving a crutch forward and bringing the opposite peg's foot up level with it and then repeating with the other side, but my confidence quickly grew and I was able to take larger steps, although still only with an alternate crutch and leg action but I felt a lot safer and I was having great fun, albeit very tiring. As I slowly crutched and stumped my way across their bedroom, I imagined that I was Maggie and I had lost my other leg, and it was my loving husband Rob who was teaching me these first things that every DAK has to learn and master as second nature to compensate for their lost legs.

On that first attempt I only went as far as the bedroom door, laboriously turned myself round and started back across the room feeling ever more confident, just making it back to the safety of the bed as my strength ran out. Standing by the bed with almost no support from the crutches I just allowed myself to gently fall forwards and lay there panting with the exertion until I recovered enough to drag myself back up on to the bed, rest some more and then flick myself over on to my back and release the belts holding my lower legs which had gone to sleep ages ago, and had had no feeling since I had first stood up by the bed.

Now that I had had a taste of the experience of life as a DAK like the object of my lust, Rob, I knew that I would want to try again......

To Be Continued....