Schooling.
I wasn’t overly interested in boys at school but they sure were interested in me.
It didn’t take long for the boys to notice I was ugly and not one to take things lying down. So when they teased me, I lost my shit and therefore they teased me more until it got to a point out of outright bullying on their part and pure sadness on mine.
The boys I went through school with were utterly cruel to me.
Matthew once threw a basketball at full pelt deliberately at my head and all the boys laughed.
Anthony stabbed me in the back several times with his compass in science class, the same compass he used to clean the dirt out from under his fingernails with.
Even one of the teachers bullied me, he didn’t celebrate my feistiness either. Before I even got into high school, I would occasionally see Mr MacRae who would sarcastically tell me that he couldn’t wait to have another kid from my family in his class next year, he was riling me up before I even had a chance. He was the Technology teacher, South African, and in my first class with him he told us kids that he used to beat up black people with chains, until he became a Christian obviously, and then proceeded to demonstrate how sharp the chisels were by using one to shave a 6-inch strip of hair off his arm.
Quite why a 50-something year old man was taking so much joy out of giving a 13-year-old girl a hard time is not worth considering, but he so clearly got a kick out of it. His snidey comments, his singling me out, he took pleasure in making my life difficult. At one point he went off on leave for a term and we had a stand-in teacher, Mr Brian. Mr Brian was lovely and he helped me complete my cast iron fire poker project. When I say ‘helped me’, he totally understood I wasn’t overly interested in ironwork and likely this wasn’t going to be a skill I required in later life, so he kindly made the whole thing for me.
Mr Brian left prior to marking the pokers so when Mr MacRae returned, he marked all the kids’ fire pokers. And he gave me a B. It was a semi-victorious moment because it proved he had it in for me but I still had to endure the remaining school year with him. Aresehole.
In the end, it got to such a point of animosity between him and I that it was decided I would not do Tech anymore and Mr Winkler said he would take me in to do extra music classes instead. Sadly, despite Mr Winkler’s generosity, I can’t say that today my saxophone playing skills are any better than my iron work skills.
The bullying persisted and only finally came to an end when my parents took me out of that school for an all-girls school across town, 9 years later. I did really well there.
Time passed and I had been living in London for a few years when one summer I was home for the holidays and I met up with some of my girlfriends from school. We were sitting at a table outside a bar in town and a group of boys we went to school with randomly arrived and sat at the table next to us. Whilst I say randomly, this is a small town so maybe not as random as it would be in New York say or Rome but nevertheless they were there unexpected.
The boys said hello to all of the girls around the table by name and just sort of ignored me until Anna said ‘Guys, that’s Her!’ and they all said ‘Oh, shit, we didn’t recognise you, hi.’ Whilst it was a victory over my ugliness, I still didn’t feel completely vindicated as there wasn’t any acknowledgment of their dreadful behaviour.
One day, a few years later again, Luke stopped me on the street when I was home visiting and he apologised completely unprompted for being such an arsehole to me in school.
And just a couple of years ago, I went to buy a coffee from a trendy little joint in town and I received another apology from David who served me, who I barely remembered going to school with him. He even took the time to step away from the counter to look me in the eye to make sure his apology really hit the mark. He was sincere and it was very good of him to take the time 30 years after the fact.
Perhaps that expensive Christian education did have some positive outcomes after all.
I don’t know if things are abundantly better now as kids are inherently mean, but as adults we are much more attuned to noticing bullying and knowing what to do when we see it and feeling obligated to act. No more do we think it’s a good way for kids to learn what the real world is going to be like, because we have laws now to say it’s not acceptable there either!
