The Bully

This is a departing from my usual genre of science and horror based fiction - a confessional in a sense, an almost entirely un-embellished recounting from my childhood.

The Bully

When I was young, I lived in a small village where everyone knew everyone else. Some people knew each other a little better than they should, but that’s another story.

It was one of many small villages one or two miles apart from others, scattered in the countryside between two large towns.  It had a single, central street with houses of all ages and styles on either side. There were several village greens, five magnificent horse chestnuts and a giant gooseberry bush behind the abandoned methodist chapel.  The shop sold a cornucopia of sweets and single cigarettes. There was a haunted house next to the pub, its tangled garden home to snails and, allegedly, an unmarked grave.  It thrilled us as kids, but it got knocked down for new houses eventually.  There was a playing field with a giant oak that challenged any child to climb it and a secret path that came out behind the shop.

The village lay amongst fields, bounded by sinuous streams and our magical places like Fairy Tale Wood, the Newt Pond and The Tunnel. Bucolic for the most part, the village also had an expertly vandalised phone-box and a bus stop that always stank of piss. Perhaps most out of place was the heavy plant yard which sat like an oil-soaked canker in the heart of the village. The yard was an irresistible assault course of gap-toothed digger buckets, tractor tires and hydraulics. It claimed the consciousness of several youngsters, as they bashed their heads on unforgiving steel, rusted to the colour of dried blood.

I shared countless days of scuffed knees and laughter with a gaggle of kids about my own age. My very best friend lived round the corner from me. He was the friend that ran the fastest, got more gold stars at school and had the most daring ideas for adventures. I was the friend that would always join in, but never go first. I was the friend that could always be persuaded.

We built tarzan swings over the beck and secret dens in the back fields.  We caught newts and kept them in a baby bath in the garage, where they would die.  We would sneak into gardens where conkers lay like treasures in the dew-soaked grass of October mornings.  We concocted plans to render them indestructible with vinegar and glue. We would play mischief when the nights drew in, longing to be old enough to buy fireworks.

Soon after leaving Junior School, my friend moved away when his dad bought a small farm and gave up being an engineer.  It was about 5 miles away, but easy enough on a bike.  My friend became a different boy, one used to hard farm graft, able to fix motorbikes and joyfully despatch rats with a spade.   At the age of eleven, we went to different schools. My friend went to the “rough” school and I went to the Church of England Comprehensive, which clung to its cohort of ex grammar-school teachers, with predictable results.  At my new school, being smart was considered cool. Only a few “towny” kids smoked behind the sheds.  I became bookish, specky. My friend and I grew apart.

Looking back, so many joyful childhood memories that were near forgotten have revealed themselves, one leading to another, like a string of colourful beads drawn out from the dust.  But there are things which have always stayed with me and never really been forgotten. Things which scratched their initials in my bark.

My very best friend, for example, and the way that he, so many times, got the better of me. “Shall we play boxing?” he said one day, showing off his new boxing gloves.

“Ok,“ I said. He battered me into semi consciousness, laughing. But it was a game, wasn’t it? I kept taking it, until his mum stopped him. I couldn't run away or cry in front of him.

On the tarzan swing, there was a game where you’d be swung round, faster and faster and then launched out over the beck. My friend would somehow manage to smack me into the tree trunk instead, head, shoulders, knees and nose bleeding.  But that was the game.

“Let’s make a catty,” he said, another time. “Let’s see if I can smash Mitchell’s greenhouse from the back field.”  We sliced up my bike innertube for rubber to make a catapult.  When Mr Mitchell inevitably caught us (of course it was us, everyone knew everyone in the village)  my friend said “Pretend it’s yours! My dad will knack me!” as he thrust the murder weapon into my hands.  Mr Mitchell dragged me home by the ear, where of course, I got the knacking, but mates never sprag on mates, do they?

And there was the time I surely came very close to death on the creaking asbestos roof of a barn, trying to retrieve my friend’s frisbee. “You’re smaller than me, you should go, in case the roof caves in,“ he said, urging me up.

There was abuse of all kinds throughout my childhood.  One of the “big lads” was a merciless bully to us younger kids. On his 17^th birthday he was killed on his new motorbike.  To the younger kids, this was just desserts, but others said his dad used a belt on him.  There was the brother and sister tag team – the weedy lad would start the fight, and his sister would be waiting, cat-like, to finish it off, tufts of hair clenched victoriously and skin beneath her nails. Their mother often wore sunglasses, to hide the black eyes she got from walking into the door. That’s what my mum said.

The alcoholic pub landlord would beat his wife. His son would pick a fight with anyone, and often it was me.   He always used his fists, but we all knew he carried a sheath knife and we were never certain he wouldn’t one day use it.  We sneaked into the pub cellar once, through the trap door round the back. He dared us to swig something vile from an unlabelled green bottle. “Whiskey,” he explained proudly, after a long, eye-watering swig “and you’re chicken if you don’t drink it.”

The school bus picked us up outside that pub.  There was a hierarchy in the queue. Bus stop rituals and rules evolved. One ritual was to tease a girl called Heather, who bore it, day after day. These days, she wouldn’t be consigned to mainstream education, she would have the special help she needed, been better protected by teachers, and indeed, from teachers. But in the 70’s, she had to fend for herself. One day, her mother came to the bus stop. None of us had ever seen her mother before, and she was evidently disabled, like her daughter. That day, she was an angry giant, fighting her daughter’s corner. That day she scrubbed a packet of crisps hard into my face, shouting in spittle-flecked rage at me, and the others, to leave Heather alone. And after that, we did.

One day on the school bus, a boy pulled up my underpants and gave me a superbly painful wedgie (the craze was just beginning) and everyone laughed, one girl in particular. So we tried to pull her skirt up. It was just for a laugh, really it was. We were eight or nine, and didn't understand the implications, but still it was two boys against one girl, and she had to fight us off.  It took her tears welling up to stop us; that and the scratches. I shudder now to think of that.

At secondary school, I was a new boy, like some 300 others. In their wisdom, my parents bought me the full uniform, complete with splendid blazer. Unique enough amongst my peers in that blazer, I was also presented with my father’s old school satchel, not an Adidas sports bag. I was made to wear a duffel coat, and not a snorkel parker. The cherry on the victim cake was the violin that I was learning to play.  Or was it the “nashies”, national health service spectacles, with the clear plastic frames?

My first two years at secondary school were thus a challenge.  A lot of kids, and even girls, would beat me up and pick on me. One small girl, Julie, in particular, took a great delight in kicking my arse from behind, every chance she could. 

But then puberty arrived, and I started to hit back; got into a lot of fights, gave as good as I got, sometimes better.  The bullying stopped, like magic. I even kicked Julie back, just once, and was sent to the Head for it. He loved jabbing you hard in the sternum with his pen. It hurt, but it felt worth it then, I remember.

When I think about Heather, I still burn with shame.