In the last couple of days I have read two stories of early teenage life which had resonance with me. The first was Demetrious Panton's story of sexual abuse and betrayal in Islington. Demetrious suffered horrific abuse at the age of 11 at the hands of the paedophile who was then head of a children's home in the London Borough of Islington.
When Demetrious raised the issue some years later it took Islington Social Services four years to respond. The letter he received from them simply urged him to "move on from those unhappy times". Eventually the scandal grew to encompass children's minister Margaret Hodge, who was eventually forced to issue an apology for comments she had made about Demetrious.
When you read about this kind of thing it is inevitable that your thoughts turn toward your own childhood and you remember those times -- those really bad experiences -- you would rather forget.
And the first thing that I would like to forget, if I could, would be my time with Nigel, the son of the woman who would feed me lunch on schooldays, and who would look after me through the school holidays while my mother and father were at work. Nigel was perhaps five years older than I, no more. But do I remember that he had already grown pubic hair.
Nigel's thing, the thing he liked most, was to get me to "stroke his knob". During the long holidays he would trap me in a remote part of the house when his mother was out, sometimes even when she was in, and get me to wrap my hand around his hot stiff little penis. "Jerk it," he would say, panting. "Jerk it more." The combination of fear and revulsion made me want to vomit.
Always I would ask him to leave me alone. I did not want to touch him, to be anywhere near him. He asked me once to put it in my mouth, but even though I was thoroughly terrified I would not acquiesce to that request. I remember him chasing me up the garden path, threatening to kill me if I told anyone what was going on, and then dragging me back to his bedroom for what he liked to call another "feel". I was ten years old.
After a couple of years of this torment I finally got up the courage to tell my mother what was happening. It was so hard to tell her. At that age your head cannot find the words to express the feelings you have, to explain about the situation. You don't even know if what is happening to you is right or wrong. It feels wrong, but perhaps it is not; maybe this is something that is allowed in proper society, or perhaps you yourself are the one who is being wicked. You cannot judge these things at that age. You are trapped between the fear of getting in trouble yourself because it is your fault and the fear of what will happen if you get your abuser in trouble. Or you fear that you won't be believed, that by speaking out things will only get worse. All you can say, is something like "He…touches me…" and then you clam up, mumble, put your head down, look away.
At ten years of age you are not some politician who can suddenly jump to his feet and give a persuasive speech which convinces a whole room of adults that you have been abused, and get the listeners baying for the blood of the culprit. You are just some snot-nosed kid, who like all kids, gets caught lying now and then, gets caught making things up, because you are still living in that half-fantasy world of childhood.
My mother, as I feared, professed not to believe any such nonsense but anyway I know she talked to Nigel's mother for I remember then a series of extremely uncomfortable days at the woman's house, when she would hiss things like "Dirty little liar" in my ear as she passed and then force me to eat every scrap of lunch, even though she knew peas made me sick. Pretty soon after this, when the fuss had died down, Nigel started getting up to his old tricks again, but eventually I stopped going to the woman's house by persuading my mother that taking school lunches would be cheaper (Oh, how I loved those school lunches!) and simply roaming the streets during the school holidays and never going near the woman's house.
I don't know what became of Nigel. I don't know if he became a rampant paedophile or if he grew up to be a happily married man with a couple of kids who adore him. Maybe these days he looks back on his youth and chuckles when he tells his daughters "You wouldn't believe the kind of stuff I used to get up to when he was a lad." Perhaps he remembers me just as some experimental device he used during his own sexual exploration, remembers me vaguely as the skinny little kid who liked to "stroke his knob". Perhaps he doesn't remember me at all. If I met Nigel today, I would probably hurt him, I would be uncontrolled, even now, forty years later I still hate him more than anyone on the planet.
Nigel was the worst thing in my pre-teenage life, and my only true experience of sexual abuse. But I remember other men who had a certain strangeness about them, who like to stand too close, and who did unexpected things: the piano teacher whom my mother insisted on sending me to on Saturday mornings, a small, podgy man with brown teeth, halitosis and terrible body odour who liked to sit too close on the narrow piano seat and rest his hand on my thigh; the old storeman, as big as a bear, in the big Sainsbury's at the end of Reading's Broad Street who seemed to be trying to kiss me one day when we were alone in the cold store.
And then there was the music master at our secondary school who seemed to me to take too much enjoyment from spanking the misbehaving pupils in his class. There was always someone misbehaving in that class. Sometimes three or four kids would be punished during a single lesson: the music master had no control over the class whatsoever. This master's weapon of choice for punishment was an old floppy gym shoe, a "slipper" he liked to call it. He always got his victims up in front of the whole class, bent over an old stool. From this position we could all see the expressions crossing the face of the victim as each blow came down. True hardcases like Tucker and Horsegate took their slippering with pride, no tears, just a rigid sneer and a cocky walk back to their mates at the back of the class when it was done. Wannabe hardcases like Brooking or Holland might sniffle a bit. Two or three smacks was standard, but for serious offences the music master could get himself worked up sufficiently to dish out three or four hefty blows. He never went up to six, though -- only the Headmaster could give you a "six", and that wasn't with some mangy old gym boot either.
The music master had pets: boys who usually never got in trouble, who seemed to like listening to his boring jazz and classical music records and could even sometimes play an instrument. If by chance one day one of these boys got a little too smart-mouthed and was called to the front, there would be whispered excitement in the class, a sense of expectation, like in good theatre. Standing up there, looking at the slipper and the stool, the pets always looked terrified, particularly if it was their first time. But the music master, it turned out, was really a kindly old soul and he would only pretend to smack the slipper against their proffered arses, going through the act in exaggerated slow motion, like he was giving an action replay of some significant sporting moment.
Was no one but me aware that this man's overt liking for corporal punishment was completely bizarre? Did I have Nigel to thank, that here, just a few years later, I could sense something strange that the other kids did not? Or were there many of us sitting there feeling sick inside, relating what we saw to our personal experiences?
I heard that Ricky Gervais attended my school a few years later, before he went on to write and act in the "The Office" on the BBC. What it was like in your time, Ricky? Did you ever came across the Slipperman when you were there?
(There was some scandal at our school a couple of years after I left involving the headmaster, something about canning and young boys in his study - I never did get the full story. Perhaps things had progressed by the time Ricky was a pupil.)
The second article that I read recently, and which also disturbed me a little is Dafydd Jones's story of a boy who was bullied at school who has now created a web site to tell of his experiences.
Bullying was rife in our boys-only school, but I never felt it was something that was restricted to our particular educational swamp in the middle of Whitley estate. I had my first taste of being on the receiving end of it from some bigger kid who thought it fun to elbow me hard in the kidneys at lunchtimes.
I don't know what motivated him. He wasn't a popular boy himself, and he was probably being bullied in his own turn by someone higher up the bullying ladder, just passing on his abuse to me to somehow lighten his own burden.
We had set positions in the dining hall, so this kid with the elbows always sat behind me every meal, dishing out little helping of pain whenever he got the urge. He was sly about it too, so the chances of him getting caught were slim and it was just as likely to be me ending up in trouble for making a noise during grace, or for clumsily slopping my milk.
That little spell of torment ended on the day he chased my into the school after he had pushed me and I had, for once, in terror, pushed him back. As I dashed into the library, I flipped closed the doors with my hand. The doors swung shut much faster than he had anticipated. I remember them chopping shut on his head, catching him across in front of the ears, smack. His eyes bulged and he fell back outside the doors.
My first thought was that I had killed him (more terror!).
When I eventually stopped cowering and emerged from the library there was no one in sight. There was no blood, no corpse, no crime scene.
I was dreading the next lunch break, but when I took my place at the table and he took his behind me there was for the first time in months no contact between us, and as it turned out there never was again. From that day he left me well alone.
There was another kid in our school, called Tucker, who was a ferocious fighter -- I saw him once take out the playground's unofficial top thug, Horsegate, in a boxing match staged under the supervision of the sports master after he had found the two brawling in class.
You didn't mess with someone like Horsegate. He was the kind of kid who went around with a little army of wild-eyed cohorts, kids who like to practice their "don't mess with me" stares and spit at you while they did it. Horsegate was top dog in his age group and all the other kids on the Whitley estate paid him respect, or stayed well clear.
But you didn't mess with Tucker either. He was just an averagely-built kid with a pleasant, easy-going manner but he had a look in his cold eyes that made you think he'd already seen things you didn't want to know about. The prevailing belief in my small group of friends was that you kept your distance from Tucker. There were too many unknowns there.
Most of the other kids at the boxing match were backing Horsegate, simply on the grounds of self-preservation: if you weren't shouting for him you might be singled out for some special attention afterwards.
Horsegate came out swinging with his big, powerful arms looking like a real boxer. (The sports master, it later transpired, had been coaching the great lummox after school hours: perhaps he was hoping that his pupil was going to set us all a good example of how to channel our anger into the clean, wholesome sport of boxing.)
Tucker came out like a street fighter, crouching low, and then struck fearsomely, flooring Horsefield in seconds.
When Horsegate got up, Tucker knocked him down again.
And again and again.
The sport's master stopped the fight after two rounds because there was no way Horsefield could continue, he was down on all fours, absolutely defeated, his face covered in blood. Tucker just stood over him, calmly, with a slightly disdainful expression, and then looked up and fixed us all with that look from those cold eyes.
Not long after, as I walked home one day from school up Whitley Wood Road, the kid who liked to elbow me at lunch came running up to me.
I cowered, convinced he was going to unleash his wrath on me for hurting him with the library doors, but he went running right on past.
I could see that he was panting, fearful.
Behind him, riding on his bicycle came Tucker, in chase. We were a mile from the school and I had the feeling the chase had been on for some time.
Fifty metres on, Tucker jumped off the bike and pulled Elbows down with a flying tackle and laid in to him with breath-taking ferocity.
I admit I cheered good and loud at that moment.
When Tucker eventually rode away, Elbows got up and made the customary death-threat threat to me, but I could see that his heart wasn't in it, and then he sloped off down the road, bloodied and torn, with his tattered knapsack hanging loosely from his hand.
I'm sure that his life at school did not improve from that moment on. I believe his family moved away from the area shortly after.
Later in my school life I came across Horsegate, Tucker's erstwhile opponent, in a school corridor. I guess I wasn't standing enough to one side because he shoulder-barged me to one side.
As he pushed me I knocked into one of his sidekicks, a small runt of a kid who hesitated for a moment as though he was considering something before turning into whirlwind of flailing fists, and boots, and spit and swearing. Did he at that moment decided it was time he came out from under Horsegate's wings and started building his own little team of potential victims? Horsegate and his other mates stood around shouting encouragement until I managed to make my escape. Later that same day, Sidekick cornered me on the tarmac yard between the school buildings, laughingly called "the playground" and tried to have another go at me.
As I backed away desperately, my collar was grabbed by a master, who had seen trouble developing from across the yard. It was the technical drawing master, a strict but otherwise kindly teacher close to retirement who was famous for his standard exhortation to his pupils, "Thin, faint lines, boy".
The master took me off to an empty classroom in another part of the school to "cool down".
I was shaking, crying, trying to explain to the him what had happened, to give him some history, but he was having none of it.
"It always takes two," he said.
When I later gained my freedom, whispered messages were passed on to me by Sidekick's associates and by other kids who were just curious to see someone squirm: "He's going to be waiting for you after school. Four o'clock. By the gates", "He's going to 'do you'. He's got a knife, you know," and such like.
Needless to say, there was no way I was going to be down at the school gates at four o'clock that day, or any day. In fact, for weeks afterwards I found new ways to get in and out of the school grounds through holes in the fence, sometimes over the fence, never knowing whether my tormentor was going to be there at the gates, waiting or not.
I believe it was Sidekick was involved in another incident, when I was a little older, although whether it was actually him or not I don't clearly remember.
What I do remember that it was late one evening, maybe 9 o'clock, and I was around fifteen. Andy Allen and I were sitting on the bus, talking about soccer perhaps, and it was just us, the driver, a couple of older passengers, and, way down at the back, three youths shouting and just being generally obnoxious. Andy and I were on the way home from work, a Thursday evening of stacking toilet rolls on the shelves at the big Tesco Supermarket in town. As the bus came to the stop before ours, one of the youths, who I shall call Snowman, came up the bus and smacked me hard across the back of the head shouting "There's a fucking poofter sitting here." Then each of his two mates did the same. Same type of blow, same words - the bullies weren't that creative around our way.
Snowman was maybe three or four years older than me, 17 or 18, pumped up with the adolescent hormones. He looked remarkably like one of the guys in the pop group 10cc, a group I could never listen to for years after, and on who I would always switch off whenever they came on Top Of The Pops.
Snowman wasn't a stranger to me. The first time I had seen him was a few years earlier, on my way to school one pleasant winter's day, scooping up handfuls of snow from the low concrete garden walls, forming them into balls and chucking them down the lane so they exploded over the tarmac. I was probably making "Kerpow!" noises to myself. I remember reaching over a low wall into a garden to get a good handful of fresh snow, and then heard a shout. Snowman was standing at the backdoor of his parent's council house. He was shouting something angrily at me, so I scampered on and away, not really understanding what he was on about. I found out a little later that he had been shouting at me because he had thought I had stolen something, a tennis ball perhaps, from the garden.
Occasionally my path crossed Snowman's again, and he would swear at me, or give chase for a little while, but it was not until the evening we were on the bus that he physically attacked me. Maybe he was emboldened by the presence of his mates, or perhaps he was just happy to have me cornered after all this time.
After he had struck me and the three of them had made their first pass, Snowman stooped, turned, and came back. I guess he could see that I was terrified. He put his face close in front of mine and said: "You are a fucking poof, aren't you. Fucking say it. Fucking say it, you…you…" - he desperately searched his limited vocabulary for a suitably expletive - "...you cunt." Then he head-butted me in the face.
I hoped that someone, one of the older passengers would step in and save me, but they just kept looking ahead, not seeming to notice what was happening. Then the driver turned in his seat and told us all to get off the bus. All of us. I couldn't believe it! I was terrified. My legs had turned to jelly. I was close to pissing myself. My whole body seemed to have shut down. And I was being asked to get off at the same bus stop as this freak who had just attacked me!
I cannot remember how Andy and I managed to get away that evening. I think maybe Andy, who was a lot tougher than I stood up to them, or maybe one of the other passengers eventually stepped in, or maybe we just ran like hell, although I cannot believe that because I remember my legs shaking uncontrollably.
Within a few days I had quit my job at Tesco's, and was delivering newspapers instead. (On the days when I had to cover the delivery route that took me past Snowman's house, his parents never got the paper they were expecting.)
Every moment of my waking life, until I left Reading at eighteen, I was terrified of meeting Snowman.
Most of my school life I managed to keep myself out of trouble. There were other kids who weren't so lucky. Smith, for example, used to get it from Holland and Brooking every now and then. Pushes, shoves, rabbit punches, emptying of school bags over the street -- the usual kind of thing. Holland and Brooking weren't really tough guys like Horsegate, more sort of Imperial Storm troopers who occasionally toyed with the idea of experimenting with the "Dark Side of the Force" for a while.
One day when we were playing a rough game in the playground I lashed out at Holland. I didn't mean to connect at all, but somehow I caught him with a real haymaker and he just collapsed. I was very contrite afterward and made it up with him with apologies handshakes. But after this, I noticed that Holland and Brooking left me well alone. I had moved a step above them in the bullying order. I found that I could get them to back off if I put myself between themselves and someone like Smith. How good that made me feel!
(Did Brooking and Holland ever recall their bullying career later on in life? Is this how they remember things? What you would be reading now I wonder if, say, Holland was writing this story? Would he report the facts in the same light, or would he be saying that it was me who was his nemesis in school, always picking on him, threatening him?)
But while I could get Brooking and Holland to step down, there was no way that I had any impact on the really mean youths in the class, nor did I ever stand between them and their victims. There was one tragic kid in particular, who seemed to get the wrath of every-sized bully in our year, regardless of their standing in the class pecking-order. His name was Cook, and he was top of the class for a while -- at least in his own mind. He was always smartly dressed, I remember, and had an unfortunately superior air, whether intentional or not I do not know, which I guess was what was his downfall. He would always be the first with his hand up whenever the teacher asked a question. We were all about fifteen or sixteen.. The other kids in the class used to pick on him, start fights for no reason, push him around, draw yellow streaks of chalk down the back of his school blazer, but he seemed to be able to tolerate this low level of torment reasonably well and it wasn't until the incident with Carr that he really started going bad for him.
Carr was a rugby player, a hefty guy, but reasonably mild-mannered. One day there was some argument at the old billiard table we had in the common room where, having lost most of the balls, everyone played instead a gambling game of my own invention using the few loose coins we had in our teenage pockets. I remember Carr saying in an adult tone of voice: "Cook, I'm a quiet person and I don't usually get angry. But this time it's enough." and then - bang! - Carr's fist shot out and smacked into Cook's jaw. Cook's glasses flew off from his face, broken (I recall that they were always taped-up, those glasses) and he just stood there looking stunned. Carr walked away without another word. Cook's lip had been split open, and blood started to drip onto the billiard table. There were tears in his eyes, but he fought back the tears, because I think he already knew that tears were not going to help. Cook-baiting rapidly became a full sport in the school, with semi professional players amongst the Horsegates and Sidekicks of the school. Even some of the teachers started to give him a hard time, ridiculing him in class. As though Carr's single punch had brought Cook-beating into the open and made it a respectable activity. Cook's academic standing slipped quite quickly after that. He left school early, I think, with pretty dismal exam results. I always wondered what happened to him, and I have always carried a little bit of guilt that I never had the balls to step in between him and his tormentors as I did for Smith. I would like to meet him and say sorry for being to much of a coward to step in.
I personally had other brushes with violence, involving other attackers. When I was 18 there was the guy who suddenly and without warning punched me in the mouth when I jokingly mentioned he owed me sixpence from many years back, and in my early 20's there was another guy in the pub who suddenly and without warning punched me in the mouth when I simply said, "Hi Phil, I haven't seen you for years. How have you been?" and held out my hand to shake. (It turned out Phil had been in prison for a spell.)
I never understood these sudden outbreaks of unexpected violence. They mortified and mystified me, terrified me. It was only later, when I was in my thirties that an incident occurred that gave me some insight from the other side, an incident that exorcised some of my daemons from those painful growing years, and melted my residual childhood fear of the Snowman. I was sitting on a train early in the morning, wearing a suit, on the way to a business meeting in The Netherlands. A drunk rolled up the carriage, singing, then leaned over me, and said something in Dutch. I shrugged, said I was English, and then pretended to go back to my newspaper. The drunk found this sufficiently insulting for him to feel justified in slapping me around the face. Perhaps he thought it would educate me.
When he hit me, I was frozen for a moment with the old fear from the school ground.
I couldn't believe what had happened, it was 8 o'clock in the morning for Christ sake!
Then I sprang up, striking back, flailing punches at him, kicking him in the legs, driving him back down the carriage and through the doors to the next, letting all the years of pent up frustration of all those elbows, and rabbit punches and headbutts pour forth. Part of me viewed the scene as an impartial on-looker, marvelling at what I was doing, awed at the anger I had in me. It was like all the guilt that I had not stood up for myself before suddenly broke like a dam, and all my emotion poured forth on that hapless Dutchman. He was shocked, stunned that a simple little slap to the face of some unknown foreigner could cause such a response, and I could see doubt and fear come into his eyes as he raised his arms to protect himself and back away to safety.
Yes, I saw his fear, and I am ashamed to say that at that moment I enjoyed what I saw.
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