Personal Histories: part 1
My childhood was what I would call a happy one. My parents worked hard, and I did not see a lot of them. We had one holiday per year, in the summer, often in the UK, sometimes in Europe. I was aware that many of my peers went straight home from school, and spent their holidays with their mothers playing around the village and taking day trips but it didn’t bother me tremendously that we did not. That was just the way things were. I was confident, talkative, full of curiosity. I had a few friends, by no means the whole class, but enough for a good game of pass the parcel. We played games of chase, and imagined other worlds to inhabit, usually worlds that involved chasing. There was a lot of chasing. Aged 11, when asked at interview for my senior school, I said proudly that my friends would describe me as weird.
A year later, at the same interview for the same school, I spoke little. I said that I got good marks, that I knew some people at the school and they always seemed happy there, that I would work on my french over the summer to try and catch up. I had had hand writing lessons in the interceding year, learned to write faster, and finished my story in the English test. I was still a happy child, but I was quiet, watchful. I had always been observant but observing became a survival strategy - sit quietly, work out what people want from you, who you can speak to, who to avoid. This was only reinforced as my teenage years went by.
The bullying I encountered in my last year of primary school and my first year in secondary school was not horrendous or newsworthy. It was not physical, save for one incident, nor was I tormented by groups of vicious teenagers in the playground. Rather it took the form of sideways glances, snide comments, occasional moments of ridicule. The type of bullying incited by girls, and backed up by the rest, typical to schoolyards everywhere and rumoured to toughen you up a bit. The reason it hit me so hard then, is unclear, excepting to say that previously to that I was well-liked by some and treated with indifference by others, and perhaps being high achieving I was sensitive to criticism. Our school had been a happy one and our class had always got on as well as a group of 30 disparate children can do when put in a room together for 7 years and asked to work together. There were occasional fights and problematic kids, but never any long-term difficulties. The shock of a whole year group of people and the adults meant to control them, who were at best unconcerned for my welfare, and at worst actively seeking to harm, was a harsh one. And yet, on starting my new school I made a motley collection of friends, and enjoyed a year of relative ease, accompanied by black eyeliner, Georgia Nicholson, and an excess of burnt CDs of AC/DC.
