A Stolen Childhood

by Casey Watson

  I had several large display boards and had got to work on them quickly, taking down what remained of the previous bunch of students’ work and, while I was at it, wondering how they were all doing. Being out of school for a few weeks meant being somewhat out of the loop, and I made a mental note to try and track them down when I could. In the meantime, I decided, surveying the newly barren walls, I’d hang on to the gold card frames that we’d put up for Christmas but would be perfectly serviceable for a while yet. I could then turn my attention to my ‘quiet’ area.

  A good number of the children who came to me had a tendency to become volatile, so a ‘chill out’ space was another essential. It was a place I could send kids to calm down if they needed to and, equally, it was a place that might prove preventative on that front – not to mention being somewhere a shy child could escape to, should the bustle of the classroom get too much.

  It was a simple space – the only seating being those half-dozen floor cushions – and bound on two sides by a pair of bookcases at right angles, facing inwards. There were books, of course, but also a selection of stationery: trays of paper, pens and pencils, in case creativity blossomed and the urge to be artistic took hold.

  The knock at my door came just as I was deciding if I had time to rearrange the muddle of books, while putting a new label on the crayon tray. I bobbed up to find Donald Brabbiner, the deputy head, had put his head round the now open door.

  ‘Casey, do you have a minute?’ he asked, looking stressed. Not that Don looking stressed was anything unusual in itself, currently. The school was in the middle of preparing for an OFSTED visit, and there wasn’t a member of the senior staff who wasn’t stressing about it – the furrowed brow and frazzled expression was very much the look of the moment.

  But, no – he looked more stressed than even that, I decided. ‘Yes, of course, Don,’ I said, pulling myself upright and brushing chalk dust from my skirt. ‘I don’t have any children in till tomorrow, and I’m about done here. Is there a problem?’

  He nodded grimly. ‘Apparently so.’

  He was obviously keen to return to it, too, I decided, as he was already turning and heading back out into the corridor. I quickly followed him, opting for grabbing my satchel, rather than spending time finding my key and locking the door. There was nothing in there worth pinching currently, after all. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. I was having to jog intermittently to keep up with him as we headed off down the corridor, and not just because I was five foot nothing to his six foot two. He was the sort of man who was born to lead and a great asset to the school, and with his brisk manner and his ‘everything must be done yesterday’ attitude, he was hard to keep up with at the best of times. But he was well liked by both the staff and the students, because he was down to earth, fair to a fault and enjoyed a laugh with the children, attributes that made for the best kind of teacher – well, in my humble opinion, anyway.

  ‘Year eight assembly,’ he said, directing his words half over his shoulder. ‘Some sort of incident going on involving two of the pupils. I was told I was needed and so were you –’ He turned and smiled a grim smile. ‘And as you were on the way, I thought I’d scoop you up en route.’

  So he was on his way to it. Which meant he must have been sent for or paged. ‘A fight?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe so. Though I’m not yet quite sure … Ah –’

  He didn’t need to finish whatever it was he was about to say as we could hear the commotion before we saw it; well, the tell-tale sound of massed kids who, as our eyes soon confirmed, were all being herded out of the hall, most of them over-excited, chatting nine to the dozen about something exciting that had obviously gone down – and which probably livened up their morning no end.

  ‘Settle down,’ Donald barked, to no one in particular. He didn’t need to – just his presence in the area was enough. The various form teachers were busy trying to wrestle back some order too, but the decibel levels suggested that whatever had happened was something more serious than just some radiator-related unrest.

  That too was soon confirmed, as Andrea Halstead, one of the year eight form tutors, emerged from the hall and beckoned us to both follow her in.

  ‘Oh, Mr Brabbiner,’ she said, sounding as if she was still getting her breath back. ‘Casey, hi. Bit of a to-do, I’m afraid. Might have been something and nothing, but Thomas over there’s hit his head and Mr Reynolds and I were thinking that someone will probably need to take him down to A and E.’

  ‘A and E?’ Donald went straight into accident mode. ‘What sort of head wound? Any bleeding? Did he pass out at any point?’

  I looked across to where a group of assorted teachers, teaching assistants and one of the school secretaries, Janice Wells, were forming what looked like two separate human cordons around what must have been the two pupils in question, neither of whom I could properly see yet. What I could see, however, was a large muddle of chairs, several of them overturned, around which Barry, the caretaker, was methodically working, stacking the unaffected rows of chairs both in front of and behind the groups, and dragging them to their positions back against the walls. It was a circle of devastation that looked a little like something had been dropped in the middle of the hall from a great height. A fight, then, for definite.

  Or perhaps not. ‘I’m not sure,’ Andrea said, ‘We don’t think so. But it’s been bleeding rather copiously. It’s up in his hair at the back –’ she gestured to her own head to illustrate. ‘Just above the back of his neck. Quite a nasty gash.’

  ‘Wouldn’t an ambulance be simpler?’ Donald asked.

  ‘We weren’t sure,’ Andrea said. ‘I was going to call one, but then Janice reminded me about the roadworks on the way to the General. We were wondering if it wouldn’t be easier for someone just to take him in their car. Mr Reynolds seems to have got the bleeding under control.’

  ‘You want me to take him down in my car?’ I asked. ‘Who is it, anyway?’

  ‘Lad called Thomas Robinson,’ Andrea said. ‘You probably haven’t come across him – he’s only been at the school for a couple of weeks or so, bless him. But, no, we were hoping you’d be able to take charge of Kiara, there. She’s in no fit state to go back to her friends.’

  She nodded towards the second of the two huddles, at the centre of which I could just make out a second pupil, who I now realised wasn’t the gender I expected. ‘Kiara?’ I said. ‘So it’s a girl?’

  Andrea nodded while Donald strode off to take charge of the patient and decide how best to get him to A and E. ‘Kiara Bentley,’ she confirmed. ‘Have you had any dealings with her?’

  As if to underline that even if I hadn’t I might well do very soon, the subject of our discussion then started shouting. Shouting quite loudly, in fact; and making a great deal of noise for what looked like quite a small amount of pupil.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Andrea, at a loss to work it out. ‘Did the pair of them have a punch-up in the middle of assembly?’

  ‘Not quite a full-on fight,’ she said. ‘But it certainly got physical. I didn’t have the best view because they were halfway along a row, quite a way behind me. By the time I got to it, it was hard to make out what was going on. And she’s still in a right state about it, as you can see. Come on, let’s go and see if we can calm things down a bit, shall we? Then we can all get back on with our days.’ She gave me a wry grin as we walked across the hall. ‘One of those days, eh? Still, at least it’s stopped everyone whining about the radiators.’

  I’d already been involved in quite a few fight situations in the course of my job, and some things were common to all of them. The adrenalin rush, the urgent need to lower the emotional temperature and stop fists flying around, and the equally important need to establish the facts.

  In that regard, coming into this one after the event left me at something of a disadvantage. On the one hand was this beefy-looking, scruffy, long-haired lad, clutching what looked like a tea-towel to his head, his white(ish) schoo
l shirt liberally splattered with blood and with the unmistakable pallor of a child who was in shock. And on the other hand was what seemed like a slip of a girl who seemed to be alternately sobbing and raging at the huddle of staff who were trying to calm her down.

  But there was no point in trying to establish quite what had happened, not till the lad had been taken off to have his wound looked at and not till the girl – Kiara Bentley, that was it – was on a more even keel.

  ‘This is Mrs Watson,’ Andrea said, as we joined the small group surrounding her. Toni, the teaching assistant who’d been sitting beside her, immediately jumped up. ‘Here,’ she said, gesturing towards the seat she’d vacated.

  I would have sat on it, too, the better to communicate with the girl, had it not been for the fact that at that exact moment Donald was leading the boy and his retinue out of the hall, which meant walking past us.

  ‘You’re a fucking dick!’ the girl screamed suddenly, leaping up from her own seat, and only being stopped from lashing out at the boy again by Andrea’s swift arresting arm.

  ‘Kiara!’ she barked, blocking her route to him. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘You’re a fucking bastard!’ she screeched, ignoring Andrea completely. ‘And I hope they shrivel up and fall off as well!’

  Hope what fall off? I wondered as I helped Andrea gently restrain her. ‘Come on, love,’ I said. ‘This isn’t helping anything, is it? Come on, how about you come with me, eh? Then you can tell me all about it, and –’

  She ignored me as well. ‘I’ve got more balls than you’ll ever have anyway!’ she yelled, shouting loud enough to make my left ear hurt, as Donald, with a short barked instruction of ‘Enough!’ disappeared with Janice and Thomas through the double doors. The boy, whose arresting mop of shoulder-length hair was flopping over his face, obscuring it, was half-doubled over, I noticed, and clearly in pain. I didn’t need to see his face. I could hear him.

  The penny dropped. Balls. That was what the girl said, hadn’t she? Ouch.

  ‘Enough, now!’ Andrea repeated as between us we managed to guide the girl back to the seat she’d been sitting on, though, rigid with fury, she refused to sit down.

  ‘You get back,’ Andrea said to the two young teaching assistants still remaining, then turned her attention back to Kiara. ‘Now, are you going to go with Mrs Watson nicely, my love? I know you’re upset, but nobody can help you when you’re screaming and hollering like this, can they? Come on, try and calm yourself down, okay?’

  With the boy gone, all the fight seemed to have gone out of the girl anyway. ‘I hate him!’ she said, but it was a last angry parry, before dissolving into the latest of what looked like a few bouts of tears; she was wearing mascara – well, had been. By now most of it was on her cheeks.

  ‘Kiara?’ I said, trying to get her to focus her attention on me. ‘What a pretty name. So, come on, how about you come to my classroom with me? You need something to drink, and to calm yourself down. Sort yourself out, eh?’

  Not that she had anything with which to do that as yet, and I suddenly remembered that while delving into my bag earlier, I’d seen a half packet of tissues. I rummaged around for it and passed it to her so she could wipe her eyes and blow her nose on something a little kinder than the wodge of rough paper towel someone had obviously run and got from the loos.

  She mumbled a thank you, and abruptly sat down again. It was almost as if her legs had given way beneath her, and I wondered if she was actually starting to faint. She was certainly pale enough. I sat beside her. ‘We’ll be fine if you want to get off as well now,’ I said to Andrea. ‘I’ll take Kiara down to my classroom,’ I said, glancing up at the big wall clock. Almost 12.15. It wouldn’t be long till the bell went for lunch and the crowd outside – now dispersed presumably – would all be thronging back again, on their way down to the adjacent dinner hall.

  ‘Come on, Kiara,’ I said firmly as she dabbed at her eyes. ‘Let’s get out of here as well, eh?’

  She looked up at me as if only properly seeing me for the first time. ‘I hate him, miss,’ she said.

  Kiara Bentley was a tiny thing, slight in every sense. Which was to say she was my height but there was almost nothing of her. She also looked young for a year eight – was almost doll-like, in fact, with a small oval face which was currently half hidden behind a mass of curly, chocolate-coloured hair. She looked so forlorn too, now the fight had gone out of her; like the proverbial rag doll that gets parked in the corner by a child who’s gone off in search of more interesting things to play with – a look enhanced by the two flaming spots on her pale cheeks. But the doll-like impression was at odds with the look in her eyes; a strange knowing look, causing the phrase ‘old head on young shoulders’ to pop unbidden into my mind.

  ‘Am I in trouble, miss?’ was the next thing she said to me, a full minute or so since Andrea departed for her tutor room, and we’d left the caretaker to finish clearing the hall. Still, at least she’d come with me readily enough.

  ‘That’s not going to be easy for me to answer, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘As I have absolutely no idea what you’ve done.’

  I waited, to see if she’d start to tell me the story. In my experience, kids either maintained a sullen silence or it all came rushing out, in one long torrent of denials, accusations and bitter recriminations, from which you then had to winkle out the facts.

  ‘I never hurt his head. That wasn’t me,’ she said firmly. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. Just so you know. It wasn’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking anything,’ I said mildly as we reached the door to my classroom. I opened it and stood aside to let her in. ‘I’m completely in the dark. So how about you put your bag down and grab a chair, while I grab you a glass of juice, and you tell me all about it. How about that?’

  It seemed Kiara Bentley had no problem with that at all. She had fallen asleep in assembly, she told me. She hadn’t meant to – how could she? She hadn’t realised she’d been asleep till she woke up.

  Which was logical. I agreed she had a point. And when she’d woken up, she went on, it was to find her head was in Thomas’s lap and that everyone around her was sniggering at her. ‘And he’d been saying things,’ she said, her voice now beginning to wobble, ‘and messing about with my hair, miss, and …’

  Her hand went to her hair then and as it did so I noticed that close to her temple there was a bald patch about the size of a ten-pence piece. ‘Doing what things?’ I asked, trying to visualise the scenario, all too aware that not all modern 12-year-olds were the sexual innocents their pre-teen status might suggest. Particularly groups of boys in close proximity to one another; it was a myth that it was only girls who got attacks of the giggles whenever it came to matters of sex. But what about that bald patch? Had he been responsible for that?

  ‘Doing what to your hair?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know, miss, but something. You know. Messing about. Putting his hands in it. Pretending that I was giving him a, you know, a blow-job or something.’

  Though it was slightly startling to hear such a phrase coming from what superficially seemed such a young innocent’s mouth, this I could visualise all too easily, sadly. The sort of pubescent nonsense that young boys got up to everywhere. But one thing struck me. That must have been some nap she was having, for her to fall asleep so completely that him doing something like that didn’t wake her up. That was odd. But then, I reasoned, he’d have had to be pretty quiet about his silliness, given that they were slap-bang in the middle of an assembly.

  ‘And then you woke up,’ I prompted, still wondering about the head wound and the hair and the hapless lad’s testicles.

  Kiara took a gulp of the orange juice I’d now poured for her before nodding. ‘And I realised where I was and what was happening, and they were all saying stuff, like “Ooh, can I have a go next, Kiara?” Stuff like that. And he was, like, “Thanks for that. You’re really good,” and laughing at me and making faces and being an absolute dick.�
� Her eyes narrowed, her tears forgotten. ‘So I got him back. Where it hurts.’

  Which still didn’t explain what happened next and I said so. Upon which Kiara explained, with a definite edge of pride, that she’d grabbed his balls so tightly that he’d actually screamed. ‘Right in the middle of everything,’ she said, the memory obviously firing her up all over again, ‘because I did it just like my mum showed me. And he jumped up then, but I hung on and he kind of fell backwards and then – well, I don’t know, really, because I’d let go by now and I didn’t really see properly, but he was grabbing his balls and crying and then his chair tipped up somehow, and he fell back and then someone obviously stopped him, but then he slipped and – well, I don’t know how really, but he, like, proper banged his head. On the edge of another chair I think it was. And that wasn’t anything to do with me, miss. But then everyone started yelling and shouting and there was blood going everywhere, and then his mate Connor – he’s a dick too – he went and grabbed me; grabbed my hair and started yelling in my face –’

  ‘And pulled that clump out?’

  ‘What?’ She looked confused now. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, raising a hand to where I’d pointed then shaking her head. ‘No, that wasn’t him. That’s nothing to do with it. Anyway, I told him I’d do the same to him as I’d done to his idiot friend and he let go. And then the teachers were all shouting and everyone round me’s shouting at me too, saying I did it, but I didn’t do it, miss. He fell over by himself. He banged his head by himself. Not that he didn’t deserve it, miss. He’s a dick.’