We were joined by a group of young female students, all identically attired in short navy blue pleated skirts (well, they were short for the 1950s, stretching from their waists to just above the knees), white short-sleeved blouses, pristine white ankle socks and remarkably white, unblemished plimsolls. I had become susceptible to girls since reaching double figures, and the sight of this bevy of athletic long-legged beauties in short skirts and tight blouses is one of my favourite memories! Behind the students strode a much older woman with short cropped hair, broad shoulders and massive arms and a face that could freeze soup in cans. She was attired rather differently, in a white jacket with sleeves and a more capacious white pleated skirt. Later we discovered that this Amazon was the students’ teacher and she called the shots. The bossy woman in white put the fear of God into us as she boomed out various orders, telling us to line up smartly, be on our best behaviour and listen carefully to all instructions. Even our teacher looked frightened of her and stood like a spare part, watching proceedings but venturing no comment.
Each student was assigned five pupils on which to practise her skills. It was not an unpleasant experience for me and my pals to have our own personal fitness trainer – this tall willowy blonde with a soft smile and long legs who helped us with our physical exertions: star jumps and squat thrusts, hand springs and forward rolls, handstands and press-ups. After half an hour of stretching and jumping, leaping and running, we were allowed to rest and get our breath.
That morning I lay on my stomach staring across the parkland dotted with grazing deer, avenues of tall cedars, dense woodland of ancient oaks, manicured lawns, wide borders bursting with colourful flowers, pale statues and spouting fountains. I had never seen anything like it.
On our way back to school, our teacher, now in rather a chatty mood, told us that the house had once been the home of just one fabulously rich man and his family, a grand and very wealthy lord, and that he would have had 700 servants to look after him – gardeners and grooms, coachmen and carpenters, kitchen maids and cooks, brewers and butlers, stewards and housekeepers, lamplighters and a man to wind up the clocks. He even employed a mole-catcher. A hundred thoroughbred horses would have been kept in the stable block, which resembled a huge Georgian house. With all the precocious confidence of a ten-year-old, I asked him why would anyone want to live in such a big place and was it not unfair that someone should have all this while others have so little? I cannot recall the teacher’s reply, but I guess that he merely shrugged as he always did when one of his pupils asked an awkward question.
I returned to Wentworth House some thirty years later and this time I went inside. I was General Adviser for Language Development with Rotherham Education Department at the time, and was given the task of disposing of the remnants of the college library. In 1979 when Lady Mabel College closed, Sheffield City Polytechnic took over the property, but by the mid 1980s, when the local authority gave up its lease on the house, all educational materials and equipment of any value were transferred to the city campus. A residue of several hundred unwanted books, teaching texts, guidelines and journals was left behind and it was my job to dispose of them. Rather than just sending them to a waste paper company for pulping, I initially circulated all Rotherham schools inviting interested teachers to come and take what books they wanted for the school libraries. I would be there all day on a Saturday I specified, to supervise matters.
On the day when Wentworth was open for the collection of books, it snowed heavily. I drove up the long gravel drive, now thick with snow, and parked the car in front of the house. I describe the scene which I beheld as I sat looking out over the expanse of white, in one of my Dales books.
All around the hall stretched a strange white world stroked in silence. No wind blew the snow into drifts, no birds called, no animal moved and, save for the sporadic soft thud of snow falling from the branches of the towering dark trees which bordered the drive, all was silent. There was a stillness, as if life itself had been suspended.
The caretaker responded to my banging after some time and the great door was opened and I stepped inside. I followed him through a vast pillared hall which must have been sixty feet square and forty feet high, with a gallery supported by huge fluted marble pillars. In its day the grandeur of the dimensions, the ornate decoration, the magnificent paintings and statues and the lavish furnishings would have been unparalleled in their beauty and opulence.
The books had been stacked in the Marble Saloon. It was here in 1912 that the great ballerina Anna Pavlova had danced for King George V. I set myself up on a hard-backed chair in the Ante Room, an area which must have been at least forty feet in length and half as much wide, with an immense stone fireplace guarded by a pair of fearsome-looking carved stone griffins. It was strange and rather unsettling for me, sitting there on a shabby hard-backed chair amidst the piles of old books in this cold, empty building, thinking of what this house must have been like in its heyday.
As I left that winter afternoon, having dispensed the books to those hardy teachers who had braved the weather, I paused for a moment at the top of the stone steps and looked out over the snow-covered lawns and I pictured that little scrap of a boy in his P.E. kit doing star jumps on the grass.
26
‘No childhood,’ writes Philip Roth in The Plot Against America, ‘is without its terrors.’ My terror came in my last year at junior school in the form of the bully. I was a popular pupil with my teachers. Most were kindly, smiled a great deal, rarely shouted and clearly enjoyed the company of children. I also found them mines of information and would not be afraid of asking them questions or reticent about sharing my own thoughts and feelings. From what my school reports say about me, I was ‘well-behaved’, ‘a steady worker’ who ‘tried his best’, a boy who was ‘good-natured and helpful’ and one who caused his teachers no trouble. I wasn’t a high flier, nor was I a child in need of special help with my work; I was just an ordinary sort of boy. When I visited Broom Valley Junior School as an education adviser in Rotherham many years later, the present headteacher, Philip Crutchley, informed me he had looked through the old punishment book prior to my visit to see if my name appeared when I was a pupil at the school. Thankfully, there was no mention of me. Nor was there a mention of my achieving anything of note either.
Schools are places where children acquire much more than the principles, ideas and processes of a subject. They are formative little worlds where children develop their social skills, learn to get along with others, make friendships and sometimes enemies. They are places where rules circumscribe their every move, where they discover, are hurt, feel lonely, experience success and failure, and where teachers loom large. In the good schools they learn about love, beauty, compassion, goodness, cooperation, care and other positive human emotions and feelings. Children, however, even in the good schools, also learn the hard lessons of life; lessons about injustice, humiliation and cruelty and sometimes, if they are unlucky, they come across the bully. A measure of rough and tumble in a school builds a degree of immunity and teaches us to stand up for ourselves. One can’t expect children to be permanently pleasant with each other. We have all been name-called and called others names ourselves, but systematic cruelty in the form of constant bullying is a very different matter.
Bullies seek out their victims, those who are likely to be in some way different. It might be skin colour, physical appearance, a disability, the colour of one’s hair or the way one speaks. For me it wasn’t just my name that set me apart. Perhaps it was that to some in my class I must have appeared something of a ‘goody-goody’. I enjoyed most of the lessons (the notable exception being mental arithmetic), readily volunteered answers to the teachers’ questions, offered to tidy the books, clean out the hamster cage and act as milk monitor. I little thought that my behaviour would antagonize the large moon-faced boy who was frequently outside the headteacher’s room for misbehaving.
Charlie, it was clear, was not popular with the teachers. His
hopeless forgetfulness, his permanent scowl, his answering back and lack of interest in the lessons rubbed them up the wrong way. I guess I appeared to him everything he was not, and he singled me out for his special attention. He would delight in mispronouncing my name, much to the amusement of some of the other children, who were no doubt as afraid of him as I was and thankful they were not his victims. ‘Gervarse! Gervarse!’ he would shout after me down the corridor. I would carry on walking, afraid to face him and feeling everyone’s eyes upon me. Children can be a delight, but they can also be corrosively mean and spiteful, and those of us who become the object of the bully’s unwelcome attention remember for a lifetime those periods when it was our turn to be picked on and our most secret insecurities exposed and held up for ridicule.
Charlie developed a real, almost obsessive dislike of me. He was a tall, fat, round-faced boy with lank black hair and scowled constantly. Maybe if it had been just him who picked on me I might have summoned up enough courage to challenge him, but he enlisted two other boys to make my life a misery. Charlie and his two fellow bullies would stop me going to the toilet and tip everything out of my satchel, write cruel notes and leave them on my desk and spit at me when my back was turned. He would poke and push and call me names at every opportunity. His speciality was the Indian burn. At breaktimes he would sidle up with his two cronies, who would grab me and hold me while he would wring a bare wrist with his hands close together until the skin chafed and stung.
The bullying soon began to affect my school work. I became very quiet in class, stopped volunteering to help the teacher and at breaktimes found a quiet corner in the cloakroom rather than go into the playground. I kept my head down, not wanting to attract attention. I tried to keep out of Charlie’s way and ignore him as much as I could, believing in the old adage that bullies soon get tired of teasing once the victim ceases to react. This didn’t work and the bullying continued.
I never said anything to either my parents or my teachers and to them everything must have appeared normal. But things were not normal. Those who have been bullied know only too well how vulnerable you feel, how your self-confidence diminishes and how weak and frightened you become, dreading going into school, filled with fear and apprehension in case your persecutor is lying in wait.
There are two ways of dealing with those who delight in others’ suffering. You either enlist the help of an adult who might make it stop, or you confront the tormentor. I eventually took the second course. Recently I heard the legendary Yorkshire athlete Lord Sebastian Coe speak at a dinner. He started his immensely entertaining talk with the words: ‘When you are brought up in Sheffield and are called Sebastian, you soon learn to run.’ Well, I grew up in Rotherham and was called Gervase and I couldn’t run, but I soon discovered that words could be powerful weapons, more powerful than fists. I have never believed the sentiments in the children’s chant: ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but calling never hurts me.’ Those who are bullied know only too well that ‘Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can break your heart.’ For a while, I endured a miserable time at school, watching and waiting for the bully to pounce, having to endure his constant name-calling and cruel comments. Bruises fade but cruel words stay with you.
I found that my words could hurt bullies too, and one day I gave as good as I got. I recall vividly the very first time I confronted him. It was on the way home. I usually waited a while in school until the rest of the children had set off for home. In doing so there was less likelihood of Charlie getting me. That day he was without his two cronies and had commandeered a girl’s skipping rope. He waited for me outside school, then followed me down Broom Valley Road and began thrashing at my legs with the rope. I had had enough. I grabbed the rope, yanked it from his hands and told him to leave me alone. Then the words just spilled out. I told him no one really liked him and that they talked about him behind his back and laughed at him and everyone knew where he lived, not in a proper house but in a prefab.
Of course, it ended in a fight. I’d known it would happen one day, and at night in bed I had often wished I had the courage of Tom Brown, who flattened the cowardly bully Flashman to the cheers of the other boys, or David, who killed the Philistine giant with a sling and a pebble. It didn’t quite work out like that for me. Charlie was a head taller and a good stone heavier. He thumped me hard in the stomach, which winded me, then grabbed me around the neck. I kicked his shins. He cried and swung a punch at me which split my lip. I felt frightened and angry and I hit him in the throat with all the force I could muster. He cried, gasped, coughed and spluttered, then lunged at me again, punching me in the chest. I remember picking up the skipping rope and throwing it at him. I heard the crack as the wooden pommel came in contact with his head. Then I turned on my heel. I was much smaller and thinner than he and a faster runner too, and I soon left him behind me, hurling insults and threatening to get me the following day at school. I had been well and truly thrashed and ran home with tears streaming down my cheeks, a bloody nose and cut lip.
I was pleased the confrontation with the bully had taken place well away from the school, without a baying audience to witness my shame. I had seen playground fights and had shuddered at the thought that I might one day be in the middle of a ring of solid spectators egging on each of the panting adversaries with roars and cheers of encouragement – ‘Smack ’im!’, ‘Thump im!’– until the teacher hurried out to break it up.
At home I told Mum, as she wiped my face and rubbed Germolene on my lips, that I had fallen climbing up the gate of the allotments taking the short cut home. She knew, of course, that I was lying.
‘Who did this?’ she asked.
‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I fell over.’
‘Do I look stupid?’ she asked, and repeated, ‘Who did this to you?’
‘A fat kid at school,’ I admitted.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’m up to the school tomorrow to sort this out.’
‘No, Mum, please,’ I pleaded. ‘It will only make things worse.’
My brother Michael, who had been combing his hair in the mirror, said, ‘Leave it to me, Mum, I’ll sort it.’
‘And how will you do that?’ she asked.
‘I’ll have a quiet word with this fat kid. Tell him to leave him alone.’
The following day at school Charlie sauntered up to my desk. He was sporting a red bump on his forehead. He kicked my ankles under the desk. ‘You’re dead!’ he told me, running a finger across his throat.
After school, as usual, I ran home but as I approached the allotment gate I slowed down. I knew the bully was stalking me. As I turned to take the short cut through the allotments, he ran up behind me, panting.
‘Got you!’ he shouted, grabbing my shoulder. Then my brother appeared. Michael was really good at sports and played cricket and football for his school. He was lithe and athletic, and in the sea cadets he had taken up boxing and proved to be a good amateur fighter. He had been waiting, out of sight. The bully stopped in his tracks, then reeled backwards at a blow to the base of his stomach. He landed with a thump on the ground. Michael, legs apart, stood over him, then dragged him to his feet and pushed him up against the iron railings. He pushed his face forward and grabbed Charlie by the throat.
‘You’re choking me!’ gasped the bully. ‘I can’t breathe.’
‘Touch my brother again,’ said Michael, ‘and I’ll ram your bloody teeth down your fat bloody throat.’ Then he pushed him away, kicking him up the backside and sending him staggering forward.
‘I’ll tell mi dad!’ howled the bully, holding his throat.
‘And I’ll tell mine,’ said Michael, ‘and he’s bigger than yours. Now scram!’
The next day at school I said nothing about the incident and neither did the bully. He kept well out of my way and wouldn’t meet my eye when I stared at him in assembly. I suspect that like most bullies, Charlie was more frightened than frightening and as much in need of help as his victims. After t
hat, to my great relief, he left me alone.
I feel passionate about anti-bullying and schools should acknowledge that it exists, is a real problem, and should actively do something about it. As parents we would all like our children to attend a school which is happy, optimistic and productive, because children thrive in this kind of environment. Bullying, both physical and verbal, causes children untold misery. I know it did for me. Persistent bullying affects a child’s happiness, well-being and educational success and can result in permanent health and psychological damage. In my experience bullying causes enormous family stress and is responsible, in great measure, for truancy and depression. It can even lead to a child taking his or her own life.
In 1994, I was addressing a parents’ meeting at a small primary school. At the end of my talk I was approached by a large man with a pale moon face and a great mound of a stomach. I recognized him immediately. He was with a tall, overweight boy of about eight or nine with lank hair and a round pudding face.
‘Now then,’ said the man smiling widely. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘I remember you very well. Your name is Charlie.’ I could feel my heart beginning to pound in my chest.
The man turned to the boy. ‘I was telling my lad here that you were a pal of mine at school, wasn’t I?’
The boy nodded and scowled.
‘No, I wasn’t,’ I corrected him. ‘I was no pal of yours. You were a bully. You bullied me and made my last few weeks in primary school a misery. You used to call me names, kick me and spit at me.’ The man coloured up and shook his head but he didn’t reply. The boy looked up at his father. ‘I just hope,’ I continued, ‘that your son doesn’t have to put up with what I had to endure at your hands.’
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