Bully Boys

 Have you ever noticed how fragile a bully boy actually is? 

In primary school, we had separate boys and girls playgrounds because boys were too fragile for skipping and standing on your hands in a skirt to show the world you knickers. In theory, this should have reduced the interactions between us. It should have confirmed that we were different species and that we had nothing in common. However, all it did was create unofficial no-man’s land in the spaces between, where girls and boys discovered that they had more in common than was popular at the time. The boys were treated as special. They went out first and were generally taught that they were better. There was one boy called Ian who took his role of being the best very seriously. Because he wasn’t actually very good at anything he worked on his own superior status by bringing others down.

Sometime towards the end of our final year a new girl joined. She was an Amazonian woman. She had at least four inches on the tallest boy, could run faster than anyone, was smart (she literally could recite her nine times tables standing on her head) and had a strange accent. Susannah’s parents had moved around a lot. Her dad had been responsible for pipes or something all over the world. They had just returned from a 5 year stint in America and so her vowels were strange and exotic in comparison to our flat estuary diphthongs. This should have made her a target for Ian but he knew she was way out of his league, so he avoided her and continued to pick on Michael, who everyone said should go to a special school because he hardly spoke but who was just traumatised from being the first person to find his dad hanging in the garage. Susannah didn’t know about Michael but she wasn’t prepared to let a bully make her feel uncomfortable. The rest of us girls stood in no man’s land watching Ian’s verbal cruelty move towards gentle pushes and we knew where this was heading. We knew Michael would say nothing and stand still,  taking it until he finally flipped and launched himself at Ian, taking a bite of whatever bit of flesh his mouth made contact with first. We knew that it would be Michael that would be in trouble with more whispers about special school. Ian would wait with wide-eyed innocence and be rewarded for his bravery. To be fair to us, Susannah hadn’t been conditioned to the situation, as we had. We had got used to it gradually but her new fresh wide brown eyes were shocked. She marched straight into the boys playground and told Michael to step away. She offered herself in place.

“If you wanna pick on somebody honey, then try me,” she drawled.

Ian cried. He just stood there and blubbed. Big fat tears rolled down his face and a teacher came running onto the playground to find out why their golden boy was making such a racket.

“Susannah!” the teacher shouted, “What are you doing on the boys playground?”

“Sorry Miss, I didn’t mean to break the rules,” she said, looking back at us and rolling her eyes, promising to fight that battle another day, “But Ian was being really horrible to Michael and I just wanted to tell him to stop.” 

She didn’t hold back either. She gave the teacher a full verbatim recount of everything Ian had said. 

The teacher was shocked. Ian was still making the sound of a birthing whale and Michael was sitting against the fence making a daisy chain. She asked Ian if it was true but all he could manage through the sobs was, “She...she....she,,,,”

“What did she do to you Ian?” 

The teacher put her hand on his back and his sobs went from birthing whale to boiled alive lobster.

She asked his friends to dish the dirt on Susannah but what could they say? She hadn’t done anything, except offer herself up as an alternative sacrifice. 

I was thinking about that incident when the fall out from Harry and Meghan’s interview happened. The bully boys have been called out. They may try to defend themselves, still not seeing that they’ve done anything wrong (See the society of editor’s letter, written by a former boss of my daughter who has a history of defending bullies) or, like Piers Morgan, throw their toys out of the pram and sob uncontrollably, while the rest of us look on, ashamed at our own complicity at letting this go on for so long.

Susannah didn’t stay long but this incident and her long dark shiny plait left a lasting impression on me.