Alone

by Pip Granger

  When it became obvious that ignoring me failed to achieve much response, apart from my relief at being left alone, my life at that school rapidly descended into another kind of hell. On a cold, but sunny lunchtime, it began with an almighty shove in the back that sent me sprawling on to the tarmac behind one of the bike sheds. I struggled to my hands and knees but was shoved over again, this time by a foot clad in a scuffed white winkle-picker with a pointed toe several inches long. I kept my eyes on the half-dozen sets of feet that surrounded me as I tried, once again, to get up. This time I saw the kick coming. The foot wore a dark blue plimsoll and I remember thinking that at least it would be softer than the winkle-picker.

  I was wrong. The plimsoll had far more weight and considerable venom behind it. It caught me in the ribs, knocked me over yet again and winded me so badly I could not move for several moments. It was the sight of another winkle-picker, this time a black job, pulling back to kick me in the face that galvanized me into action. I rolled to one side, felt the wicked point brush past my cheek and heard it crash into the wall of the bike shed. There was a loud scream of pain and anguish. The lengthy, black pointed toe had been reduced to a mangled stub by the force of the collision. Inside the shoe, the flesh and blood toe obviously hurt like crazy, because its owner was hopping about clutching her foot with a hand that boasted a set of well-chewed fingernails. I just had time to roll into a tight ball with my arms over my head to protect it as best I could, before the kicks came thick and fast from all directions.

  My brains seemed to leave my body and note the proceedings, in a detached sort of way, from the safety of the leafless horse chestnut that towered over the shed. Some kicks seemed loaded with hatred, while others were more timid, as if the owner of the foot in question didn’t really want to be there at all but had tagged along for want of something better to do with her feet.

  I was just beginning to think that the booting I was taking would never end when I heard a voice shouting, ‘Miss, Miss, over here, they’re kicking the shit out of someone over here!’

  The assault stopped as suddenly as it had started, and although I didn’t see my assailants scatter, I heard them leave. One hissed at the whistle-blower as she passed, ‘Bloody sneak. We’ll get you an’ all next time.’

  To my relief, I heard Miss Roberts, my form teacher, say, ‘Angela, please do not use foul language.’ Then, after a brief pause, ‘Oh I say!’ A gentle hand rested on my hunched shoulder. I still had my head clutched in my arms and I appeared to be incapable of unclutching it for several long seconds. ‘Can you move, dear? Is anything broken? Who did this to you? Angela, hurry and get Mrs Hampton. Perhaps you’d better bring the first aid kit while you are about it.’

  I was lucky, I suppose. I had several nasty bruises in places that didn’t show, but no broken teeth or bones.

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t see who did this to you?’ Mrs Hampton asked as she poked about in my hair, like Nitty Nora looking for head lice, only she was looking for lumps and bumps. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ I told her three.

  ‘Good. What day is it today?’

  ‘Tuesday,’ I answered.

  ‘What’s my name?’

  ‘Mrs Hampton.’

  ‘Good. Well, it looks as if they missed your head but you’ll be sore everywhere else for a few days. There’s no broken ribs, either. You’d be in a lot of pain if they’d broken your ribs. Now, once again, who did this to you?’

  To be honest, I really wasn’t sure, because I was initially attacked from behind and, once I was down, I was too busy watching the feet or protecting my head to look up into any faces. But I did have a shrewd idea. The white winkle-pickers one attacker wore and the hardbitten nails of another gave me a clue, though I knew better than to say so.

  There was one particular gang led by a popular girl called Cathy, who I remember bit her nails so far down to the quick that they often bled. Apart from this, she was a pretty girl who always seemed to be able to afford all the latest fashions, including the winkle-pickers that were all the rage at the time. I never did know why Cathy had it in for me – but then, I suspect, neither did she. She had a bosom pal, Trish, who owned the scruffy pair of white winkles and seemed to be ready, willing and able to do anything that Cathy told her to do. They were usually joined by an assortment of other girls, but these hangers-on changed all the time, depending who was in favour and who was not: it was Cathy who made those decisions. That said, the core group usually consisted of Cathy, Trish, Viv, Patsy, Ann and Beryl. Poor old Beryl was regularly dumped in favour of someone else, but she clung on, knowing that if she didn’t, she’d wind up being picked on just like me. Or so she told me once, when she was on the outs with Cathy’s gang.

  I felt rather sorry for Beryl, a sad, lost soul whose dad had left her to the mercy of a foolish mother and her mother’s abusive boyfriend, who would take Beryl out in his van and do things to her. Beryl would whisper these secrets to me one day, then help to knock me about the next. I often wonder what happened to her, and whether she ever got out of the clutches of that ghastly man. I also feel a bit guilty, even now, because I realize that I should have told someone about the boyfriend. At the time, though, I didn’t really understand what she was trying to tell me, especially as she always seemed willing to climb into that little white van. Of course, maturity has taught me that she probably felt she had no choice in the matter, and she may have been so desperate for affection that she mistook his attentions for love. But I still wish I’d told someone, despite having been sworn to secrecy.

  Most nights I’d try to hang around so that I could leave school with Mother and travel home with her, but this wasn’t always possible. I was often dispatched to get our dinner on the go, to do some shopping or to render some other domestic assistance, while Mother stayed at school for meetings with colleagues or parents, open evenings, net-ball matches, rounders matches, or marking and displaying children’s work – all of which took place after school chucking-out time. This gave the bullies plenty of opportunities to pounce on me somewhere between the gates and the tube station. As I never knew exactly where the ambush would take place, it made dodging it even more difficult.

  Then there were playtimes. There was ample opportunity to administer a few punches, kicks, scratches and wounding insults, hidden from the prying eyes of the authorities in the nooks and crannies that abounded in the playground.

  There were more subtle tortures, too. I found the notes difficult to deal with, because they usually managed to touch a raw spot and they always promised future misery, which meant I spent an awful lot of time waiting for it to happen. The waiting was worse, in many ways, than the actual thrashing. Then there was the interference with the contents of my desk. This usually involved tearing up my exercise books, scribbling all over my work with crayons or pen, so it couldn’t be rubbed out, and stealing or damaging equipment, such as rulers, pens and pencils. All of these things were at a premium at the school, and an exercise book had to be examined minutely, and any free space filled, before a new one would be issued. Pencil stubs had to be presented for inspection to prove that they were indeed too small to be held, and an enquiry was launched into every bent nib, broken nib-holder and missing ruler. This made telling the teacher that I had lost yet another book or pencil a real trial, and I was often sent to Mrs Blackmore, the headmistress, to account for missing or broken items. As I knew better than to grass anyone up, I had no plausible excuses and was usually put on detention for blatant profligacy or ‘criminal carelessness’, depending on Mrs Blackmore’s mood.

  Thinking back to those days, I am utterly amazed that I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. But, as every bullied child knows, snitching only makes things worse, and I suppose I was already in the habit of not burdening my mother with yet more trouble. I was terrified of rocking our boat and giving her an excuse to hit the sauce again, so I kept schtum and suffered badly, as did my school-work. Much to my parents’ disgust, I wound up languishin
g in the E stream.

  15

  The Red Mist

  ‘What have you been up to?’ Father asked out of the blue.

  I was visiting the Soho flat for the last time: sixty-five stairs with a pram and bags of shopping had proved too much, and they were moving to a house in Twickenham.

  I hated it when Father shot questions at me. He did it a lot. He liked to quote someone like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde or some obscure Elizabethan poet, then demand to know who he was quoting. I always got the answer wrong, even when I knew it. It was the same every Friday, when our teacher tested us on our multiplication tables or spelling – but mostly the tables; I was better at spelling. My mind would go completely blank with terror, then, when I mastered it for a moment, she’d be several questions further on and I’d be in a sweaty panic. Sometimes I was actually sick. If I was in luck, I’d be sick before the test, then I’d be excused. The verbal tests were the worst. I didn’t find writing the answers on paper anywhere near as hard.

  ‘Are you deaf?’ said Father. ‘I asked you, what have you been up to? Your mother says the school wants you to see a psychologist. So, I ask again, what the fu—’ Father stopped, sighed and tried again. ‘What have you been up to, that they want you to see a trick cyclist?’

  ‘They want to know why I’m not doing better with my school-work,’ I whispered. How I hated talking about school. I was so sick of it and the misery it seemed to bring me, wherever I went.

  Father thought about that for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s a fair question,’ he concluded. ‘You’re obviously not an idiot, so you ought to be doing better than you are.’

  I was surprised that this was all he said. I’d been expecting an explosion. He sometimes expressed the exact opposite view of my intelligence when I couldn’t answer his literary and general knowledge questions. Just when I thought I knew which way my old man would jump, he’d jump the other way. There was no telling with Father. He was like the English weather, changeable: except that he was much, much stormier.

  A few weeks later I was taken out of class, right in the middle of Religious Instruction, to the headmistress’s office to talk to the ‘trick cyclist’.

  She stood up and smiled as I came into the room and introduced herself as Miss Dangerfield. She wasn’t very old, perhaps in her late twenties, but of course, that was fairly ancient to me at the time. I was struck by how slender she was, almost weedy, and by her masses of frizzy ginger hair. It was so thick, a blackbird could have brought up a dozen chicks in it with no bother at all. Behind the thick lenses of her glasses, her eyes were a very pale, watery blue, and set in red-rimmed sockets that looked as if they were really sore. They were the kind of eyes that went all squinty in strong sunlight, and itched like mad in the pollen season.

  I gave her clothes the once-over while I was at it. I liked clothes. Hers, however, were worthy and dull. I remember thinking that she would have looked good in lovely autumnal greens, russets and golds, but she had chosen a pale grey twin-set and a charcoal grey skirt instead. Her large, narrow feet were shod in sturdy brown shoes. If she had to wear grey, I thought to myself, then she should have worn black shoes, at the very least, but something a bit more exciting, like bottle green, would have been better. As she was a ginger-nut, red shoes were out of the question: they’d clash.

  ‘What are you reading?’ she asked me, breaking into my thoughts.

  I showed her the book that had attracted her attention.

  ‘I’ll Cry Tomorrow,’ the lady read out loud. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s about this actress,’ I answered.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘It’s about when she was a little girl. Her dad was a famous actor and it’s about how her mum and him didn’t get on.’

  ‘I see,’ the lady said. ‘Your mummy and daddy didn’t get on very well either, did they?’

  I didn’t think it was any of her business. The silence between us grew as she waited for the answer I wouldn’t give.

  I decided to start again. ‘So anyway, this actress’s dad drank like a fish, and her mum was very cross about it.’

  ‘I see,’ the lady said again.

  ‘And he took mistresses too, and she was very cross about that as well,’ I elaborated.

  ‘I expect she was. Do you know what a mistress is?’ she asked. I wasn’t the only one who could change tack.

  ‘Like another wife, only it’s not legal, like a proper wife is,’ I answered promptly, proud that there were some questions I could answer. ‘Or,’ I added, being a smartarse, ‘they are lady teachers.’

  ‘I see.’ She looked at me with slightly narrowed eyes. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘this actor, he “drank like a fish”, I believe you said. Surely fish drink water?’

  I gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘It’s a saying,’ I explained patiently. The poor woman was obviously not very worldly or, indeed, that bright. ‘It means he was an alcoholic.’

  ‘Indeed. And what is an alcoholic?’

  I took pity on her and told her, at some length, what an alcoholic was. At the end of it she asked, ‘And how do you know all this?’

  I hadn’t seen it coming. I should have done, but I didn’t. There was a silence so long that I grew frightened, and the fear galvanized my brain for once, instead of paralysing it. ‘It tells you,’ I held the book up slightly, ‘in here.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, looking at me searchingly over her glasses.

  I didn’t mention the bullying to her. It was no good involving grown-ups. It was better by far to manage these things alone. In my experience, grown-ups only seemed to make things worse.

  I subsequently learned that Miss Dangerfield had recommended that I be taken from the substantial bosom of my mother and placed in a boarding-school. Lists of suitable schools were sought, and an inventory of items that I would need to take with me – such as a tuck-box, netball knickers, geometry equipment, towels, two complete sets of uniform (winter and summer), footwear (ditto, plus games shoes), and so on and on – was acquired from somewhere, so I presume a school had been chosen by somebody – but not by me.

  I’m not sure why the plan, having got that far, foundered, although I think it may have depended on who was supposed to be paying for my new school. If it was the local authority, then all well and good, it might have gone ahead. But if Father was supposed to be coughing up, perhaps not. Things were looking decidedly sticky on his financial front at that time, and school fees would have been far too much of a stretch for Mother, as her salary was nowhere near as generous as a man’s would have been for doing the same job.

  I don’t remember being upset that the boarding-school idea came to nothing, because I was afraid to go for all sorts of reasons. I was being badly bullied as it was, but it occurred to me that in a boarding-school there would be no getting away from it. At least at a day school, once I was inside my own front door there was some respite. There would be none at all if I had to live, eat and sleep with the girls who were bullying me.

  I was also scared of what might happen if I left Mother on her own. What would I do if she wasn’t there when I got home again? It was entirely possible that she could have legged it, or dived head first back into a bottle. I spent a lot of time, when I was young, being afraid that people would disappear in one way or another.

  So, with no boarding-school and no more interviews with the trick cyclist, life went back to being pretty much as it was before, but with one big difference: something happened that stopped the bullying abruptly.

  I had often read in stories that the hero or heroine ‘saw red’ when they became really angry, but I was utterly unprepared for it when it happened to me. I had had a note warning me:

  Watch your back – were going to get you

  I’d been afraid for days, waiting for the ambush that I knew was coming. When it came, in the form of being shoved and kicked, just once, around the corner from the school gates, I finally saw the fabled red mist descend before my eyes, bl
inding me to everything except my tormentors.

  Instinct told me to get the ringleader, Cathy. Rather than backing away, I charged, much like an enraged bull, and knocked her clean off of her feet. I was astride her in a flash and had her head gripped firmly between my hands as I pinned her to the ground. Almost two years of pent-up fear and fury came roaring to the surface, and I believe I must have been going for the kill. According to witnesses, I was about to batter her brains out on the kerb when a voice boomed, ‘WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?’ and I was hauled off my enemy by the scruff of my neck. It was the local beat bobby, Constable Jenkins.

  Cathy and I were marched back into school and into Mrs Hampton’s room. Mrs Hampton was the deputy head, and also the history teacher. I liked history the way Mrs Hampton taught it.

  ‘Mrs Blackmore about? Only I thought I saw her car leave a while back …’ Constable Jenkins asked.

  ‘You’ll have to make do with me, Mr Jenkins. And what have these two been up to?’

  The policeman hauled me up a little straighter and said, ‘I caught this one, with this one’s bonce’ – he hauled Cathy upright to indicate her ownership of the bonce in question – ‘in her mitts, looking as if she was about to kill her if she could.’

  Mrs Hampton did not look pleased to hear this news. ‘Oh indeed!’ She glared at me. ‘And what brought on this unprecedented fit of violence, may I ask?’

  I hung my head in shame. I didn’t like to upset Mrs Hampton. She was all right, and very interesting to listen to when she was teaching us, a fact I appreciated immensely. Most teachers I had come across could bore for England – or, indeed, the world.