A PERFECT BULLY REMEDY

ON SCHOOL LIFE

As a child at school in England I suffered from acute bullying. I went to an all-girls secondary school, also known as High School outside of the UK, and my first and second year were extremely torturous. I was the only brownskinned girl in my class, the rest of the girls were pretty much evenly spread out between white girls and black girls. For the most part it was the white girls who made my school day a living hell. Now I should point out that it wasn’t all the white girls. There were some who were pretty nice to me and were my friends. So you might ask, how was I bullied if I had many white friends?

Here’s the alarming thing. Our classes were made up of around 30-odd pupils and the teachers always divided the class in half for art lessons, sciences lessons and home economics. The problem for me was not that the class was divided in half but the criterion the teachers used to halve the class. They looked at the class register and split it down the middle.

Those at the top half of the register were in one group and those in the second half were in another group. My surname, as you know, begins with the letter ‘H’. Unfortunately the surname of every single girl who bullied me was also at the top of the register from ‘A’ to ‘L’. All my friends were in the ‘N’ and below category.

They would then make us sit in alphabetical order and again, unfortunately, all the bullies happened to be in the ‘G’, ‘H’ and ‘I’, ‘J’ category; they sat right next to me. I’d be punched or kicked or called names throughout those classes. One time we were in a chemistry class about to turn on Bunsen burners and one of the regular bullies, whose surname was Hepburn, said, ‘I hope you burn yourself’. Another time, when I was punched in an art class, because they sat next to me, her companion turned to the puncher and said, ‘I’m glad you punched her’. As I said, this pretty much carried on for 2 years.

The bullying stopped in the 3rd year of secondary school. At this point, lessons started to be mixed with pupils from other classes. I met some nice girls and the bullies disappeared into their own little clicks and I barely saw them, except at REGISTRATION IRST THING IN THE MORNING.

I have to admit that, even though I was bullied incessantly, I never missed school, nor did I want to. I didn’t tell a teacher or my parents either because I knew that it would have made things worse for me during breaks, lunchtime and home time.

I often wonder if teachers knew who the bullies were and their victims. Classes WERE PRETTY SMALL IN THE IRST AND SECOND years so it seems implausible that they were that unaware. Whether or not they were aware and chose to ignore it, I believe they did a gross disservice to me and to themselves because if those girls didn’t bully me later, they might have made life hell for another girl or someone else later in life.

I escaped bullying with a few bruises and spending my days in fear. I think I was one of the lucky ones in that I didn’t let the bullying get to me. Apparently there are plenty of kids who do and as a result hurt themselves or end up taking their lives. If you google bullying and its consequences, there are plenty of stories of children found hanging in closets at home or from ropes in school, just because a bully told them to go and die.

I am appalled that my schoolteachers didn’t stop the bullies from making me miserable.

But one father in America took matters into his own hands. He recently found out that his 10-year-old daughter was banned from riding the school bus because the driver caught her bullying a classmate, again. According to her father, his daughter looked smug about being banned because she then thought she’d have the privilege of being chauffeured to and from school by him. He was not having it, however. So to teach his daughter that bullying is unacceptable, he made her walk 5 MILES TO SCHOOL AND 5 IVE MILES BACK. He drove behind her while she walked in the bitter cold, come rain or shine every single day for the rest of the term. He said, no way was he going to reward her bullying by giving her a comfortable ride. He did the right thing and I wish my bullies had also been taught a similar lesson.

BUT DECADES LATER I DID IND OUT something ironic and extraordinary about my main bully, the girl whose last name was Hepburn. She later became a nurse. Yes a nurse! How is that even possible? It’s also very scary that someone with her history could become a carer for the sick or elderly!