The slow clap of dead puppy ears
Exhibit: Tony Blair: boarder at Fettes College, Edinburgh, hated the school
Extract…
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The naïve victim walks to the block, his persecutors following, their followers following as followers do. This attempt to feel a tiny vestige of a hint of control of the circumstances is a monumental mistake. Persecutors hate it when their victims show even a simulation of courage, and they hate it even more when it happens in public. It’s theatre. Now showing: “The making of a pariah”…
The locker room is narrow. A single light bulb dangles above a tiled alley between dark-wood lockers. He drags his feet to the end of the room, ready to turn at bay on reaching the dead end. The smell of mud on old socks hangs in the air like the body of the small boy hanging on his dead-weight-stretched school scarf in the toilet next door a few years later. A row of curved cast-iron hooks cast quiet, curlicued shadows on the lockers. He turns, only to find he is alone. Whilst the doorway is crowded, there’s a no-mans-land between him and them. They’ve lost impetus. The tail end of their script is just visible as it scuttles off into the darkness beneath the benches.
At this point, with stunning naivety and to make absolutely certain that his future in the school hierarchy will be totally fucked for ever, he removes his jacket, hangs it on one of the hooks and, haltingly, quietly asks whether it will be all of them at once or just one at a time. He is a small boy at bay, trying desperately to pretend to be brave and not to cry or to cower.
Note: this was not a good plan unless the objective was to completely and utterly piss-off the captains of your year group. In effect, he’s led them to the lynching, turned at bay and asked them what they are going to do about it. Not a good plan, not a recommended method to ingratiate yourself with those who will control your life over the next several years.
If only he’d known how the local culture operated.
Big Tom is first. He walks forward and there is pushing and wrestling. Only muted baying from the crowd jostling to see at the door. As he’s pushed against the wall, a hook is pressed into the flesh of his back – why bother with a voodoo doll when you can impale the real thing. But Tom’s heart isn’t in it, there’s no heat just head. It’s too considered, too premeditated and best described as “a bit of a tussle”. That’s it. No-one else steps up. Just a series of ritual warnings: [subtext] “make sure you kowtow next time; don’t do it again or else; by the way, in any case, you are so screwed”.2
Everyone disappears en mass3, an ebbing tide that leaves a single child washed up against a wall. The adrenaline leaves too, disappearing onto the night. It’s cold, quiet and very, very empty. Like him. No longer feeling in the least brave, just homesick, small and completely alone.
Tears are not allowed. No-one must see you cry…
The beady eyes of the script flicker in the darkness beneath a bench.
He walks to the dormitory in a bubble of whispers and isolation. Pyjamas. Wash. Teeth. Bed. Lights-out. Dark. Tomorrow seems both a very long way off and far too close.
As an adult, I react very badly to bullying or to attempted bullying. I probably see bullying even when it is not necessarily meant as such, perhaps merely very insistent attempts at persuasion from positions of power. It’s visceral. Peter Cook said that his time at Radley had left him with “a sense of injustice about the world”. Just so.
Fortunately, this kind of thing never does anyone any harm…
- Fighting was a far from a passive spectator sport. Even the early pushing stages would draw a crowd, egging on the protagonists and attracting others with chants of “fight, fight”.
- He found out later that pressure was put on anyone associating with him to practice shunning. This became very unsubtle a few days later in the dorm when, one at a time, each boy was asked whether they liked Wilson or not, with “not” being the only acceptable answer. His only friend in the room, H, courageously said he didn’t care what they said, he still liked. He was taken aside later for more advanced training. Unfortunately, he left the school soon after as his father had financial problems.
- There should be a collective noun for children behaving as a group, like “shoal” or “paedoswarm”. Under the right conditions (such as a closed, very hierarchical community), they behave as a hive mind under the control of one or two leaders. More recently, this has been exacerbated by social media where it has become increasingly easy for a few to influence the collective, the shoal driven hither and yon by the shifting sands of instant social opprobrium.
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