The
Heart
At the heart of it
all, at the very centre of everything, is a boy.
He is seven or eight
years old, and he stands in his accustomed position, facing the wall
with his hands over his face, wishing it would stop.
Through his tears and
the gaps in his fingers he looks at the pink, sparkling granite, the
ridge of mortar between the irregular shaped blocks of stone, the
sandstone window ledge just above his eye level and tries to block
them out.
He has no idea when
it started, or why, just that this is where he stands every day
whenever he is in the playground, while everyone he knows in the
world who isn't either an adult or a relative stands around him in a
semi circle, chanting, laughing, occasionally pushing or kicking him.
He doesn't understand
why everyone seems to hate him, he never does anything but try to be
friends, to fit in, but every little attempt is seized upon and
turned around, twisted to make him once more the target.
If he should dare to
lash out, as he occasionally does when it all gets too much, it is
greeted with wild laughter and cat calls, intensifying the torture
even further.
If one of these wild
flails should actually connect then he is plunged into an even deeper
hell of recriminations, calls of,
“What did you do
that for?!” or,
“You can give it
but you can't take it.”
All he wants is for
it to stop, but it never does.
Muncaster Church of
England primary school was exactly a mile from my house, uphill all
the way except for the last hundred yards when the road sloped down
again briefly before a last climb to its peak, about 50 yards beyond
the school. The school itself was part of a small row of buildings
along the left hand side of the road, beginning with the local Police
Constable’s house which backed on to the infants yard, and
finishing with two semi-detached cottages backing on to the juniors
playground. Also adjoining the juniors playground was the headmasters
house. Across the road from the school was the gatehouse and entrance
for Muncaster Castle, our school was part of the Castle's estate.
I have vague memories
of my first few days there. Because we were a rural community, there
was no such thing as a nursery school, instead you started at
Muncaster aged three and went two days a week, Tuesdays and
Thursdays. The infants classroom was divided into three tables –
Big, Middle and Small, which was the table you were on until you
graduated from Nursery status to Infant status aged five and moved up
to Middle Table.
My first real memory
of the room is me standing next to Small Table in some confusion as
to what is going on. My birthday is in June and so I must have been
one of the last to arrive that year, I don't feel like I know anyone
in the room at all and a girl called S. who is Canadian and
lives on a catamaran on the estuary is telling me it's time for
maths. I don't even know what maths is.
The first year must
have been ok, however, as at the end of it I told my parents I
wouldn't go back unless I could go full time. The county council were
approached, and a special dispensation was made for me to go to
school every day of the school week rather than just the two.
The two classrooms at
Muncaster were joined by a large central room which served multiple
purposes. Assembly, PE, music, TV, school plays and of course lunch,
served by the cook through a hatch from the kitchen and distributed
by the dinnerlady to the various tables of children.
Assembly was held
every morning by the Headmaster in front of the whole school, a
massive twenty-three children when I first started that slowly
dwindled to just seven by the time they closed the school when I was
nine. By that time we were all in the juniors classroom together and
the cook and dinnerlady were long gone, leaving the one woman who had
been a constant throughout my time there, Mrs B., as our sole adult
supervision.
Mrs B. was a tall
thin woman with one kidney. Her husband worked for British Nuclear
Fuels Ltd at nearby Sellafield and she would constantly rail against
the people in the media who dared to criticise the safety of Nuclear
Power. If one of the children dared to repeat something they had seen
on TV or that their parents had said that criticised the industry
then she would treat them to the full extent of her wrath, scorn and
sarcasm.
When I arrived at
Muncaster, Mrs B. was the infants teacher, replaced occasionally by
supply teachers when she had to make trips to hospital for the
treatment of her kidney disorder, there were three or four of these
ladies, one of whom, Mrs C., a kind and loving, nurturing teacher, is
the only adult I remember from the school with any degree of
affection, other than the cleaner.
The headmaster taught
the juniors, and while I progressed from table to table we went
through three such men, Mr F., a classic British teacher with half
moon glasses and a quick temper who cried during his retirement
ceremony in the dining room; Mr Fr., tall, dark haired and ultra
strict, who made all his charges start any statement addressed to him
with “Please Sir,” and finish with “Sir.” (“Please sir, yes
sir, it did sir”); and Mr R., tall skinny and bald with a friendly
smile.
After the departure
of Mr R., Mrs B. was elevated to the position of Headmistress and
moved to the Junior classroom, coincidentally at the same time that I
and my class mates from Big Table moved through there too. Leaving
one of the supply teachers, Miss H., short and rotund with mousey,
bobbed hair and a lovely temperament, to look after what remained of
the dwindling infant class.
During the years in
the infant classroom Mrs B. had shown her temper and intolerance to
us on many occasions. She ruled by embarrassment, and the fear of it.
If you found something difficult to grasp she would eventually stand
you up and tell everyone in the classroom how stupid you were. If a
child were to commit the cardinal sin of wetting themselves at their
table, usually out of fear of asking to go to the toilet, then she
would vent her anger by telling the classroom what a baby they were,
sometimes even questioning the ability of their parents to bring up
their own children.
Once, when one of the
boys from the village was taken out of the school by their parents
and sent to the Catholic school in nearby Seascale. Mrs B. dedicated
weeks to the constant slandering of both child and parents, along
with the school and Catholics in general.
I. B. was two years
older than me, his mother was the dinner lady and he was my first
bully. I have scattered memories of encounters with him while I was
in the infant classroom, by the time I was on middle table, he had
moved up to the juniors so I only saw him in the dinner room or
outside school, and that was infrequently as I lived in Ravenglass
and he lived in Broad Oak, a hamlet several miles away. I once stood
up to him, it was in the infants room, he was pushing me and saying
mean things and I just lashed out a punch that landed square in the
middle of his face. There was a split second of abject terror while
the shock of what had just happened registered across his face and
then suddenly he was shaking my hand saying, “Good punch mate,
brilliant.” and then he left.
I'm pretty sure he
was the ringleader when I moved up to the juniors, certainly once he
left for secondary school, the torment ended, for a little while.
I can see, smell,
feel even taste the wall in my mind as clear as if it were yesterday,
the ridge that ran through the middle of the mortar between the
granite blocks, the pink and black facets in the granite that made it
sparkle even on a cloudy day, the sandstone lintel that made up the
bottom of one of the classroom windows.
We would be sent out
to play and the taunting would start almost immediately, sometimes I
would chase the entire group around the playground, crying and
lashing out but never able to actually catch them while they all
laughed hysterically, sometimes we might actually be able to play
some game or other where I was able to join in but invariably I would
say some innocent thing that one of them would seize upon and then I
would end up by the wall, two or three inches away, with my hands
over my face, just waiting for playtime to be over so as I could
return to the relative safety of the classroom. Sometimes, now that I
have started to think about it properly, I step outside the boy and
look at him from above or from the road that runs along the edge of
the playground. He stands there looking so small and helpless and I
just cry and cry. I wish I could step in, to tell them to stop, to
hug him and tell him it's ok. But I can't and the pain is unbearable.
Whenever I visit my
parents as an adult, I will invariably end up driving past the
school, now a country guest house, a number of times. Every single
time, my eyes fix on that one spot on the wall where I would stand
and my heart will fill with sadness as I mourn that child’s
happiness.
Whenever things get
difficult in my life from this time onwards. Through the hell of
secondary school, throughout all my relationships, throughout all my
work, whenever there's an argument or I feel under pressure, then in
my minds eye I see the wall through my tear stained fingers and I
freeze, hoping it will all go away, that if I just stand here
quietly, it will stop. This is why I don't do well in arguments,
particularly domestic ones.
In the infants, my
mum would take me to school and pick me up, usually pushing her bike
on the way there in the morning so as she could free-wheel back to
the village on the way home. In the afternoons at the end of school,
there would usually be a group of mums from Ravenglass all together,
and a big gang of us would all walk back down the hill, it was almost
always a happy and carefree time, where the kids would walk along the
top of bankings or down our own secret paths at the edge of the woods
next to the pavement. I remember laughing a lot.
By the juniors, I was
walking or cycling to and from the school by myself. I would set off
alone and walk the mile to the school with an ever increasing sense
of foreboding, wondering how long I would have before somebody would
begin the chanting and I would end up at the wall.
Once, I set off from
our house with such dread, that I couldn't even start up the hill. I
couldn't go, I felt physically sick with the prospect of another day
of abuse looming over me. I couldn't just go home and say I didn't
want to go, I had tried telling my parents I was being picked on once
and it hadn't worked, so, about 50 yards from the end of our path, I
saw a concrete fence post planted at the side of the road. I went to
it and scraped from the bridge to the end of my nose up and down it
until blood began to flow and then turned around and went home,
telling my mum that I'd tripped and fallen on the way. It hurt like
hell but at least I didn't have to go to school that day. I was no
more than eight years old.
The junior classroom,
like the infants, had three tables, these were named, in a rather
more grown up fashion, Bottom, Middle and Top. By the time I reached
Top, there were only seven children left in the school and we were
all in the one room. When I was on Bottom though, the room was still
relatively full and every person in it, excepting Mrs B., would be in
the semi-circle around me at the wall at playtimes.
It was regularly
remarked by all the children that Mrs B. had gone power mad when she
became headmistress, someone had heard the word, 'megalomaniac' and
it was bandied around a lot. Certainly her outbursts of public
humiliation grew worse and worse. One boy, A. G., of whom I was
terrified, was stood up by her almost daily so that she could tell
the class how “stupid” he was, how he “refused” to learn, how
getting him to work was “like getting blood from a stone”. Poor
A. would be kept in at playtimes and made to do extra work, we would
look in through the windows to see the two of them physically
fighting. One day, as the end of his last year at Muncaster
approached, she stood him up and told us all how she was having him
sent to a “Special School” rather than Millom, the school
everyone else went to, it was a school for other kids who “refused
to learn”. A. stood there, bright red, staring at his feet while
she looked on with her hateful smile, clearly relishing her victory
over this insolent ten year old child. Within the first term of his
time at the “Special School”, A. was diagnosed as being dyslexic.
At some point during
my time on Bottom Table, a new girl arrived in the village, S. H..
She was red haired, with freckles, very pretty, with a beautiful
smile and a slight lisp. At her previous school she had already
learned to do joined up writing in a cursive script that Mrs B. was
extremely impressed with. She went on about it so much that one
Friday I decided that I too would learn to write joined up before
Mrs B. had taught us to and therefore impress her and be praised in
front of the class like S. had been. I made it my mission to have
learnt how to do this by the time we returned to school on the
following Monday.
All that weekend I
had my parents show me how to join letters together and I practised
and practised. It wasn't quite the fancy cursive style that Susan had
but I was sure that my initiative would impress Mrs B. still.
On Monday morning we
had some piece of writing to do and I of course set to with my new
grown up style. I handed my piece in with everyone else, smiling and
excited about the congratulations I was surely about to receive.
This wasn't, however,
how things turned out.
A look of utter fury
crossed Mrs B.’s face before she commanded me to stand up.
“And what is this
supposed to be?” she sneered at me.
“Umm, joined up
writing Mrs B.,”
“Who do you think
you are? Really, who do you think you are? What do you think you were
doing?!” (big grins and barely muffled sniggers all round the
class)
“...”
“This is nothing
more than joined script, not cursive. This is common, and badly done,
you think you're all big and clever don't you? Well this is terrible
and you are not big or clever. SIT DOWN!”
I sat down, with
tears running down my face, numb from the shock of my good idea going
so badly wrong. I looked around the room and all I could see were
people looking at me and laughing while all I could hear was Mrs B.
re-telling S. how wonderful her writing was.
The way in and out of
the school, to the car park which served both it and Muncaster
Castle, was through the gate at the top of the infants playground. To
get to this from the juniors you followed a path around the edge of
the school furthest from the road, not very long, but considerably
longer than the patch which went up the other side of the school,
between the kitchen and the wall that ran along the road. This
directly connected the two playgrounds but was, for some unspecified
reason, forbidden.
For a little while L.
D. and I took to ducking down beneath the windows when we left school
in the afternoons and running up the forbidden path, thus beating
everyone else to the car park by about twenty seconds. We got away
with this for a while until one day, as I rounded the corner of the
building, Mrs B. stepped out of the kitchen doorway to catch us,
obviously having got wise to what we were doing. L. was lucky enough
to realise what had happened before he got to the corner of the
building and so wasn't caught, he turned and fled the proper way. I
stood there while Mrs B. hissed that she would deal with me later,
then walked dejectedly around the other edge of the school. This was
going to be bad.
The next day at
assembly, I was brought to stand at the front, facing the rest of the
school. For what seemed like hours Mrs B. stood and told everyone
what a bad person I was, how I felt I was “better than everyone
else in the school”, how I felt that “Rules don't apply to me”
and how I needed to be “Taken down a peg or two”. She went on and
on while I stared at my feet because every time I looked up, all I
could see were gleeful smiles. My cheeks burned, tears pricked my
eyes. Eventually I was told to sit back down. My punishment for this
heinous crime was, as I clearly felt I was above them in some way, to
be separated from the rest of the juniors. I was banished back to the
infants classroom where I sat by myself on a small table in the
library part of their classroom. I wouldn't have minded this at all,
but for the fact I was regularly summoned down to the juniors for
humiliation and also that play times were still spent in the juniors
playground, facing the wall. The humiliations would usually take the
form of one of the kids from Top Table, being sent to tell me “Mrs
B. wants to see you”, a message always delivered with a big grin.
Often it was for the weekly spelling or multiplication test, but they
always neglected to tell me this. I would arrive in the juniors class
room to a statement along the lines of “Here IT is at last” from
Mrs B., she would then say it was time for the test. I would then say
I had to go back to get my pencil which would infuriate her still
more, commanded to run I would hear her telling the rest of the room
how useless I was and how she didn't even know why she bothered with
me. I would return and after another bout of abuse the test would
commence, followed by playtime. Obviously everyone would have plenty
of ammunition from my recent public humiliation to keep me facing the
wall throughout the playtime.
I've no idea how long
I spent on my own table in the infants, it seemed like a year, I
guess it was probably about a term.
Outside of the school
yard, things were generally ok, for some reason the abuse only ever
took place within the confines of the school. This was maybe partly
due to I. B. living far enough away from Ravenglass for him not to be
a part of our regular social circle, although I don't know this for
sure. Anyway, as an only child, I was more than able to entertain
myself and if things started to take a turn for the worse I would
play alone. I had several dens that were mine alone, that I never
even told anyone else about, mainly near to my house and the station
of the narrow gauge steam railway that I lived on. I would play out
imaginary games which usually involved me suddenly discovering that I
was actually a prince or even a king or that I was a knight of old or
lived alone far from any other human contact. I was also
exceptionally good at playing board games by myself, some times
playing Monopoly as four separate players usually on behalf of
various stuffed toys, generally I would have a favourite in any game
that I would pretend I wasn't helping to win, but I could happily
play board games by myself for hours on end.
I would also wander
around the various sheds and offices of the railway, looking for
'jobs' and ways to 'help' people. Most of the people who worked on
the railway had known me since I was born, my mum and dad had met
working there and indeed my mum still ran the stores for the two gift
shops that were at either end of the seven mile line up to Eskdale.
Our house, the station house at Ravenglass, came with her job and we
lived there from when I was about eighteen months old until she quit
her job when I was about twenty-three.
By the time I reached
Top Table, my penultimate year of primary school, There were just
seven children left at Muncaster. Ravenglass seemed to be a village
in it's death throws. As the older generations slowly died off, their
houses were bought as holiday homes that were lived in for two weeks
a year, the community was dying and there were less and less kids. It
was decided that Muncaster would close and that the remaining
children would move to Waberthwaite, the next nearest school. During
our last summer term at Muncaster we would be driven up to
Waberthwaite a couple of times a week so as we could integrate with
all the new, unknown children. There were forty-two children at
Waberthwaite and it seemed massive, especially as everyone shared the
same playground. The noise was unbelievable.
We had our last days
at Muncaster, a school photo taken in exactly the spot where I had
spent all that time facing the wall, and we were presented with a
Bible to help us through the rest of our lives.
I never saw Mrs B.
again, and never wanted to.
The headmaster at
Waberthwaite was Mr D., a lovely man with a kind smile who was both
easy going but commanded a deep respect from the children, he rarely
got angry and on those times when he did, we would feel bad for
having upset him. The only time he would talk about you in front of
the class would be if you had done well. If you needed a reprimand,
it would be done quietly but firmly by his desk so no one else could
hear. That year at Waberthwaite was one of the happiest of my entire
school life.
