Arborfield Old Boys Association
AOBA
Arborfield Life
Bullying
Greg Peck 53B
At the time of writing this, the third of March 2003, a thread has been running for
some time on the Forum message board on the topic of bullying at AAS. It certainly
existed there in its various forms and everyone who passed through AAS would have
been subjected to one form of it, or another, during their stay at Arborfield. As
to how terrible it was, only an individual can comment on that from his or her own
perspective. For me personally, bullying started much earlier than my entry through
the front gates of Arborfield AAS. Bear with me and I will endeavour to relate how
it affected me, as I was as a child, then as a teenager and indeed even now.
My first
contact with a bully was while still a child of tender years, living at that time
in Bakers Street, Luton. Michael Allen, my nemesis, lived some four doors away from
the house in which we lived. Our house faced a side road, Cambridge Street, a very
short but quite steep thoroughfare leading towards the Council Bus Depot and a main
road into Luton from the south.
Michael Allen was quite a large and aggressive kid
who led a little pack of hangers on. From the day that my family moved into the street
he relegated me to bottom of the pecking order and my life was made a misery whenever
our paths crossed. I soon learned to avoid him and his cohorts, slipping quietly
out of the street to seek the company of my older cousins whenever I could, the gauntlet
had to be run again on my return home but I became very expert at lurking without
being seen and then making a very swift dash once the coast was clear. My Mother
often entrusted me to go into the Town centre for the meat ration once I got a little
older, I developed a defensive technique for that which never failed me. Fearing
to get waylaid and having money and ration card taken from me, I would gaze out the
front window down Cambridge Street. Upon seeing a couple of old dears whose routine
never varied, I would dash out and walk with them all the way to Dewhursts, the butchers
shop in Wellington Street. In cold and slippery conditions the two elderly ladies
thought I was a very nice young lad, as they clutched my arms to help them maintain
their footing. My motivation was for their presence to deter my feared persecutors
of course, a very happy sort of quid pro quo for me!
Michael Allen and all of his
pack ended up going to Surrey Street school, which was downhill from where we lived,
while I went to Tennyson road, slightly further away but uphill. With he and his
sycophants spending more and more of their time with new chums from their school,
I saw much less of them and that thankfully from such a distance that it permitted
me to avoid them.
Unfortunately, this did not end my problems as far as bullying
went, I had become such a furtive and introspective little bloke by this time that
I guess my body language invited predation by those types who need a victim to fulfil
their otherwise empty lives. Another larger and older kid at my school promptly filled
in the vacuum left by my erstwhile tormentor. The quadrangles at the school were
poorly serviced by teachers at break times, they rarely ventured out of the building
unless called out in the case of a kid getting into strife by way of a fall or whatever,
or an air raid warning. This left me entirely at the mercy of this big fat older
kid, who gave me several hidings for no apparent reason other than that he could.
My recesses were spent skulking, or if spotted, running for my life! An older girl,
noticing my plight, started to intercede whenever she saw me being set upon. I worshipped
the very ground she walked upon and quickly utilised her the same way I had done
with the two old dears, hanging out just close enough to her so that I could scoot
to her side if threatened. Inevitably, there came a day when she was away from school
for some reason, fatso had been waiting for this and at the lunch break he finally
cornered me. I was trapped in a corner of the rear quadrangle and he just stood there
slapping at my head, one slap started my nose bleeding and something snapped inside
of me. I quite literally saw red for a second, a sort of haze, and then I felt sort
of weightless. Next thing I remember is hearing screams and having a teacher pull
me off of the chest of the fat kid, who I had somehow knocked to the ground. Both
of us were well bloodied and were screaming, me with rage and he with fear, as I
pounded at his head with flying fists.
A short while later, after a lecture on errant
behaviour, I was given six strokes of the cane across the palm of my hand, my first
clash with authority and a painful one too. Not even that could take away the tremendous
feeling of elation coursing through me however, I had, so I believed, solved the
problem where bullying was concerned. From that day on, whenever picked on, I would
stand my ground and if necessary, protect myself with flying fists.
Incidents that
caused me to fight became very infrequent, probably because I no longer carried myself
like a frightened potential victim, instead of lurking on the periphery of whatever
was going on, I became an enthusiastic participator.
In my final few days at Tennyson
Road School, my old protagonist was transferred from Surrey Street School, for unruly
behaviour apparently. We were preparing to emigrate to Melbourne in Australia and
my mind was really on other things. Once he had settled in, he tried to start at
precisely where he had left off, belittling, shoving, elbowing and the final straw,
smacking the back of my head in class with his ruler. Luckily without attracting
the teachers' attention, I turned around and took a swipe at him, mutual threats
were exchanged and we arranged to fight outside the school gates. He disappeared
after lunch and when, after vainly waiting outside the school for some fifteen minutes,
the eager crowd had dispersed, I started to make my way downhill. At the first intersection
Michael Allen waylaid me, in tow he had a tough looking kid from Surrey St and they
both started to shove and push at me. I lashed out and offered to fight the other
kid immediately after I had sorted out Michael Allen. This bravado really nettled
them and the kid said that he had no real quarrel with me, I only had to fight Michael
Allen as far as he was concerned. What a doddle! He was quite hopeless, this was
very obviously the first time his bluff had been called and after a few punches and
a bit of wrestling, he spat the dummy. This was all the proof I felt was needed that
bullying by your peers did not have to be endured.
Australia was very different,
somehow much more casual and relaxed, although the schoolyards contained bullies
too. As a Pom, I found myself a magnet to those who wanted something different to
have a go at and every school that I went to (Nine in total) necessitated some scrapping
in order to secure relief from that. I quickly noticed that teachers much better
patrolled schoolyards there than had been the case in Tennyson Road School. This
I utilised to good advantage. My invariable stratagem being to become extremely vociferous
when challenged by a would be bullyboy, having attracted an enthusiastic audience,
towards which the teacher would be hastening. I would launch a sudden ferocious assault
on my foe. The object of which was to do as much damage as I could in the short time
available to me, this dismayed the object of my attention because all he wanted to
do was establish dominance as cheaply as possible, or arrange a clash after school.
My apparent enthusiasm for instant fisticuffs totally baffled them and none showed
any enthusiasm for a rematch, of course, a few strokes across the behind with a plimsoll
was received by each of us for fighting but this was a small price to pay for being
left unmolested.
Some of the incidents during my time there were unusual and stood
apart from the ones over which I could exercise some manipulation to my advantage,
not all victories were to be cheap.
While I was at Highett School I had two standout incidents, the Saturday before commencing
at the school I went to the cinema for the very popular matinee for kids, I had my
younger brother with me. Duncan had a really white blonde head of hair and for some
reason this provoked some teasing from some kids sat in the row behind us. One of
them reached forward and pulled four year old Duncan's hair quite viciously; I grabbed
him around the neck, pulled him into my row and set about sorting him out. When the
ushers came to see what it was all about, plenty of other kids told what had been
done to my brother, so we saw the matinee while the rat bag and his mates were tossed
out. When I fronted for my latest new school on the Monday, who should come swaggering
up to me but the kid who I had fought with in the cinema, he announced himself as
the best fighter in the grade and told me to watch myself. I sniggered at his swollen
and blackened eye and told him to scarper before I gave him a matched pair, no further
trouble from that quarter.
Later on at Highett School I had befriended a kid called
Paul, who complained to me that this older lad was taking lunch money off of kids,
he told me that it was only a matter of time before he caught up with me. I suggested
that perhaps he needed to be taught some manners and then organised to secrete some
cudgels by the route we followed to school along the road down by the back paddock.
A couple of weeks later, this big ginger headed yobbo confronted us and told us to
cough up our lunch money, instead of which we took off down the road, he hotfooted
it after us. His smirk when we pulled up by this big boxthorn bush didn't last very
long though, we set about him with the cudgels to such good effect that he was off
school for three days, he never 'dobbed us' in though and never came near us again
either.
At Auburn School we had two classes in our grade and the rivalry was really
intense, this particular day we actually went for each other like you wouldn't believe.
I ended up rolling around on the floor locked in mortal combat with a biggish Yugoslav
kid, as the teachers arrived to break up the scrimmage, all the kids still on their
feet sprinted away, one of them managed to stomp on my hooter on the way. One broken
nose! Just three weeks after this, it got done again in a fight arranged in my normal
format, it was really sore but as always, things happen in threes! In the third instance,
my kid brothers little red pedal car had been left outside the front of the Milk
Bar that my parents then owned. This kid from a couple of doors down had decided
he would muck around with it; he was sat astride it and scooting with his feet. Duncan
had a bit of a toot when this kid told him to POQ as he asked for it back. My Dad
told me to get this kid off of the pedal car. Well he was two grades ahead of me,
although he was a runt, much as I was. I pointed out to my Dad the disparity in ages
and asked if he could deal with it. He made me an offer, deal with this kid or get
a belting from him, my Dad was a nasty piece of work and a hiding from him was to
be avoided at all costs. Well, I tried diplomacy and when that didn't work, grabbed
the kids' hair and pulled him off the car. The ensuing fight was the longest and
hardest I was ever to have in my entire life. We ended up in the alleyway alongside
the side entry to the living quarters, surrounded by a large crowd of boozy men cheering
us on and even making bets on the outcome. My shonk had succumbed again within seconds
of the scrap starting and I was covered in gore and snot. Three times I had my worthy
opponent on the ground and each time he got up and came back at me, the next time
I got him down I commenced to smack his head against the pavement. It was at this
point that a foreign sounding lady came into the alleyway and, berating the onlookers,
pulled me away from the other lad. She took me into the shop, where my mother took
charge of me, the lady lectured my father and then took off. As I lay in the bath,
nursing my sore hands, along with my badly swollen and still leaking nose, my father
came in, slipped a half crown on to my piled up clothes and said, "Well done". That
was the only time I can ever remember feeling that I had earned his genuine, unstinting
approval.
As a result of all the damage done to my shonk, I developed an infection
in it that threatened to erode the bone and cartilage, it spread to my ears, causing
mastoid problems, a course of penicillin injections, followed by cauterisation, stopped
the rot. This badly frightened me and I had a bit of a rethink as to whether fighting
was such a good idea after all. Looking at how most of my contemporaries coped with
signs of aggression from others, I decided to try humour as a first line of defence,
resorting to method two only as a last resort. This stood me in reasonable stead
for some four or five years immediately prior to enlisting as an Apprentice tradesman,
I had very few fights during that period of my life. Those I did have were very brief.
Watching a much fancied very tall lad get his come-
Less than eight months after returning
to England in mid 1950, my father succumbed to cancer of the brain. My mother had
a surly Cornishman in as our "stepfather" within a matter of three weeks. He was
a humourless, heavy-
Within
a very short time I had been set in the role of family skivvy, having to shop, cook
and be at Bill Browns beck and call whenever he needed an errand doing. His heavy-
The new Sports teacher at Challney,
which was my thirteenth and final school, was a keen boxer and started a training
group, he was hoping to get organised in time to take part in competitions but something
went awry with the registrations, so we dipped out. I was appointed as school boxing
captain but as it was my senior year and we had failed to nominate in time, I never
had a competitive bout. I was very keen though and trained really hard, so of course
that went into the report card that the school sent to AAS on my behalf. The other
thing that was mentioned was my supposed indifference towards authority, this stemming
from a refusal to accept punishment from a hectoring and bombastic type of teacher
who had accused me, incorrectly, of flipping him a V sign as the class marched in
from lunch recess. I defied the principal, his deputy and of course the twerp himself
and such defiance was almost unheard of. Fortunately my sterling reputation for goodwill
and honesty swung the Deputy principal, Mr Heelis, to support me.
Eighteen months
or so before enlisting into AAS, I enrolled as an Army Cadet with the Sundon Park
half Company of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. The other half of the
Company was situated at Toddington village, which was about eight kilometres away
as the crow flies. Rivalry between us was intense and on the two or three occasions
every year when we met as a full Company, trouble was never far away. Lieutenant
Sears, and his older brother, who was our colour sergeant, ran Sundon Park. The older
Sears was a good sort; the CO was a bit stuck up and never took to me at all. He
was ever ready to find fault with anything I did, he gave very grudging praise when
I became the only cadet to pass my part two badge with credit out of some 250 cadets
from all over East Anglia, when tested at Dunstable Towns drill hall. Some two months
before going into AAS we had a cadet camp at St Martins plain near Folkestone in
Kent. The Beds and Herts, Suffolk's and Norfolk's were all there together. Many of
us recognised each other from the tests and all was going well until the Brigadiers
parade and march past in the late afternoon of the first day. We were marching as
a full Company and I had the misfortune to have the Toddington bullyboy right behind
me in the centre rank. He kept treading on the back of my heel as we marched; I could
hear him and some of his mates sniggering every time he did it. I hissed a warning
to him with no avail whatsoever. So finally I turned around as quick as a flash and
king-
Such
was the baggage that I brought with me into AAS, probably not the best of backgrounds
for presentation to somewhere that demanded absolute obedience, at once! At least
I was reasonably well equipped to handle the various sorts of bullying that places
set up like AAS could present you with.
When Master Evans thought to set himself
up as the bully boy of barrack room F4 in HQ Coy at AAS, I was the first one he tried
to intimidate, he tried to bulldoze me out of his way, I simply wrestled him to the
ground and held him down. When he tried to repeat the experiment, obviously not believing
that someone of lesser physique could manage that other than by sheer fluke, I repeated
the process, the second time much less gently. The sort of hazing that seniors assume
the right of towards juniors was never much of a problem to me at AAS, on the very
rare occasions that it did occur, I was philosophical about it, we all had to have
a turn in the barrel!
I never became a bully myself I hasten to add, I abhor bullies
of any sort. My biggest problem was a form of vanity, I started to think that I could
put anyone away with no more than three punches and started to become very willing
to check my theory if someone was giving me a hard time. My hubris in this respect
caused me to almost kill a man in 1978, less than two hundred metres from Christies
Beach Police station in SA, they call what he had road rage nowadays. He was big
and mean and I wasn't going to put up with his crap, he got up after a terrible single
punch felled him, my second blow was picture perfect, he hovered, horizontal and
then crashed to earth, bleeding from nose, mouth and ears. Only the whites of his
eyes were showing. I brought him round, thank God, before I left him in his car and
drove off.
I have always been a basically friendly sort of bloke, I wonder sometimes
if bullies ever stop to think that their actions can have the potential to turn a
nice bloke into something very dangerous and that some other fool will reap what
they have sown, or that the odds are it will one day be them on the receiving end
of a "monster" created by one of their own ilk? I am only too well aware of what
it is that motivates a bully. It is an adrenalin rush, I know because I got an enormous
"high" whenever I tackled and triumphed against someone who was trying to dominate
me. Some people achieve these highs through sporting ability, some through risk taking,
some by brutalising those they perceive as lesser men. Or in my instance, by turning
the tables on the idiots who wanted to hurt me for their own senseless and selfish
gratification.
As for me, I am simply very grateful that whenever I did respond directly
to physical abuse, actual or threatened, I never ended up taking a life.
© Greg Peck 53B
Copyright: Unless specifically stated Intellectual property rights and web design
Arborfield Old Boys Association 1999 -