Bully for You

Courtney had hit Eileen again.

Neither of them was in my class, but the head reckoned I knew them both better than their class teachers did – I taught them both physics – so it fell to me to visit their parents. So that was that evening done for. Marking delayed a day yet again. Ho hum.

Big Courtney had hit little Eileen. So Courtney’s the bully, and Eileen’s the victim? Well – yes and no.

You’ve heard how psychological bullying can be as bad as, or even sometimes worse than, physical bullying? How true that is.

Eileen was a small girl, not much bigger than me, but was the prime mover in a group of posh girls who teased Courtney mercilessly about her accent and grammar.

Courtney was a big, clumsy girl. She had no friends in the top sets, although she was in top set for everything except English, and near the top of the class in most of the unsetted subjects. She didn’t have many friends in the school at all.

Most of the posh parents wanted Courtney expelled from the school, and kept saying we were being soft on bullying.

What can you do?

Courtney hadn’t hit her very hard really. She’d reached the end of her tether and lashed out, but even then, she’d taken care not to hit too hard. If she’d just whacked her as hard as she could, Eileen would have been a hospital case – possibly worse, if she’d landed badly.

They were thirteen or fourteen at the time.

Courtney left school at sixteen, and the last time I saw her she was working as an assembler in an electronics factory. She said she wasn’t very good at it – too fiddly for her big hands and poor co-ordination. A great shame – she was a very clever girl, much cleverer than Eileen and her middle-class pals. She’d have been perfectly capable of doing Maths or Physics at a good university, and probably gone on to a research career. She got first rate O levels, despite her disadvantaged background.

The last time I saw Eileen, she was a trainee store manager in a retail chain. I don’t think that was an appropriate job, either. I can’t imagine her being very good with her staff, and probably not with the customers, either.

© 2010 Clive K Semmens.
(Like many – not all – of the anecdotes in The Reminiscences of Penny Lane, this is almost a recount. Some are more fictionalized than others. This one, only very slightly – names and subject changed, and my relative size! "Courtney" was bigger than me, but "Eileen" was smaller. The electronics factory was MicroVitec, in Bradford – which was started by a neighbour of mine and his brother, and where I worked several times on temporary contracts.))