One Chance (4 page)

“A single to Staple Hill,” my imaginary passenger would say. I would hand him his change, issue his ticket, and wait for another passenger.

“Return to Temple Meads, please.”

“I'm sorry,” I'd reply. “You're on the wrong bus—you'll need the 51 bus on the other side of the road.”

“Oh, okay.” And the passenger would get off the bus.

To everyone else on the playground, I looked anything but normal. Here I was, this skinny runt, running round with an imaginary steering wheel—and being a bus, it was a
huge
steering wheel. I'd use my hands as the doors, too, and pretend to operate opening and shutting them. I would also make the noises the bus made.

It might seem obvious why I was bullied. At the time, though, this was how I dealt with being alone. To my mind, I was interacting with people; they just weren't real. Of course, this did little to help me interact with the people who
were
real. People getting onto my “bus” weren't going to argue with me, nor were they going to thump me, kick me, or call me names, which is what I ended up dealing with.

To make a bad situation worse, I wasn't helped by my tendency to be combative when challenged. Sometimes I acted like the whole world was against me, and that's how it felt at times. When the other children shouted and screamed at me, I resisted for quite some time, but in the end I gave in and had a go back at them. The children who were goading me were having great fun at my expense, knowing that if they kept going long enough, I would react.

The teachers constantly told me to ignore the bullying, telling me it would “go away.” I refused to believe them but carried on trying not to react—and failed. Eventually I learned that shouting the odds back didn't actually help matters at all.
But even then I didn't know how to apply the teachers' advice in the right way.

When faced with children who were physically bullying me, I didn't know how to respond. Following the teachers' advice, I allowed the bullies to do what they wanted without taking any action to stop them. I tried to “ignore” the boys while I was being physically beaten, sometimes eight of them at a time in a lane on my way home. I was so outnumbered in such situations that it didn't matter whether I followed the teachers' advice or not.

Often the main troublemakers were waiting for me in certain parts of the playground, or in the alleyways after school had finished. I constantly tried to change the route I took going home from school, because Dorian, the main bully, would lie in wait for me. As he lived right by the school, he was virtually impossible to avoid. Sometimes I walked a mile out of the way in order to dodge the bullies, but this wasn't always possible. In these situations, I learned to just take the physical abuse.

I received emphatic and open threats that if I told anybody about what was going on the beatings would just get worse. So I tried to keep it to myself, but eventually I ran out of ways to explain away the bruises to my parents. Mum has always been a gentle soul, and she wanted to have a word with the school about it. My father had a different take on things: when we had disagreements, he sometimes told me it was “no wonder you get bullied.” He apologised afterwards for saying it, but even though he didn't mean it, I took his words to heart. I could be argumentative at times, and especially with my father.

Mum did go and speak to the school about it. But as the bullies
warned, it only made the situation worse. In the end, I just told myself I'd have to live with it.

At first this seemed the same as ignoring it. Other children had the outlet of their friends to moan to about people they didn't like, or who didn't like them. I didn't have that outlet, and could only take it in on myself. I didn't understand why the children were being nasty to me, and I didn't like things I couldn't understand. It left me feeling alone and powerless, and was the start of my bottling up my emotions.

How supportive the school was on the bullying issue depended on whom Mum spoke to. I always got on really well with the head teacher, Mr. Luton, but his deputy, Mrs. Seaby, was a different animal altogether. For some reason, she was always hypercritical of any work I did, and upon reflection, it didn't help that I was too defensive when she criticised my work.

One of the ways I attempted to avoid the bullying was to get myself a position as one of the helpers for the dinner (lunch) ladies. A group of four of us, including Alex, helped clear up after dinner. It helped keep me away from the playground, which was the last place I wanted to be.

There were other benefits to being a helper. We didn't get paid, but it was seen as a privilege and usually meant we had the best pick of the food. One dish more than any other was popular with every child at the school: chocolate shortbread with chocolate coating and chocolate custard. It tended to be so crispy that you almost needed a hammer and chisel to break it apart. As a result, we called it “chocolate concrete.” That
doesn't make it sound at all appealing, but it was the best thing ever served.

It was so popular that even children who normally brought in packed lunches would have school dinners on that day. By helping the dinner ladies, we were guaranteed a slice, and often were allowed to join the head of the queue. At Christmas we were all given a box of chocolates. So all in all, it was a great position to have.

That is, until the day one of the other boys started messing about. One of them wrote
prunes
in big letters on the dry wipe board. A few minutes later, Mrs. Seaby left her classroom and saw the writing. Immediately, she called us over and was quick to pick me out.

“What on earth do you think you are playing at, Potts?” she asked.

It was like the incident with Mrs. Hunt all over again.

“It wasn't me, miss,” I said. “I didn't write anything.”

“Of course it was you,” she snapped. “I can recognize your scruffy handwriting a mile off.”

This time, the boy who had done the writing owned up. Mrs. Seaby, though, was having none of it.

“It's no use trying to save your friend,” she continued. “It's Potts's scruffy writing, and it's Potts who will pay.” She turned to me. “You clearly can't be trusted to be a helper. You leave me no choice but to remove you from your position.”

I was bitterly disappointed. Not just because of the injustice, but because the playground was the last place I wanted to be. When I wasn't avoiding the main troublemakers, I sat by myself on the steps watching all the other children having
fun playing football and running round in groups. The playground showed me just how alone I was.

The playground bullies were given further ammunition by the prominence in the media of the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.
Blue Peter
, a long-running children's TV series that aired twice a week on the BBC, was famous for its annual collection of silver foil and milk bottle tops to raise money for poorer parts of the world. They would recycle the metal in the tops and the money raised from this went to charity. This one year, it was for the people and children of Cambodia. Pictures were shown of the incidents there, and while young viewers were spared the gory details, we were left in no doubt that awful things were happening, and that we were to send in our foil and bottle tops as soon as possible.

The similarity of my name and that of Pol Pot was not lost on the bullies at Chester Park. Many found it hilarious that my parents “could have named” me that. I didn't want to just back down, so I tried to be the clever one by arguing with them and asking exactly how my parents were supposed to know in advance about something happening eight years after I was born. This just made them laugh more, and I was targeted with increasing frequency. I was reminded every day that “my” deeds meant that millions of people had to send their milk bottle tops off.

I wanted the other children to like me, but it felt like such an impossible task. I thought about taking things into my own hands. At Chester Park, in the junior section, there was a steep set of steps that led to the children's toilets. I would stand at the top of the steps and will myself to throw myself down. I could never bring myself to do it.

Having failed to throw myself down the steps, I came up with another idea. At the other side of the playground were temporary buildings called annexes. The section of the playground by the annexes had a five-metre metal bar going across from close to the annexes, about five inches off the ground. I decided to run round the section and tried to make myself trip over it hard enough to injure myself.

I knew what I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to kill myself, because that wouldn't achieve anything. I wanted to injure myself enough to get people to feel sorry for me. Enough to find myself in hospital for at least a few days. Now, I was bright enough to know this wouldn't be enough to make people like me, but I just wanted the other children to feel something other than hatred for me, even if it was temporary. Anything was better than being the most hated child at school.

Despite the best efforts of the bullies, there were other elements of early school life that I did enjoy. In the final year of primary school, my favourite teacher—the head teacher, Mr. Luton—organized a trip to Dieppe in northern France.

This was the first time I had ever been away from home without my parents. It also meant that I was the first child in my family to go abroad. Dad was in the Territorial Army for our early years, so he was sometimes away in Germany around the town of Hildesheim, close to Hanover. But apart from that and a trip my mum had made to Switzerland when she was at school, I was the only one to go abroad.

The trip took place in the autumn. We took a long ride in a coach to Newhaven in Sussex for our ferry crossing to Dieppe. In
those days, you could travel within Europe without an individual passport, and we all travelled on a group one. The purpose of the trip was largely historical. We explored the area, learning about the ill-fated assault on the Dieppe cliffs during the Second World War. It was a pretty little city, flat and easy to walk round. The beaches were flat and the weather was sunny, if a little breezy and cold.

The trip was an adventure for me, and one that I felt privileged to be on. I remember falling asleep on the coach, curled up in my individual seat until we arrived back in the late evening. The whole excursion was a thoroughly enjoyable one—and was where my love of history was born.

I was also reasonably successful at sport in primary school. The one benefit of being bullied was that I got used to being able to run away, something I was generally very good at. I also had a competitive streak: just as I hated being wrong, I also hated being last. I got so competitive in the school sports day that I was disqualified from the egg and spoon race—that I had won—because I was deemed to have been
holding
the egg in the spoon rather than balancing it. I did okay in the sack race, finishing third. At least I wasn't disqualified! I did fall a few times, as jumping inside a sack as quickly as you can is much harder than it looks.

Of course, the happiest memories of school life were the holidays—those long summer weeks with nothing to do. My childhood was an era when package holidays abroad were starting to become commonplace for many families. Classmates would return after the long summer holiday to tell us about their escapades. I listened with envy about the sunny climes, the
beaches, and the exotic food. My family didn't have the money for holidays abroad, and I was often teased about this at school.

The teasing, though, was misplaced, as I enjoyed our family holidays in the UK. Sometimes we'd go to Wales, staying at caravan parks in Prestatyn in North Wales and Newquay in West Wales. More often than not, however, we'd go to Portsmouth and Southsea. We never really knew why we liked the area so much; we just did. We always said it never rained when we went on holiday, and we usually came back with suntans. We associated it with happy experiences and sunny weather.

One year, Mum was working at a factory that made fireproof uniforms for firemen; she wasn't able to join us because she couldn't get time off. We got a letter explaining that someone we liked was going to meet us by our normal swimming spot. We had no idea who it was going to be. It was Mum. She had decided to surprise us by turning up unannounced on her day off. She could only stay for the day, and had to return on the train before joining us for the second week. This made that week very special.

Over the years, Portsmouth became like our second home. We spent a total of fourteen summers there. We usually stayed in a static caravan (mobile home) at the Eastern Road caravan park on the very edge of Portsea Island. It was fairly large and right by the sea. There were shower blocks and toilets for use by those who were camping. It was a four-mile walk to the Southsea seashore from the caravan park. We walked into Southsea and went to a regular area just west of South Parade Pier, between the pier and Southsea Castle.

Our trips to Portsmouth were by train on a bank holiday. We got the first service out from Bristol in the morning, which was
around five o'clock. We took the very first bus to Old Market and then walked the half-mile down to Temple Meads station. It was still dark, and as Courage Breweries were still brewing in Bristol at the time, our nostrils were assaulted by the aroma of the hops being cooked along the River Avon. That bittersweet smell is something I still associate with my childhood.