Birch Switch Secondary Comprehensive*. I hate this school. I was here for seven long years, from the age of eleven to the age of eighteen. In 1987, the year that I arrived, the former headmaster, a gentle, liberal-minded fellow by the name of Mr Doberman, was replaced by Mr Wizbit, a tall, thin, darkly bearded man with wild, staring, hollow-looking eyes. His former residence of employ had been Uglywood Minster Girl’s School, an unpleasant place by all accounts whose reputation had spread to the surrounding neighbourhoods. We knew what we were in for. He ran Birch Switch with an evangelically strict regime of perfect uniforms and pointless punishments. He haunted the corridors in his long black graduation cape, frightening first years and even sending sixth formers into a submissive scurry. He did not have a sense of humour, he did nothing but shout in assembly, and everyone hated him and called him Wiggy behind his back.
Birch Switch is a monolith of a school. The catchment area covers everywhere in the locality from the nice end of Goosetown, to the reasonable Clownville, to the bad end of Underfield. You can see it on the road out to Cow Vale; two looming grey concrete buildings at either end of a vast, muddy playing field frequented by seagulls and ploughed by the footsteps of over two thousand navy-clad pupils. Closer still you can pick out the ugly prefab extensions built back in the seventies and the cold, windswept, graffiti-painted tennis courts. Shards of glass gleam in the dank yards, and nettles still patrol the borders. One ray of light remains in this dismal landscape; the horse field caught between the school and the surrounding woodlands. We used to walk there each lunchtime and feed the dozen or so ponies our sweets and sandwiches.
I walk past the running track where I once beat Danielle, the fastest girl in the school, on a two hundred-metre sprint. I had collapsed and had an asthma attack by the finish line and I thought I was going to die. Our games mistress, Miss Lemonface – evil cow – didn’t praise me. She told me I needed to put in more effort and stop attention seeking.
Climbing through the railing I make my way between the chilly Lower School gym and the tennis courts. At the top of the concrete steps, two storeys of dull, draughty classrooms confront me. I crane my neck, and on the first floor I can see my old French classroom, where Madame Mardy, an incredibly small, dangerous, stiletto-heeled French woman, would shout and scream until she turned blue at all the boys in the class for throwing erasers and broken pens at each other behind her back.
Just around the corner is my first form room. The bastards at Birch Switch deliberately separated me from my best friend, Jodie Lee, in line with some warped philosophy of assimilation. I had always been a shy and insecure girl at junior school, and whilst the confident and popular Jodie did indeed make new friends, I rapidly fell into a meek and embarrassed silence, and became a target.
The worst of the bullies was Warren Weasel. He plagued me through the whole of my school life. Through junior school where he sat next to me for two years and punched me in the arm whenever I answered him back. His torments went on through Birch Switch until he left at sixteen. It was people like him who left me with no confidence in myself or my appearance. I wouldn’t even smile with my mouth open because I had a gap between my front teeth I thought made me look goofy. The funny thing is, it was always the boys who bullied me, not the girls. If the girls bitched, I was oblivious to it. The boys hit me, called me names, spat at me, hurt and terrified me so much, in fact, that I don’t think I ever held a single conversation with a boy, the whole time I was at that school.
In my home town of Niflheim in 1987, “slaphead” was a generic term for anyone who didn’t have a fringe. I was a slaphead, and so I was slapped on the head at every opportunity, until I was hit so hard one day that I was almost knocked out. After weeping myself sick in front of schoolteachers and parents, they finally let me move to Jodie’s form, where I could contend with all of her new friends.
Above my first year form room is the geography room. My knowledge of geography has always been rather limited. Mr Egor was our teacher, a tall, white-haired Frankenstein of a man who couldn’t control the class. There was a sink at the back of the classroom, and the boys would soak bits of paper and textbooks in it and squirt streams of water at each other, while Mr Egor sat at the front of the class and intentionally remained oblivious. I heard he had a nervous breakdown and retired early. There was another rumour that he killed himself, but I don’t think he did.
Off across the playing field, I can see the woods where we used to explore. Jodie and her new friends, Emily Wellingtons, Leanne Lollipop and I, would all set off up there at break time and climb through the broken wire fencing and over the deep, muddy ditch. The woods were endless, with criss-crossing overgrown pathways. They were escape. A small farm with a loud barking dog lay off to the right, and we were always terrified that it would come chasing us through the broken fencing. We would eat our dinner on a fallen tree trunk and make up stories about Goosetown House, a huge white mansion that could be glimpsed through the trees, owned by the local council for some mysterious purpose.
Deeper in the woods was a large stone tumbledown enclosure with two arched entrances. It was our secret garden, filled with huge potholes and bushes of nettles and weeds. An oak studded door lay rotting in the shade at the far side, and beyond the garden, a steep incline imprinted with horse’s hooves and drowned in the scent of garlic. Occasionally we would walk down one of the pathways in the wood and chance upon one of the Goosetown house’s caretakers. We would turn and flee, screaming out onto the safety of the field. The woods were Out of Bounds to school children, and we were terrified of being caught. Mr Wizbit announced in assembly that pupils had been seen trespassing near the house. He threatened litter duties for all, but that didn’t stop us going into the woods. It just made us quieter and more cautious.
Some of my most embarrassing memories are of Lower School. I started my first menstruation in the Lower School toilets, and Ducky Swann ran shrieking down the corridor; “Jane Dean has got her period!” I developed terrible acne that bubbled across my face and made my forehead shine pink. I had a layered eighties perm that I discovered I hated, and tried to brush out. It became a fluffy mass that earned me the nickname “Tina Turner.”
As I turn around the front of the building, I glance in the direction of the front yard where I was beaten up. Jodie’s new friends were bitches. Emily Wellingtons wrongly accused me of telling her parents about some sexual misdemeanour she’d committed with a boy. I arrived at school one morning to find, literally, half of my form in the front yard waiting for me. I was beaten up, pushed from one boy to the next. People I had thought were my friends obviously didn’t know me at all. The girls later discovered the real perpetrator; the boy had been bragging to his mates. I received no apology.
I was absolved, but, betrayed, tired of the cruel words, the rivalry, the bitching, I stopped being friends with Jodie. A loner by nature, I remained friendless. I didn’t trust people anymore, and my aloneness was only interrupted by Warren Weasel and his cohorts’ relentless bullying.
At lunch and breaks I read books instead of socialising. I became lost in a fantasy world of my own making, and although I believed I didn’t need anyone, I became so depressed, so convinced in the futility and meaninglessness of existence, that I ceased to talk at all. When I was asked a question I would ignore it, because it was pointless to answer. I sat in my room, or I watched Star Wars. I developed a heartbreaking crush on Luke Skywalker.
My third year at Lower School was punctuated by a six-month absence while I was off sick with what turned out to be the beginnings of M.E. The doctors tried in vain to find a name for the mysterious wasting, exhausting illness which myself, my sister, and my mother and father had all developed. I was tutored at home, and for most of the rest of my school life I worked only half-days, as anything more could leave me shaking with tiredness and aching until I cried.
I make my way around the side of the building and turn left down the road that runs along the edge of the horse field, towards Upper School. By the time I was elevated to Upper School, it was 1991 or 1992, and all the girls still had horrendous fluffy perms scrunched up with mousse. That strange fad of wearing big woollen white socks wrinkled around their ankles had only just burned out, and Smileys were still on everyone’s shoes. The fashion code was strict; opaque black tights, very short black pencil skirts, and massive baggy white shirts made of thick, wrinkly cotton material. After a torturous time with a second bobbed perm, I had all of my hair chopped off and earned a new nickname: “Gazza,” because my new haircut resembled Paul Gasgoine’s haircut of the moment.
After moving up into the fourth year, our form room had been relocated at Upper School. We also received a new form tutor, the delightful Mrs Radish, who never said a kind word to anyone and handed out detentions for treats. Everyone said she was a lesbian.
Upper School was no better. It was at Upper School that I was bullied by several nasty pieces of work; Robert Royal, an Asian boy who had me in the Queen’s Medical Centre with a broken thumb after I kicked his football, Brett Grime, a creepy, tall, ghoulish-looking boy who would snort spit at me, and Noel Fist, an ugly brute with brown hair that had a blond patch in the middle, who used to try to steal my lunchbox, my bag, my book, whatever came to hand, and threw mocking insults at me in French lesson. And, unsurprisingly, their ringleader was Warren Weasel, the boy who plagued me through the whole of my school life, for reasons I never understood.
I used to dream of going to a school reunion and thumbing my nose at every single one of those boys. I’d be rich and famous, and they’d be stuck in factories or fixing cars. I longed for brutal, violent vengeance. Propelled by my protective parents, I was even persuaded to take up judo for a while, so I could try to defend myself. It failed miserably: boys half my age flipped me on the ground and bruised me.
Mrs Radish was no use at all. She didn’t like me. Perhaps she didn’t like me because I was quiet. Perhaps it was because, unlike the rest of the girls in my class, I had no desire to brown-nose around her. She targeted me too. She screamed at me, even physically shook me, for not tucking my shirt into my skirt. I never paid her any notice. I had learned to become oblivious of such tactics. I had no desire to conform. I had her figured out. Like the head teacher, she was nothing but a petty, power-hungry little dictator with nothing better to do with her time. It made her feel good to make us feel bad, to enforce pathetic rules. It was all so pointless.
One day I enraged her. She had pulled me aside in the main corridor and demanded that I tuck my shirt in. I did as I was told. Then I turned away and half way back down the passage I untucked it again. She followed me all the way back across the school to the form room and dragged me out of class, yelling at me for a good ten or fifteen minutes. I simply replied coldly; “No. Why should I?” Eventually, she had to give up. There was nothing she could do. I had defeated her. But she had it in for me after that. She always made me stay later after cookery to clear up pots that weren’t even mine. Even though she knew the taxi driver from social services – on account of our illness – was waiting outside the school entrance to pick me up, before he went to collect my younger sister up from junior school. My little sister was all too often left waiting on her own in the street.
I can see the Upper School gym now, and the Netball courts where I was pushed to compete, and then teased because I cringed away from the ball. Miss Lemonface, with the moustache and the Wham haircut, used to stare at us in the showers. I quickly learned to play truant from games, after the collapse at the end of the two hundred metres on the Lower School running track. After I fell ill with M.E. I was unofficially excused to the school library, where I spent my time reading Tanith Lee and attempting to write short science fiction stories about children who detested their teachers and defeated them through pure intelligence and righteous will.
I turn and walk around outside of the dining hall, the favourite haunt of Mrs Doughball, the deputy head. She was a small, fat waddling woman with a grey basin of hair plastered against her red cheeks. She resided in a hovel of an office halfway down the main corridor. Everyone said she was a transsexual. One parents evening, she had an embarrassing encounter with my mother, who mistook her for the cleaner. Mrs Doughball was a nasty piece of work. She used to take over the shouting in assembly when Mr Wizbit developed a sore throat. She used to make the rules up as she went along. I remember the time she gave all of the people wearing blue shirts a detention for breaking dress code, when the uniform guide said specifically, “Pale blue or white shirts, preferably blue.” My friend Juliet, a very good girl, refused to apologise, and her mother kicked up such a public fuss that she had to back down.
I pass the DT workshop, and remember Mr Mad. Mr Mad had a glass eye, and two of his fingers were missing. We were, as a result, very careful and safety conscious students. His son was in my form, and I think he hated it practically as much as I did. He’d go and hide out with the rockers in another corner of the school. Passing the coal pile, which everyone said was haunted, I turn into the side yard. The library is straight ahead, my favourite place. I would have stayed there all lunchtime, except we weren’t supposed to eat our dinners in there, and when I did, I had to do it surreptitiously, lurking between the bookshelves. Angled to the right, above the library, is Juliet and Amanda’s old form room.
I must have been halfway through the fourth year before I actually made some more friends; Juliet Jewels was a delightful bitch of a girl with a sense of humour that would make a Valley girl look good-natured in comparison. Miranda Mermaid, who spoke even less than me and stared out of a pair of owlish glasses. And Amanda Amaretto, a child-like and eccentric strawberry blonde with a creative streak for poetry, who would lecture me on everything, and seemed nothing so much like a cross between See Threepio and Mary Poppins. She’s still a good friend, and the only person I’ve kept in contact with from Birch Switch.
Juliet and Amanda’s form room overlooks the low roof of the library. The bolder lads would dare one another to jump out of the window onto the flat roof and run to the end of the building where it becomes a two-storey prefab. Then they’d dare each other to jump the two floors onto the paving below, scaring the life out of the girls who would sunbathe on the bank outside my old form room.
That’s where I go now, down the muddy hill and around the corner, to peer in through the grubby windows of the fire exit. My form room. The suspended polystyrene ceiling must have been replaced yet again; there are no stains or pencil holes in it. They had to replace it periodically, whenever the sixth form’s toilet broke upstairs and sewage came flooding through the ceiling, bringing the whole lot down. It happened two or three times when I was there.
My form room is a tapestry of bad memories. It was in this form room that I had to deal with Mrs Radish’s constant tirades. And in this form room that I was bullied by Warren Weasel and cohorts. It’s empty now, silent.
I’ll never forget my very last day, at the end of my “A” level English exam, when Mrs Radish tried to make us all stay in the hall because we had started talking when our exam was over. We were eighteen. It was our last day. But that didn’t matter to her.
I knew the taxi driver was waiting outside. I’d had more than enough of her little games over the years. What could she do? Give me detention? Disqualify me from the exam? By this point I really didn’t give a damn. I was sick of her petty bullying. I got up and walked out. People began to laugh. Then everyone started to stand up.
She grabbed hold of my arm in an effort to restrain me. She was furious. She yanked me around to face her as the rest of the students all ran out around us. I told her to fuck off, you stupid bitch, I’m not having my little sister waiting on the road for you again.
My last day at school was a good day. And every day after that was better, and better. I always promised myself if I had children, they wouldn’t go to school.
It’s funny. I suppose what comes around goes around. A couple of years ago I chanced upon an article in The Evening Chronicle about a boy who had broken into his parent’s house on a freezing January night, because he had nowhere to live. He forced open his old bedroom window for somewhere warm to sleep, and set off the burglar alarm that had been installed in his absence. He rang the police himself, to tell them not to bother coming out, it wasn’t a break-in, it was alright. They proceeded to arrest him, and his own parents, sick to death of his bad behaviour, pressed charges.
I turn my back on my old form room and begin the walk across the sunny bird-scattered playing field towards home.
Warren Weasel had been inside for burglary before. He was sentenced to five months in prison.
* All names have been changed to protect the ignorant.
