This chapter deals with severe issues involving bullying and particularly nasty effects of child abuse. Please move on, if you can't read it, but if you want to know the essential plot outline mail me.

CHAPYER 4
That was my introduction to English school life, and it was a fair one, because that was the way it went just about every day of the next few years. I was still tanned from years in the tropics, so that made me a ’wog’, which in those days was reason enough to beat me. Add in the up and coming skinhead fashion, and top off with the fact that at four foot six inches tall I posed no threat to anyone, male or female, that wanted to give me a bit of a kicking because they had had an argument with their friend, or a teacher had looked at them funny, or, well, just because., and because they could. My academic gifts did not help my case, as that simply added another reason to beat me, and as my father was away so much of the time I had no protector apart from Iain, who, despite being two years younger than me was now four inches taller and growing. I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and being guarded by a ten year old. Not only that, he was too young to be in the same school.

Things came to a head one day when I was attacked by a group of six girls, all shouting ‘Woggy’ at me as they used me as a football until some passing man intervened and called an ambulance. One of the girls was the head’s daughter, and it seemed that as I had lain trying to protect myself from their kicks I had caught her leg with my shoe and bruised it.

I received a visit from a charming policewoman who told me, lying in my hospital bed with two cracked ribs, that boys didn’t hit girls and, in her words, I was fucking lucky not to be charged with assault.

A week later I took my first overdose, of my mother’s sleeping pills. I missed the warmth, I missed my friends, I just hated being alive in this cold grey hellhole. Iain found me, lying on my bed with a tape of Beethoven playing to help me relax, and I was back in Carlisle General by ambulance once more. I remember vomiting round the long tube they forced down my throat, and crying in frustration. My mother hid her pills, so as soon as I was home I tried it again with paracetamol. Same journey, same result. I couldn’t seem to get anything right.

Mam sat by me after the second attempt, and cried with me as I tried to make her understand that it was no problem, just let me go, it was better than staying, and once I was released, with the most perfunctory psych interview I have ever had she took me and Iain away for a few days to Nana’s.

The psychotherapist (‘therapist’? No fucking way!) had been very off-hand. I was just attention-seeking, that was all. He totally missed the point; I didn’t want any attention, I got far too much of that. I just wanted to be left alone, and as that would never happen I just wanted an end.

Nana lived in Boot, a tiny village in Eskdale served by a narrow road from the West, a horrendous one over two extremely steep passes to the East, the Wrynose and Hardknott, and the La’l Ratty, or Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, also from the West. Each end of the valley was controlled by a Roman fort, at Hardknott and Ravenglass, and after the softer land at the estuary the fells started to close in. At Eskdale Green was the King George IV pub, called the King of Prussia till some unfortunate event in 1914 made that a little awkward. I was always fascinated when my Dad took me in there, because they had hundreds and hundreds of bottled of malt whisky arranged in alphabetical order across what seemed like a mile of shelves.

Past the Green, we rolled on in our Vauxhall Viva as the valley got narrower, until we finally arrived at Nana’s old stone cottage near the Boot Inn. I used to love going there, despite the lack of heating and old black-lead range that she used for cooking, because the hills were gorgeous, Nana was sweet, Mam was so much happier and I never, ever saw anyone from school there. As I read more and more about the area, I wanted Mam to drive us up to Langdale, over the passes, but she was too nervous for that, and instead drove us round to Wasdale a few times, where I drank in the view, so much more wonderfully full than the simple bleakness of Anthorn. That was when I hated my life and my new home the most, when I saw the Lakeland Fells receding behind the Vauxhall as we headed back to my hell on Earth.

Nana had been told by Mam what I had been up to, and the tiny old ex-shepherdess was clearly concerned.

“Now then, Stevie, what have thee been doing to thee Mam? She’s scared for thee, tha knaas, and that’s not good, is it?”

She sat me down, under a patchwork quilt she had made some time in the Cretaceous, and as Mam and Iain sorted out the bedrooms, she fed me hot chocolate and hugs, all 4’11’’ of her. I could see where Mam got her stature, and I was clearly following suit.

I just broke down. The contrast between what happened every day at school, and this weathered, withered bundle of love was almost unbearable. In between sobs I told her what I had baulked at telling Mam, and had never had a chance to tell Dad, all about the names, the beatings, the casual destruction of anything they could pull from my bag or my hands. Being left out of every team picked, whatever the game. That made her smile.

“Stevie, I spent aal me life walking these fells tha see around us, and I never had anyone to tramp them with us. What do tha need to play in a team for? If aal these shites hate thee, tha mun find summat tha can do by thesen. Bugger them aal, that’s what I say to thee. Now, can tha run?”

That was how it started, my first recovery. While Mam took Iain out on train rides and walks around castles, Nana showed me her favourite tracks around the head of the valley, the places she had sheltered her flocks when the weather got nasty, and named everything she saw for my benefit. Now, this may sound like some mystical claptrap, meeting the shamaness of the hills and touching the Goddess of whatever the hell, but it wasn’t like that. She was just a tiny old woman, fit as a flea still, who had spent her years working and walking the land when the men were away getting butchered in places like my own hospital. She knew the place as she knew the soles of her old boots, and felt it through them. No mysticism, no revelations, just a mother, loving her child one generation removed and trying to heal him. That was when I started fell running.

Fell running is a Cumbrian sport in the main, which usually involves a race to the top of a hill and back down, at a local fair for example, or longer courses up, over and round a mountain route requiring navigation skills and self reliance. In hindsight, Nana was only in her fifties back then and not the aged gnome my young self saw her as, so when she started showing me how to run hills, how to pace myself and place my feet, it isn’t really surprising that she was still so fit. We covered vast areas of fellside, up to Hardknott fort and back, stopping at the Woolpack for tea before the final leg home along the valley bottom, and it was all so different from that first day’s PE lesson. Gradually, I got fitter and faster, and there were moments when we came tumbling down a hillside when I was actually in heaven, or so it felt.

She didn’t heal me, not really, but every moment I spent with her gave me some surcease from the monsters in my class. I still grew no taller, though, and each day back at school they took away, drip by drip, the peace I had regained through my grandmother’s care.

My mother caught me in the bathroom that day, my thirteenth birthday, when I had thought her out, and the slap split my lip and sent the pack of razor blades flying into the sink.

“WHY? WHY ARE YOU FUCKING DOING THIS? DON’T YOU KNOW WE LOVE YOU?”

What answer can you give to that? I just lay on the floor crying till she gathered me up and rocked me, her tears wet on my back through the shirt that had already been soaked in the piss of three of my classmates. That was the start of the end of my life.

Mr Mitchell was my new psychiatrist, psychologist, exorcist, whatever the term was. I won’t dignify him with the term ‘Doctor’. I was left with him for a half hour that first time. He was a man of fashion, it seemed , with a Mexican bandit’s moustache, collar length but thinning hair and a taste in clothing that extended to velvet jackets with lapels like wings and flared jeans over zipped Chelsea boots. His tie could have been used as a hammock, it was that wide, in a paisley pattern exactly the same as his shirt.

He mostly left me to put pictures in order so as to tell a story that first session, and then on the next one moved on to showing me a picture and trying to get me to make up a story about it, doing not much except making ‘mmm’ sounds and playing with the ‘executive toys’ on his desk.

By the third session he was onto sex. In hindsight, he was probably a paedophile; if not actively molesting kids himself, he certainly got his jollies from talking dirty to children. In hindsight, as well, I could have done the world a service by using one of those razor blades to cut the bastard’s throat….but I was thirteen, and hurting.

“Have you kissed any girls yet, Stevie?”

“No….”

“Have you been looking at their knickers when they sit down?”

He had me there. Micro skirts, along with long socks, were all the rage, and if a girl sat down opposite you there was no real option but to see her underwear. I wasn’t actively looking for little thrills, it was just something I couldn’t help seeing. Besides, I wasn’t actually getting any ‘thrills’ from down there. Then the next question.

“Have you kissed any of the boys yet, Stevie?”

I was flustered by that one. I quite liked the twins, as two girls who had always been among the few who seemed to care for me, but the idea of snogging just didn’t fire any sparks down my spine. The mere thought of doing anything like that with the demons who kicked and punched me, who pissed on my back–well, it sent me white and then red with fear, and shame at what had been done.

Years later, when I had his notes released, I found out he had marked me down as ‘obvious passive effeminate homosexual’

Bastard. Utter, devious, conniving, perverted bastard.

The one thing he did do, though, was take a lot of blood samples, another trick I am sure he actively enjoyed, to try and find out why I wasn’t growing.

Two weeks after his Dracula act, my mother got the results.