It was on the journey home that I passed by the school
field. It was play time. The supervisors cannot watch every corner and things
happen in some corners that don’t get seen.
There were four or five girls in the corner of the field,
next to the fence, and one boy, smaller by a year or two. One of the girls
kicked the boy solidly in the ankle and he cried out.
I have been on the receiving end of bullying, enough to
know how unpleasant it all is and how powerless it makes a person feel. It’s a
lonely experience being the bullied. I remember days of simply skipping school
because I couldn’t face the confrontation. I remember the casual clipping of my
desk that tipped the pencil case on to the floor. It was not the sniggers of
the bullies that bothered me, but the silence and the pretending they didn’t
see of the non-bullies. No one should be treated that way. The strong should
not bully the weak just because they can.
With this in mind I had strong words with the girl,
Abbie. I called her out as a bully. Said it made me angry that she could treat
someone like that. She was eight or nine years old – bullies start young in
life. I made her apologise. I threatened to speak to the headteacher of the
school about her behaviour. I looked into her eyes and wanted to see shame
there.
In my mind’s eye I saw a chair. A dozen or more.
I’d just come home from a week in Krakow. The city was
beautiful. It hadn’t gone through all the renovations that other German
occupied cities went through after the war. The buildings didn’t have a look of
age that was really a recent build. They were old. We were visiting the Jewish
ghetto. A pharmacy on a corner had been a place of refuge and escape as the
German discrimination against the Jews grew ever more horrific. The place was
now a museum.
Outside, in the square, there were dozens of chairs,
tall, metal, dotted around. There were other smaller chairs around the square. When the Jews were first
herded into the ghetto, which got progressively smaller as the Jewish
population were transported to camps, they were not given time to take
possessions. There were pictures of queues of children carrying chairs on their
heads.
Inside the museum there were dozens and dozens of
stories, on the walls, in drawers that you pulled out of cabinets, on screens
that paired up with headphones. Sad tales. Silly tales. Anecdotes of
off-the-cuff music nights and dancing in people’s homes. People trying to live
a normal life as best they could, finding things to smile about when everything
around them was tragic.
A note in one of the drawers was written by an
eight-year-old girl, no older perhaps that Abbie, the boy kicker. I don’t know
what consumes eight-year-old girls these days. Are they still into unicorns and
Barbie dolls and horses? This little girl wanted to know why people were being
moved again. The ghetto was being split into Ghetto A and Ghetto B, the workers
in one place and the non-workers in the other. Friends and families were being
pulled apart. Her father and her brothers worked. Other family members were too
sick.
The chairs, the girl’s letter, Abbie kicking a boy –
there was something about planets lining up.
I wanted to drag Abbie over to one of the chairs in the
square. I wanted to read the girl’s note to her. When one person decides that
another person has less value it opens the way up to bullying. When one person
kicks another person, because they can – it’s like the Jewish Ghetto all over
again.
I would really like to claim that I have never bullied
anyone. Maybe I did with my words to Abbie this morning. There was a fence
between us. It was the edge of the school field. Maybe all that saved Abbie
from being kicked by me, and I was that cross, was the fence. But words – fences
don’t stop words. My words were not gentle. Does that qualify as bullying? My
own bullies never laid a hand on me. I was never kicked. But there were words.
And the sound of the pencil case hitting the floor. And the feeling of isolation.
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