Well I have to tell you …. I’ve always shut away memories of school but recently I have had contact with someone from my school days who reminded me of what they were like for me. Awful! Not his fault at all that I was reminded of bad times but his association with that time cos we were at the same school. It caused me a sleepless night when old feelings resurfaced and made me look a little closer at what happened.
You see, we lived in the middle of nowhere as kids so outside of school we didn’t have the opportunity to socialise and have close friends. So school was it for us three girls…. School was our connection with the outside world, it was our only opportunity to make friends.
Primary school in the tiny village a mile away from home consisted of no more than 30 pupils and only two other girls of my age. That created so many problems cos it ended up with me being always the one left out. It was a lonely place to be!
Secondary school brought about a completely unexpected situation for me. Not only a massively massive Comprehensive school with several hundred pupils but the nasty jealousies of other girls who made my life hell. They said they hated me because I was pretty and “got with a boy who one of them had been wanting for ages”. This was something that never entered my head. I never saw myself at all as pretty…. I was just me, painfully shy and a bit of a swat. I lived on a Farm and was happy in wellies and old jeans and totally unlike these mega fashionable girls from the Village (which incidentally was a Town really). I caught a school bus every morning which collected us from the edge of the Farm an hour and a half before we had to be at school. We trundled round several villages picking up more and more pupils…. One of those pupils was to be my tormentor for the remainder of my school days…. Joanne Morgan was skinny with black hair and freckles, and the bus picked her up from outside her rather large home. She was vile to me from the minute she got on the bus and it continued ten fold at school once she had a girl crowd around her. The threats, the jibes, the derogatory comments cut deep! She was in the year above me so I had to put up with this for way too long. The other culprit was Kim Murphy. She took a dislike to me and often stole my lunch from me throwing the bread crusts at my feet when she’d finished. She likened the cream cheese in my sandwich to “spunk” and made me eat it whilst telling me over and over what I was eating.
By the time I left school I had so little confidence and those feelings to a certain extent stayed with me into adulthood. Happy ending here though, cos despite the bullies I made something of myself and truly excelled in life. But one thing remained with me and that was my wariness of women as friends! I remained a bit of a loner really preferring to put my trust in what I know is real and what I know will never let me down. More recently though I am establishing girl friendships and learning to trust women again, but it has taken me 40 plus years to do that. I’m happy in my skin now and I love to boost other women so that they feel good about themselves. So no more sleepless nights for me now…..I forgive those bullies, I can’t think why they were so vile but venom like that had to stem from their own insecurities, jealousies and unhappiness. I only hope that they never had to witness their own Daughters go through what they put me through!
