3

I know changing schools isn’t that big a deal. Everyone does it, and has that thing of making new friends and learning the ropes again. But Woodbridge was massive in comparison with my old school, so while lots of Churchfields people went along, it turned out none of my old friends were in my class. It was full of kids from other places, and most of them already seemed to know each other. At this point in my life, I became very shy – I know that may sound hard to believe – and I’d say I didn’t really stand out at all. Except when I did grab people’s attention, and it wasn’t in a good way!

I still had all my allergies, which meant I had to bring my lunch food in a little box. Plus, I’d had to have train tracks fitted onto my teeth literally the month before I started secondary school. The timing for that couldn’t have been worse! I had a bit of an overbite as well, so every night I was in a neck brace to try to correct it. Not exactly glamorous, ha ha.

My braces were pink, and one night I ate spaghetti Bolognese and they got stained orange. I had to go to school looking like that, and that didn’t exactly help my confidence. Another time, I was swinging on my chair in class. Pretty normal, except somehow I managed to fall through the chair – I hit my jaw on the table, so that my teeth AND tracks went through my lip. Blood went everywhere! I’ve actually had so much lip filler these days, you can’t really see the scar any more, but for a while it was bad – this massive purple bruise coming out of my mouth. When the braces finally came off, I had to wear a retainer for a bit with a false tooth. I was in those train tracks for a year, and, trust me, it was a very, very long year.

So I had all these things wrong with me, and let’s just say they didn’t exactly help me fit in at Woodbridge.

I do want to make it clear there were some nice people at that school. There was this little group I joined in the music club at lunchtime. I could take my violin there and have lessons or just practise in the room. I was the youngest one, and there were some nice boys and girls up there, all a bit different from the usual, doing their own thing like singing and playing instruments. Basically, we had our own little glee club in Essex.

That music room was a little getaway for me, and there was a really nice music teacher called Mrs Wright. But everywhere else was becoming a nightmare. It was just one of them things. My year at Woodbridge could have been a nice bunch of kids, but it just happened to be a vile one. I knew a few girls from Churchfields, but they found a new crowd, and they were all a bit bitchy. The ones I already knew were never bitchy to me before, but they turned and started being not very nice.

I’ve always been someone who, if someone’s being picked on, I make a big effort so they get included. There was a nice girl with learning difficulties. She’d also been at Churchfields, where she’d had people looking out for her. Now, I sat next to her and tried to help her, but the people around us were just horrible. My class wasn’t even that bad, I just didn’t know anyone that well. The boys thought they were gangsters, and the girls all behaved like rude girls. I ended up thinking they were all scum, just a bunch of bullies.

In Year Seven, a boy asked me to the school dance. I said ‘No,’ but the next thing I knew, I was getting a phone call from some girl. It was all, ‘Don’t you dare go to the dance with him, he’s talking to one of my mates.’ I wasn’t even interested in him and I barely knew the girl he was apparently talking to, but what could I do? He’d asked me, but without even trying, I’d ended up in some psycho-drama and from that moment, they wouldn’t leave me alone. Then I sang in a school show, and from that moment on, the bullying really started.

That single school year, Year Seven, was one of the worst of my life. Woodbridge is divided into two big main buildings, Mallards and Wynndale, and you have to walk down a lane between them to get to lessons. Every time I had to do it, it felt like the longest walk of my life. I had a few incidents, and, in one of them, a girl spat in my face. I was so scared to report it, and at that time, I was worried these girls would come and find me, but now, looking back, I’m glad I did report it. I remember having to flick through the school yearbook pages looking for the girl who did it.

It never stopped. I had these shoes with a little kitten heel on them – I’ve always liked to be a bit different – but people would laugh at them, taking the piss out of them for no real reason. Then, one day in the corridor, these same bullies were there, which just made me really nervous, and I ended up falling down the stairs as I tried to get past them. They all laughed, and even while I was picking myself up, I could feel myself boiling up. I just thought, ‘Someone’s fallen down the stairs and you’re laughing. Really?’ It just showed their values – it was all about being in a group. It was more cool to act cool, and not help. It gets me fuming even now just remembering it. No more kitten heels after that. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t even wear kitten heels now, but back in the day, I thought they were fashionable.

The worst thing was what happened to my diet. I still had all these stomach problems, but it felt like my little lunch box made me an easy target. To try to fit in better with everyone, I even stopped following my special diet. How bad is that? I was just trying to be normal, wanting to go to the lunch hall and queue up with everyone else. I would have done anything not to stand out and to avoid being picked on. That’s how powerful them bullies are! They make you do stuff where you end up damaging yourself.

By now, I was taking Nurofen and paracetamol every day. I got to a point where I was so ill that my mum said, ‘That’s enough, you’re not eating that food any more,’ and she started making me chicken salads. I felt really isolated – I didn’t have a lot of friends anyway, and everyone was either in the cool group, or trying to get in it. I ended up so unhappy that they started giving me counselling sessions. I’ll say this – the school did what it could. The counsellors asked me, ‘Who would you like to come to your next session?’ so that I could maybe start a new group of friends. There was a girl called Ghurdeep who I liked, and also Laura, Shellie, Robyn and Georgia from my old school, so I recruited them. I had a few lessons where I tried to stick with them, but those other girls carried on being so nasty, it didn’t give me enough protection from the bullies.

I was walking along the corridor with my friend Laura one day, and this girl who everyone was scared of came up to us. She’d been threatening to beat me up if I went to the dance with that boy who asked me. This girl ended up smacking Laura around the face. Laura was tall, I was little and she started screaming at both of us. I couldn’t do anything – instead I just stood there petrified. My friends were nice girls, but in situations like these, they couldn’t stand up for themselves either. The counsellors tried to help me focus on the positive, but it was a terrible situation.

After this girl threatened to beat me up, I came out of school for a few days. Then my mum came in with me to speak to the head, asking why they’d allowed it to happen and what they were going to do about it. The teachers all said I would be okay, nothing would happen, but then I started to worry because my mum had come in. And shock, rumours started that my mum was coming in to beat up one of the other girls. So that just made it all worse. My poor mum was just being there for me.

One day soon after that, I was walking through the playground and it literally felt like I’d been smashed in the back of my head. I fell to the floor, and it took me a while to realise I’d been smacked from behind with a wet inner sole of a shoe, by a boy in my class. Once I was on the ground, everyone crowded round and he continued to slap me. Someone videoed the whole thing. Turned out I was the latest victim of ‘happy slapping’. I’ll never forget lying on the floor, drenched in a puddle of water. My friends were shouting at this boy, not knowing what to do while he kept slapping me about seven times. Eventually some older girls ran out and pulled him off, but by then I was hysterical. It became a serious incident at the school – the head said anybody caught with the video on their phone would be instantly excluded, so the film got deleted.

It might not sound like much, but something that hurt me nearly as bad was when one of the girls spread a rumour that I had nits. In the scheme of things, it’s not actually that bad, but it’s the worst thing to go round a school when you’re that age. I didn’t want to go to school any more. I started trying to avoid going in, I stopped playing violin, I stopped singing – I thought giving everything up might help me fit in, but nothing worked. I always sat next to the girl who had learning difficulties, because she had carers nearby, and I hoped they would protect me. I turned into a shy, weak, quiet child, scared all the time, waiting for the next bad thing.

I also became really skinny again, and the teachers had a note from my mum which said, ‘Megan suffers from migraines, so when she needs her tablets, please let her go.’ That note, which only the teachers knew about, was actually so I could go to the toilet, because by then, I had all my belly problems back again. I was such a nervous wreck, I needed to go to the toilet the whole time.

I was so skinny, my arms became hairy, so of course one boy pointed this out to the rest of the class. ‘Why are your arms so hairy? People that have hairy arms like that are anorexic.’ Lovely. For the rest of the summer, I used to sit in my blazer, sweating so bad but not taking it off, just so I could avoid any more comments.

I was just coeliac and I had allergies, but because of all the comments, I wasn’t eating what I was supposed to. I even started hating science lessons, not because I didn’t like science, but because science meant putting my hair up, and putting my hair up meant having my ears on show. This probably wouldn’t affect any other person, but some of the boys in my class said I had elf ears, and all these little comments just got to me. So I’d do anything to avoid it.

By now, my confidence was so low, I used to go and eat my lunch on my own in the stairwell, because I didn’t want people to see me get food caught in my train tracks. I didn’t want them to see my salad – too different. One day, I was feeling miserable like always, and I remember standing there, thinking, ‘I don’t want to be at this school any more, I hate my life.’

Finally, someone thought it would be hilarious to steal my door keys. I had a Playboy key ring, and someone – let’s call her BB – stole it when I was in the music room. My parents were worried this would mean someone could break in, so they had to get all the locks on our house changed. Soon after, one of my coloured keys got found underneath the piano where it had been put back.

Almost at the same time, I had a tiny little mobile phone, and an unknown caller rang it. A girl’s voice said, ‘When you come out tomorrow night, I’m going to get you stabbed.’ I put the phone down, shaking.

I thought I recognised a girl’s voice in the background, and my dad drove me round to her house. Turned out it was the girl’s cousin who’d phoned me. That was the last straw for my parents, and they pulled me out of school.

I didn’t even bother telling anyone I’d left, I was just so glad to be gone. It had always been my dream to go to theatre school. My nan and granddad, always a massive part of my life, had saved up enough money and used their savings to send me, as my mum and dad couldn’t afford to.

A couple of weeks in, I was coming back from my new theatre school. I was walking back from the station in my new uniform, and it had ‘private school girl’ written all over it – bright green and white stripes like a deckchair, emerald green blazer with a gold trim, the works. I was happy – until me and my mates walked past a crowd from Woodbridge, and they all kicked off saying stuff about my uniform. By now, I’d got away from them, but their words still really got to me. I’d heard through the grapevine that these same girls were saying loads of mean stuff like, ‘Megan thinks she’s better than everyone else because she goes to theatre school. Who does she think she is?’ So when I was at their school, they picked on me. And when I left, they picked on me. WTF? I just couldn’t win.

I felt weak, and I was frightened that other people I hardly knew had so much power over me. These girls were the ones everyone liked or fancied, and I was a nobody. They were mean girls; I was brace-face. When I first came across them, of course I wanted to be in their crowd as well, but it got so awful, I went from admiring them to hating them. I was looking in my diary from that time recently, and one girl’s name kept popping out of the page. I can’t actually remember any one thing she did, but her name kept appearing, so I’m guessing she must have been one of them who hurt me the most. Isn’t it crazy to think I don’t even know now what this girl done to me, but her name got written down so many times in my diary, she must have done me a lot of damage.

I’d love to be able to say I’ve forgiven them for what they did, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do that. I was a happy kid and they destroyed a year of my life just to look cool. I’m still a local girl, so I do still bump into those same faces from time to time. Whenever I see them now, I act as if I don’t even know them, and I feel quite good about myself, because I used to look at them and think, ‘Why can’t I be like you? I want everyone to fancy me too,’ and now I see them and it’s clear time has not been kind. I must admit, I did have a smile on my face when I drove past one of them in my lovely white Range Rover, my dream car since I was a kid. Their lives haven’t moved on – they’re still hanging out in the same places they always did, while I’ve just built my first home with my own money. If they were to ask me how I was, I’d say, ‘Great, how are you?’ and I’d want them to know I’m doing something I love. To be honest, my happiness is probably the best punishment for them, but it doesn’t make it okay. Them memories will always be with me. Them girls will probably have no idea the effect they had on me, but they need to realise what they put me through, and probably other people too after I left school.

It’s a big part of me, and I think it’s always going to stay with me. Last year, I had therapy because I felt I couldn’t control my anger, and it definitely all stems from that time. It’s definitely damaged me a little bit. All these years later – you’ve seen it enough on telly to know – the tiniest thing can set me off, because it immediately brings back all the feelings I had in that stairwell, in that lane between the schools, on the ground in the playground. If two girls are whispering, they might not even be talking about me, but I’ll immediately think they are, or I’ll assume they might be planning to do something hurtful. Sometimes I’ll think it’s safer just to believe the worst. Doesn’t exactly make me the most relaxed person.

I worry that people just see that side of me and get me all wrong. If you were to listen back to some of them arguments I’ve had on TV in the past, but instead heard them inside my head, you’d know they always come from a good place. I just want everyone to be heard and to be treated fairly. The reason it goes so wrong is because of how I express myself. I can’t control my emotions because the anger takes over, and that’s always been my downfall.

Bullying is vile. People have seen me lose my shit on the telly over and over again, and they probably assume I’m the bully, because I shout and use swear words, but I never could be, because of what I went through myself. In fact, a lot of me losing it with people and not being able to control my temper comes from how I was treated. I was always the quiet one, I was always too scared to speak up, so now I’m probably just trying to make up for it!