4

It wasn’t until I reached junior school that my status as an only child became an issue. I suppose I must have noticed that other children and characters in books had brothers and sisters, but when you are young you accept your own situation as normal, whatever it may be. It didn’t strike me that I was somehow defective until Sandra Skeet, into whose gang I had failed to ingratiate myself on the first day of term, called me an Only in the playground.

‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, blushing under the gaze of six pairs of hostile eight-year-old eyes.

‘You’re an only child – you’ve got no brothers and sisters. It means you get spoilt,’ she replied, linking arms with her courtiers to form an unbreachable barrier of blue gingham.

‘Sticks and stones –’ I began bravely, reciting the infamous lie that mother peddled whenever I reported some instance of playground name-calling, but Sandra had already finished with me.

‘You’ve gone all red,’ was her parting shot as the chequered wall swung round, ready to advance on some other pariah.

From this time onwards my onliness began to preoccupy me: I was reaching the age where it no longer seemed so important to have my parents all to myself. I wanted someone to play with, to talk to after lights out, to giggle at over the tea table, but most particularly to invoke as a protector and ally in the face of the school bullies.

There were several of us in the class who had been marked out for treatment by Sandra and her friends. My surname was enough to do for me, and various other children with the misfortune to be fat or feeble, or especially dim or clever, were similarly targeted. I would suddenly become aware that I was being shunned by various sections of the class; the desk next to mine would remain empty; people who the week before had been my friends would ignore me when I spoke or discuss me with each other as if I wasn’t there. When I walked into the cloakroom the conversation would die and then unnaturally begin again on a new theme. And then, just as suddenly, without any warning, it would all stop, and Sandra would be saving me a seat at lunch, sharing her crisps with me and telling me her secrets, and for a few days life would be sweet again. It’s strange that we victims never thought of getting together and forming a rebellious gang of our own, but the fact was we hated one another. And Sandra’s methods were too subtle to allow for insurrection: only one person at a time was bullied, and when that person wasn’t me I was so grateful that nothing would have induced me to make myself conspicuous by standing up for that week’s scapegoat. In fact I was so spineless, cowardly and demoralised, that on those occasions when Sandra did make overtures of friendship in my direction I would abase myself thoroughly, even to the point of colluding with the treatment being handed out to a fellow sufferer. But those times were less common than the times when I was on the receiving end, or so it seemed; walking down an infinitely long corridor past a column of smirking girls, or sitting alone at my desk daydreaming of the imaginary sister whose loyalty would be absolute. Break times were the worst, as we would all be turfed out of the relative safety of the classroom into the cheerless wastes of the playground, where a solitary teacher with a whistle round her neck was all that stood between me and any number of unimaginable atrocities. Skulking in the loo was out of the question as the Girls’ Toilets were used as a sort of headquarters by Sandra and her gang, and wandering in there would have been regarded as an act of provocation. By denying myself drink at breakfast and lunch I had managed to train myself not to need the loo all day. On occasions when that proved impossible I would ask if I could be excused during lessons – itself a humiliation – which earned me a reputation with the teacher for having an unreliable bladder.

My parents were powerless in the face of my enduring despair. Every Sunday evening would see me labouring to manifest the symptoms of a new disease which would suffice to keep me at home on Monday.

‘Can’t you find some other nice friends?’ mother asked one night as I sat in bed snivelling into my cocoa – a low point, I remember.

‘No. There’s no one left. When Sandra starts ignoring me they all do.’

‘What about the other girls she picks on? Can’t you pal up with one of those?’

‘I don’t want them as friends. I want normal friends,’ I sobbed.

‘Doesn’t the teacher put a stop to this sort of thing?’

‘She doesn’t notice.’

‘Well, why don’t you tell her? This Sandra girl shouldn’t be allowed to make your life a misery. And mine,’ she added.

But tale-telling, I knew by some instinct, without ever having been told, was the worst crime of all for which Sandra would already have devised the ultimate punishment.

There was one person however – a girl called Ruth Pike – who was even more unfortunate than I was. As well as being dim, she was also afflicted with terrible eczema, which smothered her hands, face and legs in red, flaky patches, so that there was hardly a thumbnail-sized patch of undamaged skin left. As if this wasn’t bad enough she had serious asthma, which meant she was always wheezing and puffing on a little plastic gadget. Her alarming appearance made her a natural object of ridicule, and she was often to be found hiding behind the coats in the cloakroom, sniffling and trying to make herself invisible. Needless to say, the pity I felt for her didn’t extend to friendship. Try as I might, I couldn’t like her. Because of her various ailments, and probably because of her unhappy experiences at school, she was often absent, and the sight of her navy mack with its mittens still sewn childishly on to the sleeves with tape, hanging on her peg, would fill my cowardly heart with relief at the thought that she and not me might be the day’s sacrifice.

One Monday morning in spring, after a particularly bad week in which I had cried myself to sleep every night and mother had only been dissuaded from complaining to my form teacher by desperate entreaties from me, I arrived at school to find that the weekend had wrought a miraculous transformation and the sunshine of Sandra’s favour was smiling on me once again. She was sitting at the spare desk beside mine, brushing the nap of her furry pencil case and looking up at me from under her fringe. For someone with such power she was oddly harmless in appearance, being small for her age, with very pale, almost albino skin and white blonde hair which she always wore in two thin pigtails to her waist. Her pale blue eyes with their colourless lashes gave her a slightly washed out, unfinished look, like a painting that needs some outlines. Her sister, Julie, who was at the High School, was supposed to be even more dangerous. A rumour was currently running around the class that she had held some girl’s head down the loo and pulled the chain because she hadn’t shown the proper respect – a punishment known as bogwashing. My avoidance of the Girls’ Toilets had never seemed so wise.

‘Hello,’ said Sandra. ‘Nicky’s off sick today so I’m going to sit next to you. I’ve got some new pens. Do you want one?’ She shook out the pencil case on to her desk to reveal half a dozen plastic propelling pencils which smelled of fruit.

‘Really?’ I said, cautiously, in case it was a trick.

‘Yes, go on, have this one. Pineapple’s the nicest.’

We were in the process of sniffing them all and comparing flavours when Ruth Pike came in and sat down. She had one of the few single desks at the side of the class, occupied by the disruptive or the terminally friendless, and she lifted the lid hastily when she saw Sandra and pretended to be busy sorting books, a strategy familiar to me.

‘My mum says if you’ve got what she’s got you can’t wash properly because you’re allergic to soap,’ said Sandra loudly. The shuffling behind Ruth’s desk intensified. I felt myself blushing with pity and shame. Sandra blinked at me with her pale lashes. ‘You can copy me in the spelling test if you want,’ she added, which was really an invitation for me to leave my own paper uncovered: she was a hopeless speller – buisness and Febuary.

At break time, after a test in which Sandra and I alone of all the class had scored full marks, a result which earned us a good hard stare from Mrs Strevens, Sandra swept into the playground and enthroned herself on the only bench on the site, displacing the previous occupant on the grounds of a full year’s seniority with a cool ‘Off you get, I’m here now’. Her acolytes, including myself, hovered close at hand. The girls were always squeezed out to the edge of the territory by the boys’ football games which dominated the central space. Sometimes there would be as many as seven different matches taking place on one pitch, with seven hard tennis balls ricocheting around at head height. I could see poor Ruth Pike skirting the perimeter fence in a doomed attempt to infiltrate our group and remain invisible at the same time. Every so often she would realise she was observed and tack off again in the opposite direction. She was holding a packet of biscuits. Her mother had probably in desperation recommended this as a way of winning friends, or perhaps offered them as a bribe to get Ruth to school. I recognised that tactic too. As the bell went and we started to straggle back across the courtyard into class I found Ruth at my side. ‘Do you want a biscuit?’ she asked, holding one out between her fingers. It was a proper bought biscuit with pink icing and jam in the middle, a luxury to me, used to mother’s gritty flapjacks, and I had just taken it from her and exchanged smiles when Sandra suddenly appeared, grabbed my other arm and shrieked, ‘Don’t eat that!’

‘Why not?’ I stammered, looking from Sandra’s white face to Ruth’s stricken one.

‘Because you’ll get what she’s got – eugh!’

Ruth instinctively put her raw hands behind her back, but said defiantly, ‘No, she won’t. It’s not catching.’

‘Drop it,’ Sandra urged me, with real concern in her voice, and – craven heart – I did as she said, and watched her grind it into the concrete with her heel. As she frog-marched me back into the building, I saw Ruth looking at me with utter disbelief and reproach in her brimming eyes and I felt as small and hateful and despised as the smallest crumb of biscuit under Sandra’s shoe.

‘Why haven’t I got any brothers or sisters?’ I asked my parents over supper that evening, as if that was the source of all my troubles.

Father looked up from his lamb chops nervously, deferring to mother.

‘Well,’ she said, uncomfortably, ‘having children isn’t as easy as all that, you know. They don’t just arrive on the doorstep fully formed. Anyway,’ she said, quickly, in case my questioning took an obstetrical turn, ‘you can’t always choose: things don’t necessarily turn out quite as planned.’ And here she gave my father a glance that wasn’t entirely friendly. That was all the explanation I was getting.

‘If I had a sister I wouldn’t care about Sandra. We’d just go around together and talk to each other,’ I said.

‘You know, sweetie, I think it’s time you stood up to this Sandra,’ said father mildly.

‘I think it’s time I went up to see the headmistress,’ said mother with some asperity.

‘No, no,’ I insisted, covering my face with my hands. ‘If you do that Sandra will really get me.’

The truth of this principle was proved some weeks later.

I had been sent to the medical room to lie down after feeling dizzy during P.E. It was one of mother’s days at work (she was a doctor’s receptionist, part time) and the school secretary was having some difficulty contacting her, so I was left to languish on the sick bed, authentic ex-hospital issue with an adjustable backrest and abrasive grey blankets. The medical room was in the same corridor as the headmistress’s study. From my vantage point I could observe through the half-open door the passage to and fro of various miscreants, and hear the sighing and fidgeting coming from the vicinity of the wooden chair on which offenders, like prisoners on death row, were obliged to await their punishment. The first visitor to pass the doorway was Peter Apps, the school layabout, a recidivist in his final year who was caned on a regular basis. The door creaked open to admit him and clicked shut, and then there was a minute or two of silence before he was ejected and slouched back up the corridor rubbing his bottom.

The next to pass into my field of vision were Ruth Pike and her mother. Their conference with the headmistress lasted at least a quarter of an hour and ended in the corridor with much handshaking between the two women, apologies on one side and thank-yous on the other. Five minutes later I heard a familiar footstep on the tiles; I would have recognised the slip-slop of Sandra’s sandals anywhere. She sat on the chair outside the head’s office holding on to the seat with both hands and swinging her legs from the knee. After some time she was admitted, and for all my concentration I couldn’t catch so much as a syllable of what went on inside. She certainly hadn’t been awarded the school prize, as when she did emerge her pale face was whiter than ever, apart from her eyes which were pink and puffy with crying.

Just before lunch the school secretary poked her head around the door. ‘I’m afraid we still can’t get hold of your mother, Abigail. Is there a neighbour we could call, or are you feeling better?’

I was no longer feeling ill by this time, and besides the blanket was becoming almost unbearably itchy, so I decided to rejoin the class. The midday bell was ringing as I made my way back to the form room to retrieve my sandwiches, swimming upstairs against the tide of bodies that surged down to the dinner hall. Classrooms were out of bounds during breaks. The only exception to this rule was the monitor who was allowed to stay behind at the end of the lesson to clean the blackboard and tidy the chairs. This duty, which was much coveted, happened this week to have fallen to Ruth Pike, who would happily spend the entire lunch hour rearranging the furniture, lining up the scissors and pens in their racks and wiping every speck of chalk dust from the board rather than face the savagery of the playground.

As I reached the top of the stairs I could hear a commotion coming from the classroom. Through the panel of glass in the closed door I could see Ruth Pike lying on the floor, surrounded by a pack of girls whose job it was to restrain her. Sitting astride Ruth’s stomach was Sandra Skeet who was in the process of slapping her about the head, face and arms with the blackboard rubber, which sent up clouds of filthy dust with every blow. Ruth’s dark hair was grey with the powder, and her raw skin was cracked and smothered. She was making a strange choking noise.

‘Stop it!’ I shouted – my voice emerging as a squeak – as I threw the door open, and was brought up abruptly, as Sandra glanced over her shoulder at me and then carried on oblivious. For a second I stood there, helplessly, as if I had done my bit and there was really nothing more I could do, and then from nowhere I felt a tremendous anger rise up in me like boiling milk, and before I could stop myself I had marched over to the scissor rack and seized a pair. If they hadn’t been round-ended safety scissors I would surely have drawn blood, but as it was I grabbed one of Sandra’s spindly blonde plaits and chopped it off about two inches from her scalp. It wasn’t a clean cut either, but Sandra was so stunned by my assault that she only realised what was happening after the first snip, by which time I had a firm grip on the hair and her writhing and screaming were to no avail whatever. I was still standing over her, pigtail in hand, when Mrs Strevens erupted through the door, scattering conspirators, while Ruth lay twitching and gasping on the floor, a little puddle spreading beneath her skirt.

I never saw either Sandra or Ruth again. Sandra didn’t come back to school after that incident – a pity, as I was looking forward to seeing how she would disguise her lopsided haircut – and gossip swiftly confirmed that she had been expelled. Ruth was taken off in an ambulance: a combination of terror and the lungfuls of chalk dust she had inhaled had brought on an asthma attack. Despite the headmistress’s assurances that the chief culprit had been permanently excluded from the school Mrs Pike decided that Ruth would be better off taking her chances elsewhere. I was severely reprimanded for the amputation of the pigtail, which in the commotion of the moment I had been left holding and had finally stowed at the bottom of my desk, where it lay coiled like an anaemic viper. I was saved from expulsion by my previously unblemished record and the fact that I was acting in defence of Ruth. My parents felt obliged to make a show of disapproval of my behaviour to satisfy the head, but although my mother was concerned at this previously unsuspected streak of aggression in my character, their principal feeling was one of relief.

‘After all, she only cut off one pigtail,’ my father offered in mitigation.