Hate replaced fear at that moment; I remember it as though it were yesterday. I despised them and loathed their very existence. I wished them dead, and I wanted their obliteration to be at my hand, as gory as possible.
Of course, fear was still there. The fear of the pain and the humiliation; the mocking of my tears but at that moment the greatest fear was falling, of slithering down the outside wall of Leven’s Rifle Club. I would have been eight, the boy beating me would have been around 16 and I remember he had stout black shoes on. I was frightened to fall as I knew what damage the kicks would do. I had to stay upright.
Another punch and I crumpled, sobbing and wrapping my arms around my head, waiting for the kicks to my stomach. But, there was nothing. The five of them laughed at me in my pitiful heap and walked away.
It was just another encounter with the bullies but this time I felt different. The hate was stronger than the fear. It still is today.
There are a number of reasons I remember this particular beating over the others because they would continue regularly for around another three years while I was at primary school in Leven. You daren’t tell your parents because that would have made the situation worse probably. You couldn’t tell your teachers because they already knew and with few exceptions they were bullies too.
Normality was a little world filled with big bullies.
My father taught me to always stand up for my principles, for what was right. An honourable trait but, to my chagrin, that stance was to be taken with words not weapons. As a result, while I may have appeared to bravely refuse to back down that was usually the trigger for another beating. This did not make me proud, this made me a punchbag. I was no Mahatma Gandhi, I wanted to be Cassius Clay, but had no skill or stomach for fighting and hurting others with my fists or feet. No, I wanted a gun like Bronco Lane, or like Slim or Jess out of Laramie. I wanted the bullies to stop, and that never happened, not even to this day.
And to my shame out of every confrontation I have ever had with a bully I have come off worse. I have never won, not once.
So what was at the root of that encounter all those years ago that I remember so vividly today? What was it that makes me to this day still remember their faces and clothes?
It was my mother.
And probably because of my upbringing I won’t share the names. I still don’t want to inflict pain on those who perhaps regret their actions or don’t even remember them, or to wound the memories of the families they had and left behind after meeting the emotionless equaliser of death.
Giving me a tin of sweeties, a hug and a kiss, mum left. My sister Marysia, seven years older than me, was maybe party to what was wrong but all I knew was that she was ill and had to go into hospital in Edinburgh.
There was no road bridge then; we had no phone. All we did have was our prayers and, as dad worked shifts at the pit, he told us to go to church and pray for our mother. This we did.
During those long days I used to sit in the foot of mum’s wardrobe with the tin of sweeties she gave me and hope that one day she would be well enough to come home.
Then one day we got the news that mum was being moved to a convalescence home and dad organised our one and only visit to see her. It would be a long journey for a brief few minutes together but it meant a lot.
I went out to play in the morning, passing the time before we set off to see mum.
Just as it neared the time for me to head back home I came off the beach and was walking between Buchlyvie Terrace and the town’s Rifle Club when I met them.
There was the bully I knew from school who used to regularly take his ire and frustration out on me with kicks and punches. This time he was in the company of his very scary and unpredictable big brother and his younger sibling, who was learning the rules of the family’s role and reign.
With the bully was his closest friend and ally, accompanied by his big brother. I reckon he would have been around 16 then and it was rare to see them out together.
There was a bit of banter and I suppose I made the big mistake of saying I had to get home because I was going to see my mother.
This gave the bully an idea.
He reckoned his pal was a “better fighter” than me and unless I took him on they would stop me visiting mum.
I had nothing against his pal and I was also a lousy fighter, so I happily conceded that he was the best fighter and decided to make a bolt for home. That didn’t work out as the 16-year-old hauled me back and demanded I fight his brother. I refused.
I could tell the bully’s pal wasn’t too comfortable with what was unfolding but he was egged on, finally, reluctantly and ineffectually, swinging a punch at my head. I dodged one and took the next in the mouth.
Yelling that I wasn’t going to fight anyone and I wanted to go so I could see my mum, the bully’s pal took another swipe and I could see where this was heading.
In desperation I lunged at him, getting both hands on his shoulders I shoved him as hard as I could and he ended up on his backside.
That was it.
His big brother let out a stream of obscenities about me and started pushing me until my back was against the Rifle Club wall. Then the slaps and punches started. I kept my head down to avoid the full face blow and focused on those black shoes.
The tears came and I tried to stay upright but eventually he felled me … the kicks never came but the hate did.
That hate and fear would last before Scotland’s antiquated education streaming would see the bully and I at different secondary schools and him physically, if not psychologically, out of my life.
I learnt every other way to get to school to avoid him, even if it involved a long detour. There were periods of truce, of course, but there was always the tension that could explode into violence.
He and his brother once found sets of darts and gave chase to a few of us along Leven prom, hurling these at us, as one whizzed past my head the youngster next to me fell to the ground with a dart embedded in his thigh. The kicking would follow but we left him to his fate.
One of the most disturbing incidents actually happened in the school playground, just in front of the huts the senior primary pupils used.
A new pupil had verbally stood up to the bully and everyone gathered round as the beating began. This time it was different. Although the lad was battered and broken, the bully wasn’t finished. The few stairs up to the hut were supported by strong posts. The bully grabbed his victim by the hair, dragged him to the stairs and started to pound the poor boy’s face into the wooden pillars. He was probably unconscious when he let him go, his face pouring blood.
When a teacher finally arrived, the bully was sent home and suspended from school for a few days, no doubt with a note being despatched to his parents. The suspension was, of course, a badge of honour, and his return to class saw him more arrogant in his reign.
It was a horrific attack for children to witness. I had taken punches and kicks for refusing to steal, for scoring a goal, for laughing, for not laughing, for having my own pals … but I’d never been subjected to such a vicious assault. For that I was thankful and terrified that level of violence could be used against me.
His departure from primary six months before me felt like a reprieve from a nightmare that had lasted years. Unfortunately, he provided a grounding in understanding that bullies exist everywhere, and dealing with them without violence only makes you a perpetual victim.
It can also give you a new name. Out went Morkis and in came Muckyarse.
Golf was responsible for that, or golf lessons to be exact.
George Harvey was an established and celebrated photographer in Leven. He was a successful businessman and a Rotarian. My father, on the other hand, was a coal miner, later becoming a shift-working security guard in Kirkcaldy after the Michael Pit disaster.
However, what the two did have in common is that they were both Polish so when Mr Harvey had a relative coming over for a visit who was the same age as myself, it was reckoned the two of us should be friends.
He was a nice enough lad and we got on fairly well, despite our lack of knowledge of each other’s language. Mr Harvey also thought it might be a good idea to introduce his Eastern European relative to the sport of golf, a relatively unknown pastime in Poland.
As a result we were both signed up for lessons, taken by a professional at the edge of the municipal golf course in Scoonie.
The janitor at school had given me a couple of old clubs so, with my Polish pal, I headed up to Scoonie to wait my turn to be tutored in grip, swing, then full-blown strikes into a practice net. The two of us were probably among the youngest there, and total beginners.
Most of the others there were from, shall we say, the other side of the tracks and whether it was my dad’s profession or nationality, my lack of golfing ability, or lack of ‘acceptable’ kit, I drew a bit of attention while my Polish companion, either through Mr Harvey’s connections or the lad’s lack of comprehension regarding the language and sport, was spared any ridicule.
That culminated with the son of one prominent businessman deciding that from here on in I should now be referred to in all conversation simply as ‘Muckyarse’. The instigator of this particular ridicule was a few years older than myself and he seemed to be the leader of most of the others.
Now, having instilled in me a pride in my family, both in Leven and behind the Iron Curtain, to discover yourself being mocked as Muckyarse was humiliating as well as insulting. In tradition of standing by my principles I decided this verbal abuse needed to stop so I took the ring leader on in the only way I was trained to do: I asked him to stop calling me, and my family, names.
This prompted a response along the lines of “What are you going to do about it, Muckyarse?” I responded by telling him that it simply needed to stop as it was rude, insulting and I found it offensive.
“Make me stop Muckyarse”, came the big boy’s reply. This was followed by several punches to the face for being cheeky and not knowing my place.
With more taunts of “Muckyarse” I took a stronger verbal stance which, as usual, proved ineffectual against physical attack. Finally, with bleeding nose and swollen lip, I ran tearfully home only to receive a row from my parents for abandoning my young Polish charge.
It turned out he was okay and made his own way home but that was the end of my golfing lessons but the start of a long period of being known as ‘Muckyarse’ by the more select offspring in my hometown.
By the time I reached secondary school and was able to make new friends, encounters with bullies were rarer and tended to be restricted, in the main, to teaching staff. While there were those who could be inspirational there were others whose behaviour and attitude were shocking. But, again, that was recognised by the pupils and we worked around it … when we could.
In one pupil/teacher instance I couldn’t and that centred on the rituals surrounding school dinners, a strange experience that could also be very intimidating.
Before self-service and the modernisation of the entire eating process, the tables were dominated by a senior pupil at the top and two of his cronies who assisted with the serving. New boys, waifs and strays tended to be allocated a place at the foot of the table. They were responsible for dashing to the serveries and loading the trays up at the hatch, taking whatever portion was served up by the unholy trinity at the top of the table, and then getting a cloth to clean up the sprayed and scattered food after feeding time.
To be fair, some of the tables I ended up with were fine, but it didn’t start that way.
Those table-less were required to stand at the front of the dining hall and the teacher on duty would assign you to any spaces that were available.
And so it was I took my place in the ranks of the lunchtime homeless, and was duly dispatched to the bully’s table.
This proved to be a particularly unpleasant experience. If it wasn’t salt being put in your water it was your food being carefully rationed, to the extent that mince, potatoes and peas, saw me receiving just one pea and a minuscule amount of everything else, much to the rest of the table’s amusement. Meanwhile the glorious head of the table dispensed with a plate and ate out the serving dish, like an animal at a trough.
As it was a humiliating and less than satisfying experience, I duly abandoned my seat and the next day stood alongside the supervising teacher, waiting to be allocated a different seat.
He was having none of it. I was sent back to the previous day’s table, and received more of this particular gang’s of dining etiquette, that being less food and more lack of hygiene.
The next day, I stood again in front of the dining hall. I didn’t hope for much change of heart from the teacher, given his smirking remark one day: “Morkis, your sister looked like a horse and you eat like one.”
Nice.
This time my refusal to sit at the table he insisted on brought warnings of punishment from him. I stated my case for wishing to sit somewhere else and why I wanted to move, before being forcefully sat down at the foot of ‘my’ table.
With food sneezed on, coughed on and spat on, I didn’t eat and after wiping up their debris I made my way to the cloakrooms, next to my first class in the afternoon.
There I received three visitors, the unholy trinity from the top of the dinner table. The bully boy was particularly aggrieved at me “telling tales” to the supervising teacher and, for doing so, I needed taught a lesson.
Three seniors against a junior was never going to end well for me but I didn’t expect what happened next.
The cloakroom comprised benches with hooks above them for your coat. The benches had a gap of around three inches separating them and he had his cronies splay my fingers wide so my little finger was across the gap. Then he lifted his foot and brought his heel crashing down on my pinky.
Having your finger deliberately broken as a 'punishment' is pretty traumatic, it is also very painful.
There was some relief as I looked down at it and it was still there. I was terrified his heel had torn my finger off, that’s what it felt like. As it was, my finger had given way at the top joint, so only the top third was ‘floppy’.
My next class was maths, taken by my registration teacher and I quickly dispelled telling this particular tale to him given a short while before he had relished belting the entire class until someone admitted to a misdemeanour. Telling a teacher who actually enjoyed hurting children that a bully had just broken your finger, didn’t seem like a good idea and more likely a source of further ridicule in front of the class and more humiliation.
I did tell my parents about my injury but was economical with the truth, only saying I had staved my finger. I bound it tight and it duly healed but its crooked shape still reminds me today not so much of the pain but of the foulest phlegm-covered food and the teacher who expected me to eat it.
As it was, my reluctance to share that table saw me once again in front of the dining hall the next day, but only because someone else had been conscripted to my seat by the bully.
Perhaps my Gandhi like resistance had won the day? My throbbing pinky didn’t think so.
In terms of physical violence, this really ended my encounters with individual bullies. Of course there were still occasions when you felt intimidated or threatened but these tended to be passing encounters, rather than repeatedly running down alleyways and corridors to avoid another beating or act of torture.
Looking back though, it was literally “kids’ stuff”. It was maybe cruel and psychologically damaging but not the family-destroying or career-ending that can come with systemic institutional bullying. I have always felt more equipped to take those bullies on and more optimistic of winning. Unfortunately the result has been the same – a beating and those responsible carry on unchecked, and often unchallenged.
I’ve written at great length in the past about my challenges to ‘authority’. A simple summary can be found here http://jtmorkis.blogspot.com/2018/06/lessons-from-losing.html and when I consider all the formal words I have written I still remain disappointed that I have never once changed the outcome, even when it came to the end of my own career.
Probably the greatest lesson I learned was through the lengthy exchanges I had with the Scottish Social Services Council and the Scottish Government. During that I discovered you can actually ask too many questions (http://jtmorkis.blogspot.com/2019/08/vexatious-vagina-man.html).
And that, to me seems the secret to disarming all the bullies, be they beating you up against a wall or ruling you a public nuisance – numbers.
Bullies stay in the shadows when they are outnumbered and ‘outgunned’, that’s because essentially they are cowards and damaged.
Likewise one person doggedly pursuing any part of the Establishment with a thousand different questions can be dismissed as an aggrieved, ‘vexatious’ eccentric. However, a thousand different people asking a question can bring about change.
I realise that now but also how difficult it is to mobilise opinion and generate action to force that change.
And that’s why the bullies still win today. Be it in the playground or the boardroom, the power of one is rarely a threat.
Today, as in that defining moment 56 years ago against a wall in Leven, I still detest a bully whether they hide behind clenched fist or belittling bureaucracy. The aim is always the same, forcing submission.
I really can’t see another occasion when I could muster the energy to challenge the system again on my own. I just hope I never attract the attention of another bully. I am, and always have been, too much of an easy target. Help was always hard to find.
Picture: Tumisu
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