You can leave school and your bullies behind, but can you ever silence their humiliating voices in your head?

I have sat down to write this every time the subject of bullying comes up in the news. That’s a couple of times a year, I suppose, because the bullies, like the poor, will always be with us. Something has always stopped me. It’s part of what perpetuates bullying in schools, workplaces, on sports fields, basically everywhere: the unwillingness of the bullied to own that label, to cast themselves as a victim.  

I was occasionally bullied at primary school. It was terrifying at the time but didn’t have a lasting effect as it felt random, rather than personal. 

I was properly bullied at high school. 

I’m told Westlake Boys High School on Auckland’s North Shore is a good school these days, former schoolmates have no hesitation sending their sons there. It’s changed, they say. It bloody needed to. 

I don’t recall exactly when it started, but it must have been pretty much straight away. I remember one day standing near two kids who were arguing light-heartedly over who was more entitled to the surname that they shared. I had been at primary school with one of them, and his surname was different then. I contributed this piece of information, and immediately wished I hadn’t: I received a murderous look, a mouthed threat and the unmistakable gesture of a fist slammed into an open palm. I was already afraid of this kid — let’s call him Lance. 

Lance was tall and athletic, a member of the rowing eight and soon enough the First XV, and he gathered around himself a group of like-minded others who joined in when a bit of amusing nastiness was on offer. But Lance’s most loyal bully buddy was an even taller kid —another fellow rower — let’s call him Stephen. These two made high school hell. 

The cruelty was more psychological than physical. I’d be scragged by four of five of them, a shoe yanked off my foot then tossed from one to another in a kind of humiliating piggy-in-the-middle thing. I’d be grabbed from behind, upended and carried, one to each limb, to a puddle and dumped in it. I had a lisp, and this was mocked. My school books were nicked and defaced. 

Not much actual physical harm was done. But the worst aspect of this kind of treatment is you start to ask yourself: “Why me? What is it about me?”

I was pudgy, pretty gormless and a social hockey player when I arrived at Westlake. I was no genius, but I was academically capable. I wasn’t the weakest kid there, but I was weak enough, and certainly no match for Lance and Stephen. I had the lisp. That was enough. 

One day I muttered something to my father about being picked on. “The only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them,” he advised. That’s the wisdom he would have received from his own father when he was being bullied at his high school. Dad went to King’s College.

I was mulling his advice over in class the very next day when I became aware of a commotion outside. When the bell went, we all crowded out and joined a circle of kids around a couple of teeth lying in a splotch of blood on the concrete.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Someone tried to stand up to Lance,” an awed-looking kid replied.

The school took no action that I’m aware of. Lance carried on being Lance. No one stood up to him again. 

Three years later, when I was in sixth form, I was in the classroom at lunchtime waiting for the bell for classes to resume, and probably hiding from Lance. There was another kid in there, Evan, a quiet, artistic hippy who was probably hiding from Lance too. The door opened, and Lance came in. He was visibly aroused, and Evan noticed.

“There’s dark spots on the front of your shorts,” he said, his voice full of loathing.

Lance shot him that familiar, murderous look, and turned and left, returning minutes later with Stephen who strode up to Evan, grabbed the front of his shirt, dragged him upright and forced him up against the wall. He pulled a knife from his pocket and held the blade to Evan’s throat. 

The door opened again. Framed in the doorway was the deputy headmaster. He took in the scene and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “My office.”.

Stephen mooched out, followed by Lance. Evan and I looked at each other and I could tell he was thinking what I was thinking. At last, the reign of terror was over! Stephen would be expelled! Lance would be deprived of his main henchman! School wouldn’t be the horror show it had been for the last four years!

Nothing happened. Stephen was at school the following day, and he and Lance were still at the head of their pack of goons. The deputy headmaster was also the coach of the First XV. And in the end, when your school has Maadi Cup aspirations, the rules don’t apply to anyone who is that good at tugging on his oar. 

Boys, as they say, will be boys. But boys need help to become men — civilised male members of society — from responsible adults. The responsible adults were Awol at Westlake. The headmaster seemed laser-focused on school prestige — rowing, rugby, cricket, academia, in that order — and he fully set the tone. 

I left Westlake, Lance, Stephen and the rest of them behind at the end of 1983. I had survived — but only just. The wheels came off for me in my first two years at university; I was depressed and borderline suicidal. Because the thing about bullying is that the bullies are always with you. Even after they’ve gone, there’s a part of you doing their job for them. You avoid conflict. You don’t stand up for yourself, because you don’t feel as though you’re allowed to. There’s a mean little voice at the back of your mind. “There’s something wrong with you,” it says. “You’re pathetic, weak and powerless,”  it says. “You can’t aspire to anything.”

You could say that the experience of being bullied made me a better person than I might have been, and set me on the path that has brought me to the excellent place  I am now. I sometimes wonder who I’d be now if  I’d gone to another school, or if Lance, Stephen and co. had taken their twisted little psyches elsewhere. I wonder what would have happened if Westlake had acted on any of the complaints of bullying that they must surely have received. But that’s all hypothetical. But what’s real is that mean little voice that’s with me still. Whenever anyone compliments me on something, I’m conscious of an immediate, disparaging reflex. 

A few years ago, I was in Wellington’s Civic Square when a vaguely familiar face appeared from the crowd in front of me. 

“McCrystal, isn’t it?” he asked. 

I’m bad with faces and worse with names, but his name came back to me straight away. He was a shy, frail-looking boy at school, and my path hadn’t really crossed his, though we were in the same year.  I remembered he was a gifted pianist. I asked him if he still played, and he seemed grateful that I recalled something positive about him. He told me he still lived in Auckland. “What brings you to Wellington?” I asked.

He told me matter-of-factly that he’d been in therapy for years, as the result of his experiences at Westlake. His therapist had suggested he confront those who’d tortured him, and who continued to torment him after the fact. So that’s what he was doing. He was touring the country confronting the bullies. I wondered with some alarm whether I was being confronted. 

Because the sad truth is that I can’t absolve myself completely. From time to time, a room full of kids waiting for the teacher to arrive would round on a boy. Maybe his speech mannerisms, like mine, invited mockery, or his surname was lisped in such a way as to make insinuations about his sexuality. I can’t remember whether I joined in when it was someone else’s turn. I’m pretty sure I would have grinned, as though it was funny — anything to ingratiate myself. At the very least, I know for a shameful fact I did nothing to intervene or to stand up for the blushing, miserable object of cruelty.  

People can change. When I decided I would finally write about my school days, I did a quick bit of cyber-stalking. The gang all still live locally. They have all got on in life, more or less. They still seem to share common interests. Curiously, each of their Facebook profile pictures show them holding a large snapper — for all you can tell it’s the same fish — but it’s hard to say what kind of people they are now, how they might recall their own school days, how they would talk about bullying with their kids.

I wonder what they would say if I confronted them. Would they apologise? Would they mean it? Would any apology they gave me mean anything to me?