12:12pm Friday 27th November 2009
I WAS intrigued to read that Sir Ranulph Fiennes, one of that exotic breed who can genuinely describe themselves in their passports as ‘adventurer’ harbours an unsatisfied urge for revenge against the boys who bullied him at Eton.
It is a sobering thought to learn that a man who has run marathons in exotic places, who cut off his own necrotic fingertips with a Black & Decker saw in his garden shed, discovered lost cities, led any number of dangerous expeditions and been the oldest man to climb Everest is still haunted by the memory of being bullied 50 years ago.
A former politician, one of those accused by Fiennes, has strenuously denied that he ever ‘laid a finger’ on him saying ‘It must have been someone else’.
You don’t read many memoirs written by the bully. The bullied are slower to forget. I have very clear memories of being moved from my first school in Rochdale because of a group of boys who found my London accent ‘posh.’
My parents moved to Lancashire from London shortly before I started school. My father was of the ‘stand up to them and fight back’ brigade. My mother was herself a teacher and perhaps understood better the effect of regular and systematic bullying on a small child.
The bullying of my and Sir Ranulph’s generation was comparatively unsophisticated however. (Do you like the way I bracket us together – Oakenrod School, Rochdale and Eton didn’t have much in common apart from the ‘rod’ bit I suppose.)
It tended to be physical and verbal, just like today, but it terminated once you got to the safety of home. The stories that appear regularly in the media today tell of unremitting and mob persecution via the internet and mobile phones that drive isolated young people to seek to end the misery and their lives at the same time.
It is, for some reason, endemic in our society and it starts in childhood, despite the best efforts of the majority of parents and schools. As soon as any child says to a parent ‘Don’t say anything, please’, then that parent should know the time has come to say and do something, however hard that is.
Schools have improved considerably over the last decade, but I still worry when any head teacher feels able to say ‘There is no bullying in my school’.
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