Maybe the best place to start is in the playground. So may things start there, love, friendship and loneliness all have their germination in the playground.
At the age of 17, I had experienced two of these; I was yet to find myself in love, or even feeling anything that I could identify as love, except maybe for my parents. Maybe.
Anyway, the playground in which I am starting this particular story is the playground in St Winifred’s Secondary Modern school in the town of Frownish, in the south of the northern part of England, or the north of the southern part of England, depending on whether your ancestors had come up from London to find work, or down from Edinburgh to escape the cold and smoke. It was a chilly October afternoon, and we had just finished school. I had run down the stairs from the Maths rooms, and had made it almost to the side gate of the school, when the reason for my running caught up with me. Geoff Sykes.
Geoff was the reason I hated school. I could cope with lessons, though I wasn’t a straight ‘A’ student by any means. I could cope with homework because, well you have to don’t you? But Geoff Sykes made my schooldays a misery, and he was the reason I always ran home after the final lesson of the day. The mornings weren’t so bad because I could linger at home, and then dash the half mile or so at the very last minute so that I arrived just in time for registration and everyone else, usually including Geoff, was inside. But in the afternoons we all finished at the same time, so it was a race. If I could get out of the side gate and start down the street I knew I had a good chance of getting home, or at least an adult seeing if Geoff pounced, and that meant the chance of intervention. Unfortunately today Geoff must have been half out of his seat when the bell rang, and sprinting towards the gate whilst I was still hurriedly putting my maths book back in my rucksack, because he was waiting for me at the gate, and not alone. Two of his very best cronies were there with him. They were slightly behind him, almost looking over his shoulder. I could imagine later in life Geoff would be a nightclub owner, or mafia boss, with two bodyguards, and they would look just like this.
I stopped running. No point now. I was caught, trapped by these sharks of the playground. My train of thought carried on along the lines of predators, and almost instantly I was struck by a view of Geoff and his lieutenants as hyenas, snapping at each other and barking out their mocking laugh.
‘Missed you at lunchtime’ shouted Geoff. He was right; I had made sure they had missed me! I had enjoyed my lunch for once, rather than having to watch it thrown over the school fence, or scoffed in front of my face.
‘Yeah.’ I replied. ‘Shame that.’ They didn’t seem to enjoy the sarcasm.
I had used these few seconds to try and collect my thoughts. I looked for a way to escape, but could see nothing. I could throw my bag at them and run for it, but where to? And of course my bag was full of my books, my homework, and my diary. God only knows what nightmare would become of my life if they got hold of my diary! I cursed myself for my stupidity in even bringing it to school.
No, I was going to have to face this head on, whatever the consequences, but before I could make any preparations, Geoff barked out an order.
‘Grab him!’
I turned and ran, but sport has never been my strong point, even under the strongest motivation. They soon ran me down, one of the gorillas shoved my right shoulder, and I span in mid stride, flailing my arms helplessly before tumbling over and hitting the tarmac of the playground hard. Almost instantly I had vice like grips applied to my arms and was yanked upright. I was so winded I could hardly walk, and so was mostly dragged back to where Geoff was still waiting. He hadn’t moved a muscle. More like a mob boss every day.
I slumped in my captor’s arms. I was completely defeated. In those days I had no hope of ever really beating the bullies. The most I hoped for was a minimum of actual physical pain, and as little humiliation as I could get away with, followed by a run home into solitude and safety. Now of course I know that everyone has a choice, an opportunity to at least try, but what troubled, bullied and broken teenager ever realises these things? I was content to be the average student, in an average school, in a town that was the very definition of average. I was in the top group for Maths and Physics, but only just, and could hold my own in German and French but really struggled in Latin. I was not often picked last for football and rugby, but was never first either. If I had been allowed to carry on with my life like that, I would have been happy. I never would have been one of the great bright shining lights of our time, but I would have been happy.
Geoff had other ideas. I had known him since I was in primary school, and he had not changed a bit ever since. A mop of ginger hair crowned his square face. Piercing, cruel eyes peered out from dark recesses, and his mouth was usually either smiling or sneering, often in anticipation of inflicting some sort of pain on something, or someone. Today as with most days, it was me.
‘You can’t escape you know.’ Today, Geoff managed to sneer and smile at the same time. ‘I will always find you; always get you, now c’mere!’ He snarled the last word like an angry, hungry Rottweiler, and I was thrown towards him. He caught me easily, he was a strong boy even back then. I was pushed down to my knees, and Geoff dropped to the floor behind me, his arm around my throat in a sleeper hold, I couldn’t breathe!
‘See, running just makes it worse,’ Geoff whispered in my ear, ‘now you made me have to make an example out of you; this is all your fault.’ He punctuated this by tightening his hold, my eyes felt like they were bulging out of my head, but no matter how hard I pulled at his arm it seemed to be made out of iron for all the difference it was making.
Just as I thought I would pass out to the sound of Geoff’s threats and his laughing cronies, he released my neck, but this wasn’t the end, he was just getting warmed up. The instant my throat was free, he punched me in my kidneys and stood up, dragging me to my feet by my ear. Winded from the fall, only just able to breathe from the stranglehold, and now in huge amounts of pain from his expertly targeted attack on my kidneys, I couldn’t cope any more, I screamed.
I knew this was a mistake as soon as the sound left my mouth. Not only would Geoff se it as a sign of success and encouragement, but it would attract a crowd, the last thing I wanted. I had learned from painful experience that no teacher ever comes to help during a fight after school, now I think it is because they have washed their hands of us at the final bell, and have their own lives to concentrate on rather than ours, but back then it just added to my feeling of isolation and persecution. Worse than the lack of teachers was the fact that any loud sound was guaranteed to start attracting a crowd. I have never understood why children gather around a fight, not that my feeble protestations could be called fighting back. Inevitably though, very soon we were surrounded.
Geoff’s grip on my ear, cuffs around the head, and jabs into my already very bruised and painful sides had taken their toll. I was completely beaten. I just stood, ready to take whatever he dished out. All I wanted was to get it over with and slink off home.
With an audience, Geoff’s jibes got louder.
‘You are pathetic!’ He shouted. ‘You sure you aren’t gay?’ This got a giggle from the crowd; Geoff was the master crowd pleaser. He seemed to be able to sense the mood, and perform perfectly to keep the mob if not exactly on his side, then enjoying the show enough not to intervene.
‘No…I just want to go home…’ was all I could manage. I wasn’t trying to play the crowd, I really did just want to disappear.
‘Want to crawl off to mummy do you? Go and cry in her lap while she strokes your hair and tells you the nasty man won’t hurt you again?’ He didn’t know it, but crying in my mum’s lap was the last thing I would ever consider.
Abruptly, he pushed me, threw me towards his ‘friends’ who caught me, and assumed the usual prison guard positions, one each side holding my arms. I coughed and splutted, got a few good breathes at last and then looked up.
I saw about ten or so faces, I recognised most but had no fondness for any of them. Quite a number of others were hanging around further off, kind of half watching guiltily. One thing that always surprised me was the number of girls that were in the crowds that gathered to watch my humiliation. Was it because it was me? Did they enjoy watching me, or another helpless victim suffer? I think that it was more likely that they were getting some adult pleasure in watching an alpha male assert his authority. I was certainly the runt of the pack. To be honest I wasn’t even in the same pack. I was an interloper, a stray from far away that had dared to tray and scratch out a living in Geoff’s hunting grounds.
Just as all this was flashing through my mind, Geoff spun on his heel and walked off, calling over his shoulder ‘I don’t know why I bother with you, it’s not even a challenge any more, run off back to mummy, poofboy’. He turned back to me, made a dismissing gesture with his hand, and his apes dropped me like a stone. I hit the floor, crumpled on to my knees, and fell onto my side, unable to work out which part of me hurt the most.
I was thankful for the release, and when I looked up I was relieved to see the three of them strolling off. The small crowd dispersed as soon as there was nothing more to see. Not one of them stayed to help, or to see if I was alright, beyond the obvious. I picked myself up, and started the long slow limp home, grateful that no one had stayed to mock my retreat.

I levered my way through the gates, and had to stop halfway. My sides felt like they were going to split open and spill my guts all over the floor. As my self respect was there already it would have been poetic! I spent a few minutes getting my breath back, and once I could stand upright again I took a couple of deep lungfulls of evening air, stood as straight as my mood and my injuries would allow, and re-started the walk home.
I had got maybe a hundred yards when I thought I heard someone calling my name. I was too far from home still for it to be my mum, but it was definitely a female voice, which was odd as I didn’t have any girl friends (and certainly not any girlfriends, if you appreciate the difference?) back then. I heard the call again, closer this time, and coming from behind me, from school.
‘John, wait!’ I turned around, expecting a teacher to be standing behind me, demanding to know why my knees were scuffed out of my trousers, my shirt looked as if I had been run over, and I was walking as if I had just done ten rounds with Joe Frazier. But it wasn’t.
Walking quickly towards me was an angel. Not literally of course, my complete lack of faith at that point precluded any sort of divine intervention, or even interest. She was, however, an absolute vision in my eyes. Cheryl Brown. I shared a Physics class with her, and always did my very best to try and get a desk just behind hers, so that I could see her whilst I was watching the teacher. She had light brown hair halfway down her back, which today had been tied together in a ponytail as she had been playing netball. On other girls this gave their face a severe look, but on Cheryl it just allowed her natural beauty to shine through. She had the sort of face that is perfectly balanced. Green eyes just the right distance apart, a nose that was just the right size, lips that were full but not overly so. As I am sure you can tell, I had the world’s biggest crush on her, and had been the same for the last few years, pretty much ever since I had hit puberty and fully appreciated all the wonderful ways that girls were different from boys. I stopped and waited for her to catch up. This was the first time she had ever talked to me as far as I could remember, and I am sure that I would have remembered.
‘John, I’ve been calling you since I found this on the floor, are you OK?’ She looked genuinely concerned, and was holding something in her hand, I couldn’t see what it was though.
‘You didn’t see then?’ I asked.
‘I’ve only just left English,’ she replied ‘I had some questions about some homework, you look a right mess, did you fall or something?’
I couldn’t help but give a wry smile. ‘Yeah, or something. I’m glad you didn’t see. Anyway, what have you got in your hand there?’
‘Oh, yes, sorry. Here I think this is yours. I am sure I have seen you using it in Physics, and it looks expensive.’ She held out her hand. My heart skipped a beat, she was holding my father’s pen. My eyes must have looked like saucers, and I remember gasping in shock. How close had I come to losing that? If I had gone home without it, and my father had found out, my life would have been worth less than my shoes! Melodramatic, maybe, but you have never met my dad, more about him later.