This is another story I told some time ago but it bears retelling, anyone that missed it first time round may find it amusing and a very good example of what happens when you push someone too hard.

On my very first day at Grammar School I was teased about two things, my bright ginger hair and my surname. I was struck by the banality of supposedly intelligent children seizing on these details as an excuse for teasing.

Within a couple of weeks, after the other boys had a chance to see how physically weak I was, teasing graduated to full scale bullying. My decision to learn the violin simply added fuel to the flames, I was now regarded as a sissy.

The fact that I didn’t have a father also added the term ‘bastard’ to the repertoire of insults and pointing out that my Mum had been married when I was born made no difference whatsoever.

It didn’t cross my mind to report any of this at school, I had no reason to believe that I’d get a sympathetic hearing, so I complained about it at home.

I was shocked and disappointed when Mum, supported by the man who would become my Stepfather, told me that I was a big boy now and had to learn to stand up for myself.

One morning break I was standing alone as usual quietly thinking my own thoughts when a tirade of insulting names began to come in my direction from one of the chief bullies.

Remembering Mum’s words I decided that the time had come for me to ‘stand up for myself’ and without stopping to think I ran the few yards to where my antagonist was standing and launched myself at him in a flying leap.

Even under 4 stone of furious redhead has a certain mass and as luck would have it I knocked him straight into a chain link fence. Everything clicked together in my mind and I hooked my little fingers into the fence while pushing my thumbs onto his windpipe.

I can honestly say that nothing I’ve experienced in my whole life has been as sweet as the look of sheer terror on that boy’s face as realisation dawned that I fully intended to kill him.

I vaguely registered that there was a lot of shouting going on and that hands were trying to drag me off but nothing was diverting me from my chosen task. I didn’t even flinch when he managed to get a knee into my groin.

Someone punched me in the side of the head, sending my glasses flying and breaking my concentration sufficiently to loosen my grip. Then I found myself lying in the mud getting a severe kicking.

Once everyone was satisfied that I was properly quelled the kicking stopped and the bullies went off, taking their rather subdued friend with them. A couple of boys who were almost friends helped me to stand up.

They pretty well dragged me into the changing room and made me look at myself in the mirror, it wasn’t a pretty sight; I already had a black eye and a fat lip as well as some other cuts and bruises.

The breast pocket of my blazer had been almost completely ripped off, my trousers were torn and covered with mud and my glasses had been smashed.

I had to make it through the rest of the day with no glasses so I couldn’t see the blackboard at all and I refused refused point blank to clean myself up which earned me a note from my Form Master to be delivered to Mum. I was told that I was lucky not to be sent to the Headmaster.

I wasn’t at all surprised to get a vicious thrashing when I got home. Less than half a term into my new school and a very expensive uniform had been ruined. To add to the thrashing my various injuries had to be thoroughly disinfected which hurt like the devil, TCP really stings on open cuts.

My attempt to justify the situation by explaining that I’d just been standing up for myself cut no ice at all, apparently I was supposed to negotiate my way out of these situations and not use violence.

Unfortunately it seemed that I was the only boy in my year that was expected to live by that rule.

Love

It was my first experience of undergoing surgery while still awake, although quite heavily sedated, and it was very strange listening to the surgeon and the radiographer discussing what they were doing.

I was hoping that I’d be able to watch but the monitors were obviously set up for the surgeon rather than for my benefit and I couldn’t see.

I don’t think it’s particularly weird that I wanted to watch, apart from being quite fascinating to a former nurse, it would have been nice to see that unpleasant reminder of a traumatised adolescence disappearing.

Now, onto other matters.

When I published my list of odd facts about me a while ago, several people commented that there were items on that list that suggested much broader stories explaining them.

I agree and so I’m going to spend the next few posts expanding some of those facts to give a broader picture of the little oddity that was Malcolm (aka Malc & Mac) McLachlan.

Some of the stories are quite funny, some of them are fairly unhappy and several of them, in the best traditions of drama, are a mixture of both.

I may have had to put up with more than my fair share of problems as a child and a teenager but one thing I can never complain about is that my life was ever dull.

Coming up next then is number 7 on the list which is a story I did tell quite a while ago but it bears revisiting as it really is quite funny. It wasn’t funny when it happened, at least not to me, but eventually I managed to laugh about it.

Love

This isn’t a memory that’s suddenly sprung up in the course of my mental archaeology; this is something that’s been gnawing away at me for a very long time. This is not a funny story and some of you are going to, at the very least, wince as you read it.

On Wednesday I had an outpatient appointment to discuss the treatment of a varicocele that I’ve had since I was 16. This is not an uncommon condition in adolescents and often clears up of its own accord however in my case it wasn’t a natural occurrence.

I’ve indicated in the past that bullying as well as sexual abuse had a tremendous psychological impact on my childhood and teens but there is a physical cost as well. I’m not talking about the three or four small scars, one quite prominent one on the bridge of my nose. This varicocele was the legacy of an appalling act of cruelty.

During a confrontation at school, the details of which aren’t relevant, my antagonist knocked me to the ground and with, a speed that makes me suspect he’d planned it, grabbed me by the balls and lifted me clear off the ground. Now I’m not a heavy person, I’ve been clinically underweight all my life, but the pain of being held dangling like that was indescribable.

Only when he was satisfied that my screams of agony were as anguished as they were going to get did my assailant simply let go and drop me, completely careless of the fact that I barely saved myself from hitting my head on a concrete floor.

That particular torture was inflicted on three more occasions and the last attack was so vicious that I almost passed out but to my utter horror I also got what I hoped was a completely random erection. This so disgusted my attacker that he dropped me and I was unable to avoid banging my head when I landed. I spent most of the rest of that day feeling ashamed, dazed, nauseous and in awful pain.

A few days later I noticed the abnormality but said nothing. For better or for worse nothing went wrong with me during the next two years that needed a doctor to investigate there, otherwise my parents would have been alerted.

During an email conversation today a friend of mine expressed astonishment that something like this could have happened with nobody being any the wiser but, as is so often the case, events conspire to benefit miscreants.

One of the things that sexual abuse taught me, at the age of ten, was how to keep secrets and this secrecy became second nature to me in almost all aspects of my life. Nobody in my family had the least idea what I was going through at school, all that ever got home was the good stuff about how well I was doing and how happy I was until I started losing control at about fifteen, but that was put down to me being a “bad” boy.

Similarly no member of staff ever witnessed the many acts of cruelty and violence committed against me and I, being who I was, didn’t say anything. I just counted off the many days until I could finish my last A level paper and get the fuck out of that god-awful place.

One of the things I’ve realised about bullies is that they are an entirely different species from mere thugs. Like abusers, bullies are cunning and opportunistic, always prepared to wait for a brief moment when the intended victim is completely isolated. Of course all of that opportunism would come to nothing if the victim couldn’t be relied upon to keep silent, enter the sexually abused and secretive child.

In 1976 I spoke to a GU Consultant about the injury and, after he’d got over his shock, he advised me that treatment was still somewhat uncertain and that the only real disadvantage to leaving things as they were was a severely depleted sperm count. I’d long since abolished confusion as to my sexuality so that didn’t seem like a particularly serious issue. I decided to leave well alone.

Treatment now is a great deal better and considerably less invasive than in 1976 so, as I’ve been getting a bit of pain recently, I’ve decided that it’s time to eradicate this visible legacy of a desperately unhappy school life.

Love

I talk of surviving abuse but realistically that abuse still haunts me, causes sleepless nights and throws a shadow over me that pitches me into the deepest depression at the drop of a hat.

I talk of surviving the struggle of being a 12 year old homosexual in a society where sex between males wasn’t merely unacceptable, it was illegal until 1967 and then the age of consent was set at 21 leaving me short by some 7 years. My attempt to survive this led me to reject the possibility of a genuine relationship at the age of 13 and eventually cost me the friendship of the boy who desperately wanted to love me. My inept solution to my problems was to get a girlfriend and then cheat on her in the most despicable fashion by hanging around public toilets.

I talk of surviving bullying at grammar school and yet I’m only marginally less angry now than I was when that bullying was at it’s worst. The only success I had against that torment was the near murder of one of the bullies when I was 11 and lost all sense of reason as I tried my very hardest to strangle him.

I talk about surviving the violent punishments of a Stepfather who was unable to properly communicate with an over sensitive, confused and profoundly depressed adolescent and yet I find myself accepting more and more of the blame for those terrible fights. My damnable sense of fair play demands I acknowledge that he didn’t have the information he needed to understand me.

The one thing that I can honestly claim to have survived is a nearly fatal bout of pneumonia at the age of 8 which, at nearly 50 years ago, hardly qualifies for a lifetime achievement award.

Through my own bloody mindedness I got poor quality passes at A Level and S Level so achieved a pathetically self destructive goal of not getting a place at University, a miserable attempt to “teach my parents a lesson”. Going to University now, even if I get a First, has a hollowness to it, it’s more a desperate attempt at making up for lost time than a legitimate ambition.

I suppose that my turning away from drink, drugs and relentless casual sex at the age of 20 were something of a survival. I woke up in a strange flat after a party, stark naked and very sore, to be told that I’d danced and then “enjoyed myself quite a lot”. The worrying part of that for me was that I’d danced, something I simply didn’t do, which suggested that the enjoyment was completely without self control. It’s entirely possible or even probable that at least one of my gin and tonics was spiked but that’s a pretty vapid excuse. I’m genuinely thankful that in 1973 personal video recorders weren’t known and that the Internet was a long way in the future. I still have dark suspicions that in a dusty attic somewhere there are faded Polaroids of a ginger haired, apparently 16 year old doing things that he’d prefer not to see.

Love

In the second year I was quietly reading in a corner of the library one morning when a couple of the chief bullies decided that I needed to be disturbed and demanded to know what I was reading. Without even deigning to speak I turned the cover of the book so they could see the title “The Problems of Philosophy” by Bertrand Russell and I hadn’t got it there for show I was genuinely interested in what Russell had to say particularly on the subject of religion. I’d consciously abandoned any semblance of faith 2 years previously even though I continued to sing in the church choir until I was 18, not attending church was simply not an option in my family and anyway I really loved the music and singing it, I especially enjoyed singing at the annual Founder’s Day service.

I don’t think those idiots would have minded if I’d been clearly out of my depth but with my usual lack of forethought I used the notes I’d made to start a very unpleasant argument with the RE Master and ended up being accused of trying to undermine the entire classes’ faith. I got a detention for that particular little heresy and had to walk 7 miles home because I missed the school bus and hadn’t got any money on me for a normal bus.

Not long after that my satchel got rifled and everything in it that wasn’t standard school material was held up to ridicule in front of the whole form. There was the Oxford Companion to Music (a book about the size of the OED) which was a personal gift from one of my music Masters, Crow by Ted Hughes which I’d bought the day after my second form English Master had read one of the poems to us, The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis which I was using as a devil’s advocate against Russell and most damming of all my personal manuscript book containing my first faltering efforts at composing music. There were no comics, no lightweight reading nothing that other boys my age apparently carried around with them.

For once I handled things quite well, didn’t lose my temper or swear at them, just put all my things back in my satchel and got on with the rest of the day. At home I said nothing, did all my prep, went upstairs and practiced my violin for an hour, had a bath then went down to give Mum a goodnight kiss and went to bed where I cried for a solid half hour before falling into a very poor sleep.

Love

every word is aimed at me
each one a tiny poison dart
piercing my fragile armour
breaking through defences
that took so long to build

they fall so easily
like my hopes

names shouldn’t hurt like this
sticks and stones and all that shit
but they do hurt
they make me want to cry
but I can’t
i’m supposed to be a big boy now

i want to be five again
wrapped up in my quilted fortress
warm
protected
safe
sleeping through the thunderstorm

Love

Teasing and then bullying based on something completely beyond my control, being ginger, started pretty well the day that grammar school began. I’d never suffered this in primary school mostly because I had a very loyal and quite tough best friend who simply threatened a bashing to any kid who started on me because of my hair or the fact that I started wearing glasses when I was 7. Sadly he went to a local secondary modern school at 11 and I lost that protection.

Very soon after things started getting nasty at my new school I complained to Mum that the other boys were all being mean and making fun of me. My then ‘Uncle’ was  having tea with us when I raised the matter and they both agreed that I had to stand up for myself and learn to fight my own battles. Well I took this lesson to heart and the very next day when a group of boys started on me during break I just completely lost it and threw myself at the ringleader taking him completely off guard. Even under 4 stone of furious redhead has a certain mass and as luck would have it I knocked him straight into a chain link fence. Everything clicked together in my mind and I hooked my little fingers in the fence while pushing my thumbs onto his windpipe and I was not stopping even when he managed to get a knee into my crotch.

Someone must have realised that this could end very badly and I found myself being dragged off him, not by his cowardly supporters but by boys who, if not friends, were at least neutral. When I tried to get free for another go someone knocked me to the ground and a voice threatened to get a Master if I didn’t calm down and in a moment of complete injustice I got hit several times in an effort to subdue me. When the implications of a Master getting involved finally got through to me my response was “I don’t fucking well care!” with any luck I’d be at least suspended from school, if there was any justice in the world I’d get expelled from that shit-hole. That didn’t happen and the kids who thought they were helping me kept hold until the bully and his gang had got away.

Nothing came of the incident and the appearance of two very battered first formers in the next lesson was written off as “boys will be boys”. I had to make it through the rest of the day with no glasses and in a rare moment of defiance refused point blank to clean myself up, I wanted my Mum and my ‘Uncle’ to see what standing up for myself had achieved.

It was no great surprise that I got into a load of trouble when I got home. My uniform was ruined, my glasses had been smashed and somewhere along the line I’d picked up a black eye and several cuts. I tried to point out that I was only following their advice but it seemed that fighting my own battles wasn’t supposed to include actually fighting, I was supposed to talk to my enemies. Yeah, that worked so well in the following long years.

Love