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Childhood injustices

Started by 23 Daves, January 25, 2013, 01:26:56 PM

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23 Daves

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday and I remembered a school incident of mine which is possibly absurd enough to share (although maybe not - but it's Friday, it's a day for random tales however self-indulgent they may be).

At the beginning of every school year, we were handed a homework planner by our form tutor.  These were modest affairs produced on cheap photocopied paper which allowed us to log what we were expected to hand in and when.  They were for our own use and (generally speaking) nobody else looked at them much or cared.  Given this, I was somewhat surprised to see that our new headmaster had decided to insert a bunch of rather draconian rules at the front explaining how the planner was to ideally be used.  One of these rules seemed especially questionable: "This planner is for school use. IT IS NOT for GRAFFITI, JOKES, CARTOONS or JOTTINGS OF A PERSONAL NATURE. We ask you to use the planner only for the purposes intended."

One Sunday night while packing my bag, I looked at this pompous rule thoughtfully. Why had it been included?  What business was it of anyone's how I used the planner, which was after all just some crudely photocopied paper folded in half across several pages?  Supposing random cartoons helped me by jogging my memory about certain bits of work?  So, in an act I didn't really give much thought to, and primarily to amuse myself, I doodled a little picture of Compo, Foggy and Clegg from "Last Of The Summer Wine" in the margin above the comment. They were laughing and pointing joyously, doubtless having just recovered from one of their usual scrapes.

A few months later when I'd almost forgotten about this, my form tutor asked for everyone's homework planners to be handed in for a spot inspection.  Uh-oh.  I hadn't been expecting that.  Still, looking around the classroom I probably had the least to worry about.  Most of the boys had added ejaculating penises all around their homework planners (which some were now hastily trying to cover up with tipp-ex) whereas the girls appeared to have been declaring their love for certain boys or Morten Harket out of A-ha. So I'd jotted a little cartoon of Compo, Foggy and Clegg.  Big deal.  Who was going to care when faced with this gross array of tatty planners? I handed it in without giving much more thought to it.

The next day, of course, my form tutor called me over to have a word. I half-expected him to say that my cartoon was a huge improvement on my usual poor efforts in art classes and that the angle of Clegg's hat was pleasingly jaunty, but it was not to be.  He was singularly unimpressed with the way I seem to have 'ruined' my planner in a way that was specifically ridiculing a rule that the school had been clear to underline. I was bemused.
"But surely it's my planner to use how I want, sir?"
"No David! It is not YOUR planner, it's the school's planner!"
"What does the school do with the used planners when we hand them back in then, sir?" I enquired.
"That's it, you obviously don't want to take this seriously, so I'll write a note to your parents!" he thundered.

This didn't worry me either. The phrase "storm in a teacup" sprang to mind, and when my parents actually got the note I barely batted an eyelid.  I knew they had a sense of humour after all, and might even try to stifle laughter when they found out the nature of the crime... BUT NO. My Dad was especially disappointed, and he sighed deeply and began droning on and on about responsibilities: "It's a good thing they're asking you to do here... not a stupid thing.  They're trying to teach you to organise your life effectively and take it seriously. Why must you treat this as some sort of joke?" On and on he fucking went, repeating the same old points in a bid to get me to understand, and by the end of his lecture - which was one of the first ones I got as a teen which made me think "What is he on about?", and there would be many more to come - I was probably banned from playing on my computer for three days or something.

Anyway, my point is that this is one of those childhood situations which seemed baffling at the time which still seems OTT to me now.  The fuss created by a shit and inoffensive cartoon seemed wildly disproportionate to the actual crime, and I couldn't understand why I'd been singled out.

What childhood injustices or disproportionate punishments to childhood crimes can you lot think of in your lives? Everyone always has some...

Cerys

I think I've probably posted this before, but here it is again.

I had a friend named Claire.  She was one of those primary school friends with whom you regularly fall out and engage in all-out war - but this was not one of those times.  No, on this occasion we were getting on fine, and I'd been to tea at her house and had a whale of a time.  It was the next day that the injustice occurred.  I came out of school and encountered Claire's mum, who asked it I wanted to go to theirs for tea again.  My parents would be out, I knew, and I could phone home to let my brother know where I was.  No problem, right?  Wrong.  We got to Claire's house, and I immediately asked if I could phone home.  My brother answered the phone, I told him where I was, and he told me off and insisted that I come home right there and then.  All disappointed, I started to cry.  Claire's mother took the phone from me and put it down, saying that my brother wasn't my parents and that I didn't have to do what he said.  I cheered up.  Later, after tea, I was driven home - and encountered my parents in the kitchen with thunder writ large on their faces.  Turned out that my brother had been less that precise with the truth.  Punishment: a severe tanning of the arse, and the smashing of a load of my bedroom ornaments.

It's always the unjust punishments that stay with you.  This was one of them.

Vodka Margarine

When going through my early adolescent pretentious phase at school, I stuck the JFK quote "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" on my locker. I'd spotted it in a magazine and cut it out because I thought it was cool.

Before too long, the head of Maths - a mawkish, joyless creature and born again Christian to boot - told me to take it down because it might offend people of different cultures and beliefs (ie her).

This would've been understandable if it wasn't for the various other pictures of gangsta rappers holding firearms, bra-clad titflesh and aliens smoking joints (the 90s eh, what were that all about?!) stuck on other pupils' lockers. The mad, conflicted, swivel-eyed bitchbag.

BlodwynPig

Cerys, Who broke the ornaments?

Cerys

My dad.  Although he saved one or two of them by sleight of hand.

BlodwynPig

At primary school, in assembly myself and a friend got hauled to the front of the room by the headmaster for "chatting" during his "sermon". Fair enough.

He proclaimed to the school that it was intolerable that any pupil would distrupt morning assembly and he was very disappointed...especially with this one.

As he uttered those last words, he proceeded to thump me on the back launching me forward and nearly over the precipice of the stage. (The reason I was singled out for the violence was because my father was a well respected teacher from the secondary school that this one fed many pupils too - this reason was also used many years later when me and a few friends were caught stealing A4 paper from a store cupboard and again I was singled out for the "most disappointed" speech).

Anyway, after getting the smack, my sister marched up to the stage and gave the headmaster a kick in the shins - "don't you hit my brother!". Spot on!

Inaniloquent

I was the stereotypical meek, bullied kid. Hiding behind long hair and longer skirt, I hadn't so much as held a conversation with a boy and I was basically considered a social leper among my peers, apart from a few friends of even more awkward kids. One of them was a girl who was having a really rough time of it - we were 13, her 'boyfriend' was a man of 34, put it that way. She self-harmed. She tried to deal with her problems by writing letters in a book, then giving me the book, and I'd write letters back.

I relayed in one of my letters an incident the previous day, in which a popular boy jokingly and publicly accused me of giving oral sex to a boy who was probably of even lower social status than myself. I responded with all the wit of the 13 year old that he had been the one to do so. Riveting stuff, I know.

You can tell where this is going. My RE teacher got hold of the book. After a mere glance through, she told us she was faxing it to our parents.

Thankfully my friend had written mostly about in-school bullying, so her parents sat down with her, laughed at the funny parts and told her everything would be OK.

Mine didn't even read it. My mother just saw the words 'blow job' and freaked the fuck out. How I was a disgusting liar making up things like that to be popular. How I would be expelled. How I'd never get into college because they didn't take 'girls like me'. I kept begging her to just read it, it was about how I'd stood up to a bully, just please read it, but noooo.

She'd never liked me and we'd never had a good relationship, but it got about 100 times worse after that day and never recovered.

THANKS MRS CHEW. THANKS A WHOLE BUNCH.

Cerys

Youch.  Youch and youch again.

BlodwynPig


monkfromhavana

I can't help thinking, after I read your youthful reminiscinces, that I had a blissful childhood. None of that shit happened to me, apart from the time I got smacked for drilling halfway through an exterior wall witht he sharp end of one of my toy ships.

doppelkorn

I have several of these because I'm a grudge bearing cunt.

1. I won tickets to see Jurassic Park by entering a competition on a Calippo wrapper. My winning answer was "because they have nice flavours". Anyway I received the tickets for a showing of my choice at the Rex, Wilmslow but my parents refused to take me because it would be too scary.

2. I wasn't allowed on Nemesis because it would be too scary DESPITE BEING TALL ENOUGH GAAAAAAAA!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK!!

3. I was about five and playing with these little black plasticky ninja man toys at school. Our school had loads of mobile classrooms which were that kind of mint green colour. I was running these little plastic men all over one of the walls of the classroom but in doing so managed to stripe the fucker up with loads of black lines. Mr Cope (the cunt) saw me and bollocked me for it, the bollocking involving being made to scrub the lines off in front of the whole school using what appeared to be Victorian cleaning apparatus (this would have been about 1990). The joke was on him though, as he got the sack for shagging a teaching assistant.

Big Jack McBastard

Quote from: Inaniloquentsaw the words 'blow job' and freaked the fuck out.<snip>. How I'd never get into college because they didn't take 'girls like me'.

How very very wrong she was...

garbed_attic

#12
I had to work standing up for an hour and a half year 7 science lesson because I'd accidentally knocked over a chair at the start of the lesson. To be fair, I have an oddly curvaceous spine, which the teacher wasn't to know, so writing stooped over a table was probably more uncomfortable for me than it would have been for some, but to my mind it was a circuitous way of inflicting a wholly undeserved physical punishment! Boo!

I received a C in my GCSE drama result, despite having received A* for my coursework, which constituted 60% of our overall grade, meaning that I must have received no marks for my final performance, or else something went awry. I got an A in A-level, so I don't reckon my performance was so atrociously without merit it deserved nothing. My mum enquired with the department about how I'd got a C if my coursework grade was so high, but they were cagey about it and told her not to worry. Hmmmmmm.

Talking about my mum trying to bravely sort things out for her wimpy son, in year 9 when I was being bullied rather a lot, she came into school to talk to my form teacher with a view to getting it sorted out. Apparently his response to my torment was to say: "Looking at Adam's marks, it seems Adam's good at R.E. and I always say, if you're good at R.E., you're got nothing to worry about." Twonk.

garbed_attic

Quote from: BlodwynPig on January 25, 2013, 01:59:18 PM
Anyway, after getting the smack, my sister marched up to the stage and gave the headmaster a kick in the shins - "don't you hit my brother!". Spot on!

Seriously? Your sister's a hero!

tookish

Ugh, I was always being made to apologise for things 'to keep the peace' - meaning my father would act like a turd, shouting, and hitting, and generally being horrible, and then I would have to go downstairs and apologise for making him act like a turd. Half the time I didn't even know what I was meant to have done to warrant said turd-like behaviour, and always hated having to apologise.

So one day, as a small act of revenge, I took down a picture on my wall and wrote '
Spoiler alert
Father Tookish
[close]
is a fucking wanker, he wears a wankity hat' before replacing the picture. This was not discovered until three years later when my parents came to redecorate.

A couple of injustices that spring to mind:

Age four. I finished my work before everybody else and so got to sit by the teacher. Then some other girl came and hit me so I'd move, and stole my place. I was too shy to tell on her, and instead sat and quietly cried.

Age ten, spelling lesson. Being shouted at by Mr. Cannings for 'laughing too loudly' at a joke that he made, and encouraging everybody else to laugh for longer than they should have. No idea why he singled me out as the instigator of excessive mirth.

Age eleven, my sister and I wanted to audition to play Cosette in the West End. My parents misread the measurements and thought I was too small to audition. They told me that I would have to get over it and be proud of my sister. They then reread the measurements and my sister was too big to audition, and I was the perfect size. They wouldn't let me audition, as they said it would be unfair on my sister. Ten years on, I'm still bitter about this. I shouldn't be. But I am.

Age twelve, I had to watch a Disney film with my younger cousin, while my sister and other cousin watched a 'grown-up film' with my parents. I was the same age as my other cousin and was furious at being relegated to baby status. I've recovered from this one, though, because I watched the 'grown-up film' at a later date and it was shit.

BlodwynPig

What was the film? I bet it was The Goonies.

QDRPHNC

When I was 9, my friends and I were playing chasies in the schoolyard. Or something. Anyway, the game involved running over to the bin on the wall, touching it, and saying, "123, such-and-such isn't free." Touching the bin.

One morning before class, my friend Peter jumped a little too enthusiastically at the bin and caught his knee on the bottom of it, making an ugly, bleeding cut. He was carted off to the headmistress's office (Sister Denise... it was a Catholic school. I have a poor opinion of nuns to this day). Later, as we were taking rolling in class, Sister Denise, all 4 feet of her (but she was huge... enormously fat with those giant fat tits that short fat nuns have), screaming at the top of her lungs, call us liars, etc. It seems like Peter had told her that we kicked the bins, god knows why. Anyway, she marched the other 4 of us to her office and caned the shit out of the palms of our small, upturned hands. For nothing. Cunt.

The time I had a friend over at my house and he left via the back door rather than the front. My mum was in the kitchen portioning out takeaway food. As soon as my friend had left, she started shouting, asking why I hadn't taken him out the front, when she had food here (it's worth noting that my mum would probably be medicated to hell these days). My completely logical response, that his bike was out the back and I didn't know she had food, fell on deaf ears. For some reason, she felt embarrassed, and of course had to take it out on someone rather than dealing with it.

In strolls my dad, usually the sole (although sometimes violent) voice of reason. "Why didn't you just let him out the front?" he asks. Again, I explain, but he was having none of it. In fact, it got so ridiculous, I thought I was going mad. Even my sister, who did not have a warm sibling bone in her body, took my side. I was sent to my room for the evening. Cunts.

I have others.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Cerys; "who broke the ornaments?" was the first question that sprang to mind for me too, upon reading your upsetting tale. The punishment does, indeed, seem disproportionately harsh. What had your brother told your mum and dad? That you'd called them both cunts, and you were glad to be having tea at your mates, cos your mum's grub tasted like dogshit, or something? I hope you've found it within your heart to forgive your dad. I know how you feel; my mum tore two of my precious 'Mad' magazines in half, when I refused to take my little sister to the pictures with me. 28, I....Oh, never mind.

Inaniloquent

Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on January 25, 2013, 03:04:20 PM
How very very wrong she was...

I KNOW. Such lies! I genuinely believed that the local college would base interview questions about sexual activity for about three years after.

I remember my mum smashing shit up. It really sticks with you, I think - even now I get a bit het up if my husband washes the dishes too loudly, because I genuinely expect to walk in to a floor of plate shards.

Tookish your 11 and 12 ones make me inwardly cringe in sympathy :( I'd still be pissed at them too. They really are utterly unjust and border on just pissing off your kid for a minor power trip.

jutl

QuoteStrangely, it was not in the water that they met. Hook rose to the rock to breathe, and at the same moment Peter scaled it on
the opposite side. The rock was slippery as a ball, and they had to crawl rather than climb. Neither knew that the other was
coming. Each feeling for a grip met the other's arm: in surprise they raised their heads; their faces were almost
touching; so they met.

Some of the greatest heroes have confessed that just before they fell to begin combat they had a sinking feeling in the
stomach. Had it been so with Peter at that moment I would admit it. After all, he was the only man that the Sea-Cook had
feared. But Peter had no sinking, he had one feeling only, gladness; and he gnashed his pretty teeth with joy. Quick
as thought he snatched a knife from Hook's belt and was about to drive it home, when he saw that he was higher up the rock than
his foe. It would not have been fighting fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up.

It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified.
Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you
to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same
boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that
was the real difference between him and all the rest.

doppelkorn

I've thought of two more.

In my GCSE graphics class we had to make a mock-up model of a room to show off our interior design skills. Most poeple got a shoebox and made furniture out of matchboxes and the like but I made mine out of proper wood and included a dead flashy chaise longue made out of plasticard which I'd moulded into a curvy ergonomic shape by holding it over some kettle steam and bending it while it was pliable. I also made a proper lighting system that actually worked with a proper light bulb and battery and everything.

When we all brought them into school the day after half term everyone said how mine was clearly the best by a mile. I was cock of the walk.

The long and short of this injustice is that everyone in the class got 10/10 pretty mcuh, excpet me who got 9/10. NINE! Fucking Mr. Sharp. Graphics was also my lowest GCSE mark overall. When I came home after picking up my results I told my mum and she goes "that man always was a cunt".

tookish

Quote from: Inaniloquent on January 25, 2013, 03:30:27 PM
I remember my mum smashing shit up. It really sticks with you, I think - even now I get a bit het up if my husband washes the dishes too loudly, because I genuinely expect to walk in to a floor of plate shards.

It does stick with you! I remember my dad swept everything off the windowsill when I shared a room with my sister, breaking a lot of our belongings. I still have some things at my parents' house, and I'm worried when I come out as trans that my dad will go upstairs and smash it all.

To be honest, while they're hardly fond memories, his Hulk moments have been a source of guilty amusement to me over the years. One time he kicked a laundry basket and his foot went through it and got stuck inside, which was extremely funny, but of course laughing would not have been a good plan. He also smashed multiple magazine racks; my mum had its page in the Argos catalogue bookmarked so we could replace it.

23 Daves

Quote from: Inaniloquent on January 25, 2013, 02:26:43 PM

Mine didn't even read it. My mother just saw the words 'blow job' and freaked the fuck out. How I was a disgusting liar making up things like that to be popular. How I would be expelled. How I'd never get into college because they didn't take 'girls like me'. I kept begging her to just read it, it was about how I'd stood up to a bully, just please read it, but noooo.


I'm not defending your Mum here, but I think that a lot of parents do see any kind of "note sent home from school" as being a source of deep shame, and they don't bother to investigate further, just getting on with the duty of telling their children off in the way they think the school wants them to.  That's the impression I get now with my misdemeanor at the start of the thread - if my Dad had actually listened to me saying that I'd only scribbled on one damn page of the planner rather than drawn thirty cocks of various sizes and states of excitement as some other children had, he'd have realised it was a big fuss over nothing.

Mine is a mild example, obviously, noted here more for its sheer ridiculousness than anything else. But in defense of my Dad, he came from both the generation and class which felt that if you clocked in and clocked out of work on time, kept your head down and worked hard, all in life would be well. As such, any rule, however daft it seemed, was there to be obeyed.  Coupled with this the new headmaster had taken over an educational establishment which had recently received some poor OFSTED reports (or whatever the equivalent of OFSTED was in those days) so I don't doubt he was trying to introduce extreme discipline to shock the school into better things. So it does make a bit more sense now, but at the time it felt like bizarre hysteria...

Big Jack McBastard

I remember Mini-Hitler (a man who's computer I would begrudgingly fix some 10 years later) balling the living fuck out of me and a group of other unfortunates who'd gotten in pissily late one day and were trapped by his school-wide dragnet of conscripted grasser pupils who he'd posted by every entrance (believe me I checked) into the place who turned in every transgressor without even having the good sense to turn a blind eye or be bribed with cigarettes.

Apparently he'd made an almighty stink the day before about people getting in late during assembly so he was bringing down the hammer and bollocking repeat offenders.

I'd missed this crucial bit of info as I had, admittedly, been late in that day too (by like 5 minutes, no cunt would have noticed) as I'd just gotten back from America, this was my second day back at school.

He seemed to make it a point to stand before me while he administered this rather intense, frothing at the mouth bollocking as I wasn't one of the usual suspects in his roster of scallies, I suppose it was one of those passive-aggressive[nb]Though the 'passive' quotient was a bit bloody slim[/nb] 'We expect more from you'-type warnings.

Fucker gave me (and the rest of the dregs) detention for a week such was his piss hot fury at our blithe lackadaisical attitude to the timetable he harboured such a raging boner for. I also got mildly bollocked off my folks, who's jet-laggy driving had contributed directly to how late I'd gotten in. Grrrr!

He had snagged a girl from another class with fantastic norks for detention too though, so it wasn't all bad.

Hangthebuggers

My main childhood injustice was from a lad called Philip. We'd got into a bit of a scuffle in the school playground (his fault) and we both got reprimanded and told to wait outside the head masters office.

Just as Philip got called in to explain himself, he bit himself viciously on the hand (leaving teeth imprints) and went into the office clutching it like a war wound.

Needless to say, I got a severe bollocking off the teacher, the head master and then my Mum.

Philip, if you're reading this, you're a cunt.

QDRPHNC

Quote from: Big Jack McBastard on January 25, 2013, 03:45:57 PM
I remember Mini-Hitler (a man who's computer I would begrudgingly fix some 10 years later) balling the living fuck out of me and a group of other unfortunates

I really hope you mean "bawling".

Big Jack McBastard

I remember getting a hiding for throwing one of those Matchbox cars at my brothers head while he was being an unutterable cunt to me for whatever reason when I was about 8, (he was and is 7 years older than me mind you so I'm sure it was a laugh for him at least) I forget how but he'd riled me up a little earlier until I'd stropped off to be away from him and then popped his head around the door of the room I was tooling around in just to get another jibe in to piss me off even more.

I snapped and hurled the nearest thing I could find at him, he dodged out the door and the wee silver Firebird bounced off the wall making a little scuff in the process.

Cue me getting shouted at and clipped while that cunt laughed to himself in the background. Bastard.

I got my revenge when I 'assisted' him through that plate glass door a few years later though so these things even out in time.

BlodwynPig

Quote from: tookish on January 25, 2013, 03:42:08 PM
It does stick with you! I remember my dad swept everything off the windowsill when I shared a room with my sister, breaking a lot of our belongings. I still have some things at my parents' house, and I'm worried when I come out as trans that my dad will go upstairs and smash it all.

To be honest, while they're hardly fond memories, his Hulk moments have been a source of guilty amusement to me over the years. One time he kicked a laundry basket and his foot went through it and got stuck inside, which was extremely funny, but of course laughing would not have been a good plan. He also smashed multiple magazine racks; my mum had its page in the Argos catalogue bookmarked so we could replace it.

Nothing so mental as adult man kicking the shit out of a magazine rack.

Sony Walkman Prophecies

No great injustices spring to mind, though I do remember finding it weird how child-on-child violence was generally treated so casually by teachers and parents alike. I think everyone has some memory of being hit, or seeing someone else being hit, and it being written off in some boys will be boys kind of way. What's weird about this is that if we were talking about adults - almost by definition far more resilient than children - we know the situation would be completely reversed. If Tim in HR hit Ian in accounts in a moment of random violence, Tim would almost certainly lose his job, and if there were bystanders, one of them might even call the police.

My only explanation for this seemingly backwards logic is that most see children as cattle and don't really believe they're capable of the full range of feeling adults are, yet somehow most people simulataneously believe that there's no worse crime than child murder/abduction, so work that one out...

23 Daves

Quote from: Sony Walkman Prophecies on January 25, 2013, 05:35:24 PM
No great injustices spring to mind, though I do remember finding it weird how child-on-child violence was generally treated so casually by teachers and parents alike. I think everyone has some memory of being hit, or seeing someone else being hit, and it being written off in some boys will be boys kind of way. What's weird about this is that if we were talking about adults - almost by definition far more resilient than children - we know the situation would be completely reversed. If Tim in HR hit Ian in accounts in a moment of random violence, Tim would almost certainly lose his job, and if there were bystanders, one of them might even call the police.

My only explanation for this seemingly backwards logic is that most see children as cattle and don't really believe they're capable of the full range of feeling adults are, yet somehow most people simulataneously believe that there's no worse crime than child murder/abduction, so work that one out...

This is related to the first injustice I can actually remember, although it didn't make for a good enough story to kick this thread off with (or to mention at all, really).  At nursery we'd sometimes all be let out to play in the garden area if it was a nice day, and one of the toys they had was a cheap little plastic pedal-car toddlers could use to pretend they were at the wheel of a Volkswagen Beetle.  It seemed to me that the same kid seemed to be using this car time in, time out, so one day I raced to get to the car before him so I'd have my turn.  TH-WACK!  The little git punched me right in the face and grabbed the car from me, at which point it became apparent that this was why he always had use of the damn thing and nobody else did.  I tried again the next day to the same result.  At no point did I ever see the nursery school teachers tell him off for his behaviour, and when I told my parents they just said: "But it doesn't matter, you've got one of those cars at home yourself! Just wait til you get home and you can play on that one." It was the principle of the thing, dammit!

Right to the bitter end of secondary school random thumping was tolerated. There was one "troubled youth" in my year who actually created a game out of it with dice. He'd have a list of classmates he'd quite like to punch, roll the dice twice to see which two would be on the receiving end that day, then spend the rest of the class tossing coins for heads and tails and hitting people as hard as he could while the teacher pretended not to notice.  There was a rumour that a lot of the teachers were turning a blind eye because he was very intelligent and talented and it would have been a shame to kill his potential by suspending or expelling him while his problems continued.  I hope that's not true, because apparently the cunt owns his own business now and is a thoroughly nasty, bullying employer.  His potential really would have been better off down the sewer, troubled or no. 

As for the pedal-car bother boy, I'm sure he's probably on the Executive Board at Ford these days. Bah. If he's reading this, I've a message for him: I'll bet your fancy car still has twee little upwards glancing eyes painted over the headlights just like in the old days, you massive prancing pedal pushing ponce.