Cultureshock

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Video transcript

Bullied by Chris Parkington.

The moment I touched the dip pen I was flung back in time to a classroom when I was in junior school and I felt again the horror, the sickening feeling of being bullied. It was because the dip pen was so often the instrument of torture used by my bullies. It was stabbed into me as I sat in class. My pen was taken and stabbed into the desk so that the tip became anything but a writing implement and I would have to go out to the front and ask for a new nib and of course this would then bring in the second form of bullying: name calling. And it wasn't just from other children; it was from the teacher himself.

"How much is that duck worth?" "Nothing!" "Why is there a puddle on the floor?" "The duck weed". "We don't want rotten duck eggs around here."

And all because I had come up from the south of England, from London with a southern accent that I tried so very hard to change as quickly as possible and with a surname, Duckworth, that at that time was not the household name it became after Coronation Street and Vera and Jack. Many is the time that I pleaded with my parents to allow me to change my surname. Every day was a struggle at breakfast:

"I don't want to go to school; I've got a tummy ache." "I feel sick, I've got a headache. I just don't want to go!" And my parents just saying, "But you have got to go to school!"

They didn't understand what was going on. They couldn't understand that a teacher was instigating this sort of bullying. And I never did discover why because he died before I was old enough to ask him. So it went on until I was rescued by the eleven plus, which separated me from most of my tormentors and at long last I got the chance to start to enjoy schooling in a way that I hadn't done for the past five years.

Bullying is the worst thing that can happen to a child who is already uncertain of themselves. It has affected my whole life. Even now I cannot watch TV programmes on bullying without being physically sick. I cannot cope with arguments in meetings. I was always most careful when I was teaching to stop bullying as soon as I was aware of it and not only in my own class.

Looking back I have to admit that in many ways I was lucky. When I was at school bullies used fists and boots and words, not knives. Only today on the one o' clock news I heard that a teenager had died in hospital having being stabbed by a gang of other teenagers. That did not happen when I was being bullied. And for that I am most eternally grateful.