'Meeting my high school bully after 28 years brought me relief'
29th March 2016 at 11:36

An apology from my childhood tormentor allowed me to banish a specter of nearly 30 years
Like many kids at high school in the 1980s (and, I guess, like many kids at secondary school in every decade since high schools were invented), I spent quite a lot of my time being scared. I was afraid of several teachers, of nearly all the boys in the years above me, of physical education and communal showers, and of the innumerable species of failure, punishment, embarrassment and ridicule that are indigenous to schools. But above all I was afraid of a boy called Connor.
Connor was in my grade but not in my class. He was ginger haired and pale skinned, wiry and restive. The word on the corridor was that he was a trained boxer, though just how trained he could have been at the age of 12 is a fair question. At any rate he came out on top of a few lunchtime brawls and was thereafter acknowledged by everyone to be tough. I remember him as facially-scarred, but I wonder now if that’s an embellishment of memory. I’m more confident in my recollection of his rictus-like smile: it was as if someone had lodged an invisible Mars bar lengthways between the corners of his mouth, preventing any movement of his mimetic muscles. A smile to keep you awake at night.
'I had a briefcase and a quiff'
I started at the school a semester later than everyone else and Connor took an instant dislike to me. I don’t know exactly why, but I was middle-class, academically accomplished, loud-voiced and overgroomed. For a time I had a briefcase and a quiff. It takes no huge leap of imagination to understand how my existence might have been an irritation to Connor. So he began a protracted campaign of intimidation that ran the familiar gamut from jeers and taunts, through threats and invective, to shoves and kicks