Front Line

Front Line - Chapter 4 - Year 2

Front Line

Chapter Four– Year Two

  Each year from here on out at this school would start the same way. Around the middle of summer the slip would arrive with the contents telling you the same as the year before, except you moved onto a different year and different teacher. This for me both excited me and put a damper on my summer, it meant the count down on going back to school, less freedom, and made the remaining days of my summer holiday less exciting as the ones before it. This year I would be with a woman who sounded foreign, but was quite English. Her name was Mrs Elnaquib or something along those lines, I could never spell her name right not even till this day.

  My uniform would change very little over the years that would come. The school had a very loose dress code surrounding the ideals of the uniform. So long as it had the school logo on either a cardigan or jumper, or you wore one of those white and whatever colour unit you were in, dresses, the ones that had a white patch then yellow, as I was still in yellow, and then another white and so on until it made up the dress, you were just fine. The boys had it stricter, seen as all they could wear were trousers, and wouldn’t want to see a boy running around in a   plaid dress.

  I don’t remember much about what I wore, I just wore whatever my mother and father could afford; the school uniforms were ridiculously expensive even for little kids. My main focus of attention was what I did at the school that year. Now that I had moved onto the larger side of the yellow unit, I had a whole new area to explore that I wasn’t really allowed to congregate in much before now. This year was much fun compared to the one prior to it, we had so much more now that we were a whole year older. There were more books to read, and of course I read every single one of them on the rack at the back of my classroom, I was the top reader in the class and I had to borrow books from other units simply because I had nothing else to read.

  This year much like the rest of my primary years, was a bit of a muddle in terms of I can’t remember which thing came before the other. I know what roughly happened, but one could have easily happened before the other. For instance, this was around the time where every Thursday we would have a woman come in and teach us about road safety, we would watch a video each week showing us the dangers as well as what to do and not to whilst on or near the road. Of course I already knew most of this as my mother had previous both educated my brother and I as we grew up, but a lot of the other kids didn’t know. One boy however was so desperate to get out of these lessons that every Thursday lunch he would run around the playground in full heat until his nose bled. It was disgusting.

   On another day, we would watch this programme produced by the BBC called ‘Dark Towers’ I was always seated right below the tv up high in the corner, so my neck would strain when I finished watching. It was done in the late 80’s but for us kids who were just getting over the millennium, it was still like new. It spooked me greatly but I still remember a lot from those programmes, they educated us in such matters as to tell the truth, how to spell, not to lie and such other moral things we just took for granted back then. Even to this day when I occasionally go back onto YouTube and watch them, they still gave me the chills.

  However, all was not as sunny as it seemed. The bullying only got worse as the year went on. The same old names that had once been with me stuck with me like glue, only because they were repeated daily did they feel a lot worse than they sound. Of course just like the year before, there were new ones but the ones that had been first called out to me never lost their place in my memory. I was still much too big of a coward to tell anyone, I was so afraid that if I told a teacher or even my parents that the kids who bullied me would find out, so I stayed silent and endured whatever they said and did to me.

  The only person I had to fall back on this year was my friend Kieran, not the one I had met in reception, but the other one I had met the next year. He and a boy called Andrew were both in my classes and would stick by me no matter what happened to me, which was a lot. The girls would all make fun of me because of my appearance, both how I looked and what I wore, and the boys would make fun of me because of what they had heard the girls call me. it was like a vicious cycle that only when break and lunch time came I felt a brief reprieve. Even then I wasn’t spared, sometimes I would be tripped, kicked, scratched and hit at for the silliest of things, often if I didn’t even do anything or defend myself I would be bullied.

  I have put most of the bad memories behind me seen as they were so long ago now, but the pockets of happier times since those bad memories have long clouded them and provide me with a not so bad image of what I thought of the time as, well frankly hell. I remember once my uncle, my mother’s brother, came to pick me up from that year as he was staying with us for the weekend. I had perhaps only met him once or twice before then but had been too young to remember. He was a happy man back then, he enjoyed our company with the little time he actually spent with us, and he hasn’t been back since.

  There was however, one day that stood out more than most that year. The Queen’s Golden Jubilee. As the year had rolled from 2000 into 2001, she was celebrating the next milestone in her rein. Of course being young I had no idea what this all meant, but the school was putting on a celebration on the day to commemorate this day in history. There would be ice cream and jelly, that was what I was going for, not the sitting on chairs in scorching hear, or the music, but the ice cream and jelly.

  My mother walked me in, I did a lot with her seen as my father worked what felt like most of the time. I wore a lovely yellow cotton skirt and cardigan with a pale yellow shirt underneath, we walked in and as I was so excited, maybe too excited, I fell along the ground managing to mangle my right knee in the process. When I was stood up I left a lovely trail of blood from where I had fallen. My mother took me to the blue unit bathrooms right away, I didn’t cry but I hated the sight of blood. I had managed to take the skin off the entire of my knee, leaving a bloody knee in its place no matter how many times my mother would wipe it. What a lovely way to end the year.

  Many more things happened that year before the summer holiday, we built geographical things, of course I got shouted at for not trying hard enough when I was doing my best. Me and my first friend Kieran got into a lot of mischief, friendly mischief not troublesome. We stayed the best of friends right up until the final bell rung for summer holiday, and we would once more part before seeing each other again a month later.