Walkabout

I went to high school at the age of eleven. I had long hair, past my shoulders, because I was Feral. I enjoyed being feral.

The school had a problem with that. I found out on Day One that Being Feral was strongly disapproved of and severely frowned upon. To my everlasting surprise this was not only the case with The Management, of whom these things could potentially be expected, because it was virtually in their job description ("thou must hate kids"), but, almost even more so, with what can only be called, for want of a better word , my "fellow students". If Frodo had had a fellowship like that he never would have gotten out of The Shire, and Sauron would be ruling the entire world from Mordor as we speak.

Everywhere I went the other kids were hissing at me, spitting and slurring insults and abuse: "feral". That was a strange one, because I thought that was a compliment. "hippy" and "scum" were two other ones. Sometimes, in accidental fits of soaring inspiration, they managed "hippy scum". I was impressed. "bum", "bludger", "filth", "dero" were all predictable and tiresome. The most surreal was "beatle". I had to do a double take at that one. The Beatles were a very old band from a bygone era I had only ever very vaguely heard of and knew nothing about. So I went and looked it up, and found that they had some pretty good music. I discovered that at some point they had introduced the concept of long hair to a squeaky clean, square-cut, uptight and straight-laced world, millions of years ago. I wondered if they had been feral too.

Because I just shrugged off the insults and got on with my daily business, it was deemed by The Community Of Students that Something Had To Be Done About It. So at recess time they came and found me, and picked fights. So I fought. Every day, all day. I didn't mind, it had been the same throughout every one of the six primary schools I had gone to, so I was used to it. I was good at it. I had had a lot of practice. After a while I noticed that there were other kids that were being picked on too, who didn't fight back, and got trampled into the dirt. So I went and helped them out, and stood up for them. The Community Of Upstanding Citizens wasn't impressed, and they only hated me more for it. The Representatives of School Management that patrolled the battlefields of recess looked the other way, stuck their hands in their pockets and walked away whistling. I got detention in the first week at school. It was the start of a very long career in detention.

This went on for a surprisingly long time. When you're eleven time goes very slowly, the days and weeks and months are very long and drawn out, and it's amazing how much violence, abuse and hatred can be made to fit in. Outside of recess time, during lesson time, the physical violence was exchanged for mental abuse on the part of the teachers, in the form of sarcasm, continual insults, snide remarks, put-downs, and systematic humiliation in front of The Community Of Upstanding Citizens. The Community was very impressed. I was left wondering if this was really how things were supposed to be, but, because it had been the exact same pretty much everywhere else I had been, I didn't think too much of it, and just got on with life. In the house where I lived it was the same story, so I had no reason to believe the world could be any different.

Time went past, and I grew bigger and older. I became increasingly confused and disgruntled with the way things were, and started to imagine a different sort of a life. As I started to be able to think more clearly and independently, it occurred to me that there were several serious issues with this state of affairs, and I started challenging the Management. The Management did not take kindly to this. The Big Chief was called a Principal, possibly because he was principally a cunt, on principle. He took to following me around, to abuse me and try to catch me out doing Forbidden Things, such as breathing. He used to wait for me at the school gate in the morning, so he could get in early by having a good lay-in. I was bemused at the excessive amount of attention paid to me by The Head Honcho. Surely he had better things to do? I was vague on what the duties of a school's principal might include, but I found it hard to imagine that they consisted chiefly of following a 12, 13, 14-year old around the grounds just so they could abuse them.