The Little Devils Child.

When I was twelve years-old I was kicked out of school and called The Devils Child.


True story.


It was a Christian School, and, because my bewildered 5 year old face had once been dunked into the sea on a Winter's day by one of Gods representatives, I too was irrelevantly deemed a Christian thing… a good little Christian thing. Like crosses and sandals and the Ten Commandments. 


Only…


I wasn’t a good little Christian thing. And, as it turned out, neither was the school - we were both fakes parading as pure, and we would both be unmasked in time. 


This school was presided over by a terrifying headmaster; Mr M – a charming but positively tyrannical man with an unmistakable aroma of the Hitleresque about him. In fact, Roald Dahl himself couldn't have invented a WORSE human being to be in charge of the lives of small children.


Let me draw you a quick sketch of Mr M: He had spies in each class who would report to him ALL EVIL AND UNHOLY behaviour committed by the students (like talking, or chewing gum in an EVIL manner). Girls were not allowed to show any skin (including wrists) because girls were all horrible temptresses created by the devil, but wrists especially so. Every morning he would gather the whole school in the assembly hall to blast our sleepy faces with the juiciest, most judgmental and horrific verses of the bible… and if you happened to be caught not looking at him during his preaching he would make you stand up and proceed to humiliate you in front of the whole school until you cried.


Have you ever seen a grown man yell into a 5yr olds terrified face that they were going to hell for their iniquities?


I have - EVERY MORNING.


He once pulled me aside and told me that if I thought my parents were going to protect me from him – I was mistaken. But that is another story for another time, and right now I want to tell you a happy story. 


So, under the reign of Mr M the school festered, and grew one of the most damaging traits a school could possibly nurture – favouritism. Children fought each other with ever-increasing displays of groveling and ass-licking, all in the desperate hope to get into Mr M’s good books and thus be rescued from the misery of his hot wrath. If you did manage to get into his good books like a wriggling, pathetic leech - you were rewarded amply; you were pulled from class to go to secret meetings, you were given secret duties, you were given good grades, were praised and fawned over by all the teachers, and above all - you were told that you were CHOSEN BY GOD HIMSELF as special.


In short, you were blessed.


One year all of this ass-licking reached fever-pitch. One child, using all his cunning resourcefulness, found out how to really, thoroughly wedge himself firmly into Mr M’s good books in a way that was actually nothing short of genius.


The student started seeing visions.


That’s right. visions.


And, as if a batch of sandwich bread had been Ergot infected a la Salem, mass delirium spread amongst the students. Other children started claiming to have seen singing angels in the sky above the school, or hovering beside the teachers during class. One particularly clever student claimed to have seen Jesus HIMSELF hovering over the burgeoning head of Mr M...


As you can imagine… Mr M LAPPED this up because he was a man who thought that it was only natural that JESUS WOULD APPEAR ABOVE HIS HEAD. 


*sigh*


I sat there quietly and watched the whole disgusting circus act unfold over a few weeks – and I knew, I just knew those kids were faking it, but I also knew it wasn't really their fault… it was Mr M and his vanity's fault. I was his ego, his desire for power and glory. He was a sick, sick man who had somehow slipped under the radar using his charm and gained a position of influence he should NEVER have been allowed. I hated him with my whole tiny being. 


Then, one day after a hearty fawning session administered by Mr M towards the latest visionary, I caught the child grinning smugly to himself… and something inside of me snapped. I couldn’t take it anymore: the unfairness of it, the wrongness of it. The wrongness of Mr M. What he was encouraging these students to become.



So – I did it, too.


I’m not sure where the courage came from but one morning during Praise and Worship (yes, praise and worship) I convulsed on the floor feigning a fit delirium that may have even had my mum, who had seen me feign sickness most mornings, convinced. Teachers rushed over, and through my laboured, God infested speech I told them…


“I can see WARRIORS... in... the… SKY”


Yes.


WARRIORS… WITH SWORDS AND SHIELDS AND TRUMPETS AND STUFF.


It was beautiful - I wasn’t even questioned - I was simply and utterly believed. It was hilarious. It appeared for the moment my little grimy foot was thoroughly lodged between the covers of the illustrious good book of Mr M. Nothing short of fame ensued.  I was invited to the secret meetings (bible readings, disappointingly), I was fawned over, I was treated differently. I was asked to draw a picture of the warriors and, in a panic - using He-man and an old illustrated children’s bible as my points of reference - I drew some historically convincing yet buff warriors riding through the clouds.


I stood up in front of the whole school holding up that drawing and on the inside, I was laughing. 


I was walking proof that this world Mr M had created, it was a sham. Every time Mr M smiled at me and I smiled back – but it was actually me saying “fuck you, and fuck your good books”. I had beaten him at his own horrible game. It was a secret victory that kept me warm and strong in a cold, stifling school. I never told a soul.


A few years later I was kicked out of that school and Mr M’s parting words to me were that I was The Devils Child.


A few years after that Mr M was forced out of the school after parents eventually cottoned on to the fact that he was mentally abusing their children and threatened to mass-sue him.Yay!


He left like a dog with a tail between his legs. I heard a few years later he was starting up a political party. Not so yay!


A few years after that I was driving in the car with my Mum and we drove past that school. It looked peaceful now. Children were milling about on the lawns, smiling, playing tag. It looked like a different school. Then, the image of that drawing flashed into my mind, that ridiculous drawing - and I realised I still hadn’t told anyone that I had made the whole thing up...


So I told Mum.

She paused a moment, and then looked at me.


“You little shit” she said...


Then she burst out laughing.

My face, google and a ghost.

I suffer from a curse. It's called approachability.

I seem, despite being slightly unsociable, to have a kind and open face – a face that people instinctively want to throw their freak at, like a bucket of boiling crazyGOOP.

I once had a man walk up and yell "ARMADILLO" right into my face and then continue to stand there, waiting for a reply. I yelled "yes? Um, OK!" and ran off, my back twitching with knife-fear.

Just today I was standing outside of a shop when an old man pushed his face in-between me and my phone. In a toothless and spittle drenched frenzy he bellowed “ISN’T SHE CUTE? OH I COULD KISS HER!”… So, what did I do next? I mumbled ‘thank you’ and pretended to clean my phone. Really, give it a good clean. This is apparently how I react now to uncomfortable situations.  

I have a face that has launched a thousand polite directions to lost tourists. Every time I’m in London I feel like a Celebrity Directions Giver, known and revered world over for my spatial finesse.

I have a face that tells people "look at my BIG EYES and general air of innocence, joviality and wonder. Come, smelly stranger, and talk to me about YOUR WHOLE LIFE STARTING AT BIRTH PREFERABLY, come now - DON’T BE SHY, I HAVE ALL DAY. AND NIGHT.”

I have the Mother Teresa of facial expressions. Generous. Patient. Selfless. Virginal? Possibly.

What probably doesn’t help me either is that I am TOO polite to simply tell someone ‘no’, or ‘go away’, or ‘excuse me you just spat some of your lunch into my eyes, I think it’s corn’. And no matter how hard I try, and I do try HARD - I cannot, for a single second, look mean, menacing and standoffish. The most I can muster appears to be “I’m a little sad, but don’t let that stop you!”.

Just FOR ONCE I would like to throw a magnificently potent look of pure, murderous, leave-me-the-fuck-alone HATE.

There is one story from when I was a teenager back in Australia. It was summer holidays and I was walking to the local shops. An old man stopped me in my tracks, apparently overcome by the desire to talk to me. He was short, leathery skinned, with a small, wobbling head and a thick European accent. He wore a slightly comical looking sailor’s cap and an old greasy tailored suit. He looked 102.

He had these incredible pale blue eyes that seemed… dead, but crazy: like a zombie’s. Those eyes brought with them the knowledge of my own mortality. They terrified me. I wanted to run away, far far away.

But I just stood there, as I do - and listened.

Within ten minutes he had pulled out from his breast pocket a little black diary which held within its yellow pages little mementos of his life: black and white photos, letters, old tickets and business cards from what were probably now defunct businesses. He handed each one to me and told me the story behind them. He questioned me about what I was doing with my life. I vaguely said I liked writing, when, in fact - I hadn’t written more than a few TERRIBLE and ANGSTY poems. He told me to write every day. In retrospect that was good, solid advice… which I ignored.

After that day, I saw this old man on a weekly basis. He would always stop me in my path, and enquire about my writing. Sometimes, if I saw him before he saw me, I would hide behind a hedge until he shuffled past. Once I crossed the road and walked down a dead end street, pretending to be VERY INTERESTED in someone’s letterbox. FYI: The letterbox was number 23. And Blue. And had a dent in it.

ANYWAY.

I am now, 10 very eventful years later, living in London and still most definitely NOT writing every day. The old man and his crazy eyes have been utterly forgotten, buried under the intervening years of my life.

Until…

Last week, due to a mixture of feeling nostalgic and bored at work, I had decided to Google my childhood house, and look at it on Street View. Clicking away at my mouse absentmindedly I followed that very same route that I would have taken as a teenager to the local shops.

Suddenly, something caught my eye to the left of the screen. I stopped, and zoomed in to take a closer look.

It was HIM.

The old man.

There he was. Immortalized. FROZEN IN GOOGLE like a fly in amber, mid step - with a newspaper folded neatly under his arm. I was looking at a ghost from my childhood. A kind of unusual electronic fossil, meaningless to everyone but me and only me - because its history it is intertwined with the fabric of my own. 

Seeing him made me feel sad, and strange, and like my childhood was very far away from me. I wondered what happened to his little black notebook when he died. Or his hat. Where is his little hat?

I should write every day.

How I became a freak. Or. Thanks, Dad.

I’m going to take you back in time to 1996. I am genuinely sorry - as I’m sure you’d prefer to go back to Paris is the 1920’s and NOT a time where you might possibly hear The Macarena. 

SO. Here we are: 1996. 

I’m 12, and I’m the chubby girl in my class, sitting near the back of the room alone. I’m staring out of the window at pigeons unsuccessfully mating in the rain. I have a desperate look in my eyes that blatantly translates to me being battered by huge and relentless waves of boredom. I, rather dramatically, am convinced that I’m dying – that my soul is actually dehydrating with every squeak of chalk on the chalkboard.

Yes, that is I.

I look down at the empty pages of the exercise book in front of me and sigh. I pick up my pen; I pause, and think. I then slowly and carefully draw a picture of a MASSIVE bottom. It takes up two pages and is… anally detailed.  A satisfied grin forms on my face. I pause to admire my work, but it seems incomplete somehow, and then it hits me. I draw a fart cloud billowing out of the bottom. Naturally. 

Then, without hesitation…

I stand up on my chair. 

I hold up my drawing.

I say, bursting with enthusiasm - “LOOK, EVERYONE!”

Everyone slowly turns around to look - and the classroom erupts in a mixture of laughter, snorts and gasps of disbelief – my teacher drops her chalk and stands there, speechless. For once.

And the thing is: in my little 12 year old head, I thought that I was actually helping everyone somehow. I wasn’t trying to be naughty, or disruptive.

I was genuinely just trying to lift the mood.

End 1996

This is but one of the many weird and undeniably ME SHAPED incidences of my childhood. I could go on and I could tell you worse. But I feel this particular story has bottled the essence of my childhood: a tearful and frustrated boredom towards authority and structures, and the need to do silly things by way of protest, topped with an almost compulsive need to laugh. 

My parents were called into the principal’s office the next day, and there was talk of keeping me ‘back’ a year. There were other excuses too: I wasn’t progressing at the same speed as other children, I was bad at maths, I was easily distracted and I drew pictures of bottoms farting. Fair enough, really. It seemed the adult world was pitted against me and I didn’t measure up.  But, in my 12 year old eyes… the adult world didn’t really measure up to me, either. It was boring. The tragedy is it’s the adult world’s measuring sticks that hold the authority, and they have the final say. 

So, I was kept back a year in an attempt to hammer me further into submission. It didn’t help, obviously. They would have been better off hammering the ocean into solidity.  In fact, I became worse. I did TERRIBLY at school. I wanted to do well, I really did. I wanted to fit in, I wanted scratch n sniff stickers and WELL DONE’S scribbled into my exercise books.  But no matter how hard I tried - I simply couldn’t feign interest. I wasn’t stupid – it’s just that my brain was incredibly picky about what it took in and found fascinating, and was also brilliantly effective in completely blocking out my teachers near constant barrage of useless and joylessly delivered facts. 

SO - How the bleeding fudge did I get like that?

I grew up in a house whose very walls were sweating with hot testosterone. I had four older brothers who, as far as I could tell, lived almost exclusively to punch each other and call each other GAYBO, or GAYLORD, or many other creative variations on the word GAY. And there I was, a GIRL – thrown in amongst them like a helpless and fluffy hacky sack that would eventually be kicked into rough tomboyishness or wither away and die.

My brothers didn’t understand what exactly the fuck I was. They would poke and prod me like I was a strange, gasping and sensitive beast who washed up on the shore of their BOYS ONLY Island. When I wasn’t being completely and utterly ignored by them - I became their plaything. 

My brothers once told me that you pronounced “I reckon” as “erection”.

They told me, WHEN I WAS 6, that ‘lesbian’ was a socially acceptable way of calling someone ‘silly’.

They told me sticking up my middle finger was a nice way of greeting our new neighbours.

My Dad had decided a few years before the Ass Incident of 1996 to introduce me to literature. He probably got sick of the pitiful sight of me playing with flowers in the backyard alone. Anyway - it was love at first line. So, there I was: a little girl already prone to solitary and fanciful meandering - now with an added love of poetry that kept her restless and lovelorn soul awake all night and into the wee hours of the morning.

That still happens now. 

I looked strange too. I wore the collective and outgrown shedding of my four older brothers wardrobes. This included their second hand underwear. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I also took to cutting my own hair, much to the absolute horror of my Mum. In our house there was a constant lack of money, there was no pink, no glitter, and no delusions of being a princess - There was only perpetual WRESTLING and Disney escapism. There was make do and there was my own imagination. There were pencils and hiding with a book. So, I hid and thought, a lot. 

I should probably mention that, despite how much I read – at 12 my vocabulary was entirely based on British comedies the various characters of Rick Mayall. I said Snot Face and quoted The Young Ones excessively. I still do.

So - how does all of this make me draw bottoms in class? 

I’m not exactly sure, and I’m sorry for this. I’m afraid I’ve been rambling again. I never did learn how to effectively communicate an idea into essay form.  All I can think is that the elements above were like some kind of perfectly temperate petri dish in which joyfully sprouted many alien and abnormal characteristics. 

The only thing I AM sure of is that - 13 years later – I’m becoming kind of grateful that the little 12 year old me didn’t really give in to the expectations thrust upon her by the adult world. She was just instinctively determined to be herself, even if it was a lonely and compass-less path fraught with criticism, self-doubt and misunderstanding. I’m proud of her, and I wish I could go back in time and hug her and tell her that, yes, ok - she may turn out decidedly career-less and float from one boring job to the next, but she will be fine, and she will go on amazing adventures. ALSO - She will lose the puppy fat, and Custard Creams are NOT the answer. 

The world has measured me many times since The Ass Day and deemed me, almost every time, unfit to serve its purposes. The good news is I don’t actually care. The only thing that matters to me is my own measuring stick, and how I think I’m progressing - and I wouldn’t trade it for all the acceptance and back pats in the world. 

So, thanks dad.