He stood there warlike hands on hips, wearing his ill-fitting school uniform like a grey cloak of rags. "You throwin' your butts at me, Toad Face?" he snorted, searching for any excuse to start hitting. "Why don't you leave me alone? Go annoy someone else." I took a last puff on the butt and dropped it at my feet. It was bitterly cold that mid-winter's morn, but only the fog and the steam registered on my numbed, frightened brain. Ain't ya?" A cloud of halitosis-soured steam was ejected towards me. "What's up, Toad? Don't ya want ya pretty face all smashed up? Bet yer shittin' yerself. He liked hitting, but needed the frenzy, the bloodlust. I hadn't realised then that he'd had to work himself into a frenzy so he could just hit, and hit, and hit. I sweated in the still cold air, knowing what was waiting for me, wondering why he didn't just lash out and ended this mockery, this teasing. It was immaterial whether anyone else on that oval knew of the intended attack. The fog swirled around us, isolating our little group. This underweight pre-adolescent David had been facing five physically mature Goliaths five louts who tried to be rogues. Overshadowed by five leering thugs, I knew that even in a fair fight I couldn't possibly win. To say I was scared of the imminent attack would have been an understatement I was petrified. In time they would have inevitably progressed beyond schoolyard aggression, sinking lower into the anti-social mire of the criminal underworld. They were artists in this field, artists of hate. No blow too cruel, no technique too crude. Tactics used were invariably foul: a knee to the groin two holding while George hammered the victim with massive meaty fists the boot going in while the unfortunate was writhing in agony on the ground. I didn't need any further explanations I'd seen others after they'd had their 'turn'. "Keith, you four-eyed toad," the bully said. I'd been smoking an illicit cigarette in the middle of the school oval behind a masking curtain of fog that hid all but the intermittent red glowing points of nearby smokers.īig George and his four outrigging cronies loomed out of the fog, swaggering aggressively as they'd formed a crescent of belligerency. The five toughs came for me one winter's morning. The longer we stood back and accepted their behaviour and the longer they were able to rage throughout the school, the stronger they became.
We should have stood up to them collectively, nipped their aggression in the bud, put them in their place. We were all equally guilty guilty as George and his fellow perpetrators.
I knew what they were doing I and everyone else at the school but they were left to rampage in peace, no-one standing up to their truculent tactics as they savaged with apparent immunity. Ranked by four confederates, he preyed on weaker students, abusing his strength with aggression, building his ego on the shattered remains of his victims.įor months I watched him and his cronies pick on younger boys, separating them from their friends and beating them up.
George, the big fat aggressive lout, the school bully. The threat was real, very real, but this wasn't the first time I'd been in danger.
Warning: contains language which, I believe, is appropriate to the characters in the story.