I found my school bully online

and unearthed another 30 year-old memory I'd rather forget

The last time I saw her was on a crowded commuter train to Victoria. Chatting in the doorway with a friend, I became aware of a woman a few seats away, staring at us with amused contempt. I caught her eye and was shocked into silence. 

Lydia.

I greeted her with a semi-confident, raised-hand wave.

“What is this, a Darwin School reunion?” 

The ten years since we’d shared an A-level classroom had done nothing to boost her discretion or inhibit her spite. Her voice was loud enough to attract the attention of the carriage and shame me back into an old teenage shell. 

I was 13 years old again, too terrified of her quick tongue and biting sarcasm to respond. But like my younger self, something in me still yearned for her approval. 

Maybe she’d changed. Maybe my instinctive shrinking was rooted entirely in our history and her response wasn’t intended to be as biting as it felt. Maybe I was over-reacting. If she’d changed, maybe we could have a beer, look back, and laugh at the pain she’d inflicted. 

Maybe I could believe that I was capable of change as well. Maybe I could begin to believe the hurt didn’t have to last a lifetime and I wasn’t fundamentally unlikeable. I wanted to believe all that was possible.

As she shoved past me in the crowded doorway and off the train at Brixton, I pushed a business card into her hand.

“Give me a call?”

She looked down at the card and raised a single eyebrow. I don’t remember what she said. But she didn’t call.

Every girl has a best friend

Lydia was everyone’s best friend and my primary oppressor wrapped up in one complicated, charming and highly destructive package. For a brief moment, she was also my closest friend, the one to whom I confided my few adolescent secrets, then lost them when she exposed me to my peers. 

At my intake interview, the headteacher, Mrs Daniels, laid out her theory on female friendship. In her years as a teacher, she had noticed that while boys favoured gangs of mates, girls always found a best friend amongst her classmates, to the virtual exclusion of others. For that reason, she insisted that each intake should have an even number of students. So everyone could have a best friend.

It was a declaration that threw me into a panic. I was the only kid from my primary class going to this posh school, and that was only because I was on an assisted place—a financial support scheme for kids who couldn’t otherwise afford the fees but who weren’t quite as bright as the scholarship girls. I would know no one.

A pre-school event for impending first years was surprisingly ill-attended. That should have been a warning; those who needed this event, who didn’t already belong to this world, were the only ones there. I met and latched on to Emma. A quiet, gentle soul, as uncertain as I. As I remember it now, she barely spoke while I gabbled like a desperate, friendless idiot. Our mothers shared smiles of relief and arranged a pre-school-start meet up.

On the first day of the first term, I felt a palpable relief that I’d know at least one person. How bad could it be? But it was only on that first day that I realised cliques had already formed based on years-long alliances. Most were preformed from students who’d been together at the primary feeder school. They already had a social structure. And at its core was Lydia.

Lydia didn’t subscribe to Mrs Daniels’ theory of best friends. She flitted between individuals and groups, building bonds with one through shared criticism of another—quickly identifying and denouncing individual weaknesses and inspiring a universal fear of her criticism. But she was compelling. Her energy, exhausting and befuddling, lifted you up when you were in her good graces; devastated you when you weren’t.

Lydia could be wildly funny, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable with no obvious concern about social norms or the potential for ostracisation. She had no filter, infuriated the teachers, and was frequently pulled up for her lack of respect or deference to staff. She was bright and bubbly, but in an pre-neurodiversity-aware era, she was often labelled as just “too much” or “too loud”.  Now, she would probably be diagnosed as ADHD. Then, these things weren’t on anyone’s radar. Beyond academic success, nothing much was. Pastoral care was entirely absent. Had there been any systems in place to catch problems outside of academic failure, maybe life would have been very different for both of us.

A younger me, wildly unfashionable even then.

Lydia was the eldest of the three children in a more than typically dysfunctional middle-class family. Her mother, Helga, was a music teacher. Her father, a gentle and unassuming man, taught geography at the local boys’ school. Lydia’s younger sister Jennifer was everything Lydia wasn’t and Helga frequently informed her older daughter of her relative failings; in public, in front of her friends, in front of Jennifer, at school parents’ evenings, and, I presume, in private. The Barnes family rows were public and brutal, invariably centring on Helga and her daughters. 

When Lydia was 13, her father left the family home without warning and moved in with a colleague. Helga channeled her abundant rage toward Lydia. Like my own mother, she was expert at inserting doubt into her daughter’s relationships with her siblings, her father and even her friends. 

I recognised this without really knowing what I was seeing. Like so many things at that age, I saw and I felt deeply without having the self awareness to name or to describe those feelings. With Lydia, I felt a kinship that I couldn’t explain or even voice. Our home problems were similar but different. Where hers were overt to anyone who cared enough to pay attention, mine were insidious, impossible to spot even from the inside. Where her mother voiced her anger out loud and without embarrassment, mine expressed her pain in more subtle ways, enlisting her children to act out that pain. I still have trouble naming or believing my own experience. 

When, in an unguarded moment, Lydia told me some small element of why I had become so despised, she told me her mother had said she should be more like me—more independent. My willingness/need to catch a bus or cycle to anywhere I needed to be was yet another stick with which to beat Lydia. I probably told her that this was not my choice. That if I wanted to go anywhere, I had to do so under my own steam. I’d have loved to be driven everywhere. It was just pointless to ask.

The Barnes house was as chaotic as the family. Every edge and every corner of every room, every hallway and stairwell, was piled with clothes, books, papers, newspapers, box files, toys and oddments. Even the wall-side edge of the stairs was permanently stacked with stuff, leaving only a half of each stair-width free for feet.

As well as the usual teenage clutter, Lydia’s own bedroom was home to several caged and tanked pets who competed with everything else in the room for breathing space. The family owned an impressive variety of animals; a dog, two cats, and an ever-changing population of small rodents—guinea pigs, rabbits and rats—as well as the inevitable stick insects. Lydia adored animals and hoped to become a vet until she was told, quite forcefully, that she wasn’t academic enough. 

Her pets were the most constant and reliable source of affection in her life. The rats lived in a standard two-foot wire cage on the bedroom floor next to her bed, the stick insects next to them in a similar sized glass tank. The room was in a constant state of flux as toys, books and pets were discarded or died and then replaced. When the stick insects escaped, they were left to set up their own colony above the full-height bookshelf where they reproduced prodigiously until Helga was forced to admit the need for intervention and called in pest control.

It’s after another furious row between Lydia and Helga. We retreat to Lydia’s room—I slowly, picking my way up the stairs to avoid impaling myself on a plastic sword or twisting an ankle on a Lego brick. Ahead of me, oblivious to my caution, Lydia flies up the stairs. With one hand on the wall and the other on the banister rail, she’s perfected the knack of swinging her legs upward three steps at a time and sailing over the clutter. As we enter the room, Lydia goes straight to the rat cage to pull out Ophelia, her favourite rat. 

But Ophelia isn’t moving. Already rigid, she has lived her short life to its end. Gently, Lydia opens the hatch and lifts the adored rodent from her cage. Holding her in both hands, she strokes her tiny head with a thumb, kisses her and silently shakes, wracked with grief.

I can’t speak. I have seen Lydia rage and scream at her mother and her sister. I’ve seen her bitter sarcasm directed at friends and teachers. But I’ve never seen her break. Never seen her cry. I recognise the pain but am spectacularly ill-equipped to offer comfort. Programmed to empathise, I try in my own childish, untutored way to comfort Lydia. Reaching out a hand, I attempt an awkward and lopsided hug. Lydia stiffens for a brief moment then pulls away, her back to me. 

Like many of these memories, it ends before it ends. I think I asked if I should tell her mother. I think she shook her head. I know she was silent. I know she didn’t want anyone, least of all me, to witness her grief. I know I left.

I think that’s when everything changed.

Lying on a makeshift mattress constructed of large flower-print sofa cushions, I am lulled into security by the dark. Lydia’s confessional tone convinces me that I’m safe. Lydia thinks her mother likes her sister better than she likes Lydia. I reassure her—tell her she is the most popular girl in school. Everyone wants to be like her. Lydia quietly acknowledges this. Then she’s silent. She knows my question is coming.

“What do—what do people think of me?”

The silence hangs darkly above us for a moment as Lydia assesses her options. Then she begins a thorough run-down of class opinion. A carefully chosen litany of people who don’t care for me, those who actively dislike me, and the one who thinks I’m “harmless”.

“Harmless” is the one that sticks in my heart. 

It doesn’t occur to me to question the source of these assessments. 

Lydia doesn’t ask for the favour to be returned.

We both fall silent and within a few minutes her breathing softens and stretches into sleep. I lie awake listening to the snuffling animals in their cages, the gentle crack of floorboards that contract in the cold night. My heart feels weighted with cold. Loneliness stretches me into the eventual oblivion of sleep.

I suspect, were we to ever have that mythical beer, Lydia and I would find we had more in common as children than we ever realised. We were both kept lonely, both gaslighted by our parents, both placed in a secondary role to a golden child. We found very different ways of managing our confusion. I couldn’t see it then and I don’t think she could either.

I have a type

I’m still cautious in friendship but I have a type. A type of woman whose friendship I still crave. Even now. Even when I know that yearning for approval will lead me unerringly towards an old discomfort of never being quite enough. Never quite “right” in some way. That craving leads me to become a version of myself I don’t much like; needy, obsequious, pawing for acceptance.

There is an easy confidence amongst many privately educated women of my generation. An oozing certainty of their worth that leaves me quaking in my own. These women remind me of Lydia when she was at her best. Intelligent, fun, open to good conversation. With an edge of reserve that keeps me wary. I find something compelling about these characters.

Mostly, these are perfectly nice women. I feel I really should get on well with them; on the surface we have plenty in common. But there’s a distance, a firm but invisible barrier that I feel in my soul when I catch their eye or try to contribute to their conversation. Because in my head, its’s their conversation. Not mine. They belong in the world. I merely inhabit it.

Even now, as I gallop towards 50-years of age, I feel the same tension in my stomach, the not-good-enough anxiety knot, when I find myself in the company of people who remind me of this type. I enter these interactions with my sensors at full alert; ready to retreat at any hint that I’ve got something wrong. Been too loud. Too quiet. Laughed too much or at the wrong time. Looked too eager. Too much myself.

Expecting a repeat of my old school Squid Games, my hind brain assesses each new relationship with care, watching for warning signs that a new ally is about to throw me off a bridge. 

Flowers and rain drops, for light relief.

Along came social media

When I left school, the internet had only just been made public and social media wasn’t even an inkling of a concept. No one had a computer. It was difficult enough to keep in touch with the people I wanted to keep in touch with, never mind those I was glad to see the back of. I moved away from the area, found a new version of me on an island in Wales, went to art school, found my own social bonds, and got on with life. I didn’t give any of my old school bullies very much thought.

But then came Friends Reunited, the first real social network where people could connect their profile directly to their old school. That possibility had never existed before and the temptation was huge. Who wouldn’t/didn’t want to peep? I joined under a false name, curious to know if anyone I’d known was there; terrified that they might be. I saw a couple of familiar names, then deleted my profile.

Then came Facebook and Instagram. 

During a period of intense self-flagellation, when I was looking for every reason to despise myself and justify my self-hatred, I started looking again for my old school bullies. One had a name unusual enough to make her easy to find. Once I found her I found them all. They were all still connected. They had been bridesmaids at each others’ weddings, were godparents to each others’ children and regularly posted shared experiences on their public feeds.

One had become a maths teacher, another a deputy head. The last was an educational psychologist with multiple published papers about child welfare to her name.

That was the one that tipped me from bemusement to overwhelming and head-boiling rage. 

I know who someone is as a child is not always indicative of who they become as an adult. I’m not the person I was then so I don’t expect them to be. But the discovery that this little community of bullies who had systematically traumatised and ostracised me during my entire school career; the social gatekeepers of my teenage world; were now responsible for the pastoral care of multiple young children made me question other aspects of my school experience. 

Had the teachers and support staff who ignored or belittled my pain tortured their own peers when they were children? Had they known about the culture of bullying and been complicit? Was our whole educational and junior social system just an endless cycle of gaslighting and toxic control with each generation of teachers enabling the next generation of school bullies?

I’m not sure why this should be a surprise. The UK’s entire political system has its foundations in a public school system that has thrived on hazing, fagging, and ritual humiliation of social lessers. Maybe I was just a little less cynical then.

But I couldn’t find Lydia. 

I searched for her periodically without success. Not because I wanted to see her, but because when you’ve spent your life keeping one eye on the enemy, it’s hard to stop. 

Life went on and, with the help of various counsellors, I accepted much of that part of my past. I largely absorbed it as a still uncomfortable but distant part of my self-identity. 

Finding Lydia

And then, one day, there she was. A few months ago, long after I’d last actively looked for her, she appeared in the sidebar of my computer screen. In my Instagram “suggested” accounts. I’m not sure how the algorithm connected us. We have no followers in common. No location. But when I looked at her feed (of course I looked) I was reminded why I had tried so desperately to be her friend all those years ago.

Her posts are thoughtful, relevant, engaging and beautifully written. She’s interested in nature and in social justice. She’s an avid reader, a yoga practitioner and a now a trainee counsellor. She runs workshops for women navigating midlife and menopause, and frequently quotes Brené Brown. She’s brave, open and vulnerable. She talks about her struggles with depression and about her shitty relationship with her mother. The sister she used to despise is now her best friend. And the friends who comment on her posts evidently hold her in high regard, frequently telling her she’s a kind and generous confidante.

If I hadn’t tried so hard for the role 35 years ago, I’d want to be her friend.

This version of Lydia doesn’t really surprise me. I saw glimpses of all those things back then. She was just hidden under layers of anger and pain. This is the person with whom I felt an innate kinship. 

Then I read her posts about her (our) time at school. And now I actually want to sit down and have a chat with her. A very Firm Chat. Because what she writes is not how I remember things. 

She says she was never popular. That she was ostracised for having the wrong trainers and left to walk home alone from parties when someone better came along. That teenage girls were capable of inflicting enormous hurt and lacking in loyalty and that her school experiences greatly affected her trust in women.

Well, I can’t disagree with the hurt and trust part. The abandoned at parties bit may well be true. I wouldn’t know. I was never invited. I do question the trainers comment but only because trainers weren’t really a thing then. It was another era. Maybe this isn’t a literal memory but a loose metaphor for a range of other social failings for which she was chastised or ridiculed. 

I don’t doubt she was an unhappy kid. But I focused a great deal of my attention keeping a close eye on this circle of girls, looking for an in while watching out for an attack. And I genuinely don’t remember her being the victim she presents. Not at school anyway. Did I really miss all that?

Why does any of this matter to me now anyway? It ended 30 years ago. Can’t I just get over it?

Just get over it

All my life, I’ve been told I’m oversensitive. I’ve learned to curtail my emotions and keep them within socially acceptable limits so I don’t make other people comfortable. I’ve become pretty good at managing and rationalising my way through and out of the extremes. When they arise in full force, I usually take myself out of a situation aware that if I speak what I feel in that moment and knowing that the feeling that may not persist, I can’t ever take it back. I fear a forever label of unstable, hysterical or weird.

But I genuinely thought I was over it. I’d “done the work”. I’d felt the rage and found my own acceptance of my “sensitivity”. I’d leaned into discomfort and learned to love and care for the little version of me who didn’t have anyone to fight her corner. I’ve found my tribe, my family of choice, my team. I’ve learned to trust my instinct and not to get involved with those who could drag me into the worst version of myself. 

So I was surprised by the intensity of the anger that bubbled back as I read Lydia’s posts. It rose in an angry flush to my face. It filled my ears with cotton wool and prickled my palms and fingers with fire ants. I searched through her posts for more insights into our shared past and found plenty to further ignite my ire. Stories of her own victimhood. Supportive comments and gratitude for Lydia’s current day empathy and authenticity that made me want to slap myself.

Where was that brave and compassionate soul when I knew her? 

Could this truly be the same person? Can anyone really change so completely while still failing to acknowledge the darker side of their own behaviour? If this woman was so aware of her own past; if she had moved so eloquently past her early trauma that she could express both pain and redemption with such exquisite care, then where was her contrition?  Where was her regret for the pain she inflicted on others? Because I know I wasn’t the only one. 

And then out of nowhere, for the first time in years, I thought of Emma; the sweet, gentle girl with whom I formed a mutual and rather desperate attachment in our first week. I thought of how absolutely fucking awful I was to her. 

Emma

Emma was kind and generous. She invited me into her world with an open heart, introducing me to her family; her sister with whom she had a slightly scrappy but perfectly normal relationship, and her mum who was as kind and gentle as her daughter. Emma was also desperately quiet. Even more so than I. So much so that I felt she didn’t really need or want me to be her friend. She had a self-reliance born of security, where mine was born of necessity.

Having found my requisite best friend, I worried I could have done better. I could have found a friend who actively wanted my company. But everyone else was taken. And no one really wanted my company. I was the weird kid who sucked her thumb and didn’t know stuff everyone else did, like the rules of hockey or the words to the Lord’s Prayer. I was the girl who proudly wore a diabolically unfashionable red and white striped dress to own-clothes-day and spent the entire day dodging the classmates who found my outfit hysterically funny. I wanted desperately to be liked by the popular girls but somewhere I had missed the boat and I hadn’t even known where the landing stage was. 

And yes, I was jealous of Emma. I had never known someone who came from real wealth before. Emma was not on assisted place and while she hadn’t attended the same primary school as many of the others, she was in the same social realm. Her family home was akin to a small manor house, set on the edge of Hampstead Heath, one of London’s most affluent areas. On my first visit, I didn’t even know which door to use.

I was rude and snarky to Emma, meting out my own various pains on the nearest and least deserving person. I drew her in when I felt vulnerable and rejected her when I couldn’t bear the proximity. To my unending shame I don’t even remember exactly what I said or did to her.

But I wouldn’t mind betting that Emma remembers. The same way I remember the many attacks, the petty humiliations and the active isolation engineered by Lydia and her cohort.

So why did I never seek out Emma the way I had my own bullies and offer her an apology? 

When we knew each other, we were eleven years old. Emma left at the end of that first year. It was the mid eighties. An era when, if you were a kid and you lost contact with a friend, they were gone forever. I know nothing about her life after she left. I don’t remember her family’s names or have any clue what she might have gone on to do with her life.

And honestly, I had blocked a lot of these memories. It wasn’t until Lydia appeared on my Instagram page and I delved into her current reality that I remembered the impact I had on  Emma.

While writing this article, I went back to Lydia’s Instagram profile and read a recent post about the importance of mental health care for women and girls. And I wondered how Emma might feel if she ever came across this article, if she recognised herself and me, and I’d neglected any mention of my own abhorrent behaviour while chastising someone else for doing the same shit.

I would never want Emma to feel now the way Lydia’s online identity made me feel.

I don’t know if she’d even want my apology. Would I want an apology from Lydia? Now? Is that even a measure I can use to assess someone else’s needs?

Would I accept a genuine apology from Lydia? Probably. But not because I’ve actively forgiven her or because I want her to feel better about what she did. Only because I don’t want to keep scratching a decades-old wound. I don’t want to hold on to an anger that I probably am over, actually.

We are none of us the people we were thirty years ago. I have been through many iterations of myself since that time. An apology from Lydia now would mean nothing to the kid version of myself. I needed it then, not now. Would an apology from me mean anything to Emma? That’s not for me to answer. Would she see it as an attempt to assuage my own guilt? Maybe. None of what I’ve described of my experience is intended to justify my own behaviour towards Emma. I have no excuse for that. 

Emma owes me nothing. But I do owe her a huge and abject apology. Whether she’d accept it or not would be her choice.

Emma. Wherever you are. I’m sorry. Genuinely and overwhelmingly sorry. 

Lydia, if you do fancy that beer, drop me a line. I might just take you up on it. Or I might empty it on your head. Depends on the day.

Emma. You are free to do the same to me. I’ll pay for the beer.

The names and identifying characteristics of individuals and places have been changed.

Is there any part of this that makes you think “me too”? Have you ever glossed over memories of your own complicity in someone else’s pain because you were so focussed on your own? Have you ever had to confront a less favourable version of yourself?