Are whistleblowers our 21st century folk heroes?
In the hope that I might make them proud, my parents sent me to a distant private school. The one thing they never considered was how much of an ‘education’ I’d get on my journey home after school each day.
I’d have a long walk to the tube station, a train journey and then pick up the double decker bus. Sitting upstairs in the corner seat of the back row, I did my level best to remain invisible, but it was just about impossible.
The bus stopped outside a Comprehensive school where the kids wore green uniforms, and then at another where they wore purple uniforms. My plain grey uniform blended fairly well into the background, and most days passed without incident, but sometimes a lad in a green uniform or a group of boys in purple uniforms would spot me and ask me which school I went to.
God help me if that happened to be the same day that I had to travel with my trombone, which I played in the school orchestra. They’d laugh and mock and beg to have a go on my trombone, and I’d end up wrestling them for control of the huge shotgun-shaped instrument case.
Sometimes standing out from the crowd became just a little too scary, and I over-compensated by replying aggressively. Other times the questions started out aggressively and headed inexorably towards a fight.
Whatever the outcome, every single day of my school life I lived in fear of that bus ride, yet if my mother were to read this now, it’d be the first she’d ever heard about it.
As kids we were all assured by grown-ups that if we just told them who the bully was, everything would be okay. Just say the name and nothing bad will happen.
Yeh, right. Don’t know about you, but when I was a child, that line never worked on me. To school children, adults appear as distant ignorant beings who have no idea how the world works.
How the hell could they guarantee that if I named the bad boy who was hitting me and tearing up my homework, he’d somehow turn into a benevolent angel the next day and leave me alone?
Worse still, how could I name names, when the only thing universally agreed upon by my parents, my teachers and my fellow schoolmates was that being a sneak was the worst kind of behaviour? Nobody should tell tales on another. If you do nobody will ever trust you again. You’ll be disliked, dismissed as a social entity and still get beaten up anyway.
It takes real courage to speak out, and sadly the situation doesn’t become any easier when you’re an adult.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.