The 1980s

A Memory of Brambletye House.

I’m not giving my name, but I have always taken as I found, and Malim AKA Mallett was actually really nice to me and stopped me from getting bullied by another kid, and never attempted anything weird with me or any of my friends. Now there were a couple of others who I’m not naming who were seriously creepy. If you were there, you’ll know who I mean. There was a fellow with balding ginger hair and a moustache who was a thwarted Software developer who taught Geography and proto-computing and some sports. This guy would come into the changing rooms in the swimming pool with a high pressure chlorine water hose and spray us when we were getting changed. There wasn’t a win; if we were slow to get to get changed, he would look at us naked, if we were fast, he would spray us in our clothes so we were soaking wet for the rest of the day and smelled of chlorine.

Exhibit B was the guy who would have a look at us in the open shower, but he never tried anything with me or anyone I knew, so he seemed harmless by 80s standards.

Exhibit C was a red faced man with terrible skin who basically hated all the kids through jealousy. I wonder how he’d manage now. The parents nowadays at these schools aren’t lawyers and accountants with an ok house in Hampshire and a Jaguar XJ6 like they were in the 80s, they are now foreign billionaires with a helicopter/ private jet. He would be so red faced his head would explode. He trod on my hand once, hard, when I was nine years old during a Fowler-Watt polemic in the big sports hall room with all the locker-seats, its name seemed to change a couple of times. The most yellow-wood room in the world. This same teacher made a kid who had drawn in soft pencil on a filthy old desk, already covered in indelible ink graffiti, lick the pencil writing off, with that nasty grin that those who know him will know about.

The absolute worst of the lot, and the only one I was truly terrified by, was a very angry, thin, tall to an 8 year old, dark haired man who taught something or other but was mostly into sport and seemed to wear a dark blue tracksuit all the time, who had a name in connection with the way we might display the days and months of the year. This guy was, I think, actually evil. He would corner me when no one was looking and say extremely intimidating things, never sexual, but extremely frightening for an 8 year old child. He was an absolutely nasty piece of work.

I’m totally unaffected by all this as I have nice supportive parents and so on. I’ve had a lot of gfs over the years but never married, and two of those relationships were about 8 years so pretty much a marriage. My partners could pretty much not believe that someone relatively young had been to such a Dickensian place, so recently. Three day socks, bathing in other people’s bath water. And all the rest. I think going to this school was part of my decision to never have children.

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