The bullying began shortly after my fifth birthday. My family had moved from Dorset to a small village in Buckinghamshire. I started a new school in September, just before my third sister was born. It should have been idyllic. I remember everyone being excited about the new baby on the way. My school was small and set in the heart of the countryside, with playing fields bordered by woodland. It was about a mile from our new home. If the weather was good, my mother tried to encourage me to walk with her. Sometimes she would repurpose my lunchbox as a punnet and fill it with blackberries picked from the hedgerow on the way home. But she was heavily pregnant, and at the time the mother of three (soon to be four) children aged five and under. It made practical sense for me to catch the school bus.
Weird things were already happening at school. Initially I put it down to the shock of the new. The games were boisterous – my sisters and I could be rough with each other, but everything seemed to go a little further and cut a little deeper. I’d been startled by a group of girls who had reached under my skirt and tugged my knickers down to my ankles. Maybe they thought they were being funny? I just wasn’t sure whether I was in on the joke, or whether I was the joke. At first, it felt a little like being in a dream or visiting a foreign country. Almost nothing made sense to me, but I knew I was the only one who couldn’t understand, and it was down to me to work it out.
Then I was punched on the bus.
The boy who did it was demanding leftover sandwiches from my lunchbox. I didn’t have any. “Of course you don’t, you fat bitch,” he said. It took me too long to understand that his fist was flying towards my face. All I could do was close my eyes.
I don’t remember the pain, just the shock. Quite suddenly, my life had become chaotic and disordered. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was little, but I knew enough to be good, to avoid chaos, to stay away from anything that could harm me. And I’d failed.
After the bus arrived at my stop, another boy – a kind boy – helped me off, and explained to my mother what had happened. I’m sure I was hugged and kissed and comforted, but mostly I remember my father’s rage when he returned home from work later. Of course he was furious. Someone had punched his five-year-old daughter. But I hated shouting, and so did my sisters. It was a stressful time for everyone. The newborn baby was seriously ill and in hospital. I reached the conclusion that if bad things happened it might be best to keep quiet about them.
Years later, my mother told me that she had gone straight to the headmaster, only to be told, “We don’t have a bullying problem in this school.”
The boy who punched me was about nine or 10. Now, I know enough to understand that bigger boys don’t punch five-year-old girls unless they’re experiencing great harm and hurt. But I was let down badly by many of the adults around me. The bullying continued. There was the frightening, violent bullying, and there was the insidious kind. The name‑calling. Being excluded. Other children would talk about me as though I wasn’t there and they could see through me. Sometimes I wondered whether I was a ghost – or perhaps I’d already died and gone to hell.
One year, we were asked to submit a page to be included in our school reports – a journal summarising the year. It was meant to be general, and light in tone: “I enjoyed learning about the Tudors and Stuarts, and I got better at long division.” But I saw the opportunity to set off a distress flare and signal for help. I wrote about the bullying, how lonely I felt and how unhappy I was. “This isn’t a problem page,” my teacher told me. “Write it again.” The message was clear to me: that teacher thought I wasn’t worth saving or even paying attention to.
But even though my teacher didn’t help me, I learned a valuable lesson. Writing everything down made me feel calmer and stronger. It was a powerful way to release the pressure that was building up inside me. When I wrote, I could help myself to feel better. As well as writing down all the terrible things that were happening and releasing them, I could write down all the wonderful things that I dreamed about and hoped for. That made me feel better, too.
However, when the bullying became overwhelming, I couldn’t always write my way through it. Sometimes I brought it home with me. I’m ashamed to admit that I treated my little sisters badly (eventually there would be six of us), taking my frustrations out on them when I could have been much kinder. We’re much closer now, as adults, than we were as children, and I have told them all how sorry I am for the times that I was cruel or dismissive. But it’s difficult to speak to them about the violence I experienced as a child, especially now that some of my sisters have children and find it painful to think about my experiences through the lens of their own motherhood.
As I got older, I became determined to get as strong as possible – physically, mentally and emotionally. It made me independent and keen to take charge of my life and myself. Being bullied forced me to find out who I am and to do my best to embrace all of it – the good, the bad and the downright embarrassing. It made me fiercely ambitious and desperate to prove myself to the point where I am bulletproof and bully-proof. And I hope it’s made me tender. Like an animal in the moments before an earthquake, I can usually walk into a room and work out what might be about to happen and how everyone is feeling. I can sense fear quickly because I lived in fear for so long.
The bullies left a legacy that shaped my teens and 20s. Because the bullies commented on my body, I developed a complicated relationship with food, and I struggled with eating disorders from the age of 12. At school, I worked obsessively, straining to excel academically. I believed I needed excellent results and qualifications in order to stay safe. If I had enough As, or a good degree, I could do any job I wanted, which meant that I could always run away if life became bad again. Subconsciously, I believed that if I became as perfect as possible I’d be safe. But whenever anything went wrong I felt crushed by shame. If I made a mistake or I was confronted by any of my own imperfections, I would bully myself. I’d tell myself that I was useless and I wasn’t trying hard enough.
When I was 27, I met the man I would eventually marry. At the time, I had only really thought in the abstract about having children. It might be nice, in the way that it might be nice to get married and buy a house, but back then all those things seemed beyond my grasp – practically, financially and emotionally. As I fell in love, I started thinking about the future. I had been in relationships, but I had always believed their success was contingent on me holding my breath. I had to abandon myself, a little bit. I could never let a partner find me out and discover I wasn’t pretty enough, or thin enough, or, worst of all, too weird.
With Dale, I found the feeling I had been searching for ever since I was a small child. When I was with him, all I needed to do was be; I was home at last. I wanted to marry him. I assumed that eventually I would want to have children with him. I waited for the feeling I had been told to anticipate: the great, broody compulsion to get knocked up. After all, I was one of six girls. I had been raised Catholic. Surely the broodiness was in my blood?
Instead, I felt reluctant. Ambivalent. We talked it over regularly. We kept checking in. We waited for the other one to say, “Let’s go! Let’s try!” It took me a long time to understand why I was so reluctant. Even though I loved telling stories and imagining happy endings, I simply couldn’t picture a happy childhood for our hypothetical child. I was too scared that they would have to endure what I experienced. I told Dale, worried that he would tell me I was being ridiculous and that everything would probably be fine. But he understood. “I worry, too,” he said, simply. “You went through something terrible. The way you feel makes sense. There are so many different ways to be happy, and to be a family. We don’t need to have children for that.”
Many contradictory things can be true. Sometimes I feel tearful with longing for the children I will never have. Most days, I feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the life I have built and the people who fill it. I know that my parents loved me very much and, by any standards, they did their very best to look after me. When I was little, I often felt that no one cared about me. Some days, choosing not to have children feels like another way of hiding and letting fear dictate my choice of action. On others, not having children feels like an unconventional choice, a sign that I am finally able to live in a way that feels right for me, no matter what anyone else thinks.
I’ve worked very hard to move on and leave the bullying in the past. I appear to be a functioning adult. I can conjure up confidence when required. Anyone who sees me speaking at a literary festival or swimming in the North Sea would assume that I’m not particularly inhibited. I have built a life I love and, for the most part, I’m happy.
But the memories of bullying sometimes show up and take me by surprise. If someone accidentally mirrors bullying behaviour, my body still produces a burst of adrenaline that leaves me feeling panicked and disoriented. If a friend sees me from across the road and shouts my name, I panic. My first instinct is not to stop and say hello, but to walk away very quickly and look for a hiding place. If I’m on a train or in a cafe and I hear a group of people laughing, I immediately feel self-conscious and scared. If a stranger stops me to ask a question, my heart starts to pound. Rationally, I realise they probably just want directions, but my body is braced for a blow: I’m half-expecting a cruel comment, a kick or a punch.
When I was being bullied, I developed a vivid imagination, dreaming about my future, which I hoped would be happier than the present. I started to tell myself stories, and I believe that saved my life, bringing me hope and keeping me from despair. When I was a young reader, I reached for books that featured families that mirrored mine – the one that made the biggest impression on me was Little Women. As a younger reader, I didn’t understand many of the war references, but I read complacently. Of course slavery was abolished. Of course the good guys won! That was exactly what was supposed to happen.
I don’t feel complacent any more. I worry about bullies every day. There’s no redemption or retribution for the bullies. They run the world. We live in a culture that promotes bullying – where the most powerful people behave in the most despicable ways and never seem to suffer any consequences. I’m in awe of the parents who are bringing up children in these circumstances. But I’m not sure I have the strength and skills to do so.
Acknowledging that has been heartbreaking, but it has also been liberating. I have spent so much of my life telling myself that I need to run to the next chore, or the next achievement, and not wanting to admit that I was running away from myself. There were moments when I thought motherhood might be the answer to “What’s next?”. But there doesn’t need to be a “next”. I’m not running from bullies any more. I can stand still.
When I was in the playground, I couldn’t play. It was a frightening space and one where I never felt carefree. But when I read stories, I found the freedom I was seeking. I had room to play. I could resent the bullies for the fear they instilled in me. In some ways, they made my world so much smaller. But being bullied forced me to find ways to make my world bigger, too. Now, I try to write the sort of stories that brought me comfort during my most difficult times. I know how it feels to need a book that will meet you where you are and lift you up, and I do my best to write joyful, hopeful stories. In my new novel, a contemporary retelling of Little Women, I had the chance to explore motherhood on the page.
Imagining and fictionalising the way I believe having children would feel for me has been deeply healing. When I tell stories, I get to play house in a way that wasn’t possible for me when I was a child. I have the chance to meet so many different people and discover their worlds. To me, that feels like the happiest possible ending.