Published on 12, July, 2020
Just interested if anyone else has met a person in adult life who bullied them at school.
My father ran a small coach business, the yard had an office and occasionally people would book a coach in person. One day I was on my own in the yard, I would have been about 35 then. One of the school bullies turned up to book a coach. He was one of the worst ones, anyway he greeted me like an old friend, it shocked me and I was like a rabbit in the headlights. He really was after ‘mates rates’, I really didn’t know how to deal with him, had he forgotten or thought it was just a bit of fun, I couldn’t work it out, I started to wonder, did the years of abuse actually happen? But they are too vivid, they did happen. Another thought was, he’s pushing me for a cheap price, is he trying to bully me again. I so wanted to ask him why he did it but couldn’t. My father luckily came back to the yard and dealt with his enquiry. Has anything similar happened to anyone else?
Is is better or even worse if they greet you in a friendly manner with no glimmer of remembering the suffering they caused?
I am reminded of a scene in the film The Word's End, where Paddy Consadine's character's old school bully (They're now thirty years older) runs into him in a pub, shows not a flicker of recognition, cheerfully asks 'OK to take this stool' (for the next table) and wanders off. The victim is broken by that because all that misery was such a nothing to the bully that they just moved on (not actually the case because... [spoilers]) which doubles the damage in a weird way.
It's a very affecting scene.