Between March and June this year, Spain had one of the toughest quarantines in Europe, confining 47 million people to their homes. With little to do for entertainment, I found myself returning to Facebook after a reasonably long absence.
Within a week, I’d re-discovered why I’d left in the first place.
Social media is where self-esteem goes to die, and where you can see humanity at it’s absolute rock-bottom worst. Narcissism and ignorance reign supreme on the world wide web, and while reconnecting to good ol’ FB has meant I could quickly reassure myself of the safety of the people I love, (and show off my newly-acquired origami skills) I’m thinking about calling it quits again.
Not only do you fall down a rabbit hole of COVID-related articles every time you log on, one day claiming it’s flu, the next it’s plague, we’ll be fine by next week, we’re all doomed, and so on and so forth, but you also have to contend with trolls every time you comment on anything.
It’s a cast-iron guarantee that if you express a logical opinion in a forum full of people whose IQs are in negative digits, one or more of them will crawl out from their fortress of stockpiled loo roll and start misspelling the reasons why you’re an inferior being.
Now, depending on what mood I’m in, I deal with this in two ways, the same as I do when faced with stupidity in real life. Either I’ll have a reasonable discussion (Only to realise that you can’t fix stupid, shrug, and leave them to trying to shove leaking batteries into their ear canal, or whatever passes for entertainment when your remaining braincell has been in solitary confinement even longer than we have!) or I will annihilate them verbally. There’s rarely a need for violence when you can cut someone with a few choice words.
Yesterday, I was in one such discussion on a teaching forum.
One girl came forward and asked for advice as she was pretty sure her adult male student had been pleasuring himself during their online classes, essentially paying her for the chance to wank off in a second language. A class act, clearly.
Now, nearly everyone said that she should try to ascertain if she was correct (Ah, centuries of women being taught to doubt our instincts and common sense, there you are!) and then stop teaching him and/or report it. Logical.
But one girl argued that it was a chance to re-educate this man about appropriate behaviour. I’ll let that sink in. That she believes a grown man doesn’t already know that it’s not ok to self-pleasure in the middle of a class, or that he isn’t capable of controlling his urges.
I said I thought that she was wrong and that he should be dealt with, and she leapt on me with an incredibly condescending rant, which basically painted me as some weakling who would run screaming to be rescued when faced with something similar. She also said that my attitude was the reason men got away with these behaviours, and made a big fuss about saying how she found it funny and things shouldn’t be taken so seriously. (Because turning sexual harassment into a joke absolutely doesn’t allow for this kind of behaviour to be taken less seriously and, therefore, to continue, but reporting it to the authorities or your employer does, apparently.)
Now, her extremely flawed logic aside, she got me thinking. Not about whether she might be right (she isn’t)but her comments about how my reactions were weak (based purely on the phrase ‘He should be reported to the authorities’) but on how I have personally reacted when confronted with these sorts of situations.
There have been a few, and I’ve never once freaked out or run away screaming, or even yelled at the person in question. When it’s been online, I’ve made a cutting comment and shared their information with as many people as possible, or in some cases messaged their family members and shared the messages and images with them. I’m a big believer in naming and shaming. When it’s been in person, it’s depended on the situation.
I hadn’t thought about the first time I ever saw a flasher in years. But as I sat typing out a response to that stupid comment last night, it all came flooding back to me.
Not only the event itself, but the aftermath, which taught me at a relatively young age that sexism and bias was firmly ingrained in every aspect of life. That the word of a man held more weight than that of a woman. It was the first of many such lessons, hard to learn, but valuable.
This is the tale of The Boy Who Ran.
His name was Tom, but we called him Titch.
A tiny speck of a child all through primary school, if he turned sideways you could lose sight of him. When we hit secondary school, he got taller, but never really gained any weight, it was as if he’d just been stretched out. Even though he was a reasonable height by the time this story took place, the name had been with him so long that we could hardly remember what he was really called. So Titch he remained.
He was a ball- well, maybe rather more like a string- of hyperactivity, always in trouble for leaping about when we were supposed to be sitting still. At my birthday party one year, we stood and watched in awe as he did 15 consecutive backflips, before collapsing on the floor, looking for all the world like an overcooked, sweaty strand of spaghetti.
On the day in question, Titch and his friends suggested taking a short cut to PE. We were about 14 at the time, and once a week we walked up to a local leisure centre to do PE. There was a gym at school, of course, but the leisure centre had squash courts and treadmills and, best of all, trampolines.
Usually everyone walked up all together, along the main road, but we’d got distracted and were running late, so Titch suggested we cut through the local nature trail instead. By his reckoning, it’d mean we’d arrive only 2 or 3 minutes after the others, despite setting off nearly 10 minutes late. That sounded like a fantastic idea to us, who knew that Mrs B, the PE teacher, wouldn’t allow us on the trampolines if we arrived late.
So off we trotted, 3 girls and 5 boys, bags of PE kit in hand, over the fence and onto the nature trail. These days the majority of the trail has been landscaped and cultivated to showcase all it’s magnificent features, the rare birds and wildflowers, the special kind of marshland that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the region (carefully cordoned off) but back then it was wild. I loved it. Every morning on the way to school I would stare out of the bus window and marvel at the wild grasses and weeds, and the swans gliding majestically across the surface of one of the 3 lakes, carefully avoiding the discarded shopping trolley that some drunken teen had upended into it, and no one had got round to removing even though it had been there almost a year.
I sometimes used to go walking there with our dog in the summer, the trail stretches for miles in lots of different directions, and you rarely see another human. I think that’s why I liked it, even though it was a bit rough and uncared for. I’ve always loved places that are abandoned, they carry a special type of magic, and the trail had that same feeling.
It was a beautiful summer’s day, perfect for a little jaunt in nature.
First we walked by the main lake, the one with the trolley. I let my hand trail through a patch of dandelions, leaving a cloud of fluff blowing about in my wake.
We passed under the disused railway bridge, its bricks blackened with age. Cigarette butts and discarded magazines mingled with trails of ivy and the occasional glint of natural quartz in the rocks on either side of the bridge. The puddles beneath it were immense, just begging to be jumped over, and our voices echoed in a delightfully creepy manner as we chattered our way through to the other side.
Past lake number two with its curtain of huge reeds, mostly obscuring the water from view except for on one side, where a short wooden platform jutted out. Right next to the ‘No Fishing’ sign, a man had set out a deck chair, turned on his hi-fi (yes it was that long ago!) and was patiently sitting with his rod in the water, waiting for a bite that was unlikely to come while ever the music was playing.
We huffed our way up over the hill, which had cobbled stones set into it. People said it used to be a ski slope, but I never quite believed that. We never got enough snow to ski and it wasn’t even that high a hill. A bit further and we were walking along the old train tracks, kicking the bits of coal that still lay about.
One of Titch’s friends looked at his watch. “We need to hoof it,” he said, “Mrs B’s gonna lose her shit if we’re late.”
My mate Gemma nodded in agreement. “I’m already in her bad books cos I didn’t want to do PE last week. I told her I was on the blob, but she said it’d be good for me and made me do an extra set of sit-ups!”
I laughed. “Gem, you’ve used that excuse the last 6 weeks! I know she’s not a maths teacher, but she still knows how long a month is!” Gem shrugged. “Always worth a shot,” she muttered.
As we rounded the corner, the landscape changed drastically. The ‘path’ (little more than a dirt trail) we’d been following disappeared as we reached the part of the nature trail that the council never came to tame. Wildflowers, briars, nettles, floxgloves, daisies…grass up to your knees. The ground was uneven, punctuated by mole hills that could turn your ankle if you weren’t careful. Hills rose up on either side, covered in thick shrubbery that blocked out some of the sunlight.
A few metres more and the ground started to get boggy. We were entering the marshy areas. There had been rain a few days before, so it was still a little boggy, but not dangerous. As long as you stepped on the bigger, flatter patches of grass or rock, you wouldn’t even get dirty. Of course, if you didn’t look where you were going, you risked losing your shoe to whatever lurked below the soupy, squelchy, earth.
Most of the boys were way ahead by now, having longer legs. Us girls were still picking our way across the marsh when they disappeared over the hill in front. “We’ll cover for you!” they shouted back. “Yeah, right!” we chorused.
“We’ll catch them up,” Titch said. I suppressed a smile. He could easily have gone with his mates, but Titch had a crush on Gemma, so was sticking around. So transparent, but kind of sweet. Gemma glanced over at me, her cheeks flushing slightly. It was mutual, then! I started to walk a little bit faster, partly because I wanted to give them a bit of space to chat, and partly because I was starting to worry that we wouldn’t make it on time, after all. I didn’t enjoy PE, particularly, but I enjoyed getting in trouble with teachers far less!
My other friend, Amy, kept pace with me as we started up over the hill.
It was in the next valley that we saw her.
A woman in her late 20s, with one of those old Silver Cross prams, crying her eyes out and desperately pushing and pulling at the handlebars of the pram. An angry wail rose up from inside it, intensifying her distress.
She was in kitten heeled shoes, which were caked in mud, along with her claves and the bottom of her skirt. Her hair had snaked its way out of the bun she’d pinned it up in, and into her eyes, which were puffy from crying.
Amy and I hurried towards her. “You ok, miss?”
The woman turned towards us, her eyes brightening with relief. “Are your teachers coming?” she asked, seeing our uniforms. “Erm, no,” we replied, “We’re on our way to PE.” The woman’s face collapsed in on itself like a soggy cake. “Shit,” she sobbed, “Shitshitshitshit!”
Amy and I exchanged worried glances as Titch and Gemma hurried over to catch up with us. “Can we do anything?” I asked. “I mean, there’s 4 of us so…” I looked at the pram. The baby inside couldn’t have been more than 6 months old, red-faced and still screaming the place down.
The wheel of the pram had somehow got lodged in one of the mole hills, twisted at a strange angle. “Must’ve hit that pretty hard to get it stuck like that!” Gemma commented.
“I was trying to get away,” the woman said, picking her baby up out of the pram and shushing it. “There’s a- man- he’s been following me.” All 4 of us kids looked around quickly. “What man?” Amy asked. “I- I don’t know. Every time I turned a corner he was there. I’ve only just moved to the area and I thought it’d be nice to walk the trail but then I got distracted trying to-" She lost her composure and started crying again.
“Looks like you found the marshes,” I said. She nodded, sniffling. “Then once I managed to get us away from him, I was running to get back to the road, and the wheel got stuck.”
“Well, I’m sure between us we can-“
“Shhh!” she hissed. “He’s back!”
“Wha-who-?”
“That man! He’s in the bushes! I can hear him!”
“It’s probably nothing,” said Titch, “there’s a lot of birds and animals around the trail.”
“I’m telling you, it’s him! Look!” She pointed into the undergrowth. Sure enough, there was something rustling about in there. We sprang into action then, the 4 of us, Titch and I using small rocks to try and dig away at the earth around the wheel of the pram, Gemma and Amy pulling down on the handlebar to try and create some leverage. “Hurry!” the woman said, "he’s coming closer!”
Looking up, I saw that she was right. There was a humanoid shape in the bushes, clad in something brightly coloured, moving very slowly in our direction.
I threw my rock to one side and started digging with my hands until I got a purchase on the underside of the wheel. “Loosen your side a bit more?” I asked Titch, “I think we’re nearly-“ POP! The wheel came lose from the mole hill, Gemma and Amy landed on their bottoms and the pram tipped over nearly on top of Titch. The wheel was misshapen. No one was going to be pushing it anywhere any time soon.
We scrambled to put it upright. We needed to move quickly. “Chuck your shoes in here,” I ordered the woman, “You can’t get round the marshes in those. We’ll carry the pram, you bring your baby. We’re not that far from the road now.”
Each of us grabbed a corner of the heavy pram and got ready to ascend the hill.
Then the woman shrieked. Turning, I finally got a good look at what had scared her so much.
The man was maybe in his 40s, around 6ft tall, overweight, with the face of a man who’d spent too much time in the sun, and equal amounts in the pub. His nose was surrounded by purple veins and his eyebrows were coarse, wiry, and low-set, giving him a sinister appearance. He was wearing one of those luminous yellow and orange polyester shellsuit jackets that were inexplicably all the rage among teenagers at the time…and nothing else.
While we were processing what we were seeing, I felt the pram suddenly list to one side, nearly taking me down with it. Titch had dropped his side and was running like the clappers up the hill. “Titch!” Gemma shouted, “Titch, come back!”
A throaty chuckle from behind us. The pervert had seen the only boy in the group abandon us, and now he was getting even closer, emboldened by Titch’s cowardice. I bristled with anger that he thought he could initimidate a woman with a baby and a group of schoolgirls and get away with it.
“He’s going to kill us!” Gemma said, panicking.
“What with?” I retorted, “His limp dick?”
What can I say? I’ve always had a smart mouth. Nowadays I can (mostly) control it, but as a teenager it pretty much had a mind of its own. I sometimes look back on that girl I used to be and just marvel at how few fucks I gave (and how I somehow never got my ass kicked!)
The pervert heard me and stopped a few feet short of us. “Our friend has gone to get the police,” I said calmly, hoping it would turn out to be true, “The longer you stand there, the better the description we’ll be able to give them.”
He blinked, as if uncertain what to do next. “Well, Officer,” I intoned dramatically, getting into my stride, “He was fat and ugly, wearing something I wouldn’t use to mop the floor with…But his most distinguishing feature was that he had this…thing…he kept trying to show us. Can I describe it? Oh, yes, certainly, Officer. It was like a penis, only much, much, much smaller!”
Beside me, Gemma snorted, forgetting the gravity of the situation. The woman, still clutching her baby, smirked. Amy gasped but then giggled. I looked the flasher right in the eye, and stood my ground. Inside, I was shaking, torn between fear that he might attack, and wanting to laugh myself. I have to admit I was pretty proud of myself in that moment, and even more so when the pervert turned around and walked away!
There was no time for a celebration as we lugged the pram up the hill and down the other side. When we got to the main road, Amy looked at her watch. “Uh-oh,” she said.
“How bad is it?”
“How does half an hour late sound?”
“It sounds like it rhymes perfectly with Afterschool Detention.”
The woman put her baby back in the pram and put her shoes on. “Oh, god, did I make you girls late? Will you get in trouble?”
“Yeah,” Amy said brightly, “But it’s only PE. Do you know your way back from here?”
“Yes,” the woman said, “I’m ok with the main roads, but that trail…I don’t think I’ll go walking there again without my husband.” She hesitated for a second. “Um, can I…maybe give you girls some money or something? To make up for making you late?”
Gemma’s eyes lit up, but Amy answered first, “No thanks, miss, that’s nice of you but we can’t take your money.”
Reluctantly, Gemma nodded agreement. “If you’re sure you’re ok, we really need to go or Mrs B will think something terrible has happened.”
“Well, it sorta did,” Amy said.
“You know what I mean.”
We said our goodbyes and sprinted off to the leisure centre. I half-expected to find the police there waiting for us, but instead Mrs B just looked us up and down, said “Afterschool Detention. Tomorrow.” And went back to supervising some kid on the trampoline. After the class we tried to explain what had happened, but she wouldn’t let us speak, just walked away.
We caught up with Titch and he woudn’t talk to us, either. We wanted to know why he hadn’t told a grownup what was going on, or where we were. I personally didn’t mind so much that he’d left us, if he was scared, well, we all had been, but it bothered me that he didn’t have our backs and now we were being punished for doing a good deed.
As no one was interested in listening to us, we just didn’t talk about it again. There was no point, we had detention and it seemed nothing was going to change that.
About a week passed, and we were in a music class when the Headmaster came in and asked for Titch. We wondered what he’d done, no one ever got called into the Head unless they were in trouble.
But he wasn’t in trouble, as we found out when we saw the front page of our local newspaper the next day.
SCHOOLBOY HERO SAVES LOCAL MUM FROM FLASHER.
The woman we rescued had described our school uniform to her neighbours, who’d told her which school we were from. She only remembered that we’d been going to PE and that one of us had been called Titch, so that was what she’d told the school.
When Titch was called into the office, there were reporters waiting to ask him what had happened, and I guess his version of events was very different to ours.
We tried to tell the Headmaster what had really happened, We were furious that he was taking the credit when in reality he’d run away and left us in what potentially could’ve been a very dangerous situation, but yet again, we were ignored. The Head said that jealousy was not a very becoming quality in young ladies, and that we should be proud to have a hero in our class. He didn't believe for a second that a group of girls could have handled the situation, so he didn't even look into it, he just sided with a liar instead.
Needless to say, we weren’t friends with Titch after that.
So. That’s my story. But remember, if you’re ever asked by any Internet Trolls, the official line is that I’m a damsel in distress who facilitates perverts by reacting hysterically and letting them get away with their behaviours. Got it? Good.