ATL

Battling bullies

Author Marina Lewycka tells how being studious and working hard did little to help her fit in at school

When I came over to England from Soviet Ukraine with my family in 1947, we had nothing but the clothes we stood up in, a few bundles of blankets, and a suitcase full of letters and photos. I didn't speak a word of English. But my parents were certain that we would thrive and prosper in our new home. "You will get a good education," said my mother. And I did.

I learnt English at school and wrote my first poem in English when I was four - well, it wasn't quite Milton, but it did rhyme. My first school was Saint Catherine's in Pontefract and I remember how one day I stole the school dinner money and spent it on sweets - those horrible black Pomfret cakes made of liquorice. It was easy to tell who the culprit was, because I came back from the shop with black goo all around my mouth. I passed them around in the playground, believing that this was the way to make friends. The teachers responded with great kindness and little fuss; maybe they understood better than I did how desperate I was to belong.

In 1955 my family moved to Doncaster, and at Wheatley Hills Primary School I first learned something strange about schooling in Britain: I learned that working hard and being clever was not, as my parents told me, a recipe for success. It was a recipe for being despised and taunted. My parents would never have understood, and I never told them. Nor did I tell the well-meaning teachers, who, thinking they had a child prodigy on their hands, gave me Shakespeare and Walter Scott to read (which just increased my sense of inadequacy).

The same pattern repeated itself at White's Wood Lane Primary School in Gainsborough. Teacher's pet; class pariah. Despite this I passed the 11-plus and went on to Gainsborough High School for Girls - a haven of calm and order where I at last made friends and wasn't victimised for being studious. But it only lasted for two years. At my next grammar school, in Witney, where my parents moved to when I was 13, I became a target for bullies again. This time I fought back and somehow, almost overnight, metamorphosed from a quiet little swot into a long-haired rebel complete with Cleopatra eyeliner and a CND badge. I'd finally learned that in British schools it's the bad kids who are respected.

What I remember most about all the bullying episodes at my schools is the intense shame I felt. Being bullied puts you in a Catch-22 situation, where seeking help from the adult world - teachers or parents - confirms that the bullies are right - you don't fit in with the rest of the kids.

I know that there is now much more awareness of bullying in schools and that children who are bullied are urged not to keep it to themselves. I know now that many bullies are themselves pathetic kids from dysfunctional families; but try telling that to a 12-year-old. I weep inwardly when I read the not infrequent stories of bullied children who take their own lives.

If only they'd known what I have since discovered: very many bright and successful people were bullied at school. Perhaps they owed their success to that hard early lesson in one of the great truths of human existence - life isn't fair. Perhaps being bullied makes you a student of human nature, always watchful and curious, trying to work out why people act as they do. Margaret Atwood's brilliant 1988 novel Cat's eye describes bullying among a group of girls, tracking the effects through into adulthood with brilliant insight.

Although teachers have an important part to play in tackling the culture of bullying, it is wrong to think that this is a problem of schools, or that only children can be bullies. The impulse to exclude people and to assert one's power runs deep; social groups and even nations can be bullies. Fortunately, the counter-impulse - to protect the weak and enjoy human diversity - is also part of us, and that too is something I learned in school.

Marina Lewycka is the author of A short history of tractors in Ukrainian and her new novel, We are all made of glue, is out now.