Not all of my memories are good – amusing, pleasant, delightful – some are disturbing and some are abusive.

I had a very real problem with my self-confidence in my teens – I developed a method of covering the issue by using a ‘mask’. I have a quick wit and a sometimes-scathing tongue to go with it and that’s what I used as my armour and weapon of choice against the world in general.

I had things to prove – many things, to many people, most of all, to myself.

I went about dealing with a lot of things the entirely wrong way and it cost me.

I think I developed a persecution complex – to be honest, some of it was based on experience… Being set-up for ‘fights’ against more prepared (they knew there was going to be a fight and I didn’t) and invariably bigger and older girls. I think I’ve fought every girl on that street – and some boys. I don’t remember starting most of them.

I realise I’m not going to come out of this story unscathed and I understand.

I remember a neighbour, a few years younger than me, we were either good friends or sworn enemies and the whole balance of things could change in the blink of an eye.

Picture this:

Two kids in the middle of a playing field. Something goes wrong and they are suddenly at logger-heads.

One kicks the other in the stomach, knocking the wind from their lungs and disabling them for a moment. The kicker runs like mad for home. Across the field, through the gap in the hedge, down the back garden, into the house and to safety.

The other recovers in time to see the headlong flight and gathers enough determination to pursue. Across the field, the chaser is a better runner and is catching up. Through the gap in the hedge, down the back garden to catch the kicker just as she has her hand on the door handle and is almost (but not quite) safe in her house. The chaser grabs a handful of hair and jerks the kicker to the ground.

Both kids are in a state of distress and crying with temper and/or pain by the end of it.

Will it happen again? Yes.

Tit-for-tat is a tiresome game but sending in the big sister – is that playing fair or playing an advantage?

I didn’t have a big sister.

The kicker’s sister would allow the furore to die down and everything would be hunky-dory again. She often bided her time until she had the perfect chance to strike.

I’d be caught out on my own unprepared and often the only one that was unaware that a fight was about to happen and then ‘the fight’ would start. A made-up or blown-out-of-proportion slight and before I knew it, I was in the middle of a pitched-battle against a girl bigger, older and way more prepared than I was. With an audience weighted against me too – I always seemed to be fighting against the ‘home team’.

A fight out of the blue for me, put on my back-foot, defending rather than attacking against a bigger and better fighter. With friends baying for my blood…

I didn’t ‘win’ many of those fights.

When I was caught out in the open, away from the safety of home, with no one to back me up, against two bigger, older and more prepared girls, you can guess how that was going to go.

Up at the ‘motorway bridge’ one afternoon, my neighbour and coincidentally, a girl that used to live close to our house, on the rows, decided I needed a lesson of some sort.

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From Google Maps
Far from home

The fight started – I don’t remember how or why – suddenly I was fighting off two bigger girls and they were intent on doing me damage. Adrenaline can kick in all it likes, but there’s only so much a body can do when the odds are stacked against you.

I don’t know martial arts and I certainly had no idea of it back then. It was a feral battle, using everything to hand (and mouth) in order to survive.

I ended up on the ground, t-shirt pulled up over my head and my whole back scratched raw. I’m not talking about one swipe and a row of scratches. The wounds in my back were criss-crossed and deep – so deep I couldn’t lie on my back for days.

That set the whole scenario for the next round of attacks. When the kicker’s sister ‘had hold’ of me – “Wait til I get hold of you!” – I would be knocked onto my arse, bent forward so I couldn’t fight back and she would lean over me, scratching the living hell out of my back.

I was in a major panic and I had nowhere for the adrenaline to go. My instinct took over and I took a bite out of the closest thing to me – the girl’s thigh.

I bit her – I bit deep and hard and I drew blood.

That wasn’t the last time, either.

A girl older even that that one decided she needed to teach me a lesson.

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I was always a tom-boy, climbing things etc. The goalposts on the playing field – up them like a little monkey, no bother. Swinging from the cross-bar one day, she came up behind me and pulled down my trousers, pants, everything. TOTAL humiliation in front of everyone.

Later on came the beating.

Out of sight of my house, away from where my mother could keep an eye on me for any such ambushes – that year it seemed the summer of conflict – she started teaching that lesson. I was the only student but as usual, there were plenty of observers.

She ended up sitting on the bottom of the slide. Perhaps I got lucky and overbalanced her, perhaps she dragged me down and ended up sitting a little higher than me, I don’t know.

Again, the feral, reptilian brain took over in me and I bit hard – similar place, top of the thigh so she couldn’t swing her knee to hit me. She was using ‘hammer-fist’ on my torn, scratched back and the back of my head but I was determined to hang on and do as much damage as she was doing to me.

I think I was dragged off. I was picking skin from between my teeth all that evening.

That girl didn’t give me any more beatings… but she had a bigger sister…

Images from Google