It’s all the rage these days – the outcry against bullying.  Everyone has stories of them being bullied; but no-one was a bully.  Curious that, isn’t it?

Well I was.

Don’t get me wrong, I was bullied too, but that’s not the entire thrust of this post.

Grammar school was a rich vein to mine for this.  “Quad-ing” some kid’s cap was an early example.  Second and third year boys would prowl the playground, stealing up behind the first years to pinch their cap and “quad” it.  That meant kicking it over the single storey buildings into the quadrangle beyond.  So to retrieve it, the kid had to go into school before “the bell” and run the gauntlet of a teacher catching them, which might mean a detention.

In my time I have been both quad-er and quad-ed.

Another two-way aspect of the culture was the fag system.  As a first year you might get collared by a prefect from the Upper Sixth to fag for them.  Bear in mind that to an 11 year old boy these guys looked like grown men, some being over 6 feet tall and with sideburns.  They had disciplinary powers too; I was once caught not wearing my cap on the school bus and had to write an essay for a prefect on “Exiles”.  At that age I had no fucking idea what they were and there was no Google then.

But to return to fagging, this simply meant running errands for your prefect, usually to the tuck shop with nothing like the sexual dimension described by Stephen Fry in his autobiographical works (which helps the uninitiated to understand the meaning behind the name Limp Bizkit).

All pretty unimaginative, really.

Two other splendid playground games which were more forward-looking as they were less ageist were Milker’s Guild where you grabbed some other youth’s testicles (or got grabbed) and “What’s Worse than Hurricanes?” where you twisted some other youth’s nipple (or got  twisted). Harmless stuff.

There was one jape which was a bit more original and which I particularly enjoyed and that was to nab some little kid, strap him between two cricket pads and leave him outside the staff room door.  The biggest risk with this was bumping into a wall as you ran away with tears of laughter streaming from your eyes.

Overall, I would say that the school neither condoned nor acted against bullying.  It was a kind of “playing fields of Eton” (Wellington) culture which the grammar system aped and in which I fully participated in both roles.