BULLYVILLE.

 

I had my reservations about writing this post.  Even the memory makes me shudder, but I overcame my reticence and here it is.

Bullies exist everywhere and always will.  They are like the algae that spontaneously grows
in a perfectly clean and chemically balanced swimming pool, or the scum that rises to the top of a pond. They come in all age groups, ages and genders.

When my husband, son and I moved to a country town for my husband's work, each of us experienced it first hand.  The place was a coastal town in Victoria, close to the border with South Australia.  My husband took the position because he was trying to appease me after taking a job in Perth for the second time when he knew I hated the place.  His company offered him a post in this town where he would be Project Manager on the site of an Aluminium Refinery's upgrade.

You know those movies where an innocent family moves into a haunted house and nothing but trouble ensues?  Well the whole town, which shall remain nameless, was creepy.  As well as an Aluminium refinery it boasted an abattoir and a port that existed exclusively for loading and unloading sheep destined for slaughter.

Also in this town was a clique of company wives who made that other creepy movie, "The Stepford Wives" look tame.  To top this off, and the real cherry on top of the cake, was the stupidest school principal who ever held that position.  The whole atmosphere was bad, as was the miserable cold and wet weather.

As if an omen for what was to come, we rented a house in a cul-de-sac near the centre of town.  The real estate agent told us on no account to open the oven before they had the place cleaned.  The last tenants had left a roast lamb in there and the smell was beyond description. They would have it removed before we moved in.

But we were in a hurry.  How bad could a dead roast possibly smell?  Nothing prepared us for what emanated from the oven when we opened the door to evict the deceased beast ourselves.  We had never smelled anything like it.  We slammed the oven door shut and fled from the house.  Perhaps the evil of the place had even made an old roast smell like the pit of hell.  It was very strange indeed.

Once the lamb was properly exorcised we took possession.  Our son started in the local primary school, my husband went to work and I busied myself studying for my Communications degree externally after having started it at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

The previous Project Manager had been single and, in this incestuous town, the wife of the second in command had become Queen Bee of the company's other wives.  This situation was strange in itself but existed because the refinery's owners had a club for the wives of their employees in the town.  What this company had, our little company apparently had to have also.  They would meet for lunch once a month in a restaurant and the bill was paid by the company.

Without ever being aware of it I became the new Queen Bee.  The first I knew of this was when a persistent knock sounded at the door of the house we had rented.  Queen Bee Number Two was there to visit.  I was in a rush to finish an assignment before collecting my son from school.  She would not take the hint that I was otherwise busy and stayed for three hours.  She was there to feel me out.  Was I interested in usurping her role?  She didn't ask this straight out but I got the drift.

When I was growing up no one called in at your house without phoning first, unless they were close friends, neighbours or people who knew that they were always welcome.  For this woman to impose herself on my hospitality for so long without so much as a 'by your leave' absolutely amazed me.

I was naïve enough to think other people were brought up with the same standards that I was.  I learned a lot on my travels with my husband and one of these was that courtesy had gone out the door.  It is a hard lesson to grow up with standards and find them littered like broken china wherever you go because the world was changing and not for the better.  I had always felt that good manners arose from consideration for others and common sense.  I was wrong.

After this episode, however much I tried to discourage her, QBII did not let up.  Perhaps my resistance drove her on.  In the meantime the ladies of the cul-de-sac had their very own Queen Bee.  She held a tea party to greet me to which all the women in the street were invited.  I thought it was a lovely gesture but had a vague sense of unease.  This was not really my thing.

Then I was invited by the company Queen Bee Number Two to a baby shower for one of the employee's wives.  The expectant mother was, to put it mildly, a bogon of the first order.  I am not a snob but I soon learned to be.  She eyed me as I entered the room as if deciding how she would skin me alive.  I sat through this horror party attempting to be both convivial and invisible at the same time.  After surviving this I did my best to hide from the lot of them.

Apart from these unusual social forays behind the Looking Glass, I found unpaid work at the Community Radio station which allied nicely with my degree.  My husband was busy with his work and our son at the Primary School.  I don't remember exactly when things started to go wrong for our son, or perhaps he hid it for a while.

A boy in a grade a year ahead of him, who also lived in our street, the son of the very mother who had given the tea party, started bullying him.  He would do things like tell him to stand in a shrub or he would hit him.  He had plenty of back up too.  My son attempted to comply with this bully's demands and, naturally, he still got hit.

What is a mother to do?  Will her son look like a wuss if she shows up at the school immediately?  How did I advise him to handle it while I harboured a desire to kill the little monster who would dare touch my son?  His father was very busy at the refinery being knifed in the back himself so I felt I should handle the matter.

I gave it two weeks.  Son was upset but not damaged.  Then I made an appointment to see the principal.  In his office I asked him how it was possible that my son could be bullied under the noses of teachers?  Wasn't there supervision of the playground?

It seemed the teachers couldn't be everywhere at once but naturally they tried to supervise.  But this is when it got weird.  The principal started to wax enthusiastically about the bully.  He said such things as: "Bradley is such a bright boy, I'd really like to put him in a higher grade where he could be more intellectually challenged."

He kept on along this line for some time while I attempted to overcome yet another feeling of unreality and lift my jaw off the ground to where it had fallen.  I don't have to tell you what mothers are like.  It is a wonder I didn't throttle this moron.

Instead I hissed: "I'd teach him some manners first," before storming out of his office.

If this happened today I'd be able to report him to the Department of Education.  Fortunately for him, I've forgotten his worthless name.  I also like to imagine what might have happened to Bradley.  I like to think he is in gaol or a drug dealer or both.  My son became a Veterinary Surgeon.  What some school principals may see as a child's creative frustration channeled into aggression may just be a lack of intelligence or empathy.

It is worth noting that whenever the principal caught sight of me around this small town afterwards he would hide.  I was once in the Video shop and he hid out of sight behind some shelves.  Such was the fine stuff in charge of little minds.

My next course of action was the one I didn't want to take.  I had to talk to the bully's mother and father.  Father was at work or hiding inside the house, so I spoke to the most ferocious member of any family, the mother.  We had that in common at least.

I informed her of events as delicately as possible but she didn't take kindly to what I had to say.  Her little bully had never bullied anyone.  In fact my son had bullied her younger son.  That remark was so utterly ludicrous, and no I didn't have wool over my eyes, I realised she was either deluded or that attack was the best means defense.

After this she ordered all the cul-de-sac women to ostracise me.  Even the two who were decent types did so out of fear because they lived there permanently.  If they thought this bothered me one iota, it did not.  I had work to do on my studies and at the radio station, which allowed me to remain unaffected by this nonsense.

Now my husband and I looked around at other schools in the area.  The choice was limited to another public primary and one Catholic school.  The Catholic one seemed more promising as we felt there would be better discipline.  In the meantime bully backed off having been outed.

My husband, however, was going through a campaign of resistance at work.  These guys just didn't want to let the new Project Manager in, even though the previous one had left of his own accord.  Obviously the second in command had his eyes on the job and had been overlooked.

I also didn't make myself popular with the General Manager who drove from his office in Adelaide to make his visits to site.  He was Iranian and married to an Australian woman.  On one occasion he took my husband and I out to dinner and, in the course of conversation, boasted that he had driven his high powered car at 140 kilometres an hour for most of the journey.

By this time I was fed up with idiots and let him have it in no uncertain terms.  I have no patience with fools who put the lives of others at risk because of their egos.  The town had finally pushed me to the limit and I simply didn't hold my tongue.

I wasn't popular and did my husband no favour with his company.  The whole town had a bad vibe and I wondered if everyone in it was possessed.  In the end the best course of action was to leave and go back to Perth of course.  Well, I'd almost escaped it once, I would again, but nothing was worth letting our son grow up in that environment.

Our family had lived in many places but, to this day, this town seems like something out of a horror movie.  I treasure my memories, good and bad, but if there is one I would cheerfully delete, it is this one.

END.