hell is other people's mothers

There’s a frigid woman at school, startling white jeans, Playmobil hair and crossed arms clamped firmly across her chest. She is one of my arch enemies. I doubt she even knows my name. Why should she? I have merely driven her 2 hooligans from an after school class for a year without recognition, let alone reciprocation. It’s not that which I hate her for, and let’s not think hate’s too strong a word here, but that her nasty little son is one of 2 tormenters of F10. She's bred a brute, doesn't know it, doesn't care. As long as her Merc keeps going, life is sweet.

F10 is a complex beast. He does beautiful, intricate drawings, he is fascinated by nature, his mental arithmetic is startling. He dresses up in a suit, an Indiana Jones hat and my Jasper Conran elbow length gloves to watch ‘Poirot.’ Eccentric is the word, random. He can also be maddening, argumentative and with a wearing sense of his own rectitude. He aint your average 10 year old and is a quandary too far for many of his classmates. It’s not a good mix.
Mercifully many of T12’s friends love him; for them he is “The Ledge.”
“F10’s hair is ledge,” said W12 yesterday wistfully, ruffling his own black mess, “that’s what I aspire to.”
“What?” I said, “a crazy wig in need of a radical re-think?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s ledge.”

Meanwhile white-jeans Mum (the original ice maiden who, when once she tried a smile had to spend a week in recovery), has spawned a toxic pram toy of a boy who squeaks malevolently and is chief toad in opposition to my F10. What he does not get he seeks to destroy.
His co-general is a squat lout with a plasticky quiff and the cold pale eyes of a killer fish, 4th child of a troll-goat (down to the purple hair and stumpy legs). The family have a genetic misfortune to look as if they have been thumped on the head with a hammer. I’m trying to work it into conversation.

Last week, for whatever misguided reason, F10 took to school with him his precious ring. Had I but known, I would have wrestled it from him, I would have undergone wounds from cross claws to keep it safe and out of sight.
I can only imagine that he had a very different outcome in mind when sliding it into his pocket. In his mind’s eye, he would have revealed the ring, expecting an admiring intake of breath. The ring would glow bright, drawing all near. Perhaps one boy would have dared to ask if he could touch it. F10 might graciously have conceded. An eager audience would have gathered, each craning for a glimpse of The Ring. It would be the talk of the playground.
He was wrong.

The scenario unfolded in a very different way.
Out came the ring. F10 nursed it tenderly, shyly.
“It’s crap,” squeaked Toxic Pram Toy.
“Yeah,” mocked Plastic Quiff Troll, “Crap.”
“Spazzy.”
A round of laughter at the heady wit.
“I bought it from the museum,” F10 said, rallying with the wrong rally.
“Should be in a bin.”
“It’s trash, rubbish.”
“Stupid.”
“Sad.”
“Stupid, ugly ring, crap.”
"Sucker."

They all joined in, thoughtless safety in the pack, careless power in numbers; it went on for some time.

For in addition to the leaders, as powerful as Roman Emperors within their fiefdoms – although as yet without the authority to confer senatorship on their gerbils – there are the hapless bystanders. A depressing lot, happy to gather in the skirts of the great, anxiety to be in with the core group bleeding from every desperate pore. One, an erstwhile friend of F10’s, is the Brutus of the piece. Brutus, but in smaller shoes. Another fond mother to avoid.
I'm not saying he must be cossetted. There will always be pushing and shoving, one cannot micro-manage. They have to learn to deal with the pack. The other kids don't have to like the wretched ring. But, six of them, against one? Again.

Gollum’s intensity of fervour would have wavered beneath this jeering attack. F10 clutched his ring the tighter, and said nothing.
The story leaked in bits and pieces over the weekend. He sobbed.
“Why didn’t you Tell?” I said.
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“Was Mr J not there?” I asked, meaning the headmaster, who always wants to know when there is a fresh “incident.”
“It’s not that,” he said.

What it is is the humiliation. He cannot, could not and will not Tell because to articulate the episode would force a new reality. If it hasn’t been said by him, he can convince himself it didn’t happen and keep safe his dreams. He has already developed what the school would call Coping Strategies which are far too sophisticated for a ten year old. Those of disembodiment, of effectively writing off his time there against when things start properly at his secondary school. But whenever we suggest moving him elsewhere he is distraught. It would smack of failure, of having been driven out, of the triumph of PQT and TPT.
His teacher is fantastic, and when she telephoned me to discuss it I detected a whisper of the warpath.

I do not believe for an instance in the innocence of children. ‘Lord of the Flies’ reinforces that. Sassy and wanton, vessels of corrupted morals, shot through with deep rooted unkindness and a huge sense of their own entitlement, yes. Or so my jaded condition convinces me now.
I am not alone. A sad father spills his own story when we’re out dog walking. Many of the girls in F10’s class seem as bad, with bitchy shifting sands of allegiance. Loyalty dumped for a sleepover. Promises abandoned in return for a fiddle with a mobile phone. Do they learn it from television? I don’t know. Too much too soon and none of it nice.

I don’t think I’m blind to my own children’s faults: I could list them here and it would take some time. I am not unrealistic. They complain that we are far too strict with them. We are hot on manners, harsh on dereliction of duty. I wonder what the parents of Toxic Pram Toy and Plastic Quiff Troll are told, why aren’t they on these boys like a ton of bricks? Is it just me left feeling the anguish, suffering the night thoughts, driven to fond fantasies of tragic road accidents: an ice maiden cut short in her white jeaned prime, a troll found squashed beneath the tyres of a friendly truck.

Chatting to other children’s parents brings a warped view. For many their children seem to be gadgets, accessories, objects of great wonder who can do no wrong. Perhaps they don’t see them enough. I’d be happy to fill them in. Until that joyful day, the day of great reckoning, they are free to chuckle indulgently at feral acts and enjoy the inflated sense of their kiddies’ dubious worth. They roll their eyes, “what can one do?!”
You are supposed to collude, to bill and coo. Kids, eh. I don’t. I avoid the school gates at the moment, sullen at the thought of encountering what Sir Alan Sugar would call the whole bladdy lot of them. Anger brings eloquence and I fear what I might say.

“Don’t take your rabbit in,” (Bunsy being up there with the ring), I said to F10 when tackling his wig this morning, chasing the curls with a busy hairbrush.
“I won’t,” he promised, ruffling them up again.
The ring I’ve not seen since.