The first time I was complicit in inflicting public humiliation on someone has left a strong enough impression on me to be writing about it thirty-five years later. For various reasons, complicity in group-think and mass ‘houndings’ have been on my mind a lot over the last few years. What motivates someone to join in? Can it happen by accident? Does that matter? How does one apologise? Would the hounded even view you as being complicit, or would they wonder what on earth you were talking about if you sent them a fretful, apologetic email, or an in-person mea culpa?
You, small thing, carrying such guilt! Surely it is self-indulgent to presume your small act could reach the lofty heights of contributing to someone else’s character-shaping life experience?
I do not know what impact we – nor I – had on Jason1. When I was in his company in April 2020 I wasn’t aware I was in his company until afterwards, and the situation was not one conducive to bringing up early childhood memories.
If I were to fully explain to Jason why I got involved, though, it would have to start with Harriet. The most popular and confident girl in our small town primary school, with patent leather shoes that caused me quiet envy, though I did not quite have the words for that yet. I want them was something I knew, alongside projecting this admiration for Harriet’s footwear towards the girl herself. I did not have her boisterous confidence and found it beguiling.
The shyness I already had before starting school had only increased, partly due to a series of unfortunate events that had marked me rather early on as a total weirdo. One of the first was when, in primary one, I had wet myself and tried to blame it on Douglas, a farmer’s boy who sat beside me in the boy-girl-boy-girl seating plan Mrs Hunter – who was both our classroom teacher and Headmistress of the school – had implemented from day one. Douglas’s howls of indignation at my lie were wholly justified. Sobbing, as the pool collected under my seat and into my own shoes (which were not shiny patent leather) he stood up and protested loudly to Hunter:
Miss! Miss! It’s not me, it’s not me, look! It’s her, not me!
The humiliation of wetting myself aside, this massive fib I had tried out, implicating an innocent peer no less, hadn’t exactly endeared me in the eyes of my peers. I’d also caught the attention of Mandy, a massive, towering girl who would end up becoming one of my tormentors throughout my entire school career. Come the early nineties – and secondary school – Mandy and her crew would taunt me with ‘Lemon!’ (an Ayrshire term, at the time, for ‘lesbian’) and ‘Virgin lips!’ A virgin lesbian, in other words, in a secondary school where it was a toss-up between which was the worst to be.
I ended up being on amicable terms with Harriet when we were in our mid-teens, but in primary school, while Mandy’s power came from her ability to induce terror, largely due to her propensity for violence, Harriet’s power came from cruelty of another kind. She was a terrible show-off. I find this a forgivable attribute in most nowadays (I have worked in the performing arts, after-all.) But Harriet showed off in order to make others feel bad about themselves.
Or perhaps this is latent projection. I do still covet those shoes…
At any rate, Miss Brooke, my primary two teacher – who I still remember very fondly – had taken it upon herself to try to encourage me to overcome my shyness. I had few friends aside from daughters of my mother’s friends, most of whom were in different year groups or who attended either the Catholic or Protestant primary schools at the bottom of our small, Ayrshire town. The playgrounds of those primary schools were separated by a wall and in later years I would come to understand that rivalry and bullying between the two cohorts was not rooted in inexplicable loyalty to their specific attendance in what were arbitrary buildings to me, but due to something far older and dangerous.
Harriet lived quite close to those schools, but was driven up the hill every morning to our school, the non-denominational primary for whoever wanted their child to attend. There was the Lord’s Prayer and a guitar-playing bearded minister, but God was a fluffy story, a background fiction, neither wholly pushed or rejected just lightly there. As was Harriet’s obvious wealth compared to most of the class. I was middle-class myself, something else I did not yet have the words for. But Harriet’s wealth was ostentatious. It was shiny. In a town like ours, it did not yet cause her problems, though it would, but as a child it brought her confidence.
So when Miss Brooke, encouraging me out of my shyness, asked me to pick one of the girls to approach to ask if I could play with them, instead of sitting on my own at break as I always did, I picked Harriet. She was playing a skipping game with a few of her friends. Miss Brooke urged me to go over and waited anxiously on the sidelines. I approached tentatively.
“Harriet…?”
The girls kept skipping.
“Excuse me, Harriet…?”
“Haw, Harriet, she’s wantin’ tae speak tae yoo.”
So interjected one of Harriet’s friends. Harriet looked at me.
“What?”
Her tone is what I would now call bemused and incredulous. At the time, all I knew was that my attempting to speak to this shiny queen, with my stupid pigtails and sweaty nervousness was, to her, ridiculous.
“Can I… can I play with you?” I asked.
Her friend laughed. Harriet looked at me curiously for a second and then she and her friends simply resumed their game, ignoring me steadfastly. I looked back at Miss Brooke, who looked crestfallen as I started to make my way back to her, red-faced and near-sobbing.
Harriet got in trouble for that, I remember. A scolding about how it isn’t nice to exclude people and it’s important for everyone to try to make friends. I recall enforced skipping games the following lunchtime, with Miss Brooke directing proceedings. Over time, though, even a child can work out that it is only to prolong the humiliation to be tolerated as an uncool irritant by people who would rather you let them be. My solo lunchtimes would resume.
On one such lunchtime, Harriet and her friends were continuing the work they had commenced at that day’s morning interval, which, under Harriet’s command, was to make The World’s Longest Daisy Chain. An impressive chain had already been created, as Harriet bossed a group of ten girls to assist. I sat watching them from the steps, when loud shouts came from behind me. Mrs Hunter, the formidable Headmistress, was shouting at Jason, a boy from the council housing scheme next to the school, an alien place to me that I had always found fascinating, with its identikit grey rows of houses. It had one of those Orwellian names, like Hope Village, or Grandeur Heights, which belied the reality of the rural poverty that I would come to recognise blighted the small Ayrshire town I grew up in.
Jason was kicking the walls as Mrs Hunter roared at him –
“Get into the Open Area, right NOW!”
Their exchange became muffled and I lost interest. Jason was always in trouble, when he was even in class. If I’d given him much thought before that day, it would have been as one of the identical and interchangeable boys I was deeply scared of, with their strong Scots and impressive command of swear-words, or their aggressive games and dares in the playground.
Mrs Hunter came bursting into the playground a few minutes later. She looked furious and marched over to Harriet. I could not hear the exchange, but watched as Harriet nodded proudly, and she and her ten friends stood up. Mrs Hunter lined them up, the daisy chain strung out in a line between them. She marched them to the school door.
“Wait! Stop!” she then roared, seeing that the daisy chain was dragging at the end of the line, at risk of snapping or being spoiled. “You!” she barked at me. “Get up and hold the end of this!”
You didn’t say no to Hunter. I dutifully got up and did so, trying to ignore the sneer of the little girl in front of me, a girl called Gillian who, earlier that day had been chasing pupils she didn’t like around the playground, hitting them on the arm and saying Ha! Tag! You’ve got AIDS! This was the 1980s and I recall conflicting messages that AIDS patients were deserving of their suffering, a tombstone advert that haunted me as something to avoid, but little understanding of what ‘gay’ meant. AIDS, to me, was a condition one had somehow brought on oneself by defiance of the vague God I’d heard about; also from my mother, it was an appalling illness that was blighting lives and freedoms for some of her friends, and, at the same time I was learning that, for Gillian, it seemed to be a game of tag, something she wanted to inflict on people she disliked. In this schoolyard of an arena, where we were not yet a decade into this life, I hope both my ignorance and Gillian’s prejudice may be forgivable.
We were marched into the Open Area, where Jason sat, slouching on a hard, plastic chair, scowling at the floor. He was bigger than most boys his age, and I remember thinking how old he looked compared to we tiny girls who Hunter lined up in front of him.
“Jason! Look at this! LOOK.”
At Hunter’s command, a sullen eye took us all in. When Jason’s gaze fell on me at the end of the line, I reddened and looked at the floor. What is happening?
“This is what can be created by people working together! Not by stupid little boys who go around graffitiing silly things on the library books!”
I cannot recall how long we were made to stand there, humiliating Jason with our false camaraderie. Our delicate, fragile lie strung out between our hands. But I do recall the thoughts of a child. This isn’t right. This didn’t happen. I wasn’t part of this.
I doubt that, in that moment, that would have mattered to Jason.
*
My ultimate ambition as I navigated the calls of ‘Virgin lips!’ and incessant bullying in high school was to get as far away from Ayrshire, and all of those Mandys and Gillians, as I could. I had overcome much of my shyness, largely through going to the local youth theatre, where I experienced popularity for the very first time. I wanted to write, to perform, to be in a band, to keep writing lyrics. I’d write a novel! I’d become famous! I would one day have my own little apartment with plenty of cats and I would write, write, write, in between fascinating trips around the world! I would find The One and he (I had not yet fully embraced the option for ‘she’ yet) would worship my every word!
I retain my teenage diaries. It is a little mortifying.
And so at seventeen years old, I left for Edinburgh, a full student loan seeming a fortune to me. It was quickly dribbled away on bad lager in music bars, before I dropped out of my university course in a hail of academic failure to pursue minimum wage jobs and performing at open mic nights. It would be some time before I would describe myself as a ‘poet’, and by that time I had smoothed out my Ayrshire brogue, and pronounced it ‘poet’ as opposed to ‘poyit’ as I always had done. I poshed up, finding that whatever poshness Harriet and I were deemed to possess by the likes of Mandy, was as nothing to what I was to encounter in Edinburgh’s literary world.
I brought with me from the west the same feelings that had been aroused in me by Harriet’s patent leather shoes. I want what they have. Being self-taught and a poet (or poyit) of the performance variety, it would take about a decade for what is now referred to as ‘spoken word’ to gain mainstream popularity of the sort that could even feasibly provide money for cats, rent, and the room of one’s own that provides the stability or mindset conducive to dedicated focus on one’s craft. I was immensely and gratefully privileged for some years to have the ability to do this, but, losing the envy, I had long known that focusing just on my own work was not sufficient; I had struggled through the sector due to a lack of money, connections, opportunities that included my style of poetry-performance, and very few mentors. We had all been largely making it up as we went along, and even making a living out of it had not been a major focus as that seemed as much of a pipedream as ever having a pension. For as long as I had been performing, I had therefore dedicated myself to creating events and platforms for likeminded writers and poets to share their work.
I returned to live under Ayrshire’s big skies in March 2020, just as Covid made its way to us, bringing with it plenty of time cooped up in whatever room one had found oneself in. I was luckier than most. Though reeling from the devastation of a public humiliation of my own in the literary world, which, unlike Jason’s, had been witnessed by far more than one cruel headmistress and ten cackling wee girls, I found myself greeting lockdown with absolute relief. Stop had been a word I’d been uttering for some time. Just stop this, please stop, just stop.
Through an extraordinary sequence of events, I had found myself on the property ladder, with a spacious two bedroomed flat near both the river and the beach, for myself and my curmudgeonly old rescue cat to make our own – albeit in a town I had promised myself I would never return to. I read stories of devastation and loneliness; increases in domestic violence; teenagers becoming radicalised by so much time spent online instead of at school; mothers frantically trying to work from home, dealing with unreasonable demands from their kids’ teachers; I also read of people who gave up entirely. And I, selfish in my grief for my old world, turned inwards for some time. I would walk the deserted, shuttered high street, the ghost town of my old youth, past the boarded up church that had housed my former youth theatre; past the music-now-barber shop I had worked in as a teen. I would visit the river where I, sick of school, sick of the bullying, used to visit when I was truanting, when, at my worst, I had a recorded 56% attendance rate. There was a circularity in all of this – the fleeing and returning, the identical reasons for both – that appeals to the narratives we all tell ourselves about life’s meaning in the absence there is a simple answer to that question. This all happened for a reason, and in that reason perhaps there will be beauty, and from that beauty there is a reason to keep going.
*
Social media, particularly Twitter/X, is the ultimate Open Area to display the haughtiness and arrogance of a claim to have made ‘the world’s longest daisy chain.’ Whether you are as Harriet, commanding orders to admiring fans, who may truly believe in your mission or simply want to show their appreciation for your confident proclamations (or footwear); or as Gillian, someone wickedly delighted by a chance for cruelty; or, as I was, stood at the end not quite realising what I was getting involved in or supporting when I agreed to carry the end of the chain, it is a decivilizing arena of tribalism, and every single one of us is complicit in that whether we join its battlefields or turn our eyes away from its carnage.
As the philosopher Nina Power has written, “It takes an immense amount of training, conditioning and time to ‘civilize’ humanity.”2 It took an immense amount of time to ‘civilize’ each and every one of us. It would take experiences of humility to stop Harriet lording it over the class, and experiences of solidarity for me to stop being such a reclusive, timid, total weirdo. Social media, however, has robbed us of much of the things we human beings require as avidly communicating, social animals, who perhaps at heart simply desperately require someone to tell us we are loved and wanted. We are all as Harriet there, no matter who we are. I cringe, often, at realising my own tone, as I enter the battlefield my current Mandys and Gillians have made for me. I do try, always, not to be as Gillian, delighting in cruelty and giggling wickedly as the daisy chain is used to humiliate my enemies. In truth, though, I have. I have been complicit in holding the chain of other’s humiliations too, not realising, for example, that some subtweet or other thread insulting an unnamed individual is in fact a cruel and untrue narrative about a dear friend.
I do not know what it took to stop Jason from graffitiing books, nor what it took to stop him punching walls, truanting school, or, indeed, if he ever did. What I do know is that, should those changes have occurred in him, this was not due to a fragile lie and shiny smuggery, nor can I imagine such change occurred by an adult woman yelling insults at a troubled child.
*
It is April 2020 and we are gathered around the grave of my maternal grandmother, carrying out the ritual to lay to rest my maternal grandfather who died in his sleep four days after I returned to Ayrshire. It was he who, alongside a government scheme for first-time buyers, had made it possible for me to escape Edinburgh. It will always be of enormous regret to me that he did not live to see me healed of the misery that had been the cause of my departure from a city I loved.
He had tasked me with writing the poem for his funeral, as I had for my grandmother two years previously. Unlike at my grandmother’s funeral, however, in April 2020 there can be no service, no minister, no prayers. There are few words other than that of the funeral director. He stands socially-distanced from his colleagues, who will shortly lower my grandfather’s coffin into the ground on top of my grandmother’s, and says a few kind words about the family that is gathered. It is then over to me to share my final gift to my Papa. I struggle through it. It is far from a work of literary genius but I like to think he would have enjoyed it. It includes the lines –
You fell asleep for the final time
in the room you gifted stories to us
My Papa had been an avid storyteller when we were children. He invented tales of magical caravans that transported someone to different and exciting lands, always including us – my younger sister and older brother – as main characters in both underwater adventures and enchanted forests. Elsewhere in the poem I write:
we’re gathered here
strangely for now
though hands cannot be held
we are the cords
Covid restrictions mean we are not permitted to lower the coffin ourselves. Nor are we permitted to hug, hold hands, nor even to embrace our grieving mother. We each throw a single rose into my Papa’s grave after my poem concludes the service. Nobody seems sure what to do, though we make our way to the church car park and stand awkwardly four feet apart from each other, a small group of less than ten, until, condolences offered by other relatives having been doled out, I am left in the company of my immediate family. We do, of course, plan to break the rules. Given my mother and I both live alone, and have had scant contact with anyone for weeks, I will be going back to her house to give as big a wake as possible for a man who deserved a full house for his final send-off.
My sister leaves, and just as my brother is about to do the same he says –
“Hey, did you recognise the guy next to the funeral director?”
I hadn’t been able to focus on anything apart from getting my poem out and said I hadn’t even really glanced at any of them, never mind looking intently at them. Who was it?
“Remember that kid at school? The one who was always getting in fights? He was in my year but then got kept back and was in your class? Jason.”
Jason held a cord I wish I had been permitted to. He taught me an early and character-shaping lesson to at least attempt not to be complicit in bullying, hounding, or humiliating others, nor to stand by while someone is treated to public abuse on the basis of fragile lies or misrepresentations. I hope he will forgive me now as I apologise profusely for having held a chain that I wish I had felt a choice to refuse.
Notes
1: All names have been changed.
2: Power, Nina (2022) What do Men Want: Masculinity and its Discontents (London: Penguin) p. 58
Jenny Lindsay is a writer, poet, performer, and essayist based in Ayrshire, Scotland. Her film-poem The Imagined We won the inaugural John Byrne award for Critical Thinking in 2020, and she was shortlisted for the Anne Brown Essay Prize in 2024. She has written poetry and prose for numerous publications and anthologies as diverse as the Irish Pages, The Spectator, The Australian, the Lyceum Theatre, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Her debut nonfiction book, Hounded:Women, Harms and the Gender Wars was published by Polity in 2024 to high-acclaim. Charting the psychological, social, economic and democratic harms that are caused by the ‘hounding’ of gender critical feminists, it has been described as “one of the most important political books ever to have been written about Scottish culture and politics,” by The Herald, and as “one of the definitive chronicles of these times,” by author JK Rowling.