Cinderella retold: emotional cruelty law must not forget that perpetrators are victims too

I had just started junior school when I had my first bout of depression.  It must have lasted six months. I felt sick all the time. I would be watching cartoons with a sense of dread; anxiety would stop me sleeping, worrying about things I knew very little about: exams; the future; death. But the thing that plagued me the most was being found out as a LIAR.  Oh god, that fear haunted me for years and has made me incapable of telling a lie, even to save someone’s feeling.

It had started out as a game. A little light fantasising about my life, a bit of exaggeration in front of the kids at school. I was, in any case, confused by my circumstances. My dad had made good his business and would talk to me in terms of being an heiress, which turned out to be basically just nonsense because he later remarried a woman who’s made damn sure there won’t be much left behind – in any case, my London mews is outstripping my Dad’s suburban mansion by a capital mile, so I probably don’t need to worry about it any more.

But for a time, in my middle childhood, we’d go on posh holidays and lived in an orange bricked, six bedroomed eighties pile, all pillared porch, automatic gates,  two jacuzzis and a sauna. My mum, on the weekends she had us, would take us horse riding where we learned that such things as ‘the pony club” existed, I would read Mallory Towers and hang out with kids who went to private schools and had different slang so I could pretty much get away with faking being posher than I was, which was, essentially, just a first generation self-made middle class C of E primary school kid from Kent who ate cheese on toast for tea and was instructed by my step mother, Jane, not to use more than two sheets of toilet roll at a time to save money. So I might have talked myself up a bit, aged seven. Whatever, I was convinced I would be found out, and it made me sick to the soul.

But at the same time, I started to be picked on, probably for good reason, by my childminders’ kids, and then, subtly by my childminder. She would give her own children better snacks, let them out to play with their friends while we would have to stay inside, turn a blind eye when they called me names. I’d get blamed for things I hadn’t done – nothing massively sinister, but she was too willing to believe her children’s version of events, and then, too willing to tell my stepmother, who was in turn, too willing to listen and send me to bed early as punishment. The sense of unfairness was overwhelming.

It wasn’t really her fault either. Jane was raising two kids who weren’t her own with little emotional support from my father who was too busy building his business to pay her much attention. There were times when she would take it out on my sister Katie and me. Not often –  most of the time she was kind and rather meek, but she had a temper brought on by terrible periods and resulting migraines, and the fact her endometriosis meant she would never have children of her own. But it was enough for us to know she wasn’t always entirely on our side.

I began to notice that other people had mums who would pick them up from school, who would come on school trips and help out at fetes. I began to really miss my own motherin a way I’d barely noticed when I was still at nursery. Wednesdays were sweet relief because my grandparents would pick us up in their orange Reliant with a Kit Kat, rather than having to walk in the opposite direction to our house with the childminder and her children, where we would watch Sons and Daughters on the telly while they had their tea, waiting for Jane to come back from an exhausting day as a nursery teacher – a job that paid for our posh holidays –  pick us up and take us home. The 3rd Fridays when Mum would come to pick us up and take us 100 miles to West Berkshire, I’d find myself crying tears of relief, despite our stepfather’s more assertive attempts to undermine us.

I began to struggle at school. I’d always been considered a bright kid, partly because I spoke nicely, and partly because I was one of the oldest. When our first year junior school teacher Mrs White, perhaps out of some vaguely liberal arts background, perhaps out of laziness, let us mark our own maths work – we had those Peak Maths Books with the answers at the back – I kinda started not really learning so well. At the time, I branded myself a cheater, but now I realise that is you provide an eight year old with the answers to maths problems and they probably won’t be able to provide their working out. In any case, I slipped behind. It probably only went on for a few weeks, but I developed an all consuming fear of being found out, and a fear of maths more generally. Eventually I confessed, when the guilt began to chew on me  till I couldn’t think of anything else.

Mrs White, who was overweight, and dare I say, a lesbian – apropos of nothing except she was butch and not particularly maternal towards her charges – decided to make an example of me. I was already not her favourite pupil. I’d crossed her once before when I described Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French as ‘those fat ladies’  when they did their comic relief video with Bananarama. On that occasion, she stood me up in front of the class and told everyone that I didn’t like fat people, which was rubbish. One of my best friends, who was herself on the tubby dude, promptly stopped speaking to me. The scapegoat effect of being singled out for public humiliation was acute, and I remember the PE lesson that came afterwards spent flushed with avoidance and white hot shame. Shortly afterwards I plummeted off a pummel horse and broke my arm in order to get out of one of these ‘liberal dance’ classes that Mrs White was fond of, in which she would play Jean Michelle Jarre and sit on her arse while we leapt around like loons in our vests and knickers.

On the occasion of the confession, she stood me on a chair no less, and announced to the class that I’d been cheating – as a warning of what would happen to anyone else (probably most of the class) who had been doing the same – and a chance to assuage any guilt she had about failing in her duty as a teacher and mark our work herself. She made no attempt to help me catch up, and to this day I break out in a hot sweat if ever I am called upon to perform mental arithmetic.

The thing is, though, none of these women would think they were being particularly cruel. Even viewed through the lens of  a quarter of a century (and the world has tended to become kinder to children in general,) it’s hard to call this bullying, and yet I felt bullied. But they would have seen it as merely doing their jobs, given the difficulties of raising children who are not yours, or making a point in a room full of sweaty eight years olds who only ever take in 5 percent of what you say.

And the fact is, people only become bullies when they have been bullied themselves. They are simply acting out the power structures of their own childhood. When the tables are turned and they have the power – often women over children, where they weren’t empowered any other way –  it’s hard to stay impartial and balanced all the time. God knows, I spent two years looking after other people’s kids to pay the bills when Tom was out of work. It’s hard to stay as patient with them when they’re testing your boundaries and pulling your strings as with your own, however fair your principles. When one of the kids I looked after routinely soiled himself day after day, I know there were moments I lost my cool. Not often, but enough to know I was human. Being aware of what it felt like to be discriminated against in favour of someone’s own kids isn’t always enough to prevent it happening when you’re suddenly in the driving seat. Instead,  I felt a rush of empathy for my erstwhile despised childminder, sympathy for my poor step-mum, even a touch of understanding about my poor primary school teacher who, with her artistic sensibilities had probably had bigger ambitions than supervising a room full of garrulous children.

But even then, a child of divorced parents, she must have known that I was privy to other people’s stress. It’s hard not to see that this made me an easier target. I had no other around who would stride in and set things straight, stand up for me where I could not.

But when I went pale and tearful having spilt paint on my dress one day, Mrs White wrote a note to my step mum, telling her how worried I was about it. Jane was LIVID, accusing me of badmouthing her to my teacher, though in point of fact, Jane had always overreacted about stains – handing me a scrubbing brush and Vanish soap bar to remove the slightest blots, on more than one occasion. In these moments, I would feel like Cinderella, being shouted at by a wicked stepmother for not having done a good enough job. But the point of the Cinderella story is that no one ever mentions why the stepmother was in such a precarious position that she would champion her own children above her husband’s; why Jane would feel overworked to the point of temper washing yet another school dress soiled by a child that was not her own.

The child is mother to the woman and inside every person who can’t help themselves being unfair to a child is a child who feels hard done by themselves one way or another. And a law against emotional cruelty must account for that, to help break the cycle of guilt and neglect rather than passing on an even heavier burden to women who already have enough on their hands.

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