Kicking against the bitter legacy of schoolyard bullies

Christmas may be a time for children, but not all children. Michael Hardingtries to resist the season's sentimentality that hides the truth

When I was in secondary school, there was a gang of older boys who bullied everyone. They roamed the corridors and the basements, and the showers and the toilet area, and the landings outside the dormitories, frightening other students.

They got a kick out of that; stopping smaller boys for questioning, demanding cigarettes from them, and seeking information about their parents. Stealing radios, humiliating them, and shouting orders: Come here! Stand there! Don't look at me like that! They shoved their fists into tiny cheekbones. They pushed the back of little heads against the wall.

But no one stopped them. No one chastised them. Far from it: the bullies were at the top of the tree for praise, because they were good on the football pitch.

And little boys were useless.

I saw many past pupils from my secondary school go through the rest of life struggling with alcoholism, depression and anger, because they had been treated so brutally as children.

A number of boys I knew took their own lives as adults. One jumped out a window on Christmas morning; his mother scrubbed the blood from the pavement later that afternoon. Another fellow walked into a lake. And another one dived off a roof.

It was as if the terrors of childhood triggered something inside them.

Some interior disturbance began. And an inner demon in their own mind never allowed them to be at peace again.

I have met old schoolmates in dark city bars, still depressed after all those years; still terrorised and craving some kind of peace and quiet in their hearts.

I was lucky. I dodged all adolescent traumas by devoting myself to a life of splendid isolation. I was a boy who walked alone.

Not a great way to win the hearts of girls on the school bus, but at least no one ever knew what I was thinking.

And I went fishing, with a reel and line and a little Voblex bait spinning through the brown water of Killykeen. Only then did I open a heart that was full of war. Midges in my face and geese on the far shore were all enemies. I waited for the fish to bite like a ferocious tyrant.

I made the fish suffer. They looked at me with their mouths full of hooks but I had no mercy. I battered their heads off stones. I broke their backs. My hands gripped the rod tightly, and pulled the line harshly when the bait got lodged behind the stones of the river.

I raged when the line broke, because I was out there to kill fish; to destroy and humiliate them.

I inflicted unspeakable atrocities on the little perch that came close because they thought I was feeding them. It was an easy way to cope with the world I lived in: a schoolyard of tyrants, where I was too terrified to open my mouth.

I shook my fists at the fragile things that swam in the river, and it calmed me to have something smaller that I could dominate. That was childhood! Christmas, they say is all about children. And there is no escaping the mawkish farce that is Christmas.

Every year I sit at the kitchen table on Christmas Eve and try to resist the sentimentality that hides the truth.

I brace myself for three days of over-eating, insincerity, and the preposterous sight of children gurgling with delight on the television screen, as Father Christmas with Anglo-Saxon eyes and perfect teeth, fills their socks with mobile phones, PlayStations, and oodles of other gadgets and knick-knacks.

And I try not to remember childhood too much, although I cannot control the swell that floods my eyes with tears.

I want to scream. It wasn't like that. It's never like that.

One winter long ago I walked the snow-covered road towards Cavan town.

It was St Stephen's Day. I was on my way to serve Mass. There was another boy, who came from the hills outside the town serving with me.

The sleet whipped my face as I walked around the back of the cathedral, and I saw him emerge from his father's car; an Anglia with a bale of hay sticking out of the boot.

In the sacristy we lit candles from a taper, and waited on a bench for the service to begin. "What did you get for Christmas?" I asked him.

He blushed and stared at the floor.

"A pair of wellingtons," he said.