The small group of children who live in the flats in the surrounding blocks tend to congregate on our stairwell because the leader of their small gang lives next door to me. They're nice, polite kids. Noisy, but a bit like a kind of modern, working-class Famous Five.................without the dog.....................and without Aunt Fanny of course.
So, back to the point.
I arrived home one afternoon last summer and met two of the kids on the stairs. Mandy had obviously been given a 'Fairy Princess' dressing-up outfit complete with accessories and make-up. Who knows whose idea it was, but the outfit wasn't on Mandy, it was on Duncan, the ten-year-old from one of the surrounding flats. Complete with pink dress, make-up, tiara, and the all-important fairy wand. 'Look at me', he cried 'I'm a fairy'.
All I could think of was...................... I wonder if your parents have realised that already? I wonder if they realise that they are looking at another generation of school sissy?Being the school sissy is something that I consider myself to be a semi-expert on. Because of course, I was one of a small, but select, group of school sissies in my school year. Every academic year has them. We're eternal, a bit like the chewing-gum under the desks. As soon as one lot is gone, it's replaced by another lot.
We're the ones who love drama in every sense of the word, use new and unusual words, and hate sport in almost every shape or form. The ones who never have the right football boots, the ones who don't even know what the right football boots are or why they're the right ones. We hang around with the girls, and each other, and make funny or bitchy comments to avoid having our heads 'kicked in' on the way home from school (which usually still happens at some point to the less-street savvy sissies).
It really is a skill to be a school sissy and survive the journey to emerge from your cocoon ready for adult life. At this point you can manage your own path. Unlike your school years, you're not obliged to share space with people who dislike who you are and vice versa, and you can decide where is safe for you to go, and where isn't. And of course, you can legally wear what you want, and shag who you want (which often turns out to be those same boys who wanted to kick your head in at school. The closet-larvae are always the meanest).
In retrospect, I think I was a rather accomplished school sissy. It's not just about 'being a sissy', there are talented sissies and talentless ones. It's a bit like assuming that because someone is black they have a natural ability to sing and dance. It just doesn't work like that, just watch the X-Factor auditions (along with all the other sissies!) and you'll see what I mean.
Luckily for me, I was the proud owner of a tough, rule-breaking older sister called Linda, or Lynne or she re-branded herself. She hung out with the kids who smoked, pierced their own ears, had the latest hair-styles, and allegedly 'did it' with each other. This meant that for the first few years of secondary school, when we all start becoming more aware of the opposite sex (or the same sex in my case), sissiness, or any kind of differentness, became a bigger deal. Somehow, my sister's street-cred was off-set against my total lack of it, and instead of being way down at the bottom with the rest of the bullying material, I was elevated to a rank slightly above the swots, nerds, and common-or-garden sissies, queers, and homos (their words, not mine!).
It didn't make me any more or less sissy, but it did give me an opportunity to form a cunning survival plan to avoid having my head regularly either kicked-in or pushed down the toilet. Although, saying that, mine wasn't a particularly violent school, and bullying was pretty second-class as bullying goes. It usually involved having the contents of your bag scattered across the playing fields, being subjected to circle-taunting, or maybe just having your tie yanked downwards so violently that you had to be cut out of it by a 'grown-up'.
To get through my school years, I learned the art of 'being the funny one'. This meant that as long as you kept the bullies and the hangers-on laughing, you were safe. You had to ridicule yourself, teachers, and other sissies, swots, and nerds. I became an SWA, a Sissy With Attitude. Attack really was the best form of defence, and my defence was to create a smoke screen by playing up to the ones who were my biggest threat. I was one of the lucky few, I ranked in the top 10% of a complex hierachy of potential victims. I was a sissy, but I was a working-class sissy who lived on the council estate. I was cheeky to the teachers, and my greatest achievement was that I was once caned for throwing water. As sissies went, I was practically untouchable. Way below me were the posh sissies from the outlying villages who 'spoke proper English', the middle-class, violin or piano-playing nerds, the blazer-wearing swots ................ and of course our teachers themselves. Our teachers were just as scared as we were of the bullies and their gang, so expecting any kind of protection from them was futile. They were far too busy 'watching their own arses'. So thankfully, the bullies had far too many ripe alternatives to bother with me and my girlie ways.
Being a successful school sissy leaves you both well-prepared in some ways for adult life, and crippled in other ways.
On one hand, like fist-fighters' knuckles, it toughens you up. You have to build up a thick, protective shell to protect you from all those sticks and stones. You have to be able to cover up the feeling of sheer terror, and walk into a room with your head up and a smile on your face without appearing to care what people think or say. Perhaps that's why we sissies make such good actors, we have to learn from an early age to convincingly be someone we're not. Like a rattle-snake, you have to be able to taste danger from a long way away, function whilst in a constant state of 'attack-mode', and defend yourself at the smallest perceived threat. Maybe that's why we often run out of emotional energy and burn up or break down before other people.
But it's not all doom and gloom folks! The upside to having that tough exterior is that it protects a sweet, soft, and truly deliciously-worthwhile interior. If you can weather the journey through that spiny shell and have the patience to allow us to learn to trust you, the reward is worth the effort. We have the rare ability to love unconditionally, and that's hard to find in this life.
