Surprise is a good tactic against bullies, says David Yates, but you still need a lot of confidence to make things better for yourself.

I should not have been in school that day. I had woken up feeling really ill but I decided to be a good boy and go in seeing as I had actually done my homework and finished an assignment that was due in by the end of the week.

While waiting for the teacher for the second lesson, I looked up to see two guys in the doorway. I had the briefest amount of eye contact with one of them and immediately knew this day was going to get a whole lot worse. Farud* and Jack* had been teasing me about my stammer and threatening to beat me up. Over the course of a few months this gradually wore away my confidence until I just let them say what they want. As much as I tried not to let their words affect me, they always did and sometimes you just cannot hide it. I saw them look at each other, so I knew they were planning something. They came to the other side of my desk.

"D D D D David..." said Jack, "Talk for us..."

I just about managed to keep control of myself at this and just looked at them questioningly, as if to say 'Why? What's the point in doing this?' Inside I was in turmoil, 'Why me? Can't they find someone else? Aaaaahhhh...'

"G G Go on David, say something," Jack repeated his request, "It'll b b b b be..."

At this point they looked at each other and burst out laughing. I actually wanted to scream in their faces at this, but controlled myself, just. They were laughing at me, getting in my face, repeating letters of words in mimicry of one part of my stammer. I must have gone red as I was starting to get really mad at them.

This mocking laughter could not have been for more than twenty seconds, but it felt like hours to me, just sitting there and taking it. And then I didn't realise what I was doing, but just reacted on instinct. I took a deep breath and heaved the table back, straight into their knees, I felt it connect with their knee caps, not excessively hard, but it must have hurt. They stumbled back and I kept pushing, trapping them between the table and the chairs, with people on them, of the table in front of me.

The look of panic in their faces was amazing. I had never seen that before, these two guys who had knocked my confidence down to nothing through sheer persistent bullying, trapped because of an automatic reaction. Farud looks angrily, if not a little desperately at me and says "If you don't let me go you little stammering...." as if 'stammering' was the worst insult he could come up with.

At that point someone let us know the teacher was on her way, and they walked out the door just as the teacher turned up, giving them inquisitive looks.

As we left the classroom to go to the library, I apologised to the people who were sat in front of me. They told me not to worry about it, that it was really harsh what Jack and Farud were doing to me.

In the library, I was surprised when I saw them again and even more surprised when they started to slowly walk over to me. I had not looked at their faces, I do not know what their expressions were but as I was trying to put across earlier, their sheer presence at this time put all sorts of worries and doubts into me. I started to panic.

I do not know if it was the presence of the two bullies or the sheer weight of people around me by then, but I started to hyperventilate, tears started to stream down my eyes as, I had just found, hyperventilating really hurts.

Luckily, somebody fetched the nurse (who happened to be the librarian) who took me out of the room to calm me down. I went home for the rest of that day, as I should have been doing anyway without ever coming into school.

Moving on

Jack eased off after that and what he did do afterwards I suppose could be regarded as general teasing rather than bullying and stopped altogether soon after. However, Farud was still trying to play the 'hard man' to his friends and continued his bullying, still accusing me of being racist despite much evidence to the contrary and focusing on my stammer. It took me quite a while realise that he would, on his own, probably not come off too well in a fight against me, not that it ever came to that, although it was quite close on a few occasions.

Despite the continued bullying, life did start to get better after that. I became friends with a few of what I always saw to be the 'cool, popular group' of my year in school and was even pretty much accepted into their group. Slowly but surely I gained some of my confidence back until I was able to take Farud's teasing pretty much on the chin and by the end of the next school year I was about the same stage in confidence I was before the bullying began.

Even if you stand up to bullies, you still have to make the effort to make things better for yourself. I am still not sure what pushed me to get out of the worst of it. To this day, I cannot stand anyone mimicking (in a bad way) or teasing me, or anyone else about stammering as I have realised it takes a whole lot of confidence in yourself to overcome a stammer and bullying will take that confidence away. These bullies are normally so ignorant that they cannot realise that beneath a person's stammer is actually a normal, everyday person who just wishes they could express themselves better. I will leave this with one of my phrases I have for life 'a person is not their stammer, they are a person who happens to stammer'.

*Names have been changed

From the Spring 2007 issue of 'Speaking Out', pages 4-5

Subsequent article by David Yates: "Ya Ya You Don't Know M Me..." - inside the head of a young person who stammers