told me that I was over reacting and that little Rhodes needed toughening up.
I can’t remember exactly how long James continued the activity, but I do remember him begging me not to send him to the Gym on more than one occasion. I also remember explaining, that because his parents had opted for this paid activity, I couldn’t take him out of it without their permission. I spoke to James’ Mum about this and she too had noticed that he wasn’t particularly ‘himself’ and that he appeared withdrawn at home. She was a lovely lady who adored her 2 sons but I can’t remember the activity being cancelled for him. I sat in that Gym week after week. I thought I was protecting him. One day he returned to the classroom after having helped Mr Lee tidy up and he had blood on his legs. I questioned him, but he never said a word, just cried quietly. I took him home that day and we played the piano together.
James left my care in the July to enter the Senior department. He no longer had me to protect him. It was frowned upon when the boys became 7+ for teachers to ‘mother’ them. I saw this once happy, confident child become paler and paler as time went on. He was a very unhappy boy and didn’t stay the course until he was 13, but was moved to another school when he was about 9 or 10. My colleagues in the Senior School just said he was very unhappy – that was the reason for leaving.
I next saw James when he was 11 at Harrow School and competing in a Piano competition. My Godson was in the same competition. James struck me as a very troubled young man. I later heard he had had some sort of breakdown. I have recently read an article in the Sunday Times about James who is now an accomplished concert pianist. I was appalled to read that in the interview he referred to being seriously abused by a teacher at his primary school.
I felt sick with the remembrance of it. I am wracked with guilt for not realising the hell that James must have been going through. I tried to protect him from what I thought was physical nastiness. It never occurred to me in my naivety that anything of a sexual nature was occurring. I am in touch with James again. He has confirmed the sexual abuse and asked me to name the teacher who hurt him so badly. I got the name right.
Sadly, now I look back, James might not have been the only victim. There were several children who were fearful of Mr Lee and because of that I banned all children from my Junior School from going to his Boxing activity at the end of that year. I was regarded as an over protective female by my male colleagues. Thank God I was.
I am desperately sorry that James has suffered so deeply and for so long. I am also immensely proud that he has come through this and out the other side. He deserves every success and happiness in life. Scars and deep wounds sometimes make us stronger.
I write all this because I know I have to go to the Police. Mr Lee might still be alive. He might still be involved with children, even his own grandchildren. It is my view that he is a danger to young people. As a Minster in the Church of England and a part time Prison Chaplain, I see the effects that serious abuse has on the lives of young people. May God be the judge of these people who ruin the lives of others.
Chere Hunter
So there we are. My very own fight club. As Tyler Durden has taught us, the first rule of fight club is we never talk about fight club. And I didn’t. For almost thirty years. And now I am. Because fuck you if you’re one of the people who think I shouldn’t.
There’s quite a lot to unpack in the police statement above. There’s a lot of insinuation but no real facts about the abuse. Abuse. What a word. Rape is better. Abuse is when you tell a traffic warden to fuck off. It isn’t abuse when a forty-year-old man forces his cock inside a six-year-old boy’s ass. That doesn’t even come close to abuse. That is aggressive rape. It leads to multiple surgeries, scars (inside and out), tics, OCD, depression, suicidal ideation, vigorous self-harm, alcoholism, drug addiction, the most fucked-up of sexual hang-ups, gender confusion (‘you look like a girl, are you sure you’re not a little girl?’), sexuality confusion, paranoia, mistrust, compulsive lying, eating disorders, PTSD, DID (the shinier name for multiple personality disorder) and on and on and on.
I went, literally overnight, from a dancing, spinning, gigglingly alive kid who was enjoying the safety and adventure of a new school, to a walled-off, cement-shoed, lights-out automaton. It was immediate and shocking, like happily walking down a sunny path and suddenly having a trapdoor open up and dump you into a freezing cold lake.
You want to know how to rip all the child out of a child? Fuck him.
Fuck him repeatedly. Hit him. Hold him down and shove things inside him. Tell him things about himself that can only be true in the youngest of minds before logic and reason are fully formed and they will take hold of him and become an integral, unquestioned part of his being.
My mum, bless her, didn’t notice or didn’t want to notice anything was wrong. I don’t blame her. She was a young, naive mother, overwhelmed with life and desperately trying to keep her shit together despite being a Valium-resistant insomniac with a family to look after and no rule book. It was all she could do to get up in the mornings, get food on the table and stay upright until 11 p.m. She was and is an incredibly empathic, generous and loving woman, and she was facing a horrific situation in the best and only way she knew how.
I’m not going to write about the sex in detail. For a number of reasons. Some of you might read it and use it to fantasise about. Some of you might read it and judge me for getting a boner at the time (on occasion). Some of you will read it and just feel nauseous and indignant. But most of all I don’t want to go into detail because I don’t think I’ll make it out the other side if I do, especially when you can just buy a copy of the Daily Mail if you’ve the urge to feel titillated, nauseous or judgmental. Cheaper, quicker, less traumatic for me.
The point of sharing those sticky, toxic words is simply this: that first incident in that locked gym closet changed me irreversibly and permanently. From that moment on, the biggest, truest part of me was quantifiably, sickeningly different.
TRACK THREE
Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, Second Movement
Ashkenazy, Zukerman, Harrell Trio
A few months before his death in 1828 at the age of thirty-one, Schubert completed a fifty-minute-long trio for piano, violin and cello. He had led a short, miserable, broken life with music providing the sole counterpoint to his wretchedness. Schubert was constantly broke, relying on friends for food, lodging and cash. He was invariably unhappy in love, not helped by being short, ugly and over-sensitive to slights both real and imagined. And yet, despite being a walking, talking car crash, he was aggressively prolific – he wrote more than twenty thousand bars of music in his eighteenth year alone, composed nine symphonies (Beethoven had only written one by the age of thirty-one), over six hundred songs, twenty-one piano sonatas and endless chamber music.
The vast majority of his output wasn’t performed until after his death, but this trio was. Chamber music was much easier to perform in private homes than orchestral music, and some homes in Vienna would host regular Schubertiades – informal evenings of his music, together with poetry readings and dancing. In 1828 the trio was given a first performance at one of these evenings (put on to celebrate a friend’s engagement). The slow movement encapsulates perfectly a life too short-lived – funereal and dark, tinged with hope and an insight into the infinite potential of genius.
Written by one of the only composers since Mozart who could conceive and compose an entire work in his head before scribbling it down on paper, this is the soundtrack of a man so depressed he started out his student
