My Story

Here we go then. I was a pupil at St Joseph's College, Birkfield, Ipswich. This blog is part of my attempt to work through what, in recent years, has become painfully obvious; that I was subjected to some serious abuse at that school by a teacher, abuse I had to blank out in order to survive. I shall refer to him as __ . I can show you the exact spot I stood on, shaking with shock and remember having to decide there and then that in order to get back to my friends and appear "normal" I was going to have to do something I instinctively felt was wrong. There was no option,  no place for what had just happened to be filed. I had to decide to try and shut down the area of my brain that dealt with memory.  It was "wrong", I knew that in my young Roman Catholic head, but not as wrong as the trauma that needed to not be true as urgently as possible and by any means possible.

My contemporaries will likely recognise the individual responsible for causing such a reaction and if any happen upon this blog and care to comment, by all means do.  I have been reading an excellent blog by Pat Mills (another former St Joseph's pupil) on Wordpress in which several similar stories have been related so I now know there was a culture of abuse; mental, emotional, physical and sexual. 

Doubtless there are many former pupils who experienced no problems whatsoever during their time at St Joseph's and I thank God that's so! In fact, one of the many contributing factors to my slowly becoming aware that something in my past was seriously awry was the fact that when comparing notes re. schooldays with the few friends I have stayed in touch with, it was always blindingly obvious that I was carrying a huge burden of grief when conversation turned to our experiences. 

Mention of __ always made me angry and I didn't know why, as I laughed along to tales of our antics. Why was I laughing when I spent every day there wanting to be somewhere else? I'd tried to remain as invisible as possible, watching the clock and desperate to get back to the safety of home. Safe, that was, until __ made it his business to "pal" up with my Dad. I recognise this now as the classic controlling tactic of the abuser. At the time, it did exactly what __ intended; it kept the fear and control level ramped up to the max so that not only in school could I be intimidated into silence but also at home.

My silence ended a year or two ago when enough memory had returned to convince me to report firstly to a rape crisis centre and then to the police.  I noticed that this guy was still around ( I'm in my 60's now but __ was just a young teacher back then) and it bothered me that he might still be abusing now. I couldn't bear the thought of some other case coming to light a few years hence with me having kept quiet now.  

I'll leave it there for today but there is so much more to tell. If you were at St. Joseph's and struggle today because of that, you have my sincere sympathies.