Childhood Diary | The People No One Likes

An actual transcript of my real-life diary childhood diary.  Names have been changed to protect the guilty…

January 25th

Not too good a day today. The work at school was really boring and I only got 1 out of 4 in a maths test. [Maths: the absolute bane of my life…] Luna asked me to sit beside beside her at television* today. She said to me, “Its very nice to have you as a friend Amber because quite a few people don’t like you because they say your a snob. I always make a point of being friends with people nobody really likes.”

Well! As you can can imagine this really upset me. Nobodys over friendly with me but they don’t act as if they hate me, Thats all except Lucy, who does her best to be unpleasant, and Regina, who does HER best to make me jealous of her pony. Regina chatted on about horses to Miss R and made me feel awful as everyone in the class now thinks of Regina as the horse lover, whereas they used to used to think of me as it. Earlier in the day Miss R (my teacher) kept shouting at me because I got a fact wrong at progect [The spelling of the word ‘project’, perhaps?] and to top it all she’s given us homework which 1) I dont understand and 2) I don’t know whether its to be handed in for Tuesday or Wednesday. I phoned up Luna and she says its for Wednesday so if its really for Tuesday and I get into a row I’ll just say that I ‘phoned Luna and she said it was for Wednesday.

Anyway. I’ve had a pretty depressing day as you probably guessed and writing about it has just made me realise what an awful day its been. Swimming and riding tomorrow so I’ll end this long story to go and get my swimming kit ready.

Amber Louise McNaught

I’ll write tomorrow if I remember.

* * *

Comments from Current Me…

First of all: LOL at me thinking THAT was a “long story”. Oh, just wait until you start blogging, young Padawan!

Secondly, ‘Television’ was basically when the teacher wanted a break, or ran out of things to do with us, and so she’d sit us down in front of something “educational” on TV. If we were really lucky, we might get something like The Never Ending Story, instead – which was ALSO quite educational, now I come to think of it…

As for the teacher herself, ‘Miss R’ doesn’t get an entry in the cast list, because I don’t think she appears again after this, but she was the most hated teacher in the school, and her nastiness was the stuff of legends. Miss R was most noteable for her open hatred of:

a) Children

and

b)

Teaching

I really wanted to like her because she was a fellow horse lover (Well, I SAY that: I’m not sure Miss R was actually capable of love, so maybe just a horse tolerator?), who used to drive to school in a horsebox – yes, really – and who once arrived with straw in her hair. I thought this was way cool, obviously, but Miss R hated me as much as she hated the rest of my class, and so I was absolutely terrified of her. This was a strange situation for me to be in, because teachers had always liked me up until then (this was one of the many reasons my fellow students hated me, of course), and no one in a position of authority had EVER shouted at me in my entire life, so when Miss Rose would do it, I would basically want to die.

This diary entry, marks a seminal moment in my young life. I’m not really sure why I was so surprised to be told I wasn’t well liked, because I feel like I’d ALWAYS known that (I MUST have, surely?), but I guess I’d maybe convinced myself I was just imagining it, and that they probably DID like me, really. I dwelt on Luna’s comment for literally YEARS: I would re-play it in my head every so often, and use it as “evidence” that I was, at heart, just an un-likeable person, and that no matter what I did, I would always be the outcast. If I’m honest, I still feel like that now, a lot of the time: and I also still relate to the obsessive fretting over things like when the homework had to be handed in, and what would happen if I got it wrong. I would worry myself sick over things like that: I’m guessing that, in this case, I probably couldn’t have asked Miss R herself, because she’d just have shouted at me even MORE, and I didn’t trust the rest of the class not to lie to me just to get me into trouble, so it was a bit of a pickle, really.

And you know what? Her name was Miss Rose. And I don’t care if she reads this.*

(*I REALLY hope she never reads this, because that woman was SCARY.)

* * *

[This post was part of my Secret Diary project: go here to read more about it!]