Ozzie Rozzie

[CAUTION: THIS STORY CONTAINS EXPLICIT OBSCENITY AND TRACES OF NUTS]

In 1970s south London suburbia, there were parks and roads and bombsites and gardens, new estates and derelict Victorian houses, old woods and new playgrounds with roundabouts and swings, cars parked, cars wrecked, cars being fixed, garages both used and unused, and dumps official and unofficial. There were no meadows with tall summer grasses, there were no fields of golden corn, no tractors, no ploughs. There were cats, foxes and rats, but no sheep, horses, or chickens. Nothing like that where we lived, just flickering glimpses of fictitious ancestral rural idyll on TV, which of course, we all completely believed.

"The Country" we called it, and we went there on Bank Holiday weekends, sometimes, when the first choice - the beach - was considered an option too often exercised. We took pocket-sized "Observers" books on birds and trees and sundry wildlife. We observed the Country Code, walking along lanes in single file on the right, facing the traffic.

We saw bobbing heavy yellow heads of wheat, we noted the long fronds of barley. We ruminated upon orchards and saw the dairyman bringing in the herd, mooing and bulging. We observed the cows and their amazing pissing and shitting ability. We watched cattle not being able to cross cattle grids. We fell in ditches, ran and hid in bracken, and threw dry rabbit shit at one another. These were single day adventures, after which we returned home to tarmac and brick, net curtains and broken glass, with Johnny Morris, David Attenborough and Tom and Barbara Good once again our narrators on all things natural.

One morning at school arrived a new boy with an unusual name: Oswald Rosbotham. Within minutes, he was popularly dubbed "Ozzie Rozzie".

Oswald stood out a mile. He was clearly from "the country". He had an funny air about him, somewhere between farm labourer and genius scientist. He should have been in a black and white film. He was big and gawky, with a prominent adam's apple and large hands with long fingers.

Ozzie spoke little, and when he did so it was with elongated twanging vowels and a skipping alien rhythm. His trousers were too short and his jumper was wrong. Ours were v-neck, regulation grey, thin, acrylic, more often than not purchased in Hewitt's, the official school uniform shop at the end of Surrey Street. His was brown-grey, made of lumpy wool, thick enough to double as a blanket, and clearly hand-knitted. He looked hot in it, and on his pale freckled face, his round cheeks often glowed patchy red beneath sandy coloured, frizz-dry hair.

Apart from his rural background, which was obvious, we couldn't say where he came from. He wouldn't tell us why he was in Croydon, so we invented. We said his mother had run away with a black man who was her pimp.

The fact that several of the boys saying this were of African and West Indian, mostly Christian descent mattered not, and in the context of a London school this in fact was no racist slur; neither was it meant to cast aspersions upon the many mixed-race relationships whose children attended the school. Neither was it taking the piss out of prostitutes, who we secretly admired. It was the allegation of cross-cultural transgression and reduction in circumstances that mattered, which was calculated to spark an emotional reaction - but Oswald with his potato head and patchy haircut gave us nothing.

Perhaps he didn't understand, we couldn't tell. We couldn't tell if Oswald was bright or not. He looked directly back at us only sometimes, and sometimes spontaneously licked his thick lips. We licked ours back, expectantly, calculatedly teasing him, but more often than not he turned away, back to whatever he had been doing, or even just to stare out of the window or at the wall. It didn't seem to matter to him. He didn't always blank us, he sometimes said in his country accent, "Snot treew" and wouldn't be drawn further.

The jokers and the bullies became rapidly bored with this failure to engage, and after a couple of weeks he was left alone; but his passive misfit presence still irked, and he remained the easy butt of class jokes. Even some of the duller girls resented him - he didn't respond to their bulging sweaters and flashing eyes, and his refusal to be ritually humiliated and exposed kept him from us, an outsider, unknown.

This 1970s comprehensive 11-14 school was co-educational, and at that most delicate time of incipient puberty, classes were a strange mix of fully formed, child-bearing-age young women and squeaky boys, girls with pigtails and breasts, and strapping young men with deep cracking voices and prolific acne. Sixty percent of us were nervously wondering when the great time would come that we would join the adult sex club, and either feigned disinterest or made ridiculous claims to the contrary.

Meanwhile, Oswald showed zero interest in sex or girls and yet, he was up there in the lead with the hormonal crew. In the P.E. changing room, underwear off, we saw his large male member with a sprig of dark pubes at the base. We told him he was gay. He said, "Snot treew." James Bunce said his arse was a bum-boy's magnet, which had most of us rolling around in stitches, but he didn't react and carried on drying and putting on clothes. Adam Torridge said, "He doesn't know what a magnet is!" and we sniggered. Clive Allen said, "He doesn't know what an arse is!" and we all fell about once more, silenced by loud threats from the vicious P.E. teacher. On it went, for weeks, as Spring term went into to Summer.

He seemed to enjoy some kind of dispensation from on high, some strict teachers who we would have expected to bully him significantly didn't dish out their usual punishment, and we realised he was being spared for some reason. This started to brew torrid resentment among the tougher kids. Edwin Witter, the school pyscho, decided to beat him up one day on the way home, but Oswald obviously got wind of it and didn't emerge from school. Twenty or more children waited for an hour to see the showdown, but we became bored with Edwin's self-aggrandisement - and after all, we could be next on the list if the wind changed - and we drifted away.

Kim McManus, who stayed after school for music lessons, gossiped the next day that she'd seen him being driven out of the school gates by Mrs Osterberg the R.E. teacher at 4.45pm - very odd. We gave him a wide berth after that, and restricted ourselves to the occasional playground or corridor comment about combine harvesters, groups of black men shagging his mum, his shit jumper, and occasional raucous playground cries of "Ozzieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" which could be taken up by the entire boy's population at once.

One June day, at exam time, we were "revising". Revision was being demonstrated as a useful academic skill designed to take us into college education, whose hallowed corridors in those days welcomed only 5% of the national student population. The majority of pupils left school at 15 or 16 and a minority of those with G.C.E. "O" Levels. Revising for most children meant pretending a. that you had adequate lesson notes and b. that you were referring to them to reinforce the teaching of the curriculum you hadn't been taught. Mostly these revision periods were unsupervised - there were teacher shortages. Today, we were stuck in a classroom on a hot day, bored, unattended, books out on the desk in case an adult head appeared to check on us, and several boys were discussing life, football, girls, with Oswald in front of him, or rather, several rows behind them, as he steadfastly either read or pretended to read, nobody could tell.

"Ozzie definitely wanks. He makes so much spunk that when he comes, it makes a river that takes his mum to Jamaica" said Edwin to kick us off. This was to our early teenage minds standard fare, meant less as comedy, more as a test of our resolve not to react. There was no knowing how far it would go.

"Ozzie, he's a tosser, a tosser is our Ozzie" three boys sang in passable barbershop harmony.

Nothing.

"No, Ozzie doesn't wank, he fucks his mum's black boyfriend up the arse because he's bisexual," said someone from the back. Oswald didn't flinch, but we liked this by now, it was perverse and getting interesting, so we carried it on.

"Yeah, and then he fucks his mum - up the arse!" chipped in Andrew "Clint" Eastwood, a boy guaranteed to reduce the class to a combination of delight and disgust. The boys laughed heartily, a few girls groaned and told him to shut up. Encouraged, Clint continued, "Yeah, and then when he comes, it pushes her teeth out of her mouth and smacks her boyfriend in the eye and he gets a white eye." Ewwww. Ignoring Oswald entirely now, Clint was standing up, eyes rolled heavenward, flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth, his tie askew and his stained white shirt looking like a preacher's laundry, channelling stream of consciousness obscenity.

"Ozzie's knob is shaped like a turnip and he fucks the farmyard animals, fills them up with spunk, then he kills them and feeds them to his mum. Then his mum get pregnant and she has a baby that looks like a cross between Oswald and a cow and tastes like a turnip that shits and Oswald fucks that too!" he ended triumphantly, opened his eyes, to utter silence.

Behind him Oswald had risen. His face was pink and blotchy, his mouth turned down in an uncharacteristic grimace, and he was holding a hardback text book like a grenade. He was 6 inches taller than Clint, and twice as heavy.

"Yew fucking shut your fucking mowth!" he said, in a strangled voice, his effort to speak choked with pent up emotion.

Oswald was a man confronting a boy. Clint knew he was on very dodgy ground. Oswald stood between him and the exit. We could see Clint rapidly examining his options and he looked scared. The hushed room watched as Clint realised his predicament and turned white-faced to look at his accuser, several desks away at the front of the classroom.

"Alright, Ozzie, I'm just pissing about, can't you take a joke?" he asked lamely. The hushed room was still, the girls visibly scared, the big boys calmly reviewing the showdown with interest. Oswald looked very threatening. His knuckles were white as he held the book, his fleshy lips narrow and stiff, and his eyes bulging.

"YEW DON'T KNOW NOTHING YEW STUPID CUNT YEW DON'T KNOW ABOUT NOTHING!" Oswald suddenly screamed at full volume.

Half the class physically drew back and the boy and the girls either side of him froze in terror. The whole school seemed incredibly silent - not a sound outside or in, no ball bouncing, no corridor yelps, no desklid banging, no trapped fly searching a way out, not even the endless droning sound of Mr Spickle the Maths teacher's soporific voice explaining algebra.

Clint didn't know it yet but he was about to learn something that he would never forget.

End Part One