Bullying

I remember one fine day, I was sitting with my Grandpa. He looked at me inquisitive like.

“What’s eating your goat?” He said, in his deep, deep voice.

“I was just wondering, and all,” I said.

“That sounds like a whole heap of trouble,” he said, smiling.

“I just wondered where bullies came from, Grandpa?”

“Have you been getting troubled?” He asked, worriedly.

“Not me. A friend.”

He looked at me to see if I was lying. But I wasn’t. It was my bud, Shaky. He was getting bullied real bad.

“Well, mostly bullies come from here (he pointed to his heart) and here (he pointed to his head.”

“So you’re born a bully.” I said.

“Nope. No one’s born a bully. Bullies are made. They rely on one thing, though – the fact that words don’t leave bruises. At least not ones that show. But bullies can leave scars in a person’s mind that lasts the whole of a lifetime. You see, the worst kind of terrible is to see another getting success and you ain’t. So you get mean like and maybe a little jealous and you start to resent the other’s luck. So you bully them because you feel that the world must be against you. The real mean ones, bully ‘cause a person looks, or seems different. Those folks are weak. They take strength in looking the same as other folks. But they are mean and they are bad. The world is awash with the mediocre and those are the ones who bully. Now don’t get me wrong, they ain’t mediocre at bullying, that is their one strength. But we are on this planet such a short time, that to bully has got to be the worst kind of sin. In school kids bully. Because they see it and hear it at home. Bullies make bullies. No one is born equal to anyone else. So there are always going to be people who think they are getting the short end of the straw. They ain’t – it’s just seems that way. Two people kiss and a person doesn’t agree with that, or a boy has a face that is different in a lot of ways, or a girl has a mark on her body. So what? So goddamn what? It is the folks who kiss, or the child locked in the room or the girl with the mark who has to face up to the world every day. They are the strong. The bullies are weak. They are the worst of all possible beings.”

“I hear ya, Grandpa but that ain’t going to help my friend.”

“No but you can. You aren’t a bully. You are strong. Remember bullies are weak and contribute nothing to this world. You can stand up and make a difference. We have to stop bullies creating more bullies. We have to stop children bringing their lives to an end because they can’t go on. Bullying is a virus that need to be cured.”

And he was right. Bullying never sleeps. We have to fight it until it goes away for good.

bobby stevenson 2020

...breathtaking....

 

…if she had looked up at that moment, his nurse would have seen his toes moving in waltz time to a tune that only he could hear. Through the willow window he could see the stars and the Moon and he remembered how, as a child, he would lie on his back and be overwhelmed by the wonder of it all. But now he was old and almost finished and yet he still could conjure a picture in his head of him at seventeen dancing to the Blue Danube. And that was his final thought before life finally took him back. If there was a God, and he felt sure that there was, then the music was some part of God – a sliver that rippled across the universe, an echo of God’s love, and to the man this was greater than all the wonders of the world. But if there was no god, then the waltz was written by an ape that had only recently walked upright and had created these notes while it cried to the stars: and that, to him, was just as breath-taking…..

bobby stevenson 2020

 

Being There

To hold the sky from falling on your head,
To make you safe as you dream in your bed,
To stop the world from breaking your heart,
To help you build a most beautiful start,
These are the things I wanted for you.

But being there,
Just being there -
Is the best I can do.

bobby stevenson 2020
 

Jimi, Shoreham, and the Parakeets

 

(Jimi Hendrix - died 18 September, 1970 - 50 years)

JIMI, SHOREHAM AND THE PARAKEETS

She knew he wasn’t to blame for the birds. At least, not in the other areas of Britain, but here, in Shoreham Village, maybe – just maybe.

She’d met him through, Peter, a road manager for the group Pink Floyd who had lived in the village. His daughter, Naomi, born in

Shoreham went on to be a famous actress, but it was her dad who had brought the guitarist down to Shoreham to see what an English country village looked like.

Peter and the man had been sitting outside the George pub, in what she could overhear as arguments about music. The man that

Peter referred to as, Jimi was very exotic for this part of Kent, even in the 1960s.

She lived across the street from the pub, in Church Cottages, and would sometimes lie in her room with the window open listening to the lives of folks relaxing at the bar. She knew Peter well and so had followed the two men up to the Cross (at a distance). When they got to the top of the hill, Jimi brought out a cigarette that smelled strange and began to smoke it. Peter told him he didn’t smoke.

Jimi must have said something funny because she remembers laughing – although she hadn’t intended to.

“Who’s there?” Shouted Jimi.

She popped her head over the hedge and smiled.

“Come sit,” he said in his American accent.

Peter smiled too and said the three of us should sit and look at the beautiful village below. Jimi asked if I played the guitar or any musical instrument and I told him I didn’t.

“What do you do then, kid?”

That’s what he called me, ‘kid’.

I told him I was saving up to buy a budgie.

“You like birds?”.

I nodded. I spent another hour with them. Then I told Jimi and Peter I had to be back to eat with my family. Jimi said he enjoyed our talk and I’ve got to be honest so did I.

A week or so later, a delivery was made to my house by Peter, it was two parakeets in a beautiful cage. The card said: ‘They ain’t budgies, but they’re just as pretty – Jimi’.

I saw a photo of him in the News of the World, and I realised his name was Jimi Hendrix.

On the 18th of September, 1970 – they announced on the news that Jimi had died in Notting Hill, London.

I let the parakeets go that day. I released them to be with Jimi.

The birds are still here. They are still flying around the village – scores of them.

And as I watch them squawking in the sky, I’ll always remember my friend, Jimi Hendrix.

bobby stevenson 2020

The Mothman of London

He was the first of his kind, and of course, we now know that he wouldn’t be the last. Jebediah Knox was a son of the land who joined the British Army, who was shipped off to Africa to fight the Boers, and that dear friends is where his life changed. Forever.

As long as Jebediah could remember, he’d had trouble sleeping. It grew worse in strange lands and strange beds.

So most nights when the camp was sleeping, he would take to the veldt and run under the stars and the moon.

One night, one moonless night, while Jebediah was flying like the wind across the wildlands, he felt a crack of pain in his ankle. He couldn’t see the snake, but he heard it scuttle away. Total darkness came very quickly.

The next thing he was aware of was coming to, in a wooden hut. A young girl had a wet cloth to his forehead, and an older male was giving instructions in an unknown language. He couldn’t make out the face of either people.

The dreams, oh, the dreams had been strange and weird. In those dreams, he talked to folks whom he knew were dead. He had assumed the venom had been doing its work.

No one from his camp came looking for him. In these cases, people were usually assumed to have been dragged off and eaten by some beast or another. After the Sun had passed over the hut three times, he started to feel better. His strength had returned. Sure enough, the girl or the man would always be sitting close by and, when required, would dampen his fever with a wet cloth.

Seven passes of the Sun later, and he was sure he could hear British voices in the distance. He was able to sit for a short time but unable to call or move. The voices passed and were heard no more.

One evening he awoke to find an elderly man sitting next to him. The man had a kind smile and seemed intent that Jebediah should drink from a cup. This Jebediah did. It tasted pleasant enough and felt warm as he let it slide down his throat. It immediately helped with the pain.

His strength grew as did his need to be back with his regiment. He had picked up several of the words spoken by this tribe – but in reality, he wanted a real conversation with his colleagues. He missed the nights in the Mess.

One morning in the fourth week, the elderly man took Jebediah by the hand and led him out into the veldt.

The elderly man signalled to Jebediah to take one end of a long bag that he carried. The two of them walked into the hills above the camp.

From where he was standing, he could see the Army Camp, but he was sure that he could not manage the distance with his current state of health.

They waited until dusk, for it was then that the lions roamed the plains. The old man opened his bag and constructed a large set of wings. And that was when Jebediah saw the beauty in the hunt.

The older man sat hunched, waiting to leap at a moment’s notice. Jebediah’s concentration waned waiting to see what move the man would make. At dusk, a young lion walked out into the veldt in order to stalk some wildebeest. As the animal gathered speed, the elderly man stood, started to run and then lept into the air. The wings automatically spread out to several feet in both directions, and the man swooped down on the lion, attacking it from the air.

The lion fell almost instantaneously. Now Jebediah understood. The man, this tribal chief, was protecting their animals from attack by eliminating their enemies.

Within a week, Jebediah was mastering the wings for himself. He didn’t fly to attack animals; instead, the older man taught him to control his flight across the veldt.

By week three, Jebediah was an expert at the process. The older man was impressed with the improvement of his student. He could stay aloft for over an hour, and this by finding rising hot air across the grasslands.

One evening in the following month, Jebediah went to sleep in the hut, as he had for several weeks. When he awoke, he found himself back in the fort. His commanding officer had told him, that he had been presumed dead and they were surprised to find him unconscious outside the gates. Jebediah had assumed he had been drugged.

“There was one other thing,” said the officer, “there was this package lying beside you. Is it yours?”

The package contained the old man’s wings.

It was another year before Jedediah returned home to England. It was there that he found a new job as a baggage handler at the Saint Pancras hotel in London.

One night after he had finished a 14-hour shift at the hotel, he went to the highest tower in St Pancras and opened his wings brought back from South Africa. He stood up there and watched the city below him. It was then he jumped with the wings. He soared over Euston Road and across the East End. He landed next to Regent’s Canal without any injuries.

Over the next few years, he would climb to the top of the building and launch himself, flying unseen over the streets of London.

It was in April, of the year 1888, that Jebediah was passing over the chimneys and roofs of Whitechapel, when he heard a woman scream in Osborne street, below.

He swooped down to see a darkly dressed man attacking a lady in an alley that led off from the street. He managed to land on the gentleman, the way the chief had pounced on the animal all those years before. The woman ran off as Jebediah held the man. This was activity short-lived, however as the man turned and stabbed Jebediah in the arm. The man then ran away.

He was the monster known as ‘Jack The Ripper’, and someone who Jebediah would meet in the months to come.

bobby stevenson 2020

Live. Love. Asap.

 

Run my friend and don’t look back
Don’t think the rest of life is yours
Or that unfinished day
Will hold its course as planned
Take what you think is needed now
Don’t hesitate, for loss is never reinstated
Breathe deep and strong
Then run and love and live
And tell all of those who need to know
How much their hearts are needed.

bobby stevenson 2020

 

Shoreham, Kent

Most of her 94 years had been spent in this beautiful little corner of the world. The rear of her property looked up to the Cross on the hill above, and now that most of her days were spent with resting in bed – she found this a favourable view. In the Spring and the Summer months, she watched the little birds and then the wild geese as they came to visit in her back yard and the fields beyond.

It hadn’t always been this way. In her younger, vibrant days she had worked on the farm, and later in the Cooperative shop on the village High Street.

She had been born into a place that had meant the most happiness and therefore, had never wanted to leave. She had been married for a short time, there had been no children, but she had accepted that fact and moved on with her life. Her husband had always wanted sons and daughters and had eventually found a family with his second wife, in Hastings.

In all her 94 years much of it had been spent looking from her window on to the passers-by and their changing tastes and fashions - and as the older residents had aged and passed on, so the village constantly invigorated itself with newer, younger dynamic families. Most of these folks now worked in the city, and as such spent much of their time commuting. She had been lucky. She had found everything she needed within reach. Not many had had that chance.

But the main thing that preoccupied her thoughts was the magic in this little haven. Her great grandmother, a woman who had been there at the opening of the Co-op shop - in the same year that Queen Victoria had died – had always told her the same sentence over and over again, ‘Shoreham finds you, you don’t find Shoreham’.

She had always wondered what that had meant – but it wasn’t about the likes of herself or her family, it was about the souls who thought they had discovered this hamlet by accident - a lucky accident – but an accident all the same.

Yet she knew the truth. They came here incomplete, or sad, or single, or unhappily married, or sick, or healthy, or hopeful, or lost – and they stayed long enough to put things right in their lives. To find that special person, or to lose the wrong one. To beat the depression or some disease or another. To raise a family, or find a new one. To see the end of loneliness in the company of new friends, or to find a confidence when it was lacking.

Whatever their needs, Shoreham grabbed them as they passed by, then dusted them down and didn’t let go until the time was right for them to move on.

She had seen it time and time again – enough to know that it wasn’t a fluke but a certainty - a miracle.

It was a truth that not everyone came to the village searching for something, but most of them did. They just didn’t know it.

And from her little window on the High Street, she had watched them find it and had taken comfort in their happiness, and their newfound lives.

Now from her bedroom window, she watched as the geese came to the field beyond the trees.

Those beautiful birds waited on her to close her eyes for the very last time, and then they carried her soul, to that far country where she could rest.

bobby stevenson 2020

To all those who found it. x

The Dancers

 
For Agnes and Jackie dancing among the stars.

When they were about five years old, she stumbled as they danced to the Christmas music playing on the old Bakelite radio. He picked her up from the wooden school floor. She smiled. 

When he was thirteen, they danced together for the very first time as a couple. He had been learning to dance in secret to impress her at the party. She laughed as they danced.

At the wedding, they danced the way they had back when they were thirteen years old, and the music was the same as the old school Bakelite radio.

When their first child was born, he ran outside the hospital doors and danced in the rain and thanked the angels for their kindness.

As their daughter received her degree from the college, the two of them danced a little dance as they walked up to hug her.

At their silver wedding anniversary, they danced with their grandchildren, and they wondered how they had ever got so lucky.

Every week they danced in the ballroom, and every week they would leave the hall feeling better than they had arrived.

When the doctor told him it was a brain tumour, he never spoke of it, not to her nor to the children. Naturally, the doctor had told her, but she never mentioned it – not once.

One day, he stumbled during the dance, and she picked him up from the old wooden floor, and she thought back to those days at school.

He held her and whispered, "I think we should stop the dancing now."

She turned away from him and let the tear run down her face.

It had been love – always.

bobby stevenson 2020