And because the little boy never stood up for himself or pushed them back, they just did it more and more. Pretty soon the boy was at junior school, and the big kids were taking his football cards away from him in the playground and tripping him up when he came out to break. The boy never said anything back to them, though, he just let it happen, and the children in his own year laughed at him when they saw it because they were afraid of the big kids and they didn’t want it to happen to them. Some of them even joined in, to try to make themselves more popular with the big kids.

And all the time, the little boy never said anything. He felt hurt and ashamed, but he was afraid to fight back so he just bottled up the feelings inside himself.

Then all of a sudden, he wasn’t a little boy anymore. He was at secondary school, and the same things were happening only this time it was much worse. The same big kids that had tormented him at junior school were even bigger, and now they didn’t just want to trip him over in the playground. Now they wanted to take the money he had for the canteen, and they wanted to punch him in the stomach when no teachers were looking. Sometimes they cornered him in the boys’ toilets and beat him up. One time they even held him so that the biggest boy could piss on his trousers.

And the boy in the story never fought back. He had all that shame and hurt crammed down inside himself like a bin that’s full to bursting with decades-old rubbish, only now as well as shame and hurt he also had anger rammed down in there too. Rage, really.

The more it happened and the more humiliated he felt at school, the more that impotent anger filled him up.

At this point in the story Tim remembered how his dad had paused, and how his brown eyes had flicked down to Tim’s split lip. ‘If only he’d had the courage to stick up for himself that first time at nursery school, when that other little boy had hit him,’ Tim’s dad said. His mouth curled up at the corners, but there was no smile in his eyes. ‘If he’d hit the other little boy back, harder, everything else could have been different.’

Tim wanted the story to be different. He wanted the story to be one of his old favourites that his mum read to him about The Famous Five or Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. He didn’t like this story.