The Fishwhacker Swindle?

School prefects are cunts. Lots of people have probably talked about them on their blogs before now, so this might not be very original; and I’m sorry to start the year on such a negative note, but I was talking tonight to my fiancee's brother's girlfriend who's 19 and was recently a prefect and was trying to defend them, drunkenly… on the whole, prefects are cunts.

I started high school in 1982, and that year I was a pathetic, puny child who didn’t dare volunteer for the under-13 rugby team. The cunting prefects, all rugby heroes even if their academic performance wasn’t worth shit, decided to gang up on me and the bunch of sorry losers I hung out with at the bottom of the playing fields and roll us down the hill so that we ended up eating the dirt in the bottom of the sodden ditch which the fucking arsehole groundskeeper never bothered to fill in even though the cuntfaced upper-middle-class parents had been writing to the school board and the local paper about the poor upkeep of the best school in the area. No, it wasn’t an English school; it was a private boys’ school in Johannesburg, South Africa, but it was influenced enough by the Eton mentality that my story has relevance for any of you cunts who matured in public school Britain.

There was one particular arsehole, Eric Mauff, who was a prefect and prop-forward or some such exalted position in the First Team and who ordered me to go and wash his car while he sat on the stands as a reserve with his arm round the shoulders of his incredibly beautiful brunette girlfriend, and as I was scurrying away to scrub the fucking car she let out a laugh and I hated her and him and swore that I’d never turn out like him or her, and that bullies like them were fucking scum.

Four years later in 1986 I was a senior at the school, and I wasn’t a prefect because I was too geeky and unsporting to make the cut, but one or two of my friends were appointed as ‘pricks’, as we called the prefects. They were decent guys, to a man, but one day I saw one of them walking across the lawn with a smug smarmy look on his face, and he was allowed to do that as a ‘prick’ while I wasn’t because I wasn’t privileged like him, and nor were 90% of the rest of us, and I turned into a communist. I became a right-wing anti-communist later at university, but that’s another story.

My points are: 1) it’s incredible and frightening how corrupting a trivial accolade can be to someone as young as one in his teens; 2) no matter which social stratum you find yourself in, there’s always somebody above you waiting with a poised cosh; 3) Eric Mauff is a cunt, and wherever he is now, I hope he’s either redeemed himself or is burning in a living hell.

It’s pathetic to be determined by your past and to blame your loser life on your early experiences, and I gob on people who regard school traumas as binding on their later existence. You take the shit that’s dished out to you, you deal with it, and you move on. I’m sure there are decent people out there who were prefects at school and who exercised their power and responsibilities with justice and mercy, and to you I mean no malice.

But most of you pricks were utter cunts.