Hatter

Hatter
A True Story

He was not born Hatter. No parent had taken the cruel and unusual step of christening him thus. He had spent an entire childhood not being Hatter. Likewise, I imagine he is not Hatter now. No wife affectionately addresses him as such; no children whisperingly chide Daddy with his quaint moniker. Only for us was he Hatter. We made him Hatter, and for two years he was Hatter, and very little but Hatter.

I attended an all boys grammar school in Buckinghamshire, an educational backwater where the tripartite system still reigned. Clad in blazers and ties, with little exposure to girls, ethnic minorities or the educationally average (there were different schools for each of these strange groups), we were a race apart. Things were different. We saw things differently. We did different things. I did an A-level in Religious Studies.

Even in our quaint, olde-worlde alma mater, an A-level in Religious Studies was an unusual request. Upon discovering my desire to be tutored in epistemology and scriptural analysis, the head of R.E. and the Headmaster himself were set in a fervent chin-scratch of consternation. They both thought the idea a very fine and noble one in principle, but expressed concerns as to the viability of running such a course. Clearly I could not be taught one-on-one. This was a state school, after all. The money simply wasn’t there to justify teaching a single scholar for a whole A-level course. A solution was suggested. If six other boys could be found whose A-level choices were still malleable enough for them to consider Religious Studies, then this would suffice as a viable class-worth.

Seven deadly sins. Seven seas. Seven sons, possibly of seventh sons. I recruited five accomplices quickly to bolster my chances of studying my chosen course. Alex was first. Alex intended to do an art foundation course after sixth form. His exact choice of subjects mattered little, so long as the homework didn’t get in the way of compiling his portfolio. Joseph was next. Joseph would do anything to make himself appear highbrow and quirky. He would eventually lose his eyebrows in what can only be described as a birthday experiment. Then came Michael. It’s possible Michael didn’t even know what course he was doing. Michael played guitar in a rock band. Years on, as I write this, Michael still plays guitar in a rock band. After Michael came Richard Borland. We would come to know him as Richard Boring. A pasty-faced, musical-loving mother’s boy with a fine singing voice and little else of note, least of all a personality. Scraping the barrel for a fifth, I found Will George. Initially I assumed his name was George, as no one had ever addressed him by his Christian name. By the end of the course, ‘George’ would be the kindest name we had called him.

The sixth was Hatter.

It would do no good to reveal Hatter’s real name. This is neither a character assassination nor a confession. It is merely a reporting of fact. Suffice to say, before he was Hatter, he had a name, though this would be of little importance to us. Hatter was a tall, broad-shouldered boy, the kind of build that gets a boy described as a strapping young lad. This strappingness, however, extended to his head. As broad and box-like as his shoulders were, his skull was doubly so. His giant, rectangular head grew from his torso not on a neck as such, more as if extruded, like a block of plastacine from a child’s play-dough moulding kit. This monstrous cranium was topped with a beige Brillo-pad of hair, and rimmed on all the flat edges and corners with the raw carbunkling of the serial acne-picker. This was Hatter. This was the last of our scholarly band.

As I have mentioned before, our place of learning was a selective grammar school. The ‘Twelve-plus’ exam, taken in our final year of middle school, determined who was crammed into the pre-dole purgatory that was the secondary modern, and who was creamed off the top and whisked away to academia via the Grammar school. The ratio was 5 to 1. We were not thick. Hatter was not thick. In a school where an average year group would produce at least a dozen straight-A students, it was possible for very bright young men to go unnoticed, appearing only ‘average’ if their ten or eleven GCSEs only included two or three ‘A’s. Hatter had been one of these selective education also-rans, as had the rest of our group. We were not incapable of work. We chose not to work. The system allowed for coasting. Someone had to be bottom of the genius barrel. It was our duty to under perform.

This coasting, however, relied on the ability to pull a conspicuous show of intelligence out of the hat (no pun intended) at any given time. The privilege of idleness was supported only by the capability to unexpectedly just know things when teachers queried one’s work-rate. The joy of sitting listening to Tom Waits and reading Burroughs rather than revising was relished only on the understanding that an inexplicably high exam result would turn up anyway. We all appreciated this. We all conformed to this. We were doing a Mickey Mouse subject, and were allowed to be Mickey Mouse pupils, but we knew that only by maintaining the appearance of potentially excelling could this joyous existence be maintained without fear of effort reports and less lenient homework deadlines.

This is where Hatter’s troubles began.

Not long into our lower sixth year, we began to notice something about our box-faced classmate. He began to exhibit the attitude of what educational experts refer to as a disaffected pupil. His attention span became limited; he would gaze into space for minutes at a time; his homework became slapdash, if it turned up at all; he would go absent for days at a time; his ability to come up with ad-libbed answers in class deteriorated to the point where he would just sigh and shrug at the teacher. He was drawing attention to himself (and therefore the rest of us) with his conspicuous lack of effort. He was becoming a threat to our peaceful existence, and we all knew it.

Looking back so many years later, I forget what the exact question was which bought the situation to a head (a large, rectangular head at that), but it certainly wasn’t anything any semi-serious scholar of scriptural analysis (or even the majority of entirely un-serious ones) would have found challenging. For the sake of argument, let us assume that one afternoon, the head of RE turned to our misshapen protagonist and asked,
“So, which three of the four Gospels can we group together as the synoptic Gospels?”
All eyes turned to the hapless addressee. He should know that. He had to know that. To not know that would imply that he had been asleep for the whole of the preceding three weeks. He was one seventh of the group, a representative sample. To not know that, in front of the head of RE, would imply by proxy that none of us were taking the subject seriously. He had to know that.

He did not know that.

His great head lifted upwards. His eyes rolled back. He sighed. His shoulders, weighed down, perhaps, by the massive cranium mounted on them, shrugged imperceptibly.

We were aghast. How could he not know that? Why did he not know that? Didn’t he see what would happen to us if we actually looked like we weren’t doing any work? Alex, usually as laid-back and jovial as any A-level art student, was incensed.
“Christ! You don’t know that! Why don’t you know that? You’re such a Brown Hatter!”

And so he was.

This juvenile insult, born of complete frustration, was a new baptism. He was born again as Hatter. Hatter became a label summing up all that we found frustrating, dreadful and unfair about the boy. From here on in, any time he made the class look foolish by displaying his complete ignorance of the subject matter; every time he gormlessly shrugged off a question in class; every time his homework failed to manifest; every time he sat in stony silence while the other six endeavoured to debate some aspect of Christian theology with only a cursory glance at a textbook and our native wit to guide us, we reminded him of his position.

“Hatter!”

Many people who attended school in England in the seventies, eighties or nineties will be familiar with the game known as Bollocks. While the teacher is writing on the board, or otherwise distracted, a class member softly says the word “Bollocks,” (or some similar obscenity), just loud enough to be audible to their immediate neighbours. If no teacher response is detected, another pupil takes up the challenge, and repeats the obscene outburst a little louder. The ripple of excitement spreads around the classroom as more and more adventurous youths call out the offending utterance at incrementally increasing volume, until either the teacher explodes in a fit of blind accusations or the whole class is reduced to a heap of giggling invalids (or quite often both).

We did not play Bollocks.

We played Hatter.

The game of Hatter was a far more extreme and challenging past-time. Firstly, with only six competitors in the room (clearly the man himself never felt inclined to join in), the chances of getting caught out were far greater, and the option to sit out and not take part was far less readily available. Secondly, the potential reprisals for being caught were exponentially more severe. Not only was one being disruptive and childish, but these disruptive, childish outbursts were also aimed at someone, with the intent of reinforcing their relative status within the group. In retrospect, this intent could be dubbed bullying.

We, however, did not see it as such.

The pressure to conform is very strong among modern teenagers. People who deviate from set standards and norms of behaviour, dress, speech and the like are often reminded, either subtly or in more gross ways, of their aberrance. Well-meaning adults often describe this process, rather negatively, as peer pressure. We saw it more as peer guidance. By pointing out to Hatter every time he failed to behave in a way conducive to an easy life for the class, we reasoned, we were performing a service. Our actions were preserving the fragile balance between fun and A-level qualifications, and teaching Hatter important lessons about pulling his weight.

Hatter failed to see our point of view.

We intensified our campaign.

The back of my RE folder, previously decorated with the logos of punk bands and quotes from Nietzsche, was re-decorated with a new slogan. Emblazoned in six-inch high black letters, it read simply HATTER. Every page of notes we took became decorated with ornate marginals depicting grotesque figures with grossly misshapen heads. From these illustrations, comic characters were developed such as Postman Hat, Hatman, Hat Stevens, Hatty Arbuckle, Cleo-hat-ra and worse, all brought to life by Alex’s skilful draftsmanship and my own twisted imagination, all with the same rectangular face and blank-eyed expression. We even developed a theme song.

At the time of our activities, a song was released in the popular music charts. The name of both track and artist/s is lost to me now. The tune itself was an upbeat dance track, the vocals of which took the form of a speeded up, sampled loop of rapping, the clarity of which left a lot to be desired. To this day I have no idea what the lyrics actually were, but at the time, we developed our own theories. To our ears, the song appeared to be warning us,

“Known as a Hatter,
And one of the worst kind.
Going to be Nitpickling
Somewhere in your mind…”

This became our anthem.

As a further upshot, we developed the nonsense term Nitpickle to act as a variation on Hatter. To be a Nitpickle was to act in a way reminiscent of Hatter, although we used it freely to refer to the original Hatter too.

He seemed unimpressed.

At this point, things seemed fairly bleak for our lumpen victim, and, indeed, they were. This didn’t stop the situation getting worse. A friend who had not been roped into the RE group was out one night at his village pub. Attending the pub in addition to the locals on this particular night was a group of colleagues from the local supermarket, all enjoying a works evening out. Our friend, an amiable fellow, engaged them in conversation, and made a discovery which would escalate the Hatter situation to even further extremes of teenage cruelty.

The supermarket workers were mostly assembled when our friend began his conversation with them, and were awaiting the arrival of one further workmate, who seemed decidedly unpopular among the group, due to a consensus feeling that he was ineffectual and bone-idle. What really caught our friend’s ear, though, was the nickname of the missing shelf-stacker. He was known as Bungle. When he asked after the origins of such a quaint alias, the explanation he received set the alarm bells truly ringing. Bungle was so called because his bulky form, thick, brown hair and stunningly oversized head reminded his workmates strongly of Bungle the Bear, a character from the cult children’s TV show, Rainbow. Our friend’s mind raced with the possibilities. The last supermarket worker entered the pub.

“Bungle!” bellowed his compatriots.

“Hatter!” cried our friend.

For it was.

Eventually the time came for us to fulfil the other side of the dossing around bargain and actually perform in our first set of modular exams. Each modular paper we sat was an hour long and consisted of six possible question titles, of which we had to attempt two. For six of us, the format presented no problems. Even, George, who generally seemed to have slipped through the IQ test net, was fairly confident. The pass mark was 40% for a mark equating with an E, with the grades then being delineated by differences of 10% each. We would walk it.

Hatter did not.

The following description of Hatter’s exam ignominy is taken directly from Alex and Joseph’s eyewitness accounts. Their surnames being alphabetically earlier than Hatter’s and mine being later, I was sat in a position in the exam room where to look at Hatter even if I had wished to would have been conspicuously turning round, whilst they enjoyed (if this is the right term) an excellent view of the back of his towering skull.

Upon starting the exam, Hatter carefully filled in the details on the cover page of his answer paper (His name, candidate number, etc), opened the paper and carefully read the possible questions, thoughtfully tapping his pen on the desk as he did so. He read through his options twice, paused, and wrote the title of his first selection out in full on his paper. He paused again, as if in thought, for what felt like several minutes. Leaving a gap on his answer paper approximately large enough to fit a reasonable sized response in, he then wrote out the title of his second choice. Once again he paused, apparently pondering. Then he placed the lid on his pen, breathed out gently and slowly lowered his head to the table, face down. He remained in this bowed position for the rest of the exam. The strangest thing about this whole procedure, as Joseph commented, was that,
“The top of his head formed a perfect right-angle with the table.”

Then Hatter went away.

From that day on, Hatter was conspicuous only by his absence. He ceased attending school completely, and was no longer mentioned on any registers or exam entry lists. Had we won? Could the loss of the target of our spleen be viewed as a victory? We actually quite missed having Hatter around. We cursed him for not having the bottle to brave it out. Why had he run away? Didn’t he see we’d been doing it for his own good? We thought even less of him now. Not only had he failed as a student, he’d failed as a victim too.

The truth had a tinge of melodrama that we completely failed to suspect.

That term, someone made a discovery, in whatever ways teenagers make discoveries about the adult world, its gossip and its tattle. This discovery was to shed an unhappy new light on the Hatter phenomenon, but not in the way that now, as an adult, I suppose it ought.

Hatter’s father had died.

He had been ill throughout Hatter’s GCSEs, presumably with some unspecified cancer, and had succumbed to his illness just as Hatter had begun his A-levels. The young Hatter had been left to comfort his grieving mother, hold down a weekend job at the supermarket and make the family proud by achieving A-level success. The task had clearly been too Herculean. Hatter’s disaffected attitude had been born of the grief of losing a parent.

We should have felt dreadful.

We did not.

How dare he? How dare Hatter be so bloody-minded as to withhold such a thing from his peers, alienating himself in his time of sadness? What was he thinking? To have continued bumbling through life, accepting every cruelty his schoolmates and workmates could throw at him, never once saying,
“Stop it! Shut up! My Dad’s dead!”

Why hadn’t he just stood up to us? We were incandescent. This oaf had tricked us into being vile to him at the most cringingly inappropriate time. There was no way we were going to feel guilty about this. He had brought it on himself. He had been pathetic and weak, and we would not recant.

In retrospect, our reading of the situation seems harsh, irrational, even. However, consider things from our point of view. On the one hand, you can admit to yourself that you have destroyed the life of a recently bereaved boy, for reasons which seemed slightly tenuous in the first place, that you have delighted in coming up with more and more hurtful insults for an innocent victim, who all the while was dealing with the unthinkable. On the other hand, you can sweep your own guilt under the rug, fill yourself with as much blustering indignation as you can muster, and look to your co-persecutors to do likewise, justifying your actions in the most base and cowardly way.

I defy anyone reading this now to say that they did not laugh at any of the ways in which we made Hatter’s life hell. I defy anyone to say that they were not revolted by themselves when they stopped laughing and read the revelation about his terrible loss. I defy any of you to claim that you wouldn’t do anything or say anything to make that nagging feeling of guilt go away.

We only did what anyone would have done.

This was not the last chapter in the sad saga. Without Hatter, our coven lost focus. We no longer had a common interest binding us together. We could hardly claim that a love of the subject would keep us a cohesive unit. We turned in on ourselves.

Michael drifted first. By the end of year twelve, he had left the school, and shifted allegiance to the local Sixth Form College, that palace of bohemian anti-establishmentarianism (relatively speaking, of course). A life of rock guitar beckoned, and school was not the place to be.

Reduced to five, we began to look to the weaker elements of the group as replacement Hatters. Richard Boring was the first to taste this new wrath, but being so entirely featureless, any insult we threw at him did not stick. No box-shaped head, no acne-scars, no gormless stare. He survived by his utter anonymity. How many others get through school like this, without ever being noticed? There were somewhere in the region of 300 people in the Grammar School sixth form. Looking back, I would struggle to name 50. How many Borings? Where did they go? Banking, perhaps, or actuaries, or local government middle management, who knows?

George was not so fortunate.

George’s reign as a replacement Hatter was far more successful than Boring’s. For a start, George had the look of a victim. George looked for all the world like a Quentin Blake illustration. He resembled some sinister villain from the pages of a Roald Dahl children’s story. George’s face was a single triangle; his sloping forehead and non-existent chin coming together to form a sharp spike of a nose. His hair, lank and greasy, could have been drawn figuratively by three or four coarse pencil strokes. His bug-eyes stared, rodent-like, from behind his tiny, round spectacles. He had the sort of faces that nicknames stuck to.

The name was Grundle.

Just as meaningless as Hatter or Nitpickle, and presumably just as hurtful in its repeated use, Grundle was merely a sound that seemed to sum George up. However, it was no use. Grundle would never be as exciting as Hatter. Perhaps it was George’s reaction which spoiled it. When mocked, he would laugh along, seemingly unaware that he was the butt of the humour, much like the excited wagging and barking of a confused dog when you throw an invisible ball, and it darts half-way down the garden, before bounding back, assuming the ball will manifest next time it is hurled.

The only other escape from this tedium was the day the modular results arrived. Our modular results, and Hatter’s. For whatever reason, the teacher had to leave the room for a couple of minutes, leaving the document exposed on the desk.

We had to look.

We scanned through the printed-out sheet. 68.5%, predictably sound for me; 42% for Grundle, a pass at least; 65% for Joseph, unexpectedly fair. No surprises for anyone. Then we saw Hatter’s. We paused. It had to be a misprint. The decimal was in the wrong place. Or was it? Looking back, this mark actually seemed strangely generous. Hatter’s name, candidate number, and two successfully transcribed questions had earned him 4.5%. How was this possible? In terms of percentage points per word, we felt swindled. 4.5% for spelling one’s name right? Unfair did not come close.

We felt justified.

The story now comes to its final sorry twist.

The day of our final exams. The two last modules, to be taken back to back. Three hours more and an A-level in the most obtuse of subjects would be ours. We waited outside the exam room. As we chatted, nervously, we became aware of a presence. Near us lurked a large, hulking figure. We stared. We stared some more.

Hatter.

He had returned. A ripple of excitement and speculation blasted through the group as fiercely as an alien spacecraft cutting geometric patterns in a cornfield. What was he doing here? He was taking the last two modules as a private candidate. We did some quick mental arithmetic. Two astounding performances plus the 4.5% would average out to a C over three modules. Hatter would gain an AS qualification. Not the same as our full A-levels, but what a triumph over adversity. We felt proud of our prodigal victim. He would be like the Karate Kid, getting back up after Mr Myagi had weaved his magic healing ways over the boy’s hurt leg. Hatter would stagger to his academic feet and strike his bad fortune with a fearsome Crane Kick. What’s more, we had given him the strength and fire to do it.

Justified and vindicated.

Go Hatter!

Well done us!

We entered the exam room. Again, I sat in front of Hatter. Again, Joseph and Alex sat as witnesses to events as they unfolded.

The exam began. Hatter filled out his name, candidate number, etc. He read the paper carefully. He paused a while, as if in thought. He put pen to paper, and copied out his first selected question. He paused again, his huge head almost quivering with the effort. He left an essay-sized gap on the answer paper. He wrote out the second question.

Then, with the inevitability and grace of a giant redwood, felled by the combined efforts of half a dozen lumberjacks, his great skull sloped forward ‘till it met the tabletop and came to rest, forming a perfect right angle with the surface below.