More recently-drawn maps of where most of Anti Bully "went down", in Little Downham
|
Introduction RRRRIGHT! I once wrote a long blog entry about Anti Bully, and just kind of assumed archive.org would have saved that blog in the year-and-a-half or so between it being written and my old site going offline. But they didn't, so I'm re-writing this from scratch. Anybody who happens to remember that blog will probably notice some glaring omissions / new funny anecdotes I remembered in the meantime The First Era: 1994 - 1996The Agency Formed Anti Bully, or ANTI:BULLY, if you go by the logo, was a pretty large part of my late childhood / early teenhood (I matured very slowly, as you may have noticed). It was a "spy agency" I and a rotating group of different friends had from about 1994 to 1999. We did a bit of amateur detective work / fighting bullies before then, too. A lot of the "cases" we "investigated" were largely stuff we'd made up in our heads / assumed on flimsy evidence, though. It could perhaps be broadly classified as a LARP, where the other "players" didn't neccessarily know they were a part of it.
The very first incarnation of Anti Bully was a comic strip I created in my early childhood, maybe 1992 - 1993. I don't remember anything about it, other than that it existed. I think it was set in a school (no wonder I didn't do a lot of it - drawing all those desks and chairs!), and for some reason I seem to recall it was drawn on yellow paper. The supply of blank paper for drawing on was always short when I was a kid, it was probably the back of some junk mail / cheaply-made brochure my parents had. Anyway that was long gone by late 1994 or early 1995 (I was definitely in the last year of primary school) when we had our scholastic book sale and my friends and I all bought the Funfax Spy File, which was originally released in 1993.
This fucker... My brother David, my friend Robert and I were all sitting around in my room looking at them, and after about 5 minutes decided to start our own spy agency. Robert immediately claimed leadership of the agency, as he was "the best at it", by his own modest admission. After some wrangling we decided to be joint leaders, with my brother as the second-in-command. The Funfax Spy File had a page to write out the members of your spy ring on. We both split up the "Master Spy" box and put in our own names. Then my brother excitedly showed off that he'd put his own name in the Master Spy box in his folder, reading out "Misturrr Dayvid Martiiin" in this strained, posh-sounding voice, because that was apparently the funniest thing in the world. After a brief fist-fight and shouting at from mum, we decided to further messify the spy ring page and make "Master Spy" the second-in-command, while the leader was called "Leader". Why not just decide my brother's file didn't count, and our two were the "true" ones? Because he'd inevitably use his file as "evidence" to claim leadership within about 3 days, if they didn't all say the same thing. After that was sorted out, we decided to do some "spy training". This was basically Robert hiding in the living room, my brother hiding in the dining room (where our mums were talking) and us passing a message to each other "as quietly as we can", which was not quietly at all, really. Anyway I got to Robert and handed him the message, telling him to now sneak to the dining room to pass it to David. He looked a bit dubious, and then I noticed David was hiding with him, doubtless having been too embarrased to have hidden in the same room where our mums were talking. I hadn't even finished exasperatedly shouting his name when I was already flying backwards through the air, and he somehow got three punches in before I'd even landed. During the fight he kept insisting he'd "heard a whistle" and that he assumed it was "our secret signal". I was trying to say that we did actually need to come up with some secret signals, when mum intervened again, and we were grounded. Also, we actually knew what "grounded" meant by this time. The next day Robert and our friend Thomas came round. Thomas was recruited, secret signals were agreed upon (mostly animal noises, only instead of imitating animal noises we literally just said "woof" or "meow". The only signal I can remember now is that "coo coo" was "come here") They went out on a "spy patrol" (read: a walk) while I waited for them at the end of the drive, I don't remember what my brother was doing. I decided to "add some excitement" by scuffing up some dirt from the flowerbeds and claiming I'd gone indoors for a moment and "found it like that". It was obviously a warning from "enemy agents" who were against our spy agency... the one we'd only created the night before. That day was kind of windy, and some of the dirt was blown out of it's original position. Robert gravely informed me that this meant it would be impossible for us to get any forensic evidence from it... you know, in that lavishly-equipped laboratory we had. The timeline gets a little hazy from there, but I don't recall much spying happening at primary school (we were right little bastards to the teacher in our last year, especially Robert, and spent all day drawing comics). Not long after the spy agency started, and our grounding ended, we did another spy patrol around the village. We saw some other kids and decided they were enemy agents, not just other kids hanging around. This started a common Anti Bully trend of overreacting to sightings of other people in the distance, or the finding of bits of paper with illegible / non-understandable writing on. The Early Cases We soon began one of our first "cases". This is where Robert started coming into his own. If Anti Bully was a LARP, he was the "DM", coming up with plots for us to follow. He said he saw some teenagers outside his house at night (he lived on the main road of the village, right next to the school) trying to force open the door of a car. He also said they were all wearing LA Gear shoes, which lit up when you stepped. We decided it would at least make them easy to track at night. On one of our patrols he spotted two teen girls and decided they were two of the teens he'd seen trying to open the car door. We started (badly) following them. They went around a corner and Robert looked around, then darted back saying they were "right there", sitting on a bench just around the corner, and we ran off. Great intelligence-gathering there. Later he, somehow privy to police information, said one of them had been arrested and put in a police station cell, but had a diamond ring and fold-out suction cups, so was able to cut a hole in the window and escape. It's a good thing I didn't see her around the village when the police were nearby or I'd have run up and told them she was "the one who escaped". By this time we were starting secondary school in different places, I'd not got a good look at either of the girls (beyond "blonde wavy hair"), but decided that one of the older girls at my new school was her. I later updated my notes saying she went on the same bus as me, from the same stop as me... what? Somebody from the same village gets the same bus? What are the chances, eh? I sat behind / in front of her when I was able but failed to overhear any useful information, unsurprisingly, and "The Car Case" petered out unsolved.
Another early case was one where we "investigated" "drug dealers". Robert claimed to have seen people walking down the street close together at night, so they were obviously buying and selling drugs. He also claimed to have been offered one "disguised as a sweet" once. It had been "really powdery" and made him feel sick. I made the astute observation that the "most notorious" drug dealers disguised their drugs as sweets, because it meant they had total immunity if the police stopped them - there's no law against selling somebody a single smartie on the street at 11 o`clock at night! Amusingly, a few years later "Polo Holes" came out, they were tiny mints, supposedly the middles of ring-shaped Polo mints. They looked alarmingly like ecstasy tablets and worried teachers up and down the land. I bet actual ecstasy dealers had a good period, back then... "they're just mints, officer!" There was also something about flick knives. They are illegal in the UK (for now), so Robert accused all of the bigger "bully" kids around the village of having them. Apparently he'd also been held down by them while another opened a flick knife right against his chin and told him "we know about you, you've got agents everywhere!". He'd told us he'd recruited a ton of agents among his "other friends", who we never met (more about those later!). I later mentioned to my mum that "(big kid) has got a flick knife!" and she actually beleived me. Mind you, every single rumour of a teen pregnancy (read: any time a girl got the flu and was off for more than two consecutive days) out of my secondary school would find it's way to her and she'd take it as fact. I'd then get lectured about how "a naughty girl at your school has got herself in trouble". Actual number of pregnancies at my school while I was there? Fucking ZERO. One time we investigated the flick knife owners in the snow, IE we followed tracks of footprints around the park / school (the school field was accessible from the park by a gate and, when the school was closed, members of the public could always freely walk across it). These were the tracks of dog-walkers, of course, but there was always the chance we'd come across a dropped flick knife and be able to get fingerprints off it. This was also during the residue of our old UFO / ghost / paranormal investigations, so we found tracks of a cat which snow-melt had made really big, and decided we'd found evidence of the Fen Tiger. Robert angrily informed us that, as this legendary cat was black, it was actually the Fen Panther. His write-up of this mission even said "found tracks of fen PANTHER", which he'd underlined several times. The Fen Tiger was probably actually a very large black domestic cat, which I met a few times, circa '94 / '95. It was really friendly and came meowing round our garden once or twice. Another early "case" actually happened before Anti-Bully was founded (probably in 1993), but was "retconned" in. Some bullies had formed a "Yellow Glove Gang" (because they had a knitted yellow glove, probably lost by some little kid), and fought us over a base (read - hollow hedge kids could hide inside) in the park. We got away on our bikes, and they came creeping down the dried-out ditch at the side of the field, single-file. The leader had the yellow glove on a stick, like some kind of Roman standard. We rode up on our bikes and chucked lumps of dirt at them, in several "bombing raids". They continued creeping slowly down the ditch while we restocked on ammo. Eventually they were getting too close, so we went home, rather than face an actual fight.
Bit Guns Another part of the early history of the agency, was when somebody at primary school told me that if you saw off the front of a cap gun (where the red plug that shows it's a fake gun is... before all non-real guns in the UK began to be coloured bright orange or clear) it became a "bit gun". Anybody shot by the "bits" from this suffered 10 minutes of severe stinging. My brother and I began to draw up a large number of plans and scenarios for battling the bullies, all armed with these "bit guns". We assumed that the 10 minute sting would be as incapacitating as actually being shot. Later we found a cap gun for sale which actually had a hole in the front, allowing some of the smoke to come out. We assumed this was a ready-made "bit gun" and bought it. Later we were sitting in the car park at Texas (now called Homebase, and vastly inferior - no muffins!) in Newmarket, while our parents shopped. My brother said if he spotted a bully he'd dramatically shout "GIT THE GUUURRRN!". Inevitably he "thought he saw one" about a minute later and we were ducking down and on edge until our parents came back out. This was also at a time when our neighbour and his friend used to run in our front garden to tease us, then run back out when we tried to get him (we'd stop at the edge of his garden, as we didn't want to "trespass" and thus become criminals). I dreamed of getting about 10 agents armed with bit guns set up in ambush, to blast him and leave him writhing in agony. This never happened, but one time I hid upstairs with a camera and took a photo of them in the front garden, instead. They started ironically shouting "cheese" up at me. This picture was probably later stuck on some paper with notes about how it was a "sighting of enemy agents", but I've lost that now. The Sonic Case One short-lived "case" of the early era happened when Robert lent his copy of the Master System game Sonic Chaos to somebody else in the village, who didn't give it back. His case files said he planned to "Break in and STEAL it (not stealing really because it's MINE!)". In my first week of secondary school, we had to make a mockup newspaper in IT class, only the computer room wasn't ready, so we just made them with pens and paper. I put in a story about the "Eagle Spy Agency investigating the theft". Thank fuck the bullies didn't see that, eh? Anyway the kid who'd taken the game moved away, so Robert just angrily wrote CASE CLOSED over his file about it. Park Attack / Operation Jackpot Shortly before the formation of Anti Bully, a bunch of us kids from the village had all collaborated on hacking out a bit of the hedge at the bottom of the park, to make a big secret base. This worked out pretty well for a while. The big kids were the bosses, of course, and my mates and I were the "guards". Robert, naturally, declared himself the leader of the guards. The other kids like me only ever seemed to be the ones who actually did guard duty! Anyway, the big kids eventually decided to oust us and claim the base for themselves. Probably because they wanted a place to smoke the ciggies and drink the booze they'd swiped off their parents. We decided to build our own base in another hedge at the other corner of the park. We stole some of the corrugated metal the big kids had "found" for the purpose. As we were moving it over the playing field, by lifting up the end and dropping it over, all the big kids showed up and started to cycle like mad towards us. I hestitated between taking the metal back, or just running. My other friends got "rounded up" and were being taken to the base by the bullies, when the farmer they'd actually stolen the metal off (also our playing-about had collapsed one of his hay bales) showed up and bollocked the lot of us. I had to tell my brother "it goes without saying that mum and dad won't hear about this", and for once he actually kept his trap shut, wonder of wonders. The bullies soon seized the other base, too. My dad said that when he was a kid there was a base in the middle, between the two that were around in the 90's. We decided to "revive" this base. Of course, I blurted this out to the bullies, so they let us do all the work of hacking out all the branches and nettles, then said their dads had "owned" it in the 50s, so it belonged to them. Also during the hacking-out of this base they'd briefly pretended to "help" us, while one would disappear. We'd then be attacked by a "crazy maniac" in creepy blue mask, who would then vanish. The missing kid would then come back asking us if we'd seen the "maniac", while the other big kid would disappear, and the maniac would put in another apperance. Once Anti Bully started, this was "retconned" into being one of our cases. I astutely observed that "the other two" "probably faked it". Ya think? (They were probably inspired by an early Heartbeat episode, where the community was terrorised by the "Be-Ro Man". Early Heartbeat had a canon alien abduction too!)
Anyway, by the time Anti Bully had properly started, we'd been well and truly ousted from all of the bases in the park. We wanted to have some place from which we could launch our spy operations, so had to try and "reclaim" the bases! One night, I was watching one of the episodes of Soldier, Soldier where they actually go to war, and was inspired by all the "tecnicals" and guerrla tactics on display. I came up with the idea for Operation Park Attack, which was basically to recruit more agents, get all our toy / improvised fruit-shooting weapons together, and seize the bases back. I even wanted to build a pedal-powered "tank", with a turnip-shooting "cannon", but, of course, this got no further than getting a big wooden board to form the floor of it, and vaguely marking out where other parts would be nailed to. Robert did some "reconissance" in preparation for Park Attack, he said that each of the three bases was heavily occupied and guarded by bullies round-the-clock (or at least round the bits of the clock when we were allowed out!), with 20 in one, 15 in the other etc. I actually beleived this, and avoided the park for years as a result. Robert had made an incredibly elaborate plan for re-taking the bases, which involved a lot of sneaking up on the bullies and shouting "BANG!"... on an open field. Let's hope none of them would ruin the plan by turning around at the wrong time! My own Park Attack plans were little more than "charge up the middle of the field on our bikes, escorted by the tank, and have a huge battle"... but as we never had more than about 7 agents, and never built the tank, this was pretty impractical... even if Robert's recon had been accurate. Now if we'd just thought to get good catapaults and paintballs, and sneaked around the back of the park through the fields, we could probably have taken and held a base from the no-more-than-5 bullies we'd actually have found in occupation (if any at all!).
My incredibly elaborate tactical plan I also wanted to do Park Attack when the weather was just right, not too hot and not too cold, as this would be the optimum for running around and fighting. I did not, of course, realise that it would also be optimum for the bullies to be running around and fighting! After Robert moved to Chatteris, I was at school and thought the weather that day was perfect for Park Attack, so planned to call Robert and tell him it was "on" and to bring his "other agents", as well as really get on with building my tank that evening. Of course, nothing actually happened. Also Robert didn't actually have any "other agents"! The idea of Park Attack persisted into the second era of Anti Bully, though at some point I realised "Park Attack" was not a very secretive name, as it described exactly what we were going to do! So I renamed it "Operation Jackpot" ...but, once again, nothing actually happened. Anti Bully Comes to School I'd only been at secondary school about 2 weeks when my attention-seeking, sci-fi loving, bratty immature ways had attracted bullies. At the time, the "home" spy agency was not called Anti Bully, it was first the "MM-RG Spy Agency", then later the "Eagle Spy Agency". I decided to create a second spy agency at school, which was the first one to actually be called Anti Bully, named after the old, very vaguely-remembered comic. We drew up ID cards on bits of scrap cardboard with orange and green paper stuck on... imagine what could have happened if any bullies saw those. The school agency actually had one success; two of the popular, hard boys were going to have a fight, and most of the rest of the year were going to watch it, paying 5p admission to get behind the portacabins. We hung around nearby until we saw punches starting to fly, my friends excitedly shouting "it's starting!" and me shouting "let's go!". We ran off to the staff room and told the teachers, then watched as most of the rest of the year were marched to the hall in a double file, for the mother of all bollockings (the deputy head at the time could actually hurt your ears when he got going). The next class was history and I was sat next to one of the kids who'd been busted. That was not a pleasant class. We all had a reverse spartacus moment and blamed the actual "grassing" on one of the other members of Anti Bully... it fell apart not long after. What a great piece of sneaky business, eh? If we'd watched from a distance and silently slipped away as the fight started they'd never have known it was us who had told the teachers! ...Though they would probably have just assumed it was us and threatened us anyway.
Also at school, I'd blurted out to this half-italian ginga kid that I was a "spy". This brat thought he was a mafioso, and seemed to be only barely clinging to sanity at the best of times. One time I happened to be walking behind him and his girlfriend (plus a couple of hangers-on he had), naturally I was accused of "spying" on them. Another time we were doing some group projects in the library, and the ginga was fucking around. Another of our friends called Aian kept asking him to calm down. The nutter goes "Stop callin' me (his name). I'll smash your head through those fucking shelves, man. I'll make you a book lover, man.". Aian just replied "I already am a book lover". The ginga had no idea how to take that. He was literally dumbfounded that somebody would just openly admit to such a thing. The savage shouldn't have been allowed in a civilised school. He left not too long after, anyway, and everybody breathed a little easier. Probably including the other bullies. I wonder where he ended up? Hopefully somebody shot him. The Big EA Back at home, Robert had started on another big case / LARP. This one actually had some vague basis in reality. He said it was called "The Big E" (for Ely), all of the bullies and petty teen criminals from the nearby small city were going to "hit" Little Downham in a surge of bullying and petty crimes like shoplifting sweets, under-age smoking and starting small fires then putting them out straight away. I don't know where he'd got his information, but The Big E actually happened,though hardly in the way he described. Actually a bunch of old kids / young teens hung out around the bus stop and one of the other small (and rarely open) shops near the school (which one of their dads owned). We convinced ourselves this was not the actual Big E, but merely a planning meeting for it. We cycled past a few times trying to "overhear information". All we heard was the abuse hurled at us, because, well, they were bullies. Also one time I thought they were chasing me, panicked, and ran my bike right into the full-height kerb. I was lucky I didn't bend the wheel. At this time Robert also began insisting he had a large supply of bugging devices, these, he claimed, were either large ones about a centimetre across, or small ones about 2mm across. These somehow had an extremely long battery life and picked up perfect audio which he could listen to on his base station in his loft. He'd bought all this equipment in the far-off, exotic location of Hunstanton, at a dodgy shop "down a load of alleys filled with druggies". He did concede that the really small bugs "didn't always work" though, and you had to "scatter a handful". He'd duly done this all over the village, but didn't seem to be very forthcoming with what, if anything, he'd been hearing on them. He also wouldn't let me see his base station and control centre because it'd come from that dodgy shop, so his mum didn't want anybody knowing he had it. Incredibly, I actually wrote up some files in which I beleived all this nonsense. We'd also started thinking that the bullies had their own "spy agency", like ours, which also had extensive files, surveillance operations, secret bases and even their own bugging devices. They were inferior to ours, of course. Robert once insisted he'd found one when he went off down Chestnut Tree Close (a place we considered a crime-ridden, unsafe ghetto because 2-3 of the bullies lived down there), which was the size of a golf ball. He'd smashed it in his hands and "one big spark came out", which was the sure sign you'd destroyed it. The Big E eventually evolved into the Big EA (for East Anglia), we now thought all of the bullies and petty teen criminals from several counties were all going to come to Little Downham. As if bullies from Norwich, King's Lynn, Ipswitch etc even knew Little Downham existed! (few enough people in Cambridge did!) How people still relying on their parents for travel were going to pull off such a terror campaign and get away with it was anyone`s guess, too, but we didn't worry ourselves about such things. One memorable night we went out from Robert's house, through the allotments to a field near the park and watched the bullies playing football in the all-weather playing area, from quite a distance through the fence. We later "daringly" sneaked through into the park itself, and laid on some small mounds a bit closer to the play area. I couldn't hear anything they were saying, but Robert insisted he'd heard them saying "we've got to keep training for the big one", so the Big EA was obviously still "on", at some vague point in the future. The leader of the Big EA was supposedly a kid named "Jazz Ice". I don't know if this was his nickname or was supposed to be his actual name. Of course, he was just somebody Robert had dreamed up. On another day, we'd been trying to start a battle against a few of the bullies we'd seen having a kickaround in the school playground (like I said, it was accessible to the public when the school wasn't open). They were playing with some older friends, one of whom looked about a quarter black. We didn't know who he was, so Robert just decided he was Jazz Ice.
Robert had previously claimed that a horde of about 100 bullies had attacked his garden, and he'd single handedly fought them off by throwing his skateboard and bike at them, while deflecting thrown stones with the inside of his wrist, which he insisted is "the hardest part of your hand". We tried to start another battle with Jazz Ice and crew, by shouting insults then running back into Robert's garden and our prepared "fortress" (a pile of dirt). As Robert had previously defeated 100 bullies on his own, a group of six was even more reluctant to enter the garden and attack us. One of them just ran up to the gate and yelled "come on then, if you fink yer so 'ard!", but all three of us were oddly reluctant to take him up on the offer, and eventually they left. Robert was actually pretty good at doing realistic-ish caricatures of people's faces, so we soon had a "suspect file" with Jazz Ice and the other kids in it.
Another time some teens had dragged out an old sofa that had been stuffed behind a shed at the school. They put it in the middle of the field and were sitting on it, hanging out. Of course, we decided they were having a "planning meeting" for the Big EA, or some other crime. Cunningly they were doing it out in the open so nobody could sneak up on them. We resorted to sneaking around in the allotments and occasionally shouting "distracting" abuse. Robert sang out the Italian-sounding "Idiotiiiii" in a fake Indo-Italian accent, which made the rest of us double up with laughter. We wished we had one of those "satellite dish" long-range microphone things to listen to the "meeting" with. We didn't, but my brother insisted that if you cover up one ear, the other one is able to hear twice as well. He did this in their direction several times, but apparently they were "whispering", so he still couldn't hear them. Funny, that. As well as the fantasy "bit guns", I also wanted to build a number of Anti Bully vehicles and equipment. I'd toned back my ideas of building spaceships and gadget-laden Knight Rider-type cars by this time. I wanted to build big pedal cars, super-soaker-armed bike trailers, a pedal-powered tank (with two tethered bikes inside for power) and even a glider with which to patrol the village from the air. The design for that, if we'd built it right, might even have flown... but would almost certainly have broken our necks. This also made an apperance in a second Anti Bully comic I made, this one about the day of the Big EA. We crash the glider at the "far end" of the village and have to battle our way back through the huge hordes of bullies who were going to be patrolling on that day. Anti-Bully's foray into the world of complete fiction... not the first one, either! The "Battle" of the Back Garden Another foray into complete fiction was one of our "battles" with the bullies. My brother and I, Robert and Thomas were hanging around in my back garden, when Robert said he could hear whispering and sneaking-around going on the other side of the fence (which was then a rarely-used farm yard, containing some rotten sheds and a knackered ice cream van). We also occasionally heard thrown stones hitting the fence, but only when we were looking away from it. I decided to look through a knot hole to see if I could see who was there, when I saw robert hit the fence with a stone out of the corner of my eye. A flurry of accusations and denials later (he'd been "going to just gently lean on the fence", with a stone in his hand, obviously. Also things seen out of the corner of your eye "seem faster", apparently - he'd always have some utterly bullshitted "scientific fact" ready). We started shouting about how we were going to beat the bullies, and throwing stones and earth over the fence. Robert had a whispered conversation with Thomas, who then had to go home.
Top part! A few minutes later the bullies on the other side of the fence, who hadn't said anything at all, began to return fire in silence. A brief battle of thrown stones ensued, but died down. It sure was lucky we distracted the bullies with all our shouting and throwing, as Thomas would have had to have gone home past the entrance to that farm yard, and they might have got him! I think this was the same day when Robert decided to tell me "first-rank only confidential information", and randomly accused my brother of being a traitor and double agent. That didn't last long when he realised my brother had hardly been out of my sight since Anti Bully had started. His attempt at creating a case of dissention in the ranks would have to wait... Operation Fencekill The last "big case" of Anti Bully's first era was called Operation Fencekill. Instead of being about murdering a seller-on of stolen goods, it was actually about one of Robert's other agents, who we never met, being kidnapped by Jazz Ice and held hostage. The agent's name was Goldwing.
which is absolutely not the name of a motorbike. Robert kept day-by-day files of our investigations into this, though these investigations were basically the same as all the others, we'd sneak around the park, allotments and school hoping to overhear something useful from the other kids, who were just hanging out or playing football. As time went on we got a lame excuse about this kidnapped agent being marched to a phone box and ordered to tell his mum he was "staying with a friend". Shortly after this began, Robert moved away to Chatteris, which is too far to bike, though we still visited him on and off. He had Fencekill investigation files running up into day 50, most of which didn't have any investigations at all. He later vaguely explained "Oh, he just escaped" when asked about it. We'd do "spy missions" in Chatteris, too. We'd get out the back of Roberts garden into a grassy field beyond. Beyond that was a countryside road, with some industrial units on the other side of it. We never even saw anybody else to spy on, bullies or otherwise. More spying coordination was done with Robert over the phone. Obviously Chatteris was going to be one of the places contributing to the attack on Little Downham when the Big EA came, so he was still finding out information about it over there. One time he told me he'd discovered a large underground base the bullies had built, which had two floors below ground and a 3ft high log stockade around it. Luckily he'd also stolen a stock of bombs the bullies had made. Apparently they were made by "doing that thing where you put oil in a coke can and [crackle crackle] explodes on impact". What an odd time for the phone line to go bad, eh? He'd modified a couple of these oil bombs into shockwave bombs, tested one out, then thrown the other into the bullies' base. The explosion had collapsed it, and he'd gone back later to find a whole crowd of bullies wondering what happened / extricating buried comrades. After he told me this, another agent of his delivered a letter which he opened, rather loudly, right next to the phone and told me that agent had discovered plans for an even bigger enemy base, with six below-ground floors and a six-foot high log stockade. I began drawing up a plan for how we were going to attack and destroy or capture this place.
Notice how, even if the bullies had built such a big underground complex to hang out in, I expected they would have "files" for us to capture. It's well-known that bullies keep extensive paper records documenting their bullying. We were still doing other things when we visited Robert, like making lego spaceships, drawing comics (he was even doing his own side-stories and sequels for The Gun) and so on. We got into a fight, like kids do, and stopped talking to each other for what was probably 6 months, though it felt like years. That was the end of the first "era" of Anti Bully. It's also when it should have ended entirely, I was probably 12, knocking on 13, and shouldn't have been pretending to be a secret agent / assuming other kids were also secret agents. But what the heck, eh? I'm still 10 years old in my head, so after a dull winter over 1996-1997, Anti Bully got fired right back up again (also, as the Eagle Spy Agency had split, it was now actually called Anti Bully). Robert had long since moved on from spying when we got back in contact, I think we visited him once or twice more and just played videogames. I came up with an idea to unite the Eagle Spy Agency and Anti Bully as "United Spy Agencies", or USA, with an appropriately star-spangled logo. I phoned Robert a few more times, but he was always "out", and that was the end of that. The Second Era: 1996 - 1999
An amusing encounter from 1997 The second Anti Bully was my brother, me, and Thomas, who was now far more active than he'd been in the first era. We also roped in Wayne, a friend from another nearby village called Pymoor (still beyond reasonable biking distance for little kids, but we visited often). At the same time my mum was doing a family tree, and found out two other kids called Ben and Dan were our distant cousins, so they got roped in, too. They were also friends with several of the "younger division bullies", though, and probably blabbed out what was going on to them in five seconds flat. They thought the whole thing was some sort of "gang", while I'd let the power go to my head and was acting like Captain Mainwaring, insisiting the agency be "professional". I'd told them about Park Attack (by then called Operation Jackpot). One time, just as we were leaving their house, they asked me "so when we gonna go to the park and get (one of the bullies)?". I really went off on one, telling them the agency was not a gang and did not exist to "get" other kids. One of the first operations of the new agency was setting up a Dead Letter Box. We used a tiny "bridge" (wooden plank) over a dried-up ditch into the allotments, with an older bridge under it. We'd leave messages on the lower plank for the other agents to get, then phone them up and tell them we'd left a message... and everything that was in the message. Fortunate that the bullies had not tapped our phones, eh? Thomas and I would constantly be leaving messages there, the others never bothered / knew about it. Thomas would still need telling, though... The Bomb Case The next big case was "The Bomb Case". We were going on holiday one day, and just as my parents were packing up the caravan I heard my neighbour and his friends talking about how to make molotov cocktails, or petrol bombs. Now, of course, boys will be boys, so of course they were talking about things like that... but I got all excited because I thought they were planning to actually make a load of petrol bombs and create a terror campaign across the village. I excitedly asked my dad if I could visit Thomas, he said of course not, we were going to be setting off in a few minutes, I compromised with permission to have a "quick cycle" round the village, rode over to the dead letter box and left a hastily scribbled note, telling him to investigate this case. Now, knowing that we'd be going away for a week, did he at any point during said week think to check the dead letter box to see if I'd left any last-minute, urgent messages? Did he FUCK, eh? Did. Heee. Fffuck. When we got back from the holiday and I found the soggy, unread note still there I was mouth-foamingly furious. I was planning to kick him out of the agency, but he was the only other agent who was even halfway competent. Not long after we'd got back, our neighbour had got some cheap bangers and threw some over the fence, only increasing my suspicion that they were "building to" a pyrotechnic terror campaign. With the agency on the case we soon discovered some "bomb-making chemicals" in the allotments. Two 1L milk containers, one had had a red cap, but being out in the sun had faded it to an alarming orange. The last dregs of milk in the bottles had turned blue and orange. We took these and threw them away somewhere else, thus "destroying" the enemy's "chemical stores". Some other spying and investigations into the bomb case went on, and I wrote up three files on it, which basically all said the same thing. Of course, our neighbour had probably forgotten that conversation long before we'd even got back from the week's holiday.
The Bulldog Case This was part of the second era of Anti-Bully, but also involved Robert. It must have overlapped with the latter part of Operation Fencekill, before our first "breakup". Basically Thomas said he left a note in the dead letter box, but found it torn up. He also found another note nearby that was talking about spying on him. Meaning that the bullies were "on to us", and spying on us. He claimed he'd later come across these "enemy agents" and listened to their meeting, but had been seen and chased. Obviously he'd faked it, the bullies didn't have their own "spy agency". At one point I left my spy files round Robert's house so he could "compare notes" with anything going on in Chatteris. With his desire to cause dissention in the ranks and find "traitors", he latched right onto this one. For once the Eagle Spy Agency / Anti Bully did some real investigating! Robert compared handwriting and found a number of similarities, thus proving Thomas had made the whole thing up (a charge that could, of course, never be laid against Robert!). He presented me with his compelling evidence, recommending I fired Thomas from the agency. I didn't because, well, I just didn't want to beleive it, in all honesty. Where this episode really got stupid was that, while writing up his adventure with the enemy agents, Thomas incidentally mentioned he'd seen a piece of paper laying on the ground and rather moronically assumed that it was one of Robert's old spy documents (he'd lived near the allotments / school, where all this had supposedly happened). Robert used this mention of his name in Thomases report as further "evidence" that he was a traitor. I mean what the fuck? How in the CUNT is somebody making an assumption, even if a really fuckin' stupid one, about the ownership of a piece of paper on the ground "evidence" of fuckin' anything? This was one of the few times around that era of my life when I was bubblingly furious, but not far enough out of parental earshot to scream swear words in somebody's face. What the actual fuck is wrong with people? Anyway this idiotic episode was all the evidence I needed that the Bulldog Case was motivated solely by spite and a petty need to cause drama (which it probably was anyway, regardless of whether Thomas had faked anything or not). As we cut off from Robert not long after, it didn't matter much, anyway.
The "Fun" Day
September 1st 1996, when Thomas was still the main other "active" agent, was probably the most exciting and fun day in Anti Bully's history. Thomas had gone out to do some spying early, hiding at one of the "points" we used to spy on bullies in the park. They'd seen him, and chased him off with water balloons (which I referred to in the files as "grenades"). He came around mine and we went out to "collect evidence", IE bits of the popped water balloons. We then went down one of the country lanes that leads out of the village, locally known as The Hurst, and started to build a base. Some of the bullies came down there on their bikes, too. I hauled out my Master Marksman pistol (they did a "shotgun" and "machine gun" too, the latter was awesome, but liable to jam, and all of them were cheaply made with poor QC and not really suited to, well, being played with my kids), but I'd only just got it out of my backpack when the bullies... just rode past us going "'E's got one of them guns". That was to be the last "neutral" encounter of the day. At some point we gave up on building a base, and for some reason were in the vicinity of the school. My mum was driving by and saw us, rightly guessing that we were on a mission, she stopped to shout "STÄHP DÈWÎN YÄ BLÃDDY SPÄHÍ MÏSHŪNZ" at us, well, mostly at me. I shouted "Tough!" at the back of the disappearing car. My brother had a sudden attack of the morals, going "Um gunna tell 'er yoo sed that", and rode for home. The rest of us (I think one of the cousins and one of their younger friends had joined us by this point) decided to go back to where we were building our base earlier. We got onto Cannon Street, from which you can get to the Hurst, and saw the bullies coming at us, this time in some force (maybe as many as six of them!). We panicked for no reason (as far as I can remember, maybe there was some other encounter in between during which we antagonised them), turned our bikes and sped away. Of course, running away from the likes of them is the worst thing you can do. Once they detect weakness or fear in anybody they come in for the kill whoever you are and whatever you've done (or not done!). We made a breif stop at my home after the "chase", during which my mum confronted me with "TÄHF, ÌZZÍT?", and a Cheshire Cat grin. As if knowing what I'd shouted at the back of the car meant she'd scored some great victory. I just grinned back and went "YÆŠ, ĬT ÌŞ". We then rode our bikes into the school field (which connected with the park), and sneaked up on the fence to try and overhear what the bullies were saying (about the Big EA, which we still thought was happening, of course). For once, we did actually hear them talking about us, and our spy agency... well, saying they'd tried to fight us, but we'd ran away. They then started talking about going to the village shop, which inevitably meant they'd be coming through the school field. We ran for it, they saw us as soon as they got near the gate, and gave chase. If we'd not put our bikes in the school field, we could have retreated to the cover of the "nature area", then followed them through the allotments and overheard more stuff, like proper spies. But as it was, we had to run to the bikes and get them, or the bullies (we assumed) would steal them (on a previous case, one of the bullies did breifly steal my brother's bike, but that was a parental and/or legal entanglement he wasn't prepared to get in to, so just abandoned it). I was the last to get to my bike and get on it (we never used locks or stands, just threw them down wherever), just as the fastest bully reached me, took a somewhat half-hearted kick that missed, and told us to piss off. Off we duly pissed, but we weren't done. Some other adventuring around the village happened. I think I saw some thrown-away paper near West Fen (another road parallel to the Hurst), and was trying to pick it up when some bullies came on the scene and I had to race out of there.
Eventually the three of us ended up at my house. We were in my room and could hear several of the bullies round my neighbour's house, talking about they'd been chasing us round the village all day. It was time for Thomas to go home. Mum had forbidden my brother and I from going out any more, and didn't give a shit that this would leave Thomas to have to ride home alone through bully-infested streets. Being better than that, we volunteered to escort Thomas home. Easily sneaking out to our bikes, we got on them and prepared to burn rubber in a high-speed takeoff. Now if we'd just started pedalling away silently, our departure may not have been noticed. So OF COURSE I had to go and slam the gate open, yelling "GO! GO! GOOO!", and thus gauranteeing pursuit. I could hear them shouting to each other and grabbing their bikes as we got to the end of the drive and started our ride. My brother had asthma in his childhood, though it was always pretty mild. Anyway I could hear him panting alongside me, so told him to peel off and hide in the allotments. He ended up being our decoy and getting all the "fun" while Thomas and I made a frantic, but uneventful, trip to his house. David went to the small wooden bridge where we had our dead letter box, and had built the small base once. The bullies came up this road, too, perhaps assuming we were going to do some sneaky spying in the allotments. There were two ways out of this small road (Bishop's Close), the road itself and a small alley. Most of the bullies cut David off on the road side, so he rode down the small alley and "roadhogged" (our name for hitting somebody with your bike, or trying to!) the one bully guarding the alley, and got away. Once home, he just had to go and blab to our mum what was going on. Back at Thomases house, I was bracing myself for the ride back home, through the doubtless heavily-patrolled streets. Just as I was about to leave, mum and David showed up in the car, and so I rode home under her watchful eye, mechanically performing all the looks and hand signals I could remember from Cycling Proficiency. Even the "lifesaver's look" for turning right from a major road into a minor road, which caused my mum to howl "JÄHST GÁÜW!" over the sound of the car engine. Which took some doing, considering it was an A-reg 1.2 Nova with a dodgy choke. Once I got home I was forbidden from going back out that day, associating with Thomas, or doing any more spying. Injunctions I duly ignored completely. Well, except the bit about not going out again that day... I couldn't be bothered.
Wayne's Branch Wayne was busy over in Pymoor setting up his own branch of Anti- Bully. Now if Little Downham is small, Pymoor made it look like a city! That said, a pair of twins in my school year I'd been on-and-off friends with (fully off, by this time), and several of the older bullies from primary school, all lived over there. So, as we'd decided that any kid we didn't like was a "bully", and that every "bully" in four counties was in on some grand conspiracy, Wayne had plenty to investigate over there. He recruited one or two other boys. He also found "a drug" (a syringe) near a pond, and had tried to take it home for evidence, but there had been a police car on the way, so he threw it in the pond. I wondered why he didn't just give it to the police and tell them about it. Though the finding of drug paraphinelia in a poorish rural community probably wouldn't have been met with the massive Interpol operation and busts I thought it might do.
Over the new year 1997 - 1998, we went over Wayne's house, which was next to the road leading to the social club, which was also the only place to drink in the whole village. There was a huge crowd of all the teens, big kids and young adults hanging around there. I decided they were "an army of druggies", all dealing drugs... well, why else would everybody be out late on new year's eve? We did some spying / playing about in the last hours of 1997, then went in to see the year change, then came out again and spied from Wayne's back garden at some teens smoking and snogging round the back of the social club. Wayne knew they were only 15, so it was illegal for them to smoke. We'd finally witnessed a crime! Though we ended up not doing anything about it. Later we overheard one of the twins I went to school with arguing with his girlfriend, who had apparently cheated on him with the other one. I remind you I was the same age as those twins, and was still playing at secret agents with young kids.
In keeping with this, whenever I'd go over Thomases house around this time, he'd be "asleep" or "out", I might have been a big kid, but I could still get the message, and gave up on him after a few tries. Now Anti Bully was mostly made up of little kids, with Wayne and my cousin Ben being the second oldest agents, though still closer in age to my brother than to me. Training the Younger Agents These little kids, being little kids, all thought they were the best at spying and should investigate stuff on their own, because they were the one who was going to find out some important information. Meanwhile I was getting ever more Captain Mainwaring-ish and trying to get the agency "organised". One time I said we should ride out in formation, as "a delta", with me at the front, naturally. They just cycled along in a line behind me. I asked them if they even knew what a delta was. One of them evidently watched Star Trek, and hesitantly volunteered "like the Delta Quadrant?". I wasn't best pleased. I instituted a system of "discipline points", which would be given out if they failed to obey orders, meet up in the places I'd told them to meet up etc. If anybody got 10 points, they'd be kicked out of the agency. One of them racked up 17 points in a single mission, but I decided to keep them all on as we "needed recruits". I think I still even harboured an idea of carrying out the Park Attack, though most of the older bullies who had "taken over" the bases back in the day probably didn't even come to the park any more. Still beleiving "the enemy" to be "in occupation" of the park, we started to build a base on the edge of the allotments, next to the dead letter box. We still used this, even though, if Thomas had been right, it was compromised and the enemy knew about it! We spent a day hacking out nettles and weeds from under a hedge. Ben bought the shafts of some arrows he'd got from somewhere, with the flights removed, and we drove them into the ground to make a "wall" at one side of it. We then started collecting grass and twigs to cover over the wall, so we could hide inside and watch people through it. I also had a scrim net (a mesh with camoflague patterns on), which we could put up "in emergencies", if bullies came before we were finished. I left the area for about 5 minutes to go to the shop / home to get some ice lollies or drink. Inevitably when I came back they'd "thought they'd seen" a bully and put the net up. They pointed out what was clearly an old man watering his cabbages. Our secret base was still in progress, with colourful packages littering the ground outside and our bikes parked right there, when some of the bullies who were my age or a bit older came by and watched us working. One of them said "You've got a beat-the-bullies gang, int'cha?". I wonder how he'd found that out?
Ben also supplied some "bomb cases". That's what he described them as. They turned out to be the dried, hollow husks of some large tropical fruit, these had become like huge peanut shells. We planned to fill them with dusty dirt, we could then lob them at attackers and they'd shatter on their faces and get dust in their eyes. In theory anyway. We later went round Ben and Danny's house, some petty kid arguement ensued, and I took off. I stopped off at the half-finished base to smash down the wall, shatter all the fruit husks, and carve "DIE" in the dirt. They came to my house later, looking shell-shocked and wondering why I'd done that. I said I hadn't even been there, our base must have been attacked by enemy agents! I know this was definitely 1997, because "DIE" sounded the same as "DI", as in the princess who was all over the news at that moment in time. We also did some "combat training" around my house. I'd watched the movie Who Dares Wins, loosely based on the Iranian Embassy Siege. Inspired by the training sequences from it, I set up various targets down the side of the house, and was getting agents to practice popping from cover and shooting at them. I was explaining various "rules" they had to follow so they couldn't "cheat" (and get a faster clearance time than me). Mum, of course, chimes in with "Not awaskin match, arew ya?".
Around this time, Funfax bought out the "sequel" to the Spy File，which was called INTERactive Secret Agent. The "Interactive" part being that each of the four adventure books you could get for it (it was bundled with one) came with casette tapes with audio to enhance the stories / give you clues. While the Spy File's addon books were sort of disjointed, Interactive had a cohesive theme where the player "worked for" a spy agency called INTER, which had all sorts of departments and organisational stuff. I started to copy this for Anti Bully, giving this spy agency of maybe 7 members at it's absolute peak (and more commonly 4-5) several "departments" and "specialisations". The only one I remember now is the department for supplying weapons and gadgets, like Q off James Bond, was called WOE, for "Weapons or Eqipment", and you know, bringing "woe" to the enemy. Of course, all of the weapons or equipment were just toys we'd bought. But I did connect a plastic spring-loaded missile launcher off an Action Man to an elasticated 1980's wristband of my mum's, to make a "Wrist-ile launcher". Anyway, as part of this, I began classifying all the weapons we had into categories, based on their range and the damage they could do. Super Soakers and toy swords were both "Level 1", because the former has range but doesn't hurt, and the latter does have hurt but you have to get close. This other boy who Wayne had recruited was another one who, like my cousins, thought that Anti Bully was a "gang" and that we were just going to "get" other kids. One time we were patrolling in Pymoor park, when he suddenly noticed that the sword I had, and the axe I'd lent him, were both marked "level 1", so he just randomly turned to me and went "Less 'ave a level 1 faight!". Stupid fucker. This was also around the time I started to get insanely angry at the shitty QC and general cheapness of toy "spy equipment". Like we'd always carry these toy walkie-talkies, but after constant failiures of communication decided to give them a "range test". I held down the morse code button on one, while a friend walked away with the other one. It lost signal after about 5 paces. Useless fucking shit. Another time I had a cheap Super Soaker ripoff I'd bought from the village shop, the packaging on it trumpeting that it was "gauranteed leakproof!". I held it for about 3 seconds and my hand got wet. I just snarled "fucker's leakin'!" and threw it down, smashing it. Never mind Gamergate and Comicsgate. There needs to be a Toysgate which actually does harass and sends death threats to these manufacturers. They'd deserve it, too.
Anyway, the boy who wanted to "'ave a level 1 faight" quit the agency suddenly. I'd just made him a "full agent" and decided he would be allowed to know our passwords (though we'd let him in all our bases etc without knowing them before). I told Wayne to tell him the passwords while they walked off somewhere. No doubt Wayne just forgot this about 2 seconds later, but whatever happened, as soon as that boy found the gate slammed in his face and was asked to say "password 3", he just told us we were stupid and left. Wayne wanted to follow him and persuade him to come back, but for some reason I got huffy and decided he was "a traitor, anyway". The House One morning, Ben, Danny, Wayne and a few of the other young kids we'd recruited came around and told me they'd found a great place we could use as a secret base. We duly rode out around a bunch of countryside roads and came on an apparently-abandoned house. They showed me down a side alley and to a room at the back which could be opened. The room seemed to be the only accessible one in the house, which was rammed full of old boxes and junk. There was some sort of whispered debate among the other kids who had come there before. I could catch words like "closed" and "left open", but they were oddly reluctant to tell me what the issue was. I was just looking up at a hook in the ceiling, which I thought could be used to hang a "quick reaction" backpack containing essential equipment on, when we all jumped at the sound of angry yelling right behind us. Yeah, the kids who "found" this place apparently didn't think it might belong to anyone! The farmer duly chased us off, me trying to be as polite as possible with "okay, we're going", the rest of the kids just running. We got back to our bikes and took off. Once we'd calmed down, I called a halt on the road (this had been a fair way out of the village, looking on Google Maps now, I can't seem to find a house that looks like the one we went to, though this was over 20 years ago!) and gave a firm, direct order that none of our parents would ever hear about this. We got back to Ben and Dan's house and weren't through the gate five fucking seconds before Ben's burst into tears and gone running inside to tell mumsie. Mumsie then drives off around the village(s) to tell all the other parents about it. The rest of us feeling a mixture of absolute fury and gut-wrenching fear. I finally got up the courage to go back home and face the music. My dad just thought the whole thing was funny. I think that was the last time I saw Ben for about 4-5 years. When I saw him again he'd turned into a chav and was on the back of the college bus, with him and his hard mates occasionally saying a sarcastic "hello" to me, with amused grins at my poofy long hair. I was just waiting for the day they pushed it too hard and I could go "remember the day we went to that house, Ben?", but I think he knew that was hanging over him, and backed off. Anti Anti Bully
Not long after the house incident, Anti Bully pretty much collapsed. Ben and Danny, along with the other kids they'd recruited and some others from Pymoor, set up an agency to fight Anti Bully, imaginitively called Anti Anti Bully. For once we had enemies who had their own secret bases, passwords, spying operations etc (of course, I imagine that the "bullies" had always been organised in this way). Wayne joined them as a double agent, and told me their passwords and plans, which amounted to "getting" my brother and me. I knew of a back way into Ben's garden, and he had built a small base at the bottom of it, which was just some breeze blocks with planks of wood on top. I planned to sneak out one night, go over there, and kick it to pieces, but actually I did nothing at all. In fact, nothing at all came of Anti Anti Bully. They probably forgot all about it a week ot so after forming it. The Secret Sign
Top spelling, there By 1999, Anti Bully was basically just me. And as 1999 was the year I turned 15, it should have long since ended by then! I went out and did some "spying" round the allotments in late winter / early spring. This "spying" amounted to a walk, and I didn't see any bullies, or anyone at all really. I left one of our Anti Bully secret signs (none of which had been changed, even though I knew "enemy spies" and "traitors" were familiar with all of them!), in case Wayne or Thomas should also be out and want to join in on my "mission". A few days later I went out again and found that somebody had added a bit to the secret sign. I considered this "very suspicious" and "launched a full investigation". This, of course, amounted to nothing at all.
The End Probably in March or April 1999, just before getting a computer and getting online, I was out with my spy gear in my backpack, planning to go to the muddy road round the back of Ben and Danny's garden to see what I could see / possibly find some of their lost secret documents that may have somehow ended up in among the broken tiles and junk down the side of a garage. The end of my Super Soaker 100 was poking out of a hole in the ratty old backpack, and this little girl helpfully yelled out to this "adult" she could see that something was poking out of his gear. That was a proper Eltingville Club "My god, what the FUCK am I doing??" moment. I swiftly abandoned my attempt to "look for clues" in amongst a bunch of rubble, and retired home shamefaced. A month or so later, we got our first PC, and OF COURSE my hateful aunt had to show up and stand in the corner of the room giggling to herself and offering moronic suggestions and generally ruin the special occasion. Once it was actually working, I briefly considered creating computerised Anti Bully files, but nah, that part of my life was over. Within another month I'd got the internet, got the Anarchist's Cookbook (Jolly Roger .txt file version), and become "one of the baddies", founding FAT. There were a couple of hangovers of Anti Bully. We visited Wayne once more, and just played on the Playstation. He asked if I "still did that spying stuff", and I told him now I was into making bombs and fighting against the cops. He wasn't impressed. Also Aian finally returned at school, me and Tim (the only other real member of FAT) were talking about making pipe bombs. Aian chimed in with how we were "still on" that, apparently he'd walked away from us back in year 8 or so because we said "it would be cool if we could make bombs". We told him that now it was more "we can and will make bombs". Though our efforts were, er, less than effective. Go and read the FAT page to learn about that! |
