Melissa Kite was the most unpopular girl in her school

If you are bullied at school, you see, you never stop feeling bullied, no matter how old you are. It is absurd that I am 41 years of age and a group of women can still reduce me to tears. To be fair to the bullies, I was an awkward, argumentative, pedantic nerd of a schoolgirl. I know, shocking isn’t it?

To make things worse, I arrived at secondary school from a convent primary not knowing any swear-words. The way I expressed myself — arguing pompously with the other students, arguing pompously with the teachers, and spending lunchtimes in the piano practice rooms playing Bach two-part inventions — didn’t come into its own until the sixth form when I was suddenly declared achingly cool.

Another girl found me hammering away like Geoffrey Rush in Shine one afternoon and was taken by the idea that being a pedantic nerd was the new black. I was elevated to the status of ‘loveable geek’ and students would come to watch me playing Bach while they ate their sandwiches.

Up until then it had been miserable. I used to lock myself in the girls’ loo rather than go to assembly because there wasn’t a single person in the entire school who would stand next to me.

It was a mixed school but, just as the lioness does the hunting, the girls did the bullying while the lazy-ass boys just enjoyed the show. Shouting my name, then, when I looked round, pretending no one had called me, I seem to remember, was their favourite torment.

Whenever I am pitched into new surroundings involving women now I am a nervous, hyper-vigilant wreck. In this respect, my secondary education might as well have been a tour of duty in the Mekong Delta.