Peace to all men: The day I came face to face with my racist school bully

What would it be like to meet someone who racially tormented you when you were a child? I have wondered for most of my adult life. Then, just in time for Christmas, I did just that.

I was brought up in a Jewish home in east London. We weren’t much fussed about religious observance or about Israel, and once or twice at this time of year, we had a Christmas tree alongside a Chanukah menorah.

At my happy little primary school, there were a few Jewish kids, and nothing was made of it. But soon it would be.

Aged 11, I won a scholarship to a fancy school, Bancroft’s, a bus ride away in a better area. It was a minor public school, with about a quarter of the boys boarders from all over London and beyond, the rest of us more local day boys.

Bancroft’s was on a par with Dulwich College in south London, with whom we played rugby. So while my best-known near-contemporaries are the likes of the lawyer Lord David Pannick, Mike Lynch, the late tech billionaire, and the comedian Alan Davies (who loathed the school); over at Dulwich, their star turns are the novelist Michael Ondaatje, the comedian Richard Ayoade and the UK’s probable next prime minister, Nigel Farage.

From day one at Bancroft’s, I discovered something wholly new. In my little neighbourhood, being Jewish was no big deal. But transferred to this bigger school in a fancier catchment, it suddenly was. Suddenly, a small core of my schoolmates were obsessed with “Yids” and “Jew boys”.

We were only a handful, but this snarling bunch couldn’t pass any of us in the corridor without rubbing their noses, putting on Fagin-like voices and muttering about Hitler having had the right idea. The amusing ruse of hissing to signify gas chambers, of which there has been much in the news recently, had not quite yet caught on.

Our tormentors would throw down pennies and joke about us using our apparently oversized noses to pick them up. Jews were somehow accused of being miserly and extravagant at the same time – a simplified version of the antisemites’ complaint about the Jews for a century, that we are apparently both communists and capitalists simultaneously.

I was twice physically beaten up for walking around while Jewish, but there was one tormentor who was never violent, but was incredibly persistent.

He was called Johnnie Dickens, a big, tough boarder, a scholarship boy like me, who had a kind face and was very funny – other than when he broke off to have yet another tedious go at the Jew boys.

I avoided Dickens and barely saw him, but I have wondered about him a lot over the subsequent decades. He came from the east end of London and his father had reputedly been a docker. I speculated that perhaps his dad had been a follower of Oswald Mosley, the pre-war British fascist leader. A lot of old dockers had been in Mosley’s gang.

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I had no idea what had become of Johnnie Dickens. Pals told me he softened and became a rather nice young bloke. Decades later, when Facebook started, I was amused to find he was a clearly much-loved headteacher at a junior school in Hampshire. That was a surprise.

However, with accusations of Farage being an antisemitic bully at school dominating the headlines – allegations he has denied – my curiosity about Johnnie Dickens was suddenly piqued again. I tracked him down online and sent a message. If he ignored me, or sent back an insulting reply, I would have an answer of sorts.

He didn’t respond. But then I found a phone number for him, and after procrastinating over it for days, I rang him.

Dickens’ response was one of the most extraordinary – and heartening – things I can remember in 45 years as a journalist.

He hadn’t seen my message, so I explained again why I was contacting him, and asked if I could buy him lunch and have a chat for an article I had long wanted to write about my experiences at school. I would promise him total anonymity.

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to be anonymous. I want to come right out, publicly and say how embarrassed and ashamed I am about how I was back then; how regretful I am about the stupid, vicious things I used to say.”

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This kind of thing never happens. People, many of them in the public eye, never take responsibility for anything that’s inconvenient or embarrassing to them. Dickens could have said it was all “banter” from a long time ago and he didn’t remember it, but instead, here was a prominent citizen in his area – he’s still a supply teacher and a popular funeral celebrant locally – being what in Yiddish, I’d call a mensch, a proper person.

So, why did he say such vile things? “My only excuse is that I was a totally ignorant little d***, but I was also old enough to know better. I had no hatred whatsoever in my heart, and I was basically doing it to look cool to other people. I’m extremely sorry, and please do come over any time you like. Even just speaking on the phone like this is very cathartic.”

I was completely taken aback, and expected him to change his mind, and I would have understood if he had. But he didn’t, and a week ago, I met Johnnie Dickens in a pub by Swindon station.

A grandfather now, like me, he was a thoroughly delightful, gentle and thoughtful guy. “I really was a little sh**, wasn’t I?” he said. His father, Fred, had, indeed, been a docker, then a lorry driver. They had lived in a council house in the East End, but he’s from a background of solid, if currently disappointed, Labour voters. His family disliked Enoch Powell, and today, he particularly despises politicians weaponising the small boats issue to gain power.

In the course of a blokey two hours in the pub, he quoted Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Laurie Lee and Virgil. And explained how brutal life as a public school boarder in the 1960s had been. (I should say that the school now is very different – highly multicultural and academically outstanding).

“I felt physically sick often because of the unfairness of it all,” he admitted. “It was very much the older ones picking on the younger ones, a pecking order thing. There was no support. You couldn’t say a word to the masters because you would get your head kicked in by the boys.

“I might have been big, but I would cry incessantly when I first went to Bancroft’s because I’m quite a softie. I still cry when there’s a lovely song in a film.”

Dickens explained how when we were 16, long after I’d begun shunning him, he’d been taken during a school trip to Belsen concentration camp, and it changed his life and his outlook. “One thing I will admit,” he said, laughing. “I was jealous of you guys having barmitzvahs. Nobody gave me a load of Parker pens when I was 13. I couldn’t understand how you all suddenly got all this expensive stuff.”

Charitable, well-travelled and cultured, this Johnnie Dickens v2.0 was a revelation. He goes into villages in Gambia to help people out with things like football kit they can’t afford. He is not religious, he says, but sometimes prays and adds: “I’d love to go to a synagogue some time.”

As a successful teacher – Dickens became a head at 32 – he is appalled that when we were growing up, the school had no comparative religion classes. “If someone had explained to me the differences and commonalities between Christians, Jews, Muslims, it could have made all the difference.”

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It’s an interesting point. In spite of the horrors of the Manchester synagogue attack and the Bondi massacre, I’m not one of those who believe there’s an unstoppable flood of Jew hatred. What I do see is a massive amount of ignorance, especially among Gen-Zers, that has made a dislike of Jews this year’s fashionable look. Legitimate protest against a nasty strain of crude and shameful nationalism among some Israelis has been exploited across the world by a small but virulent number of true Jew haters, with a truly genocidal agenda.

We see it time and again – young people, often at good universities, who chant “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” while knowing as much about what those slogans mean as my cat.

I realise now that the real Johnnie Dickens as a boy was not even remotely an antisemite – just a clever young lad led astray in a demanding new school environment and showing off to gain status. How refreshing for him to admit as much, and if only people in public life were as upfront about their past behaviour too and apologise for it instead of dismissing it as banter from a different age, or, even worse, denying it had happened in the first place. To be upfront and explain doesn’t make someone look shady or weak. If anything, it can be something to be admired.

Corny as it is on Christmas Eve in a troubled year to proclaim peace and brotherhood among men, the real Johnnie Dickens is welcome at our house any time. We may even try to rustle up a traditional Friday night dinner to honour him and his inspirational honesty.

Therein lies a lesson for us all.