I’m occasionally asked where I get my ideas from. Although cyber-bullying is very much a 21st century problem, the seed of the idea for ‘comin 2 get u’ was sewn many years before during my own schooldays:

It all started in the Easter term of my second year, although I can pinpoint the moment that school became a fearful place for me to an incident at the beginning of the previous term. We’d been playing football on the field at lunchtime. Walking back towards school, I was rugby tackled from behind by a group of my classmates who then started to ‘de-bag’ me. I don’t doubt it was meant in fun, and the fact that I’d been included in the ‘japery’ was probably a compliment. But instead of entering into the spirit of things, I panicked (I’ve always hated that claustrophobic feeling of being pinned down) and became borderline tearful.
A nice boy called Douglas said, ‘leave him alone; can’t you see he isn’t enjoying it?’ and they let me go. But the damage had been done, especially to my psyche, and I’m pretty sure I avoided the field from that moment on.
Unlike the de-bagging, the bullying was targeted. In the space of a matter of weeks I went from being a relatively confident, outgoing twelve-year-old to an anxiety ridden recluse. They say that the greatest gift to any writer in an unhappy childhood. If I owe boys A, B and C anything, it is the rich vein of unhappiness they gifted me, and from which I now draw inspiration for my fiction.
Why they picked on me – apart from the fact that I was the smallest, youngest boy in the class and an all-round coward – I’m not sure. Some people say that bullies target people they’re jealous of. If they were jealous of anything it might be that they detected in me a boy with a happy home life. Plus which of course they couldn’t fail to see how upset it made me.
Like most victims, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if it was my fault. These boys (certainly A and B) were notionally my friends. And indeed boy A – for whom I still retain a lingering loathing – kept up the fantasy that he was my ‘bffl’ (best friend for life) throughout their campaign. What did I do to make them turn against me?
I vaguely remember a broken ‘play date’. But that would hardly be good reason for such a concerted spell of bullying. Perhaps I was too cocky, too full of myself. But whether it was simply random or the result of some unconscious slight on my part it soon became apparent that they’d set out to make my life a misery.
Nearly forty years later, I’m able to see that they probably weren’t the happiest of children. Neither were they in that select group of school bullies who were universally feared by boys like me. In fact, I doubt they ever picked on anyone else. Maybe persecuting me gave them the kind of self-respect that their relative anonymity in the school had failed to provide. I sense also that there was something sexual about it. They were obviously going through puberty; I obviously hadn’t reached it yet.
I can’t even remember how it started. Name calling perhaps: Boy B renamed me ‘Bridget the Midget’ and – like everyone who played a musical instrument - I was regularly dubbed a ‘poof’ and a ‘queer’. I do recall a ‘short story’ they sent me about my homosexual encounter with a skinhead (‘and then Bridget and the skinhead wanked’). For several years I kept their billets doux in a drawer by my bed thinking they would serve as evidence should they ever turn on me again. But my Mum must have found them at some point and thrown them away.
There was never any physical violence – only the threat of it. The closest it came was one lunchtime when A and C trapped me in our form room. I still remember the exact words. I even used the first sentence in ‘comin 2 gt u’.

BOY A: (To Boy C) Go and get Beezo. Then we’ll see some fun.
ME: (TO A BOY CALLED DD) Help me Dave, please.
DD:(BARELY LOOKING UP FROM HIS SANDWICHES) You’ve never helped me.

Somehow I managed to escape. And from that day I did everything in my power to avoid them; walking the school like a squaddie on his first tour of Northern Ireland (that’s what it felt like) expecting at any moment that one of them would jump out and ambush me.
After a while, the situation became so unbearable that I started feigning illness; a difficult to diagnose all purpose stomach ache that resulted in me having almost a term off school. It was only when I ended up in the children’s hospital for ‘tests’ that I lost my nerve and told my parents the truth. Whenever I read a story about a child who has committed suicide as the result of bullying, (it happened at my son’s school the year he started there) it’s very often the case that they’ve kept it a secret. There’s almost a sense that the parents have been negligent in some way. Perhaps there’s a small part of me that feels angry with my Mum and Dad for not picking it up on my distress. But how could they have done when I worked so hard to conceal it? I don’t think it was so much a question of shame, but more the belief that if I told anyone it would only make things worse, coupled of course with the bullies’ charter, which states that ‘sneaking’ is the greatest sin of all.
I don’t know what happened after I’d confessed; how my mum and dad went about reporting it. But the next thing I remember I was back at school watching my three persecutors following the music master into the music room where he was obviously about to give them a bollocking. There were no such things as bullying policies in those days (except perhaps those of the bullies themselves) and I suspect that had I not been such an active musician I wouldn’t have found someone to champion me so whole-heartedly. There followed a fake letter of apology, signed by all three of them, in which they named the items they had stolen from me and were now returning (I seem to recall a book about dogs) and vowed never to have contact with me again. Boy C even appeared at my house with a record by a trombone player called ‘Slide Hampton’. Perhaps he was genuinely sorry – or perhaps he’d been put up to it by his parents, but of the three of them, I always felt he was the least committed. Later that day, as I lined up to go into a lesson, probably the nastiest of the mainstream school bullies (now an accountant) enquired, ‘it is true you split on A and B?’
Although technically the bullying stopped there, I still went round in a state of low level panic for the next three years - until A and B left school at the end of the fifth year to join the police. I still did everything I could to avoid them, escaping to the music room whenever possible and adopting a policy of casual indifference in lessons so as not to draw attention to myself. I also took to sneaking off to the cafe in the local park where I would tease out morning breaks with a Twix and milky cup of tea. And it wasn’t until the end of the fourth year that I felt confident enough to take even the slightest interest in any school work.
To my eternal shame I also became something of a bully myself; picking on my younger sister, who incidentally was one of the few people to stand up for me when Boy A and his coterie starting bad mouthing me one afternoon on the bus home.
I’ve never been bullied since, and my life improved immeasurably when I met my lifelong friend ‘Big D’ – to whom I later dedicated ‘Silenced’. But underneath the scars remain. I hate being in large groups (particularly of men) and have probably unconsciously avoided any situations where bullying is likely to take place. I’m quick to back down – even when I think I’m right - and will always go the extra mile - or thousand - to avoid conflict. Perhaps it was in my DNA already, but I have a feeling I would have turned out rather differently if I hadn’t encountered boys A, B and C.