Why I confronted MY BULLY ASAN ADULT

Teased and tormented as a schoolgirl, Shona Sibary decided to stand up to her bully decades on

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Nobody knows how they will react when confronted with someone from their past, especially if that person doesn’t bring back happy memories. For me, it was on a school reunion day, and I saw her before she saw me. At first, I could not believe it was her.

Unremarkably middle-aged and a bit plump, she was wearing a floral summer dress with sandals, and I noticed her ankles had that telltale puffiness certain overweight women in their 40s get.

But that’s just me being mean, still trying to find reasons, after all these years, to take her down. To take her power away. I wouldn’t have given her a second glance if we’d passed on the street. Yet this was the girl – all grown up now – who had made so much of my life at school a misery. I’d spent 33 years rehearsing what I’d say if I ever saw her again. Now she was here... and I couldn’t find the words. I didn’t know if I could forgive her. Can anyone really forgive their bully?

We were at a convent school in Sussex together. I joined as a boarder in 1980 at the age of nine. Before that my family had been in Fiji for four years, where my father worked as a land developer, and the only schooling I’d known had been somewhat unconventional. There was no TV in Fiji in the late 1970s, so I devoured Enid Blyton books and dreamt of boarding-school fun with midnight feasts and freezing dormitories. So when we moved back to the UK following a catastrophic flood, my parents happily obliged.

I remember arriving and my mother unpacking my belongings into the cupboard by my bed, placing my teddy on the pillow. ‘Just hold back a bit,’ she said, hugging me tightly. ‘You’ll need to find a way to fit in.’

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