The Portal - The Present Takers by Aidan Chambers
Producent: Pamela Taivassalo
ELLIOT:
The Portal
The Present Takers by Aidan Chambers
Hello everyone, my name is Elliot Broadly.
Today we'll focus on the book The Present Takers by Aidan Chambers. In a
minute we will talk to the author but before that; the very first page of the
book.
It's Lucy's birthday. When she arrives at school in her brand new birthday
shoes, she's greeted by Melanie and her gang.
Elinor Coleman reads The Present Takers (page 1)
“Happy birthday, Lukey!”
“We’ll have to teach Pukey Lukey some manners. No prezzies, but showoff new
shoes.”
“So she has!” Vicky said. Lucy felt the grip on her arm tighten.
Melanie moving very close, pushed her lips exaggeratedly wet and pursed, into
Lucy’s face.
Lucy twisted her head to avoid the soggy kiss. Melanie stepped back. “All right,
little Miss Stuckup, we’ll just have to show you what happens to people who
won’t be friendly.”
“It shouldn’t be bad this time,” Sally-Ann said like a nurse comforting a patient
before an operation.
Vicky and Sally-Ann each raised a foot above one of Lucy’s.
“Ready…. Stamp!”
AIDAN CHAMBERS:
What this is about is gangs, is the heard. If you belong to the gang, then you’re
protected by the others in the gang. But gangs then fight each other and that’s
just as bad. The people who tend to be picked on the most are people who
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don’t want to belong to gangs and don’t have any alliance any associations with
anybody who protects them. There’s no group to protect them. So they tend to
pick on the loner. And although Lucy is not particularly a loner, she is not a
gang person. But in the book what you’re told is that Melanie the bully has
done this to everybody in the class except Lucy. She’s the last one they do it to.
And it tends to happen on the kids birthday. They pick on them on their
birthday.
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday, yes….
ELINOR:
Lucy had rushed home meaning to talk to her mother about what had
happened. Usually she talked to her mother about everything. Sarah was that
kind of mum.
But today, when she saw Sarah sitting in the middle of poring over the shop
accounts, Lucy felt for the first time that she did not want to talk to her about
something important. Not only did she not want to, but could not. It was as if
what she wanted to say was too private, even to tell her mother.
Important? Private? Standing in the kitchen surrounded by so many familiar
things all higgledy-piggledy as usual, the whole thing seemed silly. Three girls
teasing a firth for a bit of fun. That’s what the story would sound like, wouldn’t
it? Who would take it seriously?
For a few seconds Lucy wondered if the scene behind the cycle shed had really
happened. Or at least has been as bad as she remembered. It couldn’t have
been, could it?
One glance at her wounded shoes and she new.
ELLIOT:
Bullying doesn't need to be physical to hurt. A single look or stare can hurt as
much as violence.
Our reporter Hugo talked to Bella and Kajsa
HUGO INTERVIEWS BELLA AND KAJSA:
“It can be small, small things, I mean, it can be like a look or something that you
just, you feel like that person, just like, not hates you but, you know that, oh
that’s so mean, they’re so mean or something. Or there’s someone passing
notes and you kind of think like, are they passing notes about me. Or it can be
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like not waiting for someone. And I think it’s really common. I mean, I think it
happens every single day in every single school.
I come from the States and it’s, there’s my old school, there was actually kind
of, not like this I mean, you didn’t get beat up or anything, but there was a
group of girls that were definitely, I mean , they weren’t very nice. And. They
had their group and you kind of were not accepted very, easily. You didn’t
know why.
I think that everything, or everybody knows that bullying isn’t a good thing, but
I don’t really think there is anything that anyone can do to stop it completely. I
think there’s always going to be bullying.
People who bully have issues and they will never go away unless we
have like a perfect society which is impossible.
There isn’t , in a lot of situations there’s not much you can do. I
mean, you can tell a teacher, you can tell a parent, you can, you know, you can
try to fight them, but I mean, a lot of time it’s just, there’s not much you can
do. So I think in a lot of situations the best thing is just to be able to like listen
and to be able to support your friend and mainly just kind of be there. It can be
quite comforting for people that are bullied to read about someone else who
has been in the same situation. I think that it’s important also to, kind of,
people, maybe they’re not bullied, but they understand like, a small thing can
cause so much pain and books about bullying, they just kind of confirm that
and hope you understand.
ELLIOT:
When Aidan wrote the book The Present Takers, he based it on a true story.
Aidan remembers well how growing up felt like, the memories keeps the
teenager in him alive.
AIDAN CHAMBERS:
In a sense, writing the books has also kept that alive in me, of course, because
all the characters in the books are really me in a fictional form. So I have to take
in what is going to happen to these characters and what happens is I recycle
myself in the characters, so I’m the girls, I’m the boys and whoever’s in the
book. I mean I’m Melanie the bully. If I’d ever be a bully I’d be like Melanie. So
they’re all me, really. It seems to me, that there’s always a reason why people
are doing what they’re doing, even when what they’re doing are horrible
things. So you need to understand that, and if you can understand why they’re
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doing it, there is a hope you can stop them doing it, if you can persuade them
not to do it. And, there is in the book, there are reasons suggested, and there
are reasons that are not said which you can think out for yourselves, so that
Melanie becomes a real character rather than simply this villain, this two
dimensional villain, that she has a reality her selves and you can feel
sympathetic towards her, even though she’s behaving so badly.
ELLIOT:
Later on in this programme Aidan Chambers will share a few advices on what to
do if you're bullied. Now our reporter Keith Foster has dived into the world of
entertainment to check out the bullies in fiction.
KEITH:
In one way, every bad guy in stories is a bully. Picking on weak people is bad,
whether you’re a school pupil or a cartoon dog or a big business.
But let’s stick to schools
The bully in perhaps the most popular school fantasy around now is Draco
Malfoy. He sets out to make life difficult for Harry Potter, although to be honest
he’s not that much good at it.
As is usual with bullies, Malfoy surrounds himself with a couple of big – what
shall we call them? Assistant bullies – but his are so stupid that a monkey with
a wand could do them.
SO Malfoy doesn’t spell so much trouble.
Thank you thank you.
Although he does help kill the headmaster, but that’s not really bullying is it?
Boarding schools where the pupils all live in school are a great place to find
bullies.
The old classic story is called Tom Brown’s Schooldays, all about old British
private schools where bullying is not really a problem, it’s the way of life!
I’ll always remember the version I saw as a child on TV, where a little boy was
kept down a hole in the floor by the bully called Flashman. He was terrified of
spiders..
Bullies are not so creative. They often shut their victims up in things. And they
threaten to beat their victims up of course. In every American school movie
there’s a scene by the school lockers where the little kid is going to get bruised,
but more often than not there’s a twist. Like in Spiderman where Peter Parker
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jumps right over his bully, or the Karate Kid who learns how to fight back. So if
you’re getting bullied, the best thing is to learn martial arts from a master or
get bitten by a radioactive spider.
A good bully will always develop a signature. A sound or a look. We all know
who this is at once…
Nelson from the Simpsons. Bullies always do have a dumb laugh, don’t they?
Cartoons love bullies. There’s Cartman from South Park
and Tom from Tom and Jerry. Or even Jerry from Tom and Jerry.
There are plenty of male bullies in movies and books. Not so many girls that we
all remember. One movie that just loves girls being bullied is Mean Girls, it
came out a couple of years ago, where the chief bully is called Regina George.
The way she bullies is all about which girls are popular. Which means being
rich, or pretty, or both.
That film is almost too painful to watch!
Are you girls really that mean?
Shame on you!
ELLIOT:
Brenda and Joanna live in Dublin, They've both got black hair, wear black make
up and call themselves emos and rockers. They wear black clothes, always,
except from when they go to school. Brenda and Joanna have changed their
minds about school uniforms.
PAMELA INTERVIEWS BRENDA AND JOANNA:
- I used to think it was a bad thing. I used to hate it- It’s alright!
- But, like, if I came in to school dressed the way I am now, I probably be
thrown at. I probably would have things hit me in the head. I’d get really
bullied, cause I already do. But it’d be worse if I came in wearing my clothes,
like. If I walk pass people from my school and they see the way I’m dressed, I
come in the next day and I’d be getting slugged.
- My school is okay, like. Nothing will get said to me, because I know
everybody, like. I went from one to school to the next with them, so they don’t
really mind [the way I’m dressed].
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- She knows people more than I do.
I literally only have basically like one friend at school, there’s one girl that
understands med and we get along great. She’s the only one that won’t bully
me, say bad thing and make fun of me, like, for the way I am.
- No one really bullies in my school, ‘cause they’re all like, we have these
teachers you go to and, like, you just say that he’s bullying and you don’t say
who’s told.
- Her school is a lot better than mine.
- Why do you think that bullying doesn’t really exists in your school?
- Because I don’t really see anyone getting bullied that much, like, everybody
gets along with each other.
-And they’re stricter, The teachers are pretty strict. In my school a lot of the
kids grew up pretty bad and their parents don’t really care that much anymore.
One person has stopped bullying me because I did fight back. And I, like, and,
usually people say don’t hit back, tell the teacher and usually I do that, but in
my school you kind of have to [hit back] cause the teachers are, they kind of
really don’t do anything.
- They don’t care.
- So when you hit him or her he stopped…
- Yeah, it was a him, he first hit me and I hit him Then he threw a chair at me. I
hit him again after he threw the chair at me. And then he just, like, he hasn’t
we’re kind of friends now, but he hasn’t ever said…He’s never said anything
bad to me [after that]. That was on the first week I started school. The whole
week he was giving me hard time telling me, like, anywhere I sat down he told
me to get up so he could sit there and he told me names. So when I actually hit
back he never said anything like that to me again. It was a fellow, a big fellow as
well. And he got hit by a girl!
ELLIOT:
Our reporter Pamela asked the author what his advice to stop bullying would
be.
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AIDAN CHAMBERS:
You have to make it known. I won’t tell you how it’s resolved in the book
because you need to read it. But it does seem that you have to make it public
who it is that is doing this and what they are doing, and not to be afraid of
doing it. Otherwise it will just go on. And as Lucy says, if they stop doing it to
me they just do it to someone else. It’s morally wrong to think: Thank
Goodness they are not doing it to me anymore, let them do it to somebody
else. But you need to make sure you are supported by people who can protect
you. If you just do it on your own the bully will get at you.
ELLIOT:
Pamela Taivassalo met Aidan Chambers and Brenda and Joanna. Elinor
Coleman read from the book The Present Takers. Keith Foster checked out the
bullies in Fiction. Hugo Zetterberg met Isabella Babette and Kajsa Björkman. I’m
Elliot Broadley and that's all from us for now. Visit our website ur.se and look
for The Portal.
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