'How I longed to understand teen psychopathy and be cool at school'

Continuing his new series, Dan Antopolski reflects on a family move from London to Cambridge and his transition from a public school to a comprehensive

Illustration by Tom Ford

Being the new kid is a project in itself. There’s the local customs, pecking order, location of toilets, establishing which teachers make good on their threats – it can be a minefield. But in 1987 I discovered that if you can wet your pants at just the right moment, you will solve all your problems, enhance your status, and within a week you will be pretty much running things.

When I was 12 we moved town – family reasons. We left London with its Victorian bones and neon heart and fled up the M11 to Cambridge. Cambridge is worth a visit. Study there by all means – and you can now: as you pull into the train station, signs say “Home of Anglia Ruskin University” – truly higher education is spreading to every forgotten corner of this isle.

The town centre of Cambridge is lovely – the colleges, the river, the quaint market square – they’ve even updated Lion Yard, the formerly shabby shopping precinct where I once saw a naked man and was surprised by my own under-reaction, I was depressed I think. The outskirts of Cambridge by contrast contain some of the country’s most contemptuously conceived developer housing, acre upon acre.

There are new satellite mini-towns too, which, while shinier, are so soulless that you cannot but marvel at how local architects could be edified daily by the mediaeval university without absorbing any desire to build something better than merely necessary. It’s jarring, the way they’ve wrapped another crap town around the jewelled core. It was my first taste, too, of Alan Partridge provincialism, local ITV and so forth, and here and there a meanness of outlook I’d simply never met before.

My immigrant dad had sent me to a London public school and now it was mum’s turn ideologically. We moved house in August, too late for admission to the local school, and for my first half-term as a second-year I attended a properly rough school a longish bus ride away. It was a culture shock and I hid in the library at lunchtimes to avoid Grange Hill type events. I couldn’t get my head round the dumb layout either.

For several weeks I believed that I had to leave the school by a different gate and walk the long way round to a bus stop that was in fact opposite the one at which I had arrived the same morning. Look, I was facing the other way and everything looked different. By the time I had figured it out, a place had opened up at the bland comprehensive round the corner from our house. I took a deep breath and transferred once more: new kid again.

Streaming and friendship groups maintained a social apartheid much more vigorous than at my London public school, where one boy’s dad drove a taxi and another one’s dad was a lord

This school’s catchment straddled two areas of Cambridge and there were two very discrete bunches of folks. Streaming and friendship groups maintained a social apartheid much more vigorous than at my London public school, where one boy’s dad drove a taxi and another one’s dad was a lord but we all rubbed along.

Luckily, the social skills I had acquired there were of great advantage to me here, with all my peers: I knew well how to draw myself up to my full height and display my Latin and to give the correct definition of a circle; these strategies endeared me to my classmates no end and they expressed great joy at my society.

The humour was joyously puerile. For example, we would hold up two sweary fingers and call someone’s name and they’d turn round into the swear – thereby participating actively in their own abuse. It was dumb but funny through relentless repetition. If you answered without turning round, you would foil this fiendish plot and claim the win, but I never had the presence of mind to achieve this in real time. It became a frustrating symbol of my enduring naivety and inability to adapt to the baseline psychopathy of the teen environment. Why couldn’t I be cooler?

 I knew well how to draw myself up to my full height and display my Latin and to give the correct definition of a circle; these strategies endeared me to my classmates and they expressed great joy at my society

As I say, I solved the coolness problem by peeing in my pants. I was 15 by this time and enjoyed age-appropriate bladder control generally but one day I suppose I had mistimed my Ribena and was bursting for the loo halfway through maths. The teacher refused repeatedly to let me leave the room during his lesson and I squirmed in my seat, willing the time away. He is dead now, at least.

There I jiggled, balancing on alternating buttocks and even trying to think about maths as a distraction, my urethral sphincter quivering with fading strength like a dying man until it spasmed its last and my warm pee flowed freely through my trousers. Sweet, posthumous freedom. Well that’s it, I thought peacefully, my family is going to have to move town again. I wasn’t really invested here anyway. Perhaps it’s for the best.

But now that hope had died, I could think clearly – and boldly! The bell finally rang and rather than wait until last, I rose from my seat like a rocket and made it first out of the door, then slowed to a decorous walk! Nobody behind me could see my sodden trousers, filthy shades of grey. Then somebody called my name. Of necessity I answered without turning round. They laughed and cursed with reluctant respect and I realised that I had at last, though inadvertently, foiled the swear-trap! And as I strode across the playground with my crotch drenched in urine, I gloated. “Well, well, well. Who’s cool now?”

It could be that self-soiling will not solve your problems. I am just saying it worked for me, though perhaps more subtly than I claim above. Just – sometimes you have to destroy yourself to rise again, you know. Take a risk! Just pee yourself and see what happens. Weeing is freeing. And this I can guarantee you: for the first minute at least, you will definitely experience a warm feeling.