How I was driven to a breakdown by the seductress who groomed me and stole my youth: The ex-public schoolboy who became embroiled in an affair with his 35-year-old Spanish teacher at 17 describes the gradual realisation he was a victim of sexual abuse
The first time I tell anyone, really go into detail about the truth of my love affair at school with my Spanish teacher Miss P, is nearly 20 years later.
The guy I confide in is a recent friend, Pete. He thinks about the story for a day or two, and then speaks his mind: ‘You realise, don’t you, that if what happened to you happened in a school today, there’d be police, lawyers, a court case. It’s a criminal offence and there’s good reason for that. It’s abuse, lad.’
‘I suppose it’s a fine line,’ I mutter.
‘What are you talking about? It’s not a fine line at all. Call it what it is. Sexual abuse.’
‘Oh, come on, Pete, I was party to it. I let it happen. It takes two . . .’
‘She was 35. You were 17, for Christ’s sake. A kid.’
My mind goes back to my torrid last months at school: the secrecy, the lies, and then the utter humiliation of exposure. The shame of it, which all seems to fall on my shoulders and not hers.
Even as my life starts to cave in, I refuse to accept the inevitable. The beginning of the end comes on the first day of the spring term in January 1993, when my best mate Nick can’t meet my eye. He’s the only one who knows about me and Miss P . . . and that is only because he guessed when he smelled her perfume on me.
The first time I tell anyone, really go into detail about the truth of my love affair at school with my Spanish teacher Miss P, is nearly 20 years later
But best mate or not, he can’t keep a secret, at least not at a New Year’s Eve party. ‘In my defence,’ he says, ‘I was monumentally wasted.’
I have hopes that Ant, the schoolmate he told, was also drunk and won’t remember the details. But these evaporate the moment I see Ant’s big grin. ‘Yeah, all right vicar, I won’t tell a soul,’ he laughs. ‘But come on, what’s Miss P like in the sack?’
If our affair wasn’t already too close to public knowledge, Miss P is flaunting the engagement ring I bought her before Christmas, emptying my childhood building society account to do it. She claims her Spanish boyfriend, ‘Carlos’, gave it to her. But this isn’t the most convincing lie, because no one has ever seen Carlos.
He doesn’t exist — the only proof of him is a photo she took with a random guy on holiday in Spain with me last year.
To create an excuse for us to be together, she proposes giving me ‘private tutorials’ — at my mother’s house. Miss P must be pretty convincing when she suggests the idea to Mum, because the three of us end up having Sunday lunch to discuss these extra lessons.
Over a meal of Waitrose fish pie with a bottle of wine, Miss P makes her generous offer to give me weekly free tutoring, as a way to get my grades back up to scratch after the disappointment of being rejected by Oxford University.
Such is her poise that under the table she kicks off her shoe and, still talking, begins to slide her foot up my leg. I mirror her movements, hidden by the long tablecloth. With my longer legs, I can reach further, run my foot along the inside of her bare thighs, which she obligingly separates.
When Mum gets up to fetch dessert, Miss P grabs my toe, rubs it up and down against herself, and mimes an orgasm. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Gibson,’ she calls out, ‘I’m sure he’ll be back on top before you know it.’
What I am sure of is that I have split myself in two. I’ve carved out two distinct versions of me. A double life.
Old me, who goes to school, sits in lessons, does homework, sings in chapel, chats to the lads about nothing important.
Other me, who exists in a parallel universe of secrecy, lying on demand, pretending I’m not a teenager but a real grown-up man.
Then, the worst happens. It’s a couple of weeks before school breaks up for Easter. I’m in the library, and from the other end of the long room, I hear the door open and close emphatically, then feet walking hurriedly, start-stopping, coming down the aisle, clearly looking for something, or someone. I look up and see her.
Her face is white, and she’s lost her composure. Glancing around, she sinks into a chair on the opposite side of the table, head in her hands. ‘I have just been spoken to,’ she begins, her breath catching in her throat, ‘at break, in the staffroom.
A warning from a friend, Mr Roberts the science master. Teachers are talking — they say we’ve been seen together. ‘You haven’t told anyone, have you?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ I lie automatically.
But I know whose fault it is. Mr Roberts the science master runs a boarding house on the school campus. And one of the boys who lives there is Ant.
READ MORE: ‘I’m pregnant’: How two words from a beautiful 35-year-old Spanish teacher ended the hopes of her 17-year-old public schoolboy lover getting into Oxford
Over the following days, paranoia grows inside me. In every lesson, every assembly, at lunch in the dining hall, in the library, I see faces staring at me, eyeing me with suspicion, and I’m convinced they all know, the whole school.
Any minute, there will be a summons to the headmaster’s office and that will be that. I’ll be out. And what about Miss P — will she lose her job? Or worse, face the police? She said once that our relationship isn’t illegal. Surely they can’t lock her up or anything.
Miss P isn’t waiting for that to happen. She asks around and learns that one of the chief gossips is the history teacher, Mr Harris. She doesn’t wait to hear his side first, just storms into his classroom after lessons, on the offensive, berating him for spreading vile rumours, not letting him get a word in.
‘He clearly wasn’t expecting petite Miss P to confront him,’ she laughs. ‘I certainly had his attention.’
This is the story she tells him: she took pity on me last year when she found me in an emotional state. Found out I’d been having a hard time, displaced at a new school, parents divorcing, mother’s cancer, clearly fragile. And, from that point onwards, I’d formed a bit of an attachment to her.
This led to some extra tuition, always with my mother in the vicinity. I don’t argue, even though she’s making me out to be the needy one.
Her excuses might save her, but they don’t help me. The teachers begin ignoring me. They don’t return my greetings in the corridor. When I have my hand up in class, I’m overlooked. Then my German teacher, Mr Grice, addresses the class about our upcoming exams.
‘Everyone needs to pull out all the stops to score highly in these papers. There are no short cuts — at least not if you’re studying German.’ He pauses, shuffles something around on his desk, then adds, not looking up: ‘Perhaps it’s different if you’re taking another language and getting special attention.’
None of the others appear to register the comment, but he may as well have walked over and landed a massive fist in my gut.
Then my tutor, Mr Batsford, calls me into his office. ‘I’ve heard what people, my colleagues, have been muttering, and I have to tell you, I don’t like gossip, tittle-tattle,’ he says, with feeling. ‘However, they’ve been hard to ignore, these things that are being talked about by everyone. So, I decided to speak to Miss P myself.’
His tone changes, softens, and as he speaks, he gets up, moves to sit on the edge of the desk. In this small room, he’s very close. ‘I just wish you’d come to me first, Joseph, when you were experiencing these difficulties at home.’
His hand reaches towards me, past my shoulder, my arm, my hand, to my thigh. ‘It’s quite all right,’ he says, his voice thicker, deeper now. ‘I only want what’s best for you, dear boy.’
Whether it’s because he can feel the tautness in my leg, the freeze of my shoulders, the quickening of my breath, he lifts off and finally returns to his side of the room. I take my cue and stand to go.
I can only pray that Mr Batsford’s wandering hand isn’t a signal that his backing comes with its own set of conditions. All the lads have speculated about his preferences, but I really don’t want to be the one to find out the truth.
What is very clear, though, is that everyone knows about me and Miss P, from the junior boys to the headmaster.
The humiliation stays with me for the next 17 years . . . until, in my mid-30s, I find myself pouring my heart out to Pete, a bloke I barely know. He, like me, is living on a narrowboat, a few hundred yards up the canal from where I’m moored.
‘What I want to know is, what happened next?’ Pete asks. ‘I mean, you were still with her when you left school. When did it end?’
I sip my beer. ‘About four weeks ago,’ I say. He doesn’t believe me at first. But it’s true.
After leaving school, Miss P convinced me not to take my gap year, or fulfil my ambition of volunteering abroad and even sailing the Atlantic. Instead, I married her at the end of my first year at a local university. Nick was my best man.
Two years later, aged 21, I stumbled out of education with a second-class degree, a ring on my finger, a sensible haircut and a one-year-old in a buggy.
That third year of uni was surreal. I was looking after the baby while my wife was teaching and I would bring our child into school at break times so she could feed him.
I’d stand there waiting to take the baby home again, feeling like a pariah, surrounded by my former teachers. They just blanked me. Denial is the default position for that type of school.
Two years later, aged 21, I stumbled out of education with a second-class degree, a ring on my finger, a sensible haircut and a one-year-old in a buggy (file image)
My wife left teaching as soon as she got pregnant with our second and never returned to full-time work. I think the school was only too glad to see the back of her.
How they let her stay when our first was born I still don’t really know. Perhaps they were anxious about repercussions, bad press if they made her redundant.
I got a job I hated. ‘No one really likes their job,’ my wife said, as I signed the mortgage papers. ‘You’re doing this for our children.’
I changed jobs every couple of years, chasing the bigger salary to keep everyone happy — ‘everyone’ being my wife and her parents. I had little contact with mine.
I did look for distractions, hobbies that might one day, somehow, become a career. I started a band, gigged a bit, dreamed of touring, until the demo we sent off got zero interest.
I tried willow-weaving, imagining a bucolic life deep in the countryside. I enrolled in a cheese-making course, dreamed of keeping my own goats.
I drafted a business plan for an organic cafe, before ‘organic’ was a thing. I made enquiries about taking over a surf shop on the coast. ‘Daddy’s going through another phase,’ she would sigh to the kids, rolling her eyes.
But as for being a dad? I loved it. I might have looked stupidly young, but I wasn’t thinking about that when I read their bedtime stories, taught them to ride bikes, dressed up as a dinosaur for their birthday parties.
Eventually, I burnt out. A midlife crisis, I suppose, except it was about 15 or 20 years before most men. The doctor signed me off work with exhaustion.
I picked up pieces of work here and there, but my career, as I’d known it, was behind me. The strain chipped away.
As much as I loved being a dad, I was failing as a husband. Failed as a son, too; all those lies. Poor Mum. Poor Dad. They deserved a better son, and I haven’t been much of one all these years. Although, just recently, we’ve begun to repair our past.
‘While you’re beating yourself up about the past,’ asked Pete, ‘what’s your wife doing? I mean, does she feel guilty about what she did?’
‘Ha! Are you kidding?’ I snort. ‘Not for a second. No way. Lately, of course, she’s just focused on her anger towards me for leaving her. I get that. But feel guilty? Take responsibility for how this all started? Not a chance. As far as she’s concerned, this is all on me.’
Pete shakes his head. ‘Some day, things will have to change. Schools will have to stop turning a blind eye to the abuses happening under their noses, all the time.’
He’s right about that. I think back to my last weeks at school, when every person in a position of authority must surely know about me and Miss P . . . and they all remain wilfully silent, determined not to take any action.
Our relationship is so obvious, Miss P asks me to invite her to the school prom as my date. I can’t face that, but, as a compromise, I agree we’ll dance together.
She’s not usually someone given to making an entrance, but on prom night, picking her way through the forest of tables, she is anything but invisible. I am not the only one with my jaw hanging open.
It’s impossible not to take her in. I can feel everyone in the room appraising her. She is dressed in a proper ballgown, with puffy shoulders and a ballooning skirt, and her bust pushed right up to bursting. Her hair is piled high on her head in full Bond-girl bombshell display.
She clutches my shoulder and practically hauls me out of my chair and on to the dance floor. By now, the whole room is jumping to the sound of 1980s classics. As we begin our best moves, one song blends into another. I lose track of time.
At some point, my head swimming, I break off to use the bathroom, and my mate Nick takes his chance to steer me away. There’s a marquee outside with a smaller dance floor and much better music. As we walk in, a small figure flies out of the twisting shoal, clasps my wrists roughly and drags me in.
Gulika, the quietest girl in my year, has had a drink or two, it seems — and she’s lost her inhibitions. With her unpinned black hair, short dress hugging her tiny frame and this unfamiliar confidence, she is transformed. ‘You look amazing, Lika!’ I yell over the music, but my words are drowned out.
As the beat pounds, she hurls herself into my arms — legs around my waist, clutching my chest, face buried in my neck. Her thighs tighten, her hands grab the back of my head. In the pitch dark, all I can see are her still-shining eyes. Then I feel her lips on mine, her tongue in my mouth.
I break away. Miss P will want to know where I am. I have to go back to her. But just for one moment, I caught a tantalising taste of how my teenage life could have been.
Joe Gibson is a pseudonym. Adapted from Seventeen: A Coming Of Age Story, by Joe Gibson, to be published by Gallery Books on July 20. £16.99. © 2023 Joe Gibson. To order a copy for £15.29, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until July 30, 2023.
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