Billy Bragg

When I turned 16 I was probably at the I’d ended up in a pretty bad situation regarding school; I’d become the focus of some rather nasty bullying, to the extent that I stopped going to school most days. I’m ashamed to say that when other kids got bullied, I didn’t do anything about it. I still feel bad about that. There was one time I even took part in it – not in anything physical but in name calling. I knew it was wrong at the time. In later years, I heard that the kid who was bullied got a job in a factory near West Ham railway station, and whenever I was on a train and we pulled into West Ham, I could see that factory and I always thought of him. Always. They knocked that factory down years ago and I still think about it now.