My bully who not only bullied me severely but instigated a campaign of division, bullying and daily humiliation of me and others by her friends, has died of cancer, so the question doesn’t arise really.
I do still feel an echo of betrayal when I think about it now though as the bullies were my best friends at prep school and they won their social cachet at secondary school and right through until six form, when things got slightly better, by turning on me and some others who they saw as outsiders: for example a Nigerian girl who joined the school in the third year.
Looking back, of course I have some sympathy for and understanding of those eleven to sixteen year olds, desperately trying to establish friendships and credibility in a dog eat dog environment. At the same time their level of relentless mental and physical cruelty and racism was horrifying at times and it did affect me later on in life.
What helped a bit was that later on in the sixth form and afterwards when I left school and went to university, some of the neutral people in the class who hadn’t dared go against the ruling bullies at the time, got in touch and made it clear that they wanted to be friends, so I felt less ostracised at that point.