I arrived in Mallorca as a panicked five-year-old, clutching my mother’s hand and trying not to dissolve into panic. I left at twelve—taller, browner, marginally more confident, yet still terrified—only now I’d learned the best way to hide it.
Those seven years seeped into me. Spanish became second nature. I made friends—like Juan Carlos Sobron and Bubi Sanso—and by the time we left, I was thinking and dreaming in Castellano. English still had its place: schoolmates like Nicky Fremgen and Ian Kinnear, Saturday sleepovers, and that tight circle of expat parents who played bridge and drank brandy like it was water. Niels once brought a prized bottle from South Africa, and Alva poured it straight back again.
School days were rich, polished things: The British School, Belver, then King’s College—complete with uniforms and priests-turned-teachers who never fully stopped us from throwing rocks at each other. There was Mr. Boyle (English), Mr. Locke (our skiing guru), Miss Peary, Miss Jones, Mr. Quinn—some of the best influences of my childhood.
Off school grounds, those years felt like pure freedom. I formed a gang, got my Bultaco Chispa motorbike, dove for octopus, kissed girls, got sunburned, and once nearly electrocuted myself. I mixed chemistry—magnesium and saltpetre—with reckless glee. I caught lobsters and found ancient coins in castle ruins and across golf-course grounds. I felt free, alive in a way I didn’t understand until much later.
Mallorca became home: the pine forests, the taste of saltwater on burned skin, motoring downhill on that bike like I co-owned the planet. Even through the mess behind the scenes—Dad’s affair, Mum’s unraveling, the persistent hum of anxiety—those years glowed. I found at least one thing I belonged to, even if it wasn't always meant for me.
Which made leaving so brutal.
It wasn’t just a trip—it was a dismantling. I’d stitched my life, thread by thread, into this place. Then someone ripped the weave apart. We flew back to Johannesburg, to a country I was born in but didn’t know—a place I didn’t want to return to.
I remember blurting to a schoolmate once, “My dad thinks Jimmy Carter will be good for South Africa.” I said it confidently, without grasping a word. “South Africa” was just a distant memory. At the time, I didn’t know that my entire childhood—Dad’s safety net, Mum’s ability to drift apart, our privileges—was built on a system that silenced and harmed nearly everyone else.
As an adult, I still carry those years like a paradox. I remember summer heat, the freedom, the smell of pine. But I also carry shame. I recently heard my brother tell his nephew’s Danish girlfriend that “apartheid was necessary because the blacks didn’t know how to run a country.” I wanted to throw up. Because the kid who cried leaving Mallorca now understands our innocence was built on pain.
Was I loyal to that place? Or just afraid of change?
Maybe both.
Mallorca gave me laughter and sunburn, stories and scars. It gave me—maybe for the first time—the feeling of losing something that mattered.
And I have.
More than once.
But that—well, that’s another story.