Rebels Without a Clue

Late 1980. I was thirteen, freshly back from my first sun-saturated holiday in Mallorca that August, and staring down the final term of Remove at St. John’s. Puberty was underway, technically, but I still looked and felt like a confused preteen who’d been drafted into the body of someone slightly taller, with hair beginning to appear where it hadn’t before. I wasn’t a child anymore, but I definitely wasn’t anything useful like a man. I scraped through the term by whatever means were available and was bumped up to Lower 4 in St. John’s speak—Standard 7 at most other South African schools.

By this point, I had begun making actual friends. One of them was Richard Bridgeman, who was everything I wasn’t. He was sharp, confident, and looked like a young Rob Lowe. His family had recently moved to South Africa from Britain for his dad’s scaffolding business, and they lived in Blairgowrie. Richard and I quickly formed a close friendship. We’d alternate weekends at each other’s houses, bonding over shared boredom, dry humour, and the slow, weird metamorphosis of puberty.

Nick Moses was part of our broader circle too. Nick was unforgettable. He had cystic fibrosis—a death sentence back then—and once showed me his daily arsenal of medications. His teeth were rotted from all the antibiotics, and his body was scarred by numerous operations, yet he somehow seemed stronger than all of us. He was smart, funny, and defiantly alive—throwing himself into the archery club, the computer lab... he simply embraced life despite his affliction. I admired him deeply, even if we never became especially close.

Then there was the Hillbrow incident.

It was late one Saturday night at Richard’s place. His parents had already gone to bed, and we were in the lounge playing backgammon or something equally unremarkable. Then the doorbell rang. Nick Moses showed up, slightly drunk and accompanied by a couple of other guys I don’t remember. He had what he clearly thought was a fantastic idea: we should take Richard’s dad’s car and drive to Hillbrow—the big, glittering hub of nightlife in 1980s Johannesburg. The idea hovered somewhere between wildly stupid and instant legend, depending on your blood alcohol level and relationship to common sense.

Even at fourteen, I knew it was colossally stupid. Richard, however, thought it was inspired. Against my better judgment, I agreed—with one caveat: we left a note in the entrance hall. It read, roughly, If you’re reading this, we’re in deep shit. Please don’t call the police. We’ll be back soon.

We pushed the car out of the driveway in silence, only starting it once we were well down the road. Nick drove us onto the M1 and into the city. By the time we arrived, the place was mostly dead. I remember very little of what happened there. What I do remember is the return trip—Nick briefly nodding off or losing control, sending one wheel into the ditch before swerving back onto the highway.

We made it home, parked the car a block away, and pushed it quietly back into the driveway, reversing our earlier manoeuvre. As the others filed into the house through the garage, I sprinted to grab the note and tucked it into my pocket. When they emerged, I turned to them with wide eyes.

“The note’s gone.”

Their faces were a perfect portrait of teenage panic—terror, disbelief, full-body regret. I held it for a moment, then cracked up laughing and pulled the note from my pocket. Cheap, but worth it.

As if adolescent rebellion wasn’t enough, I was also navigating the weirdness of puberty at an all-boys school with zero access to girls. There were the occasional organised dances and socials with girls’ schools, but I never went. There was no “just popping over” to a girl’s house. You couldn’t even imagine doing such a thing. It simply wasn’t part of our world.

So we made do.

One day at school, someone brought in a tattered old paperback—My Mother Taught Me. It passed from hand to hand like a sacred relic. Eventually, it landed with me. I found a private spot behind the shooting range and devoured it. It was the most electrifying, forbidden thing I’d ever read. That night, I took it home, stashed it under my bed, and read it again later with absolute hormonally-driven focus.

And that’s when it happened.

My bedroom was at the end of the hallway. My sister Briony was visiting at the time—briefly home from some glamorous international gallivanting with her wealthy boyfriend. She was, and still is, stunning. That night, she went to take a bath. I could hear the water running, and my recently detonated adolescent brain decided to act.

I crossed the hallway and looked through the keyhole.

Just as she opened the door.

I snapped upright instantly. We locked eyes. I froze. She didn’t suspect a thing. I muttered something like, “Oh—sorry!” and slinked back to my room in a spiral of shame. She never brought it up. She probably still doesn’t know. And if she reads this now, well... I’m sorry, Briony. You were collateral damage in a teenage hormone surge I didn’t understand.

Then came the Betamax incident.

Another whispered rumour. Someone had a genuine porno—Inside Jennifer Wells. I managed to secure an invite. That night, a handful of us gathered in someone’s lounge while their parents were out, and we watched, in total silence. I will never forget the opening scene. Jennifer was chatting on the phone, but her facial expressions didn’t match the conversation. Then the camera slowly panned down to reveal what was capturing her attention. Let’s just say the large round thing between her legs was not a hairy football.

We were transfixed. Stunned. Paralysed by awe and disbelief. Then followed ninety minutes of absolute silence. If we’d focused like that at school, we’d have all been A students. Just as the tape ended, the host’s older sister walked in—back from a date, wearing heels and a tight dress, blissfully unaware she was walking into a lounge full of teenage boys who had just had their sexual hard drives permanently corrupted.

She said hello. We said nothing. Nobody could make eye contact. We just sat there, fried.

Later that year, Richard and I went on another fishing trip with his dad. On the drive home, I found a book shoved under the back seat—The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander. Another discovery. Another education. I read it quietly, reverently, and entirely too often.

And then there was Jenny Trisos.

Niels had moved on from Sally Coulton and was now dating Jenny—a model from Bloemfontein with Greek heritage and movie-star looks. She knew how beautiful she was, and she knew exactly what she was doing. She’d sunbathe by the pool, often topless, fully aware of her audience. I made up reasons to be nearby. “Just checking the gutters,” I’d say, like some kind of pervy building inspector.

She never called me out. I think she enjoyed the attention—harmless and hopeless as it was. She’d tell me stories about her modelling friends and their poolside adventures, like she didn’t know she was adding to the pile of hormonal kindling already stacked in my brain.

She was unreachable, obviously. I was a skinny, pimply, stammering idiot. She was a goddess. But she was kind. And she was formative.

All of it—Nick’s defiance, the stolen joyride, the paperbacks, the video, Jenny—was part of the same disjointed, chaotic mosaic. It was awkward. Sometimes awful. Occasionally sublime.

But it was the beginning of adulthood. The first time the world cracked open, not to explain itself, but to say: Here you are. Now deal with it