When I was pulled out of my Mallorca world and dropped into South Africa, I left behind several overlapping layers of friendship—my Spanish friends, my King’s College mates, and of course, the ever-constant Bruce, who was a category of his own.
But when I arrived back in September of 1979, Bruce was off at boarding school, so that thread was gone. The only real companionship I had at first was Gary Makope, the son of the maid—an absolutely fantastic kid. We became close very quickly. But he was gone by the end of that year, sent back to his homeland, part of the quiet cruelty of apartheid. And that was that.
Niels tried to reconnect me with Andrew Nabarro—“Bubs”—a friend from Grade 1. I think the main link there was that Niels had been mates with Andrew’s older brother. Andrew did visit a couple of times—maybe while I was still staying at the Barclays—but we never clicked. There was just no chemistry.
So, as I entered Remove, the first real friendship I made was with Nick Moses. I’ve already written about Nick—this remarkable guy living with the absolute death sentence of cystic fibrosis. Nobody back then lived beyond 21 with it. Nick was brave and funny and stoic and full of life in a way the rest of us could only imitate. He was involved in everything—archery, the computer club, whatever he could get his hands on.
But it was through Nick that I soon met Richard Bridgman. Richard’s family were expats—his father was in South Africa on contract, running Scaffolding Great Britain (SGB). Richard was bright, confident, good-looking in a Rob Lowe sort of way, and a bit dangerous in that way some boys are. Over time, I fell into a small group of friends that orbited around him. There was Richard, Gordon Roy—“Grunt”—Duncan Torrance, James Wigley, and others whose names I can no longer remember. We weren’t nerds. We weren’t jocks either—not that we even used that word. At St. John’s, they were called main manne, or just manne—the guys with square jaws, short shorts, and a permanent spot on the A-team. We floated somewhere in the B- and C-streams. We weren’t stupid—just indifferent. We could have made the A-stream if we’d cared to try, but we didn’t. And we weren’t particularly good at sports, either. Mostly, we were low-grade rebels with no specific cause.
I remember one incident clearly. Richard and I were walking across the main quad toward the library when John Glover—a proper man—bumped into us. Some words were exchanged, and Glover got up in Richard’s face, jabbed a finger into his chin, and said, “Go on, hit me.” Richard didn’t even blink. Just dropped him with a punch like a trap snapping shut. Glover hit the floor and stayed there. He never tried that again.
By Matric, we’d all more or less migrated to the Clark House common room—even though I was actually in Hill House. Most of my friends were in Clark, and it became our unofficial HQ. We’d hang out there at break or lunch. They all smoked. I didn’t. I’d have a drink whenever the opportunity came up, but cigarettes never appealed to me.
Mark Eaton, the Head of Clark House, was a total arsehole—completely up every master’s rear end. He ratted on all of us for smoking in the common room. The lot of us got summoned to the headmaster’s office, which was no small thing at St. John’s. You could get six of the best with a cane.
When my turn came, I wasn’t worried. I hadn’t been smoking. Andrew McFarland—who was headmaster at the time—looked me in the eye and said, “You’ve been caught smoking in Clark House Common Room.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“Well, yes, you have.”
“No. I don’t smoke.”
He paused, studied me for a moment, and let me go. I think he knew I was telling the truth. Either way, I escaped unscathed.
But not everything from that time sits so comfortably.
There was an episode involving Duncan Torrance—one of our group. For reasons that were never quite clear, Richard suddenly decided he’d had enough of Duncan. This was just after one of Duncan’s parents had died—his mother, I think. Richard turned on him in this subtle but unmistakably cruel way. It wasn’t loud or public, just enough to make it hurt. And I didn’t have the guts to push back. I was too afraid of losing my own seat at the table.
Years later, I reached out to Duncan on Facebook—he and Richard are both on there now—and I apologised. I reminded him of that period and said I regretted not saying anything. He was incredibly gracious. “You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” he said.
He was being kind. I still think I do.
Back then, the loss of status was like a small death. Even when you knew your leader was in the wrong, it felt safer to look away.
During that high school period, I lost touch with Bruce entirely. He was off in the army by then—two years of compulsory service—and I hardly saw him at all. I always looked forward to the August trips back to Mallorca, but each time I returned, there were fewer familiar faces. People had moved away or moved on. Friendships thinned.
It was a strange kind of drift—away from the place I had called home, away from the people I’d grown up with, into a world I hadn’t chosen, among friends I wasn’t sure how to keep.