It was February 1985, and I had just started my first year at the University of Pietermaritzburg, enrolled in Agricultural Management and staying at William O’Brien residence—classic all-male student digs. My parents came down with me, both of them for once, and thankfully without Kirsten. We stayed in a hotel for a night while they helped me get set up in my room: ground floor, bare essentials—sink, cupboard, single bed—and a view out onto a quadrangle. The whole res was filled mostly with sons of white Zimbabwean farmers.
And then they were gone. Just like that. And orientation week began.
It was mayhem—parties every night, drinking, blaring music, the kind of thing that’s meant to feel exhilarating but to me felt more like being thrown into a cyclone. I was only seventeen, completely out of my depth, totally unprepared for the sheer intensity of it. I remember dancing to Born in the USA at one of the parties—except everyone was shouting Born in Zimbabwe at the top of their lungs, and for some reason, that made perfect sense.
I gravitated toward a group of misfits. Not quite nerds, but not the cool crowd either. One of them was from Howick, or somewhere else nearby in the Midlands. They were harmless, a bit odd, and just about the only people who weren’t trying to get blind drunk every night. But even then, I could feel myself slipping.
I’d grown up with innocent crushes—Jenny Trisos was the first, then Sally, which had gone from mild to all-consuming without me noticing. I knew I was straight. There was no confusion there. But after my dad’s reaction to Torben coming out—his panic, his disgust—it planted a seed in my head. And that seed turned into anxiety, the kind that starts whispering stupid questions and won’t shut up.
There was one moment that stuck. I was in the res common room, watching a good looking guy play pool. He was good—tall, athletic—and suddenly I had this horrible thought: “Don’t look at him too long.” I started panicking that if I did, I might feel something I didn’t want to feel. And once that loop starts, it feeds itself. It wasn’t attraction—it was fear of the idea of attraction, the kind you get when your brain turns on you and won’t shut up. I was spiralling, and I didn’t have the tools to climb out of it.
The one bright spot was the car. My parents had bought me a second-hand VW Golf—from Bruce’s sister—and arranged driving lessons while I was at uni. The plan was to take the test on my birthday, pass it, and then fly to Johannesburg to collect the car and drive it back.
So, March 16th arrived. I took the test, and everything was fine right up until the very end. During the parallel parking section, my foot slipped on the clutch—I was shaking from nerves—and the car jerked backwards and hit a cone. Instant fail. I came back the next day, passed without drama, and tool a train to Joburg.
Driving back to Pietermaritzburg was the longest drive I’d done in my life. Lavinia came with me. catching a lift back to varsity—a lovely girl I’d met through the group, though there was never anything romantic there. Still, just having a car changed everything. Suddenly I was useful. We could drive out to Howick on weekends, which we did often. There was a guy we knew, Adrian, who managed Rawdon’s Hotel and would give us free beers when we stopped by. He was probably in his mid-thirties. We'd spend weekends drinking for free at Rawdon´s and then crash at the Howick bloke´s parents farm nearby.
Then came the weekend in Durban.
The guys burst into my room one afternoon while I was half-heartedly pretending to study. I was already behind—struggling to focus, uninspired by most of my subjects, the only one I had any real connection with was accounting. They told me Adrian had been given use of a townhouse in Durban for the weekend and we were all invited to join. It sounded like a good idea at the time, and I didn’t need much convincing.
We piled into a double-cab bakkie and headed down to the coast. That night we went out to a steakhouse, had Irish coffees, far too much to drink, and eventually stumbled back to the townhouse, completely plastered. Adrian told everyone to find a place to sleep and offered me the main bedroom. It didn’t seem odd then—I was exhausted, drunk, and I got straight into bed and passed out.
I must’ve been asleep for twenty minutes when I woke up to the feeling of someone behind me—his body pressed against mine, back to back. Something was off. I didn’t say anything; I just tried to ease one leg off the bed, then an arm, thinking I could slip out without waking him. But he stirred and asked where I was going.
“To the bathroom,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.
He got up and tried to grab me. That was it. I shoved him hard—across the room, into a cupboard—and bolted. I ran down the stairs, past the guys passed out in the lounge, and out the front door, shouting, “Adrian’s a fucking faggot,” as I went. Then I kept running—down the road, all the way to the beach.
I spent the night there. It was freezing, and I didn’t have the first clue what time it was. I was just walking along the sand, trying to work out what the hell had just happened. Eventually, someone came looking for me the next morning and found me walking alone. They told me Adrian was driving us back. I refused to be in the car with him. They promised I could ride in the back, which I did. But I never spoke to him again. And that was the end of my connection with that whole group. Adrian told the others I’d imagined it all. Said I was unstable. And maybe some of them believed him. But I didn’t care anymore.
By June, exams were looming and I knew I was in trouble. I hadn’t done the work. I hadn’t been present—mentally, emotionally, or academically. I remember lying in my room, staring at the white wall for hours, caught in this relentless, panicked inertia. Eventually, I went to see a doctor. I told him I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, couldn’t stop worrying. He looked at me, completely unmoved, and said, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” That was it. No advice. No questions. No follow-up.
I drove back to Johannesburg for study leave. My mum was away at the time, visiting the Wilkinsons in Malaysia. I went straight to bed and crawled under the covers with the dogs—Honey, Wellington, and Purdey. The weight of them, their warmth, their complete indifference to my crisis—it was the first time in weeks I felt any kind of calm.
The next day, I went to see Sidney Spargo. He wasn’t technically family, but I always thought of him as an uncle. I spilled everything—panic, confusion, including my existential angst about the meaning of reality, whether there was a God, things like that—and he didn’t blink. He just said, “Don’t worry about that other crap you have the rest of your life to work out where you stand on that. Right now you need to decide what you want to do if agriculture isn't your thing.”
And oddly, that helped. Somehow, it cut through all of it. I went back to Pietermaritzburg and decided I would write one exam—accounting—because I knew I could pass it and I wanted to prove something. Maybe to myself. Maybe to the professor who’d already written me off. I skipped everything else, focused entirely on that one subject, and I think I even got a distinction.
Of course, I failed the year.
That August, I flew to Mallorca to see my dad. I was eighteen now, no longer a minor, no longer flying under anyone’s guardianship. We were barely out of the airport when I said, “Dad, I’m not happy. I can’t go back to university.” He didn’t argue. He just asked, “What do you want to do?”
I told him I wasn’t sure yet, but Sidney had suggested I do some aptitude testing when I got back.
So I did. The results came back strong for engineering. The problem was, I didn’t have the university entrance marks to do a degree. But Sidney said, “RJ Spargo (the company founded by his uncle Dick Spargo, which he now ran) sponsors two students a year to do mechanical engineering diplomas at Technikon Witwatersrand. If you want it, I’ll put your name down.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
But that’s a story for another chapter