So, 1986 arrived, and with it came my first semester at Technikon Witwatersrand—which, back then, hadn’t yet moved to the new campus. It was still in Bree Street, just a bus ride away from Illovo.
I remember that first class, first day, clear as anything. I walked in, headed for the back row, and there he was: Gary Fox. Gary had been at St John’s with me. I don’t think he made it to Matric, but he’d always been a character—ruggedly good-looking in a Kurt Russell sort of way, white Zambian, farmer stock, and constantly stirring things up at school. But for all that, he’d never been one of the arseholes to me. Which, honestly, made him a rare breed.
We started chatting—where he'd been, how he ended up here, in first-year mechanical engineering at Technikon—and soon after, another guy chimed in: Pete Becker. We didn’t know him yet, but he was quickly folded into the group. He’d done a semester at Pretoria University before a serious motorbike crash wiped out his chances there. Now he was with us, trying again. And for reasons that still escape me, Gary decided the three of us should go out to lunch—not to the canteen or a cafeteria, but a full-on restaurant.
We ended up somewhere called The Grotto, or something equally dramatic—you had to go down a staircase to get in. Gary ordered wine and a multi-course meal like we were celebrating our retirement. Pete’s eyes were on stalks. I kind of expected it from Gary, but Pete looked like he’d just met a Bond villain.
The three of us started spending a lot of time together. Gary was living in Parkmore, in a strange back-house setup, with a German girlfriend named Astrid—who was, it must be said, stunning. She had a younger sister, Tanya, who became part of the group too. But it was Pete and I who clicked most naturally. We both loved shooting. Pete and his younger sister Karen lived on Homestead Avenue in Rivonia, in this enormous property with his parents—Heinz and Anna Marie—both German, both exacting, both deeply into engineering and trophies.
Literally trophies. There was a skinned lion on the entrance hall floor, shot by Heinz on safari. There were taxidermied heads mounted everywhere. Heinz had been a serious big game hunter, and now ran a business called Entramarc, specialising in imported German and American couplings—machined for mining and rail transport. In the converted garage behind their kitchen, there was a full-on engineering workshop: milling machines, lathes, drill presses, everything. And Pete knew how to use them.
He also had his own cottage out back. Rondavel-style, with a bedroom, bathroom, and main room, and that’s where things got interesting. We called it the Cottage Club. There were endless nights of chess, port, red wine, and general low-level chaos. I was pretty sure Pete was still a virgin—so was I—and we were equally terrified of women. But soon enough, Pete started seeing Tanya, and that all changed for him at least.
By then Bruce had finished his military service and joined our circle. Pete had been at St Stithians, and had his own set of friends—Greg Bowden, Steve Bate, that lot—and Bruce slotted right in. It became a genuine group. Some clever, some complete idiots, but all of them part of this strange moment in our lives when we were trying to figure out what kind of men we were going to become.
Somewhere around this time, Richard Bridgman came to visit from the UK. We’d kept in touch by mail, and I’d stayed with him once in London on a stopover to visit my dad. That trip was memorable for a reason I can’t shake.
I’d been tasked by the guys at RJ Spargo to buy steel rulers with imperial measurements—basically illegal in South Africa thanks to some metrication policy from the apartheid government. So Richard and I went to a pub, had a few beers, and then dropped into this engineering shop. We asked the guy behind the counter for a ruler. While the man turned around to measure something or check stock, Richard just reached over and nicked one. Just like that. I was horrified. On the way out, I asked him why, and he just said, “Because I could.”
That was the first time I’d seen someone do something morally wrong just for the hell of it. I didn’t say anything more, but it stuck with me.
Anyway, Richard came to South Africa soon after. I introduced him to Pete, Gary, Bruce, Steve, the whole crew. He didn’t fit in. He drank too much. He embarrassed me. I took him home, and the next morning, his sister came and picked him up. That was the end of it. We didn’t speak again for years. These days we’re connected on Facebook, but barely. I often wonder if he hated what he saw in us, or if that moment in the shop had already written the ending.
Back to Technikon: things weren’t exactly smooth. I didn’t apply myself—again. I failed one subject: computers. Which, to be fair, wasn’t what it is now. This was still punch cards, massive mainframes, and batch processing. I couldn’t see the point. If the future of computing had depended on my enthusiasm, the digital age would’ve been delayed by decades.
But I made up for it. Took the subject again at night school once we’d moved to the new campus. There we had a dynamic lecturer who handed us each a floppy disk with MS-DOS on it. We booted it up and were greeted by the now-iconic command prompt.
And for the first time, I was hooked.