So there I was: two streets down from my beautiful house in Galway Road, living in the basement flat on Lurgan Road. My mother was still in her newly built cottage above my office, but I couldn’t exactly go there with everything happening.
Niels and Briony got together and decided she should be moved to White River. And just like that — very quickly — she was packed up and relocated to a retirement village. That was another emotional blow I didn’t have the bandwidth to process properly.
Every day I drove to the Treacle offices in Bryanston to “work.”
And by work, I mean:
sitting in front of a computer trying to direct strangers on bulletin boards toward the Fishy Pete’s website.
This was pre-social media. No Facebook. No Instagram. No TikTok. Just forums and comment sections, where you’d post something like, “Hey guys, check out this amazing Fly of the Month Club!” and hope for the best.
Rudolf had a big graph in his office showing the daily subscription target: something like 7 to 12 sign-ups at $99 each. Roughly $1,000 a day. Hit that, we lived. Miss it, we died.
And we were missing it. Often.
Meanwhile, my mental health was collapsing, I had no salary, my loan account at Fishy Pete’s was almost finished, the divorce was costing a fortune, and every day felt like my life was shrinking around me.
And right on cue — who pops back into my life?
Neil Hellman.
Yes, that Neil Hellman — the one I never liked, the one I had to show my engineering degree to because he didn’t believe I had one. Turns out he was now MD of CH Chemicals, his father’s company, and that company had the South African agency for American soda ash. A cash cow.
Neil offered me a job: R20,000 a month.
Not a dream salary, but at least it was income.
Rudolf was furious, of course — they wanted me online 24/7, flogging Fishy Pete’s like my life depended on it. But the truth is, I did need money. I had no choice. So I took the job.
My role, as it turned out, was to be project manager for Hellman’s series of completely mad “Walter Mitty” patents. He was absolutely unhinged, and I’ll get into that circus in later chapters.
But in early 2002 — April, May — my life was basically this:
living in the Lurgan Road flat, driving from Treacle to CH Chemicals, falling apart emotionally, financially, mentally.
Somewhere around then, someone — I think it was Mark Drysdale from Dullstroom — told me I should try Reiki.
So I did.
A weekend course in Joburg.
And as strange as it sounds, I felt something. Some kind of weird energy sensation that I can’t properly explain. The whole thing unsettled me in a way I can’t put into words.
That same evening, Briony invited me to dinner at her friend Noelle Bolton’s place. And that’s where I met Rowena Robarts.
Now, Rowena was the daughter of Basil Hersov — yes, the same Basil Hersov who had employed my mother as a secretary back in 1947. The Hersovs are basically Johannesburg royalty. Huge wealth. Old power. They practically invented the term “establishment.”
Rowena was tall, blonde, beautiful, elegant, and about ten years older than me. I was 37; she was in her late 40s. Completely out of my league on paper. But I asked for her number anyway.
Maybe the Reiki opened something in me. Who knows.
The next day, I called her and invited her to my basement flat. I picked her up from her mansion in Saxonwold — a massive house, four daughters, the works. I cooked her pesto pasta. We talked. We laughed. We ended up in bed.
This was huge for me. She was only the second woman I had ever slept with — Terry being the first.
Over the next few months, we saw each other often. I even took her down to White River. Carey saw us together and said, “You walked out of a mess and now you’re dating the Queen of Johannesburg!” She was genuinely delighted for me.
But as time passed, it became obvious our worlds didn’t overlap.
She lived the heiress lifestyle — game farms, weekends away, rigid family expectations. I was falling apart financially, emotionally, psychologically. I was living on a credit card and a prayer.
And then came the moment that really ended it for me.
One weekend, it wasn’t my turn with the kids, and her daughters were with their father, so we were at her house in Saxonwold. We were in bed, in the upstairs room, and suddenly her parents — Basil and his wife (her name will come to me later) — arrived unannounced.
Rowena, a nearly 50-year-old woman, jumped out of bed like a teenager being caught, panicked, and said, “They can’t know you’re here! You have to leave through the back!”
I said, “My car is in the driveway.”
“Well— then just get dressed quickly!”
We changed clothes and walked downstairs pretending we’d been having tea. And I remember thinking:
What the actual fuck?
But that’s the price you pay when your life is funded by a family trust. You toe the line.
We broke up around September. It was mutual, calm, and friendly. We’re still friends. She’s a genuinely good woman. Just not my world.
Meanwhile, the collapse at Fishy Pete’s was accelerating.
I was splitting myself between CH Chemicals and Treacle, but the truth is: the business was dying. Two or three sales a day wasn’t enough. The Rapala orders from the U.S. had dried up. The Australian agent, Mike Felton, always hammered us on price until we were earning nothing. The retail outlets in Lydenburg and Dullstroom weren’t enough to save us.
And emotionally?
I was barely functioning.
One day, I got an email from Rudolf cc’ing the board — essentially saying Fishy Pete’s would be wound down unless I committed full-time to it. By then, the board had resigned, leaving me legally holding the can for a company that was clearly insolvent. I can’t remember the legal term, but I was the last man standing.
People sometimes ask:
“Why did you get involved with Rowena when the business was burning?”
Because I was trying to survive emotionally. I was completely overwhelmed. And I was trying — desperately — to take away the pain my kids were feeling.
We had put the house on the market. I’d promised Terry she could buy a nice townhouse the moment it sold. Mikey had to move from St John’s to De La Salle — a very good Catholic school in Linden — and we got him into counselling with a brilliant psychologist, Rod Charlton. That helped him enormously.
Then, in the middle of all that chaos, something happened that should have broken me — but it didn’t.
One Friday evening, I had Angie and Ollie in the back seat of my VW Jetta. We were taking Bryony to Noelle Bolton’s house inside an extremely wealthy gated estate — the most exclusive part of Johannesburg.
We drove in, went a few streets, pulled into Noelle’s driveway. Bryony opened the passenger door.
And that’s when a pickup screeched in behind us.
A man in a balaclava jumped out, shoved a gun straight into Bryony’s face, and screamed:
“Give me your watch! Give me your bag! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
Angie and Ollie were in the back seat, watching everything.
Something snapped in me.
Rage — pure, uncontrollable rage — flooded my entire body.
I jumped out and screamed across the roof of the car:
“If you want to kill someone, kill me, you fucking cunt!”
He swung the gun at me, pointed it directly at my face, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet went over my head.
He got a fright — I think he didn’t expect me to rush him — and he jumped back into the truck. They tore off.
Neighbours came running. Noelle and her boyfriend came out. Police arrived. Statements taken. Nothing ever came of it.
To this day, I can still see his eyes behind the balaclava.
And here’s the truth most people never get to discover about themselves:
In that moment, I had zero fear. Only anger.
I would have gone over the roof and taken his weapon off him if he hadn’t fired.
But I also know something else:
if he had wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have missed.
He pulled the shot on purpose.
Still — the kids saw everything.
It could have ended catastrophically.