During this period, I was visiting White River regularly, mainly with the kids. Niels and Carey had a fantastic home there. They’d actually had a terrible fire a few years earlier, and the original farmhouse burned down, and they’d rebuilt it. Niels is an incredibly gifted builder.
Their three sons, Christopher, Danny, and James, were all born within one year of each other, and Mikey was less than two years younger than James. So, in general, the kids got on really well when we went down there and had a great time.
At the same time, my mum was in frail care at Macadamia Village, an elderly facility just down the road from them. It sounds terrible but I found it really difficult to visit her because I’d known my mum—I mean, I loved and did love my mum dearly—but she had slowly just degenerated into dementia, where she couldn’t really recognise me or the kids anymore. So, going to see her was a depressing experience, to be honest. It particularly hurt that my kids would not remember my mom as she truly was, the kind, vibrant, intelligent lady I had grown up with. Instead, they would remember this husk that she had become. Old age seriously sucks.
But then, around about mid 2008, I remember we went down for a weekend, we arrived on a Friday evening, and the atmosphere had completely changed. And I’m like, “Hey, what happened?” And what had happened was there had been an absolutely awful home invasion, where like 15 blokes came into the place. Everybody had been playing tennis, after thhe guest left it was just Niels, Carey, and James and that's when they struck.
I think at that stage, Christopher was away at university in Pertoria. Danny was at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in the UK. So it was just Niels, Carey, and James at home. And these guys came in and they tied up Niels and James. They then frogmarched Carey around the house, forcing her to point out where the valuables were.
And this apparently went on for like two hours, and eventually they put everything into Niels’ Land Rover Defender. James had been able to understand what they were saying to one another, because they were all speaking in Zulu which he could speak, and apparently they were debating whether to kill them or not.
Eventually, the right-to-life faction had won the debate, and they left them tied up and packed everything into the Defender and drove off, and then they heard it stop before it had left the property. Of course, the natural conclusion was, “Oh my God, they’re coming back to finish us off.” But luckily they didn’t.
After a period of time, Niels and James were able to untie themselves, untie Carey and call the police. They found out later that what had happened is that these gang of intruders had managed to kick the low-ratio gear stick into neutral, and they hadn’t figured out how to get it back into gear, so they’d abandoned it, including most of their stuff the had stolen.
The insurance paid out the rest, but it was a bridge too far for Carey, and she decided the whole family were going to leave South Africa. At this stage, Niels had managed to keep his Danish passport that he’d got via my father, and the three boys also had Danish passports. Carey had been born in Australia, so she had an Aussie passport.
The only place that made any sense for them to move to was Copenhagen. Luckily they were also recently cash flush, having subdivided and sold off the bulk of their property. Niels never made any money out of the many businesses he started, but he was sure lucky with property, like me I guess. They bought that farm for next to nothing in 1995 and sold the bits off for double-digit millions in 2008.
They had enough to buy an apartment in Copenhagen when property prices were at their absolute worst in the financial crisis. Another lucky break.
The three boys moved first—James, the youngest, had just finished school, Christopher dropped out of university, and Danny had just finished at LIPA. Niels and Carey went on a tour around France for a year or two; they’d planned to renovate an old castle, which never came to fruition.
But yeah, suddenly I found that I was the only member of my immediate family, apart from my kids, of course, that were in South Africa. And I would go and visit my mom. And she got to the point where she didn’t really recognise me. So it was not a cheerful thing to do.
But I got a phone call one day from—this must have been early 2009—I got a phone call from the frail care that she was in saying, “If you want to see your mom alive, you better get down here.”
So I drove down there and took time off work. After three days sitting at her bedside with her, I said to the staff, “Look, I’m going to have to go home.”
They said, “Okay, we will let you know if she takes a turn for the worse.” So off I went, and then two weeks later they called me again. “No, this time we really mean it. You better come down here.”
Now, my mom had been very specific when she was lucid about having a living will document, and she did not want to be on any life support. She did not want to be a burden on her children in any way.
So she was on no medication, no life support. I travelled down there, and there was a lady from the local Anglican church at her bedside: Niels and Carey chose not to fly out. There was a lovely lady from the local Anglican church called Mary Rose. And she sat with me for—I think I arrived at about five in the evening.
And my mom passed away at about nine that evening. And I was holding her hand, and I managed to get Niels on the phone and Briony on the phone and put it to her ear, and they spoke to her.
And it was sort of a brief bit of recognition when she heard the voices, but she was certainly not lucid in any serious way. But I was there the moment that her soul left her.
And I’m glad I was there. Very glad that I was there. But I would love to tell you that there’d been some kind of meaningful interaction between us, but it was more like the husk of life that my wonderful mother had become finally let go.
Anyway, the next day she was cremated with no ceremony, and I got given her ashes in a little wooden casket, and I stuck them on the passenger seat and I drove back to Johannesburg, driving too fast as was my way. I was known to do, and I went through a speed trap. I was pulled over by a very well-dressed, very polite black South African officer, and he said to me in a classic accent, “You were speeding.”
And I said, “Yeah, I know. I’ve had a really tough couple of days. That’s my mother there on the seat next to me,” and he looked at her and he said, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
And I thanked my mom on the way home for getting me out of that one. There were so many emotions going through me—massive grief at her passing, but also relief that her suffering was over, and then guilt for feeling relief.
I got back to Lanseria and I put her ashes in my large gun safe, which had followed me around to all these different venues that I had lived in ever since I’d been living.
Big gun safe, which had all my treasures in it, and I put my mom in it. And there she stayed until I think early 2010, until we had an official memorial for her, and Niels and Briony all came out.
By this stage, Niels and Briony were no longer speaking to each other. They’d fallen out over many different things. She was the latest on a very long list of people they had once been close to but now they no longer spoke to.
But they didn’t speak to each other, not even at the funeral. My mom’s ashes were interred at St. Charles Catholic Church in the rose garden, with a little plaque next to my father-in-law, Malachy. Two truly exemplary people.
She was a wonderful, wonderful, selfless woman who deserved—I don’t know, I want to say deserved a better ending, but at the end of the day, she’d checked out probably 10 years before her actual final physical demise.
So, Mom, wherever you are, love you dearly. I don’t know if there’s anything I could have done more for you. You wouldn’t have wanted that anyway. But I was there at the end.