by Wilbur Smith
Mr. Forbes was my first teacher in the art of storytelling and it was many years before I met another man who inspired me in the same way. In the meantime, my only teachers were the writers whose work I devoured.
•••
The next year, in 1946, just after the Second World War, I moved on to senior school, Michaelhouse, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in South Africa. It was established as a boarding school for boys in 1896, with a strong Christian ethos. The original school buildings are constructed using local Pietermaritzburg red brick and have an English gothic feel about them. The school is arranged in a series of interlinked quadrangles and you can walk from one end to the other without stepping outdoors, which was very handy on rainy days. Michaelhouse is one of the most prestigious schools in South Africa nowadays, with an international reputation for excellence.
In my day, it liked to call itself St. Michael’s Academy for Young Gentlemen. This was a manifest misnomer as there was not a single gentleman amongst us. The school’s founder, Anglican priest Canon James Cameron Todd, had declared: “Our aim is to make, not accountants, not clerks, not doctors, not clergymen, but men of understanding, thought and culture.” He was either deluded or just downright mischievous. It was very much the same school routine as before, only worse. The food was inedible and the beatings for no reason were more frequent. There was the same obsession with team sports and science subjects. Situated on the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains, the winters were arctic. We never seemed to have enough blankets on the bed. We had to get up to shower at some numbingly early hour of the morning, when it was still dark, and the limited amount of hot water was reserved for the seniors; us little guys had to dash into a dribble of icy water and come out blue on the other side.
I was in Founders, the school house immortalized by South African actor and playwright John van de Ruit’s Spud series, but my days within those walls were nothing like Spud’s or even Tom Brown’s schooldays. The first-year boys were called kaks, from the Afrikaans word for turds. We little kaks were at the bottom of the food chain and we had to serve the house prefects, be at their beck and call. The new boys would line up and the prefects would make their selection—it was like a slave market. We’d be standing in one long line shivering in the cold, red-faced, kicking our heels, expecting the worst. I was lucky. My prefect was Chick Henderson, the Transvaal and Scotland rugby international, best remembered today for his work with the Barbarian Rugby Club and as the South African English-language TV commentator in the 1980s. He treated me with disdain, but never unfairly. I had to polish his shoes, iron his clothes and, in the morning, go into the bogs and warm the toilet seat for him, while my co-kak made him his tea and his toast.
Michaelhouse was a debilitating experience. There was no respect for the pupils. The teachers were brutal, the prefects beat us and the senior boys bullied us. It was a cycle of violence that kept perpetuating itself. The cane was a constant presence in everything we did, a dark shadow of malevolence. The beatings had their own routine and weren’t administered at the time of the offense—beatings were scheduled on a Saturday night, and they accumulated. So, if you whispered in chapel on Sunday and were late for roll call on Monday, touched your cutlery in the dining hall before grace on Tuesday, or spoke after lights out on Wednesday, you would sit in the prep room on Saturday night waiting to be summoned to the prefects’ common room. Once summoned, you would be lashed for the first offense and then sent back to the prep room to be called for the next offense and so on. You might take four or five beatings in one go. It was very painful. And when the last set of cuts was laid down, you would have to stand up straight and thank the prefects for the punishment without showing any sign of discomfort or anger—you couldn’t even rub your backside in front of them. It was arbitrary, irrational and capricious, the maintenance of discipline through fear.
Some masters were experts at caning. They used to chalk the cane so the first stripe left a line, an aiming point, and they were very proud if they could lay their strokes all on top of one another so you had a very nice bruise afterward, or else they cut through the skin. I remember the first time I returned home for the holidays, and my mother came into the bathroom while I was bathing and saw my backside which was all shades of purple. She was distraught. “I’m going to see the headmaster immediately,” she said. I pleaded with her not to. “Mother, you can’t do that. You don’t understand, if you complain to the rector he’ll call in the prefects and I’ll be marked as a squealer, a blubberer.”
My father wouldn’t have done anything. He would have shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, that’s just how the system works. It’ll toughen you up.”
I learned to accept punishment without complaint. It was a badge of toughness to be able to withstand a beating, but I was miserable at the time. My English master here was also my science master, and he had little wit or imagination. There was no poetry in his soul. There were no more form prizes for me.
Reading remained my safe refuge, my exclusion zone, and creative writing was becoming a drug. I excelled at school in essay writing. I was better able to express myself on paper than I could in conversation. But I had no idea how to exploit this to my advantage. How do you get noticed as a writer? How do you become a published author? I ended up starting a school magazine for which I wrote the entire content, except for the sports pages.
My weekly satirical column became mildly famous, and was circulated as far afield as Wykham Collegiate in Pietermaritzburg and St. Anne’s in Hilton village, the two girls’ schools known for having the prettiest girls for hundreds of miles. It was my sole achievement of any note.
At the end of the year the school awarded the prize for achievement to the boy who operated the Roneo machine to print the school magazine. I was devastated. The headmaster called me into his office and explained that he had decided to award him the prize as a symbolic gesture on behalf of all the magazine staff, choosing to overlook the fact that I was the only member of staff. He also failed to mention, though I was fully aware, that this boy was also the captain of the second eleven school cricket team.
My other achievement of note at Michaelhouse was to start smoking, in the school bogs of all places. I failed at this as well, got caught and was given six of the best. The upside of my schooling was that I managed to shake off all my vices at a relatively early age. I finally stopped smoking thirty cigarettes a day in my midthirties, after When the Lion Feeds became a bestseller.
By the time I left Michaelhouse I’m sure I’d read every book in the library. C. S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower series remained a particular favorite. I read every one of them. Much later, when I could afford it, I searched for his first editions and had them bound in calfskin. Today they have pride of place on my bookshelves.
Hornblower was my perfect hero. He was a man of many parts—gentle, diffident and a staunch friend; he was plagued by self-doubt until he stood on the quarter deck of His Majesty’s Man o’ War. Then he became a gallant and intrepid leader of men. Hornblower played an important role in my life at school, giving me confidence to face the constant flak, because school felt like warfare at times, and the reassurance that the decent, loyal, good man would triumph no matter what the odds. Even today, I will take down one of those leather-bound books from the shelf and open it at random. When I read one of Forester’s paragraphs, the goose bumps rise on my forearms as I speak the words aloud. They’re like a fine old claret on my tongue.
•••
Our only encounters with the opposite sex consisted of the once-a-term dance, or “socials,” with girls bussed in from sister schools. They were awful. We’d all line the walls, watching and whispering as the girls filed in. Then the lights would dim, the music would begin and everyone would try their damnedest to grope each other to death by the end of the night.
My own sexual awakening occurred on the Durban beaches where we would spend our Christmas vacations when my family came down from the Copperbelt.
I didn’t go all the way, the girl led with her mouth, so successfully that it was years before I realized that sex could involve going below a girl’s belt.
Our family would stay at the old Imperial Hotel, and spend most of the vacation fishing off the Natal beaches. It was pure bliss and sparked a lifelong love for fishing—sea and freshwater—that continues to this day. Once Dad had made his money, he moved with my mom down to Kloof, outside Durban where they bought a house.
But at the end of every vacation, feeling full of dread, I would have to embark on the long tortuous journey back to Michaelhouse in the Midlands. I remained a rebel to the end, not a good attitude if you want to fit in. I never made prefect, I wasn’t interested. I was captain of the shooting team however, and captain of the rugby second eleven, playing number 8, a lazy, predatory position, which suited me fine.
Then my life took an unexpected turn. I contracted polio. I was sixteen, there was an epidemic and some children I knew didn’t recover—their lungs collapsed. Polio was one of the most devastating public health problems in the world at the time, and most of its victims were children. It wasn’t until 1955 that American virologist Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first ever polio vaccine. My right leg was badly affected, it became weak and withered, but my left leg compensated for the rest of my life, and the right only started to protest when I turned eighty.
Finally, in December 1950, I was free. Many pupils from Michaelhouse distinguished themselves at sport—157 Old Michaelhousians have represented seventy countries in forty-eight different sports, and some have gone on to be leaders in their field, admirably propping up the establishment. As for me, a full-time writer, I’ve been unemployed since the age of thirty, and, alongside the good reviews and loyal readers, what has given me the most happiness in my life has been the freedom to do anything I like.
I have driven past the school many times since I left, but I’ve never been in. It’s like passing a haunted house. My time at Michaelhouse was the worst of my life. In 2001, responding to an article that I had written in Durban’s Sunday Tribune about my schooldays at Michaelhouse, the then rector, Dudley Forde, himself an old boy, albeit seven years below me, acknowledged that bullying had been a factor in the 1950s, not just at Michaelhouse but at all South African boarding schools of the era. Corporal punishment by prefects, he said, had been abandoned in the early 1970s and phased out by staff before the passing of South Africa’s new constitution (which outlawed it in any case) in the mid-1990s. “Mr. Smith’s article is a forceful reminder to all of us in education,” said Forde, “of the lasting damage that the practices he describes can have on a developing young man. The bitterness that he so obviously feels about his education remains untempered by any desire to have anything further to do with the school. From what can be gathered from reading his novels, there is a strong theme of compassion for those who are disadvantaged, a heroic sense of justice and a lifelong distaste for the arrogant, haughty and brutal. The present leadership of this school, staff and boys, share these views. Michaelhouse of today is a different school and gives all boys the opportunity to develop their talents to the fullest extent in a happy, caring environment.”
5
THIS STUDENT’S LIFE
After four years of misery and endurance, I moved on to Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. The university’s motto is Where Leaders Learn, and another Smith alumnus, Ian, put this maxim into practice by becoming Prime Minister of Rhodesia in 1964. I directed my energies in a very different way however, as paradise opened before me. Suddenly there were girls who did not wear gym slips and walk primly to church in crocodile formation. Up until that moment I had never dreamt of how soft and warm these gorgeous creatures were, or how sweet they smelled. “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” as Shakespeare put it in As You Like It.
I was in Matthews, part of Founders Hall, and I soon found my way to the leading women’s Residence, Oriel, named after Oxford’s Oriel College. I fell for a girl who was in her second year. Her boyfriend was a lawyer in Port Elizabeth but she took a shine to me, a bumbling first year, naive and eager to please, but longing for adventure and new experiences. Within a week I discovered, to my joy, that the mouth wasn’t the only way to give pleasure during sex. She was beautiful and we became lovers, unable to resist the commingling of our bodies, such wildly liberating tenderness. She needed to have a pass to be out late from Res but, typically in those days, I didn’t need one because it didn’t apply to male students. One night we went up past the tennis courts to a secluded spot and after the fun was over, we both fell blissfully asleep under the stars. We got back to Oriel well past midnight and, because she didn’t have a pass, the senior girls nailed her. They turned her in. She mentioned my name and we were both sent up to the Vice Chancellor, Dr. Thomas Alty, to explain ourselves.
There was no mitigation for the girl as far as he was concerned, so he rusticated her. Then it was my turn. He called me into his office and I thought I’d had it, that I was going to be sent down. “Smith,” the Vice Chancellor said, looking me over, “this is a very serious offense.”
“Yes, it is, sir,” I replied, looking at the floor, trying to appear contrite. There was silence, he seemed to be taking time to consider my sentence, or else he wanted to see me squirm, or perhaps he was simply imagining our sinful coupling, assessing its full weight and heated consequence. Then he said: “The young lady you were with, she’s a pretty young thing, but she already has a reputation for being a bad girl.” I nodded and inwardly smiled, remembering our delicious cavorting and her enthusiasm. The Vice Chancellor continued: “I think you were the innocent party in this, so we’re going to give you a dispensation this time. Don’t let it happen again.”
I didn’t, because I never got caught again, but I felt sorry for the girl. She took all the blame and that was wrong. However, from then on, I dreamed of very little else but the opposite sex. Even books were forgotten in the feverish excitement of this new discovery. I became an expert at scaling the drainpipes at the various girls’ Residential halls. I was a bit of a wild boy from the bush and girls seemed to like my derring-do, my disregard for rules and regulations which I thought were antiquated and joyless. I worked during the long university vacations and bought a Model T Ford, for £7 10s. The car was painted pink with sky blue mudguards and it had a sign on the back that said, “Peaches, this is your can.” Yes, I know, I cringe now, but that was then when the floodgates had opened for the first time. The car had no seats in the back so we filled the space with mattresses. I had money left over from my vacation jobs, I had wheels and could travel, and my amorous experimentations went into overdrive.
I never saw my lover again after the meeting with the Vice Chancellor. But one day, at the end of 1999, I was driving through Kenilworth in Cape Town and stopped at a robot (traffic lights). Something made me turn my head and there, in the car next to me, was the girl I had loved at university, now a rather matronly woman. The encounter sent a sensuous shiver down my spine, but it was also like seeing a ghost, a spirit calling to me from so many years ago. She said nothing, just looked at me and mouthed, “Wilbur,” smiled, and drove off as the lights turned green.
Being sent down was just one of the risks in those days. We didn’t have to contend with HIV and AIDS like today, but there was the age-old worry of getting a girl pregnant. We were very nervous about our contraceptives. The girl would say: “It’s okay, I’ve just had my period,” or something along those lines, and peace of mind would be restored. Sometimes we would take the condoms and wash them to save money. We’d put talcum powder on them to dry them out. Some of them we used three or four times, some half a dozen times. We’d blow them up and put them to our ears to check they weren’t leaking. This is not a means of using contraceptives I’m recommending in any way! Even recalling our exploits as I’m doing now brings the color to my cheeks at how reckless and disrespectful we were, but back then, needs must.
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nbsp; Consuming large amounts of alcohol, getting smashed and testing one’s drinking limits are rites of passage at university. Competitive drinking was something of a sport, and great fun, but brought with it the obvious hazards of bad behavior, falling over, and general stupidity. I was accomplished at the general stupidity, but I could also hold my drink. I had had my first taste of alcohol at the age of thirteen after one of my parents’ parties during my summer vacations when I sampled the dregs of the leftovers. They tasted vile and I couldn’t understand the appeal of drinking so I kept on drinking the leavings to see what it was that adults enjoyed so much. After a brief flash of euphoria, I threw up at the back of the house and then wobbled into my bed thinking my brain was about to explode. Strangely I didn’t have a hangover in the morning; perhaps I hadn’t drunk so much after all? The pleasures of alcohol remained an obscure mystery until I went to Rhodes and developed a taste for Castle Special. It was nine pence a quart and one quart would do you! In fact, my first hangover was at university, after a rugby match. I made my own cocktail—the most disgusting concoction ever, no one else would drink it. It consisted of Castle beer mixed with tomato juice, a sort of health shandy but with high alcohol content, years ahead of its time. I should have patented it.
Another bad habit I acquired at university was gambling, but my best friend’s father, a highly-respected headmaster told me that gambling is no fun unless you play it for stakes you can’t afford. I thought about that and gave it up in an instant.
•••
All too soon, my four years at Rhodes were up. It was time to go out, learn about real life and get a job. I’d wanted to be a journalist, following my love for writing, or become a big game hunter. But my father had told me straight to get a proper job.