“If my parents knew what really went on at the school, I used to think (not being the first little boy to imagine that my main job was that of protecting parental innocence), they would faint from the shock.”
Fragments From an Education, by Christopher Hitchens
Boys will be boys. But lock them into dormitories from the age of seven, cane their naked buttocks regularly and viciously with rattan rods for every one of their minor infractions, deliberate or accidental; allow the older boys to treat them as fags and faggots, deprive them of all entertainments apart from Victorian novels and The Hardy Boys (1927), and boys will be pigs.
Girls will too, apparently, given the right amount of deprivation, abuse and encouragement.
Hitchens was right. In return for having protected us from knowing anything about the unpleasant, the unpalatable and unsavoury goings-on in the wildly wider world of adulthood, we protected our parents from knowing anything about the brutal, bestial and bizarre behaviours ritually practiced behind the walls and inside the hallowed halls of South Africa’s most reputable boarding schools. I know because I went to some of them. I played rugby against several of them. I changed in their changing rooms.
I said nothing because I didn’t know what to say.
On the morning of 8 June 1954, Alan Turing’s housekeeper opened the door of 43 Adlington Road, Wilmslow, and found him dead in his bed. A half-eaten apple was lying on the floor beside it. An inquest would determine that he had committed suicide by the consumption of a fatal dose of cyanide.
Ten years later, in the January of 1964 when Helen and I were packed off to Estcourt Junior School, Tim Berners-Lee was a nine year old trainspotter tinkering with toy model railways in south-west London. The idea that Turing’s intelligent machines would soon be able to convey entire libraries of knowledge instantly from one end of the earth to other wasn’t even a flicker of a red diode in the eye of Big Brother.
Helen was seven; I was eleven. The sum of what we knew about the world that couldn’t be gleaned from the mating behaviour of Naked Neck chickens, was contained in the unread volumes of Arthur Mee’s The Children's Encyclopædia (1908).
The question is this: When, if ever, does a wealth of information become too much information?
In 2022 it’s possible (and not illegal) for a minor to consult Wikipedia regarding the origin and meaning of a term such as “soggy biscuit”. There, even before they have reached sexual maturity and are old enough fully to understand it, they will discover that it’s also known as ookie cookie, limp biscuit, wet biscuit, shoot the cookie, jizzcuit, or cum on a cookie:
“ ...a male group masturbation activity in which the participants stand around a biscuit (UK) or cookie (US) masturbating and ejaculating onto it; the last person to do so must eat the biscuit. Additionally, a participant who fails to hit the biscuit when he ejaculates must then eat it.”
Wikipedia
They will also learn that it is a peculiarly Anglo phenomenon, originating in public schools in England and reportedly still played by adolescents and young adults at schools and universities in the UK and in all of the former British colonies, including the US. Which suggests a tradition with as long and as venerable a history as, for example, the Eton Wall Game; or perhaps, without wanting to put too fine a point on it, the game that enshrines the rules by which the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom are chosen to this day.
Behind closed doors, as they say.
The game has been featured in popular culture, including Stephen Fry's The Liar, the German film Crazy, the 2006 film Sleeping Dogs Lie, the "Chains" episode of Blackadder II, the "Freaks & Greeks" episode of Drawn Together, the "Sleepover" episode of Big Mouth, "The Patent Troll" episode of Silicon Valley, the rock band Limp Bizkit, and Skinless's song "Scum Cookie”.
Ibid
In 2022 it’s also possible to take the broader view, viz: “..since the game does not require sexual contact; the idea and practice of the game is in keeping with the spirit of adolescent sexual exploration…” — and hence, by implication, merely a harmless lark of quite natural and perfectly excusable teenage fun.
Forewarned is forearmed, nonetheless. Because it clearly becomes a lot less excusable, and a great deal more sinister, when variations of it are orchestrated by teachers, priests and scout masters for their amusement and gratification.
Barry Fowler is a South African-born clinical psychologist who has devoted much of his professional career, the latter years of it with the NHS in the UK, to investigating and documenting the causes and consequences of sexual abuse, especially in institutional settings such as schools, orphanages and the Boy Scout Movement.
His recently published book, Boys Don't Tell: What Happens if they Do? (2021) is a forensically researched, brilliantly argued, and stomach-churning analysis of how bad people get away with doing terrible things when good people say nothing.
I knew he was writing it. We had been in touch in the early 2000s when he was investigating the abuses suffered by young conscripts in the South Africa Defence Force of the apartheid years, most notably by the convicted sex offender Aubrey Levin, former Chief Psychiatrist of the SADF, aka, “Bubbles”, the Grendel of Greefswald, with whom I had had some unfortunately memorable encounters in 1971.
So I was prepared not to be shocked. What I wasn’t prepared for was coming across (in an unrelated chapter) a very familiar name, which evoked a very familiar face, which I recognised immediately as belonging to someone I had known very well in the very familiar town of Estcourt.
Out of respect for his family, who will already have suffered enough from his public disgrace, I will refer to him only as DD.
Barry’s account of DD’s long and largely consequence-free career as a serial abuser of young boys is as infuriating as it is depressing, a litany of the institutional lies, evasions and cover-ups that enabled him to continue his predations for many years after the evidence against him should (as I understand it) have been impossible to ignore.
What happens if boys tell? DD’s victims discovered the same answer I had stumbled my way to in 1971:
Nothing.
His premature death (of unknown cause) was widely reported in South African newspapers:
The KwaZulu-Natal press has been peppered with advertisements celebrating the death of a former principal and scoutmaster who has emerged as one of South Africa’s worst serial paedophiles.
Mail & Guardian, 21st January 2000
There had been rumours. I remember dark whispers about him being exchanged in the pubs and hotel bars of Mooi River, Nottingham Road and Pietermaritzburg after we had left Estcourt behind us. They chimed with what I had seen and what I had heard in the bathrooms, showers, toilets and dormitories of those boarding schools. I still didn’t want to believe it.
More than fifty years later I still don’t want to believe it, think about it, or remember it. Seeing it in black and white print is as shocking to me now as the first shocking glimpse I had, as an eleven year old child, of what adults can persuade children to do or submit to.
Skip the persuasion.
The rumours were dismissed by those who couldn’t imagine DD doing anything other than what the well-respected son of a well-respected family would have been brought up to do in the well-respected, English-speaking, white, middle-class community of Estcourt.
Which is the way apparently good people get away with murder and always have. Because they are apparently good people. Because we can’t imagine it.
The boys who were subjected to DD’s “bacon slices” could imagine it. It was the name they gave to the peculiarly sadistic caning technique DD invented as a teacher at a well-respected Durban boarding school in the seventies:
“A bacon slice was a type of very painful stroke inflicted with the cane. Instead of hitting your bum head-on, the cane was raised high and brought vertically down, thereby skimming a large area of your bum; almost like a cleaver slicing ham; hence the name.”
Quoted in: Boys Don't Tell: What Happens if they Do? by Barry Fowler
Which takes me back to January 1964, and two little pigs snuggled up on the back bench-seat of a blue and white Peugeot 403, our neatly packed suitcases in the boot, our hair tidily trimmed, cut and ponytailed, our shoes brightly shone, our eyes shining with the happiest of expectations. Helen and I, on our way to Estcourt.
Eskort.
We had plenty of hope in our hearts. What we didn’t have was any precautionary information in our heads.
If our parents ever talked about money when we were growing up it was never in my presence; nor, as far as I know, did they discuss their financial affairs with any of my five siblings. The English don’t talk about money unless it’s to plead poverty. Otherwise it’s crass. Or just boring, which is even worse.
So I assume it must have been the same straitened circumstances that forced them to sell the grand old farm of New Dell in 1964 and move us lock, stock and barrel to the small-holding of Drakesleigh, that obliged my parents to take me out of the private school of Merchiston and place me with Helen, now of school-going age, as boarders at the (all white) government-funded Estcourt Junior School.
We spoke about it yesterday.
Our two eldest siblings had breezed through Treverton, St John’s, Merchiston and Estcourt High School on the wings of their academic brilliance, their popularity and their sporting prowess. Bruce fought his way through school with his fists, his wits, his eye for the absurd, and a pencil so sharp it could turn sadistic bullies into toothless budgies. Andy, the youngest, who was sent to Maritzburg College rather than to Estcourt High School, sailed through with flying colours on his unfairly distributed all-round skills and his infectious charm, his stellar reputation cemented — anecdotally, at least — by being the fly-half who inspired the young Joel Stransky to greatness in the Rugby World Cup of 1994.
They liked school, and their schools seemed to like them.
Child abuse must have been prevalent in many schools, in South Africa and around the world, long before that. If anything, it should have been more common, more brazen, and more exploitative in those dark days after the Second World War when the cruellest of all inhumanities had made the unimaginable not just imaginable, but practically feasible, to an entire generation of soldiers returning from France, Italy, North Africa and the Pacific.
Why, then, would our older siblings never have breathed a word about it? Why was there never any hint of it, not the merest, faintest shadow of it, not even a suggestion of the wispiest passing cloud of it in the bright blue skies of all their schooldays? Why would they have kept so shtum?
There were only two possible explanations: Either it was so prevalent that it was regarded as entirely normal — as a harmless rite of passage, as expected and tolerated as six of the best, or as the practice of hazing high school ‘new poeps’ by introducing their testicles to wintergreen.
Give me fish-hooks instead. Please, sir.
Or — and this, we agreed, was the more likely of the two — the penalties for breaking the omertà, the institutional code of silence that surrounded and enclosed it, had become so ferociously enforced in the ‘40s and’ 50s that any thought of breaching it was too horrifying even to contemplate.
A third explanation occurred to me this morning, no less sinister for appearing so conceivably innocent.
Perhaps, like the English paedo-celebrity and friend of the Royal Family, Jimmy Savile, whose serial predations also began in the mid-sixties and went on (apparently) unnoticed until his death in 2011, adults around the English-speaking world were interpreting "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)"by the Four Tops and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, the two songs that were vying to top the music charts in 1965, as open invitations to experiment with alternatives that weren’t confined to the stuffy closet of heterosexual gratification.
Perhaps the early ‘60s had opened those doors. The omertà was lifted. And they grabbed at them with the eager, sweating palms of both hands.
I can’t get no satisfaction. I can’t help myself.
For the generation that grew up with “Mairzy Doats”, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" it would have felt extraordinarily liberating, futuristic, innovative, avant-garde — something excitingly new in the air or the water, as modern as the lead in the petrol fumes and the fluoride in the mains supply, or a trippy combination of the two.
We might have been humming one of those tunes as the misty green hills of the Midlands gave way to the hot, bright thornveld leading down to the bacon factory and the Bushmen’s River.
While the clock ticked.