“I urged Chris to ask the committee if they would mind if I taught the ladies to clean the boarding properly. I was not employed by the school and not working at that stage. With permission from the parents’ committee, I bought sugar soap and we scrubbed everything: the showers, the floors, the walls, the filthy couch, but eventually we had to throw that out as it was totally rotten, infested by insects. I have a lot of pictures detailing how the place used to look. On the first day of school, the teachers had a cocktail party in Surgite, the Old Boys’ bar, and my husband invited me to accompany him. The headmaster, Mr Bradley, introduced me to a mom by the name of Michelle Hobkirk; he told me she had done a lot of work for the school and maybe I could assist her in my free time if I was up to it.
“Michelle brought her retired parents to the school. Her mom took measurements and made curtains for all the windows and her dad worked day and night on maintenance, fixing up, painting and gardening, to improve the boarding living conditions.
“Michelle kindly sponsored workers on weekends to do painting, building and help put in cupboards for the boys, as they only had these broken steel trommels, broken and bent, kicked-in steel cupboards for their clothes. The toilet seats were broken and the doors did not have handles. Toilet doors could not close. The showers were totally open and no boy had any privacy. Most of the upgrades were sponsored by the Hobkirk family. One of the parents kindly loaned us R150 000 to buy the boys proper Gold-range mattresses. The day we carried those mattresses into boarding, the boys stood up and clapped so hard and long, it felt like we had just won the World Cup. We gradually paid the money back, after we rented the boarding houses out in the holidays to outside touring groups.
“For nearly a year, I worked full day for boarding with no remuneration. I also looked after the sick boys at night and, in emergency cases, took them to doctors and hospitals. The boys had never had this before. The first night we arrived, we told the boys they could come and see us if they were not feeling well. Soon we had half of the boarding house standing in a row outside our house. We’ve been told that before we came to Parktown, when the boys were not feeling well, or even bleeding, they were told to go away, or to phone their parents or just lie on their beds. Close to the end of that first year, the parent committee saw the work I had done and so they decided to pay me R5000 per month for working in the boarding house. I was very grateful as we were battling financially.
“When Chris took over the boarding house, we found at least 10 boys who were not officially on the books. When we contacted these parents, all the parents had exactly the same explanation: that a Parktown master would come to their houses or shacks and promise to give their sons full boarding and schooling in exchange for playing rugby and cricket for the school.
“When we discovered this, and the parents were contacted, we found that most of these boys were already in matric or Grade 11, playing first-team rugby. All of them came from very poor homes, most of their parents were waiters or cleaners, unable to afford the fees. The master involved was called in and he promised that there were bursaries coming, but nothing was ever paid in. After these boys finished their school rugby careers, the committee decided to expel them from boarding as no bursaries had come to light. My husband and I were very upset by this – how these boys were used for [their] excellence in sports, but once they were no longer needed, they were forced out, while they were writing their record or final exams.
“When we started at Parktown, Surgite – the Old Boys’ bar – was open most week nights. Certain teachers sometimes made the boys buy ice for them at the garage after 9 or 10 pm at night. I only found this out after putting a pass-out system in place, where security would not let the boys out without a written pass from us. One day Chris was at a golf function, so I personally walked up there and told the masters that I would not allow boys to go out as it was dangerous for them to walk by themselves at night and if they wanted ice, they could go buy it themselves. They just laughed at me. From then on they used to send security to buy ice and cigarettes for them. I am sure the parents would not have appreciated it to know their sons had to walk late at night to buy masters ice for their drinks. I also found it shocking that some of the masters had their girlfriends staying overnight with them. Chris immediately stopped this and gave them final warnings. This was when the first real problems started between us and the Old Boy teachers.
“So we cleaned up the bar and only opened it on weekends. It was run professionally and we used the money we raised to sponsor a few boys in boarding, as well as spending R32 000 for the year on the bursary and the sports boys’ toiletries. We appointed student masters in boarding to help us with prep duties. These masters did not get paid, but they had to do two hours of prep per week and help us wake up the boys. For this they got free accommodation, food and internet, and they also had to earn money from coaching at the school.
“Collan Rex was an old boy and we did not appoint him. He was appointed by Parktown Boys’ teachers Remo Murabito and Dave Hansen, and his position was Pastoral Care. From the outset, I had serious doubts about Collan. I didn’t like how he wrestled with the boys and was so familiar with them. We were already interviewing someone else for the assistant master position to replace Rex – having already made up our minds that we were not going to renew Rex’s contract – when he was arrested, as he had been given several warnings for touching the boys inappropriately by wrestling or hitting them, and he also neglected the prep. We found him to be very immature and not a role model for the boys.
“The night Rex was caught on camera, a boy, Ben, came to ask me to look on the cameras for the first-team waterpolo caps that had gone missing over the weekend after the boys returned from their game at Affies in Pretoria. We had installed the cameras two months earlier because of a lot of cell phone theft. Ben wanted us to look at it so we could see who took the waterpolo caps out of the common area. It was very time consuming and boring watching all the footage. We told Ben to carry on watching it while Chris sat next to him marking and I was in the kitchen, baking birthday cakes. I had introduced a system whereby each boarder got a birthday cake on his birthday. The next minute Ben made a loud sound. Chris looked up and saw that Rex was in the middle of doing sexual acts with a few of the boys. Chris immediately stopped the footage and came to tell me what he had just seen.
“I told Ben not to talk about this to anyone as Mr B and I had to investigate this in order to take it further. He said to me, ‘Mam, everyone knows about this – this is Rex’s way.’ I asked him to explain why would they let Rex touch them in this way. Did they like it? Ben said no, they did not. He said, ‘He does it to everyone and he is strong so they cannot fight him off.’ He said that when they went on tour, when they showered, Rex would come into the showers and do sexual acts to them in the shower. I asked him why they had not reported it. He simply repeated that Collan did it to everyone, that it was ‘the Rex way’ and it was ‘the Parktown way’. I asked Ben whether the waterpolo caps were really missing or whether he just wanted us to see the footage, but he insisted, ‘No, mam, I was looking for the caps.’ I was not convinced because the caps were on the table the entire time. We later discovered that Ben’s intention was indeed for us to see the footage and get Collan Rex fired. We decided to act immediately.
“We phoned the headmaster at the time, Mr Bradley, then we called Ben’s mom, as well as Mr Greyling and Michelle Hobkirk from the SGB, the School Governing Body. After they viewed the footage, the police were called. After the police viewed the footage, they said, ‘Let’s arrest this monster.’
“The next day the entire boarding house was called, in their grades, to our house. By then everyone knew Collan had been arrested and they obviously knew what he’d been arrested for, as it seemed like all the boys knew his ways. We told them that if they were one of Collan’s victims, they could speak to anyone in boarding. Of the eight boys who came forward, seven opened up to me and one boy to a teacher, Mr Zulu. We immediately informed all the boarding parents of the incident, but Mr Bradley did not want to let the entire school community know at that stage. He said we should just keep it between us and the boarding parents. I was not happy about it, as a lot of the victims told me that Collan did this to day boys as well … The next day I asked Mr Bradley if the school would help us secure a psychologist to try to help the victim boys.
“The school then got a psychologist, *Janet, the mother of a day