At the time of writing, Parktown Boys’ had, with no explanation, stopped payment of James’s medication and psychologist bills, and Michael’s email queries to the school have remained unanswered. James is still on suicide watch.
Chapter 5
The Boy Who Stood Up
*Ben
“So the beatings and initiations didn’t stop after the school camp?”
Ben and his father exchanged glances. The Archivist took off his glasses and started cleaning them.
“Camp is just the beginning.”
“And what happens when you get back?”
“Well, for one thing you have to pass the hostel test. And I had to do six hostel tests because I kept failing them,” Ben laughed. “They’re all on the same basis: you’ve got to name all your matrics, and you name all their accolades. So you might only have 16 matrics, but between them they could have 20 sports, and the same again for academics – and if you get one thing wrong, it’s a fail. You get three warnings, but if you do something stupid, they just say, ‘Fail’. On one of the hostel tests I got something wrong about my old pot. And I got shouted at. If you get something wrong or, let’s say, if you pronounce it wrong, they hit you, or they just shout at you and make you feel more shit. And they could make you go on your knees sometimes … I don’t know if you’ve ever kneeled on a broomstick – oh, it’s horrible. They just make you feel like shit and hit you sore. Agh, it was more of a scary thing. And then you had to know the history of the hostel: ‘So, who was head of hostel in 1964?’ You have to know all of them until today … All the names of the heads of hostels, the names of the buildings, the stairs – you had to know the stairs’ names. ‘Who died on the AstroTurf? Who was he?’ You had to know that the stairs in the hostel were named after the guy who died on the AstroTurf. Agh, you just had to know all this stuff. Just names. The Mali stairs. But you did the test over and over again until you passed, and then you did it in different venues and sometimes you had to do it in front of the whole hostel. So you had to stand up in front of them and you just felt shit scared that those guys were going to laugh at you and swear at you while you’re in the hall and say, ‘You’re so fucking stupid,’ with you not knowing what the hell to do. And that’s how they toughened you up. You got used to it.”
I spoke to Ben about James, and how James had certainly not got used to it. Ben looked rueful.
“I would see him walking around looking lost and I would try to help him. I always tried to help the softer kids. He kept saying he didn’t understand and it was wrong.”
Ben offered a half-smile.
“In the beginning of Grade 9, I just actually tried to help the Grade 8s the whole time. I didn’t spend a lot of time with my own grade. I tried to help them get into shape, because I knew that would help them. James kept saying, ‘These guys are teasing me,’ and I used to go to the Grade 8s and actually shout at them, ‘Are you teasing him?’” Ben shook his head. “He had a really rough year. I said if he needs anything he must talk to me, but I couldn’t really do much.
“But by then I had worked out the system. I knew where I wouldn’t get into shit. I started to learn what people were like, so I told him, ‘Cool, when you see them, do this, then no one can give you shit. Even if you do something wrong later, they’ll be lenient on you, because you’ve done something else for them.’ You learn who to stay away from and who to offer to buy food for from the tuckshop.”
Ben seemed so matter of fact and confident – a far cry from some of the others, boys like James. Ben half sat and half lay on the couch while we chatted, stroking the family pug. James had, on the other hand, curled into a corner of the sofa, making himself as small as possible, cuddling a small terrier who kept licking him sympathetically. But with Ben I found myself laughing and shooting the breeze, despite the disturbing nature of the content of his stories. After I interviewed James, I drove around the corner and was physically sick under a tree. James’s words lay heavy on me. If there had been a time I could have stopped writing this book, it was gone after I spoke to James.
Chapter 6
The Matron
Mariolette Bossert
The first time I met Mariolette Bossert was in the dining hall of the hostel. I didn’t recognise her at first. On her Facebook picture she looks happy and energetic and when I met her, she looked so tired, her face pinched. I had heard from a few of the mothers that Mariolette had been a rock for their children when the abuse was first exposed and she continued to be one, even years later.
Mariolette was very nervous; she didn’t want to lose her job and said she had been threatened with that before for her constant speaking out. We agreed that she would talk off the record first, and then decide later what to do in the best interests of her family and the hostel and, of course, ‘her boys’.
“I promised them I would stay until the last of them finished matric,” she said, over coffee and homemade milktart. “And I will, but I don’t know how much longer.”
She loved the boys, and while we talked, there was a constant stream of them coming in and out of the dining hall. This one needed his medication, that one couldn’t find his cricket shirt, someone else had misplaced some sports equipment. She dealt with each one quickly and with care, like a mother. She showed me around the boarding house, the new extension with coffee stations and fruit baskets and some fairly robust lounge furniture. Later she offered to write it all down for me, but reminded me that I would only be allowed to use it if she agreed. Her notes sat in my inbox for a long time.
“I arrived at Parktown Boys’ in 2016, with my husband, Chris, who had been employed as the Director of Boarding. I was not employed by the school at the time. When I first walked into the boarding houses, they were in a shocking state. All the mattresses were smelly and torn. Some boys were sleeping on dirty mattresses without fitted sheets. There was one dirty old couch for 60 boys to sit on. There was no place where they could even make a cup of coffee. If they were thirsty, they had to drink water from the filthy bathroom taps and some taps were missing. I was not surprised when I saw that the boarding house cleaning budget was R1500 for the year. The ladies only bought Sunlight washing liquid to clean everything in the boarding house. There were rats all over the place. Parents were unaware of these conditions as one of the rules – and a so-called ‘tradition’ was that no parent was allowed to enter the boarding facility, especially the mothers. The parents could only drop the boys off at the gate. I found it hard to believe that a mother would just leave her child, without seeing in what conditions her son was living.
“The boys had to endure the most terrible rules. Although they were boarding, they were not allowed in the boarding house after school and were only allowed to enter just before dinner time. According to the masters, they had to pack a bag in the morning and go to sports.
“Another harsh rule they had was that if the boys were late for dinner or had the wrong uniform on, they had to sit on the floor outside the boarding house and only got food if there was food left over, after everyone else had eaten. I was simply shocked with the way the masters were running boarding.
“I began driving my husband crazy, urging him to speak to the committee parents when they had their meetings, specifically about the condition of the mattresses. I could not sleep at night, tossing and turning, thinking about how the boys were sleeping on those filthy things.
“When I questioned the masters who stayed in boarding about the shocking conditions, they would