Fats ordered and prompted and planned, and the rest of us, each for our own reasons, followed dutifully. With my meagre possessions packed into my oversized room, I lived a life in neutral. I completed my allotted tasks in their allotted time, and otherwise I drifted across the empty city, looking at full bottles of liquor through the closed store windows.
Lillian lectured anyone within earshot on the history of the area. Untouched by the irony of being the only foreigner, she lashed us repeatedly with her knowledge of the ridge: how it was occupied by the mining magnates and the original colonisers, back when Jozi was just a scrappy piece of dust with a lot of gold underneath it. It – the ridge – was occupied for all the obvious reasons. It allowed its inhabitants to perch on top of the city and observe the movements and machinations below. Lillian explained how the ridge was a slow starter as a residential area compared to Parktown, that it was only in the 1930s that it really took off with the larnies, when the so-called International Style of architecture came around and allowed the rich to feel like their Upper Houghton houses would compete with those in France, England et al.
Of course we all knew all this; the knowledge was threaded into our genes, and so Lillian was shrugged off and smiled at and tolerated with varying degrees of annoyance, frustration and amusement. ‘These people,’ Gerald would occasionally mutter under his breath while being educated.
Word was that our arrival gave Fats the energy burst necessary to finalise his mission to enclose us. Our farming area occupied the King Edward High School sports fields. Some of the fields were being grown over to provide grazing for the cattle Javas was sourcing. Others were tilled and prepared to grow stuff. Corn. Vegetables. Sunflowers.
The school buildings were less important. We used them, classroom by classroom, for various functional ends – the closer the classroom to the fields, the higher its utility level for tool storage and such things. The outer third of the KES buildings, those facing towards St John’s, were left alone.
St John’s, Fats decided, should be treated as our moat. Our security façade. It was crucial, according to his strategy, to have a bulwark in place. He mounted a South African flag on the school’s outer pole, facing north, looking over the highway off-ramp.
His control-centre map marked off, with red pins of course, the areas where the already robust fencing could easily be repurposed. The southern fencing simply needed to be joined – each institution was already carefully cut off from Louis Botha Avenue, the historical divide between the schools and the real/ghetto worlds of Yeoville, Berea, Hillbrow and the city. The western fences around St John’s required only a moderate additional stretch to close off the small St Patrick Road entrance. Munro Drive twirled up in steep loops from Lower Houghton and could be easily sealed at the top, as it joined St Patrick. Here Fats planned to install a primary guard hut, our key defence post, which would protect the top of Munro Drive and the only entrance to St Patrick Lane, where our residence was located. Beyond our house, St Patrick died off into a dead end of ridge mansions overlooking the eastern city. All that remained, according to Fats, was to restructure the crime-prevention fencing that blocked off eastern suburban access via smaller roads leading off Louis Botha, and we had a secure area of more than a square kilometre.
There were questions, of course. Mutterings and mumblings. Lillian was the most prone to seeding rebellion. She cornered me a few days after our arrival, as I was pacing the artificial turf of the KES hockey fields trying to assess and understand. I saw her coming, shuffling aggressively across the field, the mousy intervener. Beatrice had coined the phrase and it stuck. Lillian moved like a mouse, always scratching, always ahead of herself, twitching, eyes on the move. She pulled her heavy ass around at high speed, accentuating the general impression, and once her mouth had started moving there was no stopping it. She was in every sense mousy. Equally, it was her essential nature to intervene.
She flicked curls away from her eyes with a pointed hand.
‘Fats’s thing’ – she moved to the point via an introduction on the extremeness of these public schools – ‘to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure. We could be wasting a lot of time and resources. I mean, there is no sign of anyone else, let alone invaders.’ She dropped onto her haunches and tried unsuccessfully to pluck a blade from the artificial turf. I wasn’t sure if there was more to come or if this was my cue. I let the silence settle, then initiated a stroll through the KES buildings.
I had, like most South African kids, walked into adulthood through the shadows cast by the country’s boys’ schools: KES, St John’s, Michaelhouse, Parktown, Grey, St Andrew’s, St Stithians, Bishops… Whatever city you were in, there was at least one school cut directly out of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, dropped into the southern African bush. The names differed but they were all fundamentally linked in their structure, their uniforms, their architecture and their ability to push out generation after generation of CEOs, opening batsmen, fly-halves and marketing managers. My father was a product of one of these institutions, but his dalliances with fate ensured that I navigated a different channel. Me, I attended Northcliff High, a more common brick-and-prefab organisation devoid of national sporting, political or business ambitions. At Northcliff, graduate successes were the accidents of fortune likely to befall any institution that held its doors open long enough. At places like KES and St John’s, however, the school legacy was threaded into the very edifice; every brick, every blade of rolled grass or every inch of carefully maintained artificial turf.
We walked into KES through the heavy stone arches of the hockey-field entrance, past a bronze statue of Graeme Smith leaning into an ugly, manly cover drive, then to the main hall, lush with rows of dark wooden chairs, honours boards, and stained-glass badges at the top of the double-volume glass windows, which shed bright light over the hall. The hall was, in the same manner as Big Ben and the old churches of Europe, undeniably magnificent.
I had always skirted around these buildings. Even on those occasions when our shoddy school bus would broach the gates, there was never enough space or time to truly observe and take it all in. We were always rushing through the process, through the event, eyes down, trying not to make any mistakes that would too obviously disclose the awe that the structures created.
Now, with Lillian rattling off facts at my side, I was able to step back and observe, step forward and run my fingers over the honours boards: Graeme Smith, Bryan Habana, Ronnie Kasrils, Donald Gordon – the list was endless. The wood was old and ever so slightly ridged under the fingertip. You could, if you knew what you were feeling for, actually touch the texture of the upper classes. I was, of course, an indirect descendant of this same lineage. The Maritzburg College boards featured several generations of Fotheringham success, not least of whom my father, national cricketer, DJ, oddball.
Lillian powered on as we bridged over to St John’s. ‘A World Class Christian School in Africa,’ the foyer brochures said. She informed me that the institution had maintained this motto for many decades. She snorted derisively as she parted with the information and, despite my general irritation, I snorted too. While KES was a brat factory of the highest order, St John’s was in a different, higher league. To anyone looking up at its multi-tiered stone immensity from the bottom rugby fields, it was at least as impressive in scope as the Union Buildings themselves. But its true magnificence lay in the details. Even after close on a year of natural growth, the lines of the almost nuclear green grass held steady along the stone paths and walls, and pointed decisively to the stairs. St John’s, the grass said, maintained its lines. Always.