My Only Story. Deon Wiggett
in Bloemfontein. I know that Willem did not leave Bloemfontein at the end of 1987. It was one of the first things he told me on the sweaty summer’s day we met: that he had taught at the famous Grey College in Bloem, and then moved down to Cape Town in 1995 to work somewhere epic. To hear him tell it, it was the career break of a lifetime. I remember how inspiring it was, the way he spoke about it. Willem can be so inspiring, until one day he is not.
Now that I am looking at him with grown-up eyes, well, now I smell a rat. I am hearing some dates and stories that do not make sense to me. Did Willem really leave Grey College to pursue the chance of a lifetime? Or was he perhaps fired from Grey and then just lucked out? What is the real reason he made the 1 000-kilometre journey from Bloemfontein to Cape Town and the Atlantic Ocean? It is a long way for a bullfrog to go.
If Willem was fired from Grey, and it had something to do with a boy, it stands to reason it would have been a boy in his last year at Grey. If I could just get a complete list of everyone who went to Grey College the year that Willem left, all I would have to do is find all of them, and then ask them.
The internet is inadequate for Bloemfontein back in the nineties, so I can avoid it no longer. It is time to go to Grey College, to try to talk myself into their archives, to see if I can find a list of pupils from Willem’s time there.
But will Grey College allow a perfect stranger to just poke around their archives? This may take some sweet-talk and cunning.
So rather than say: ‘Hi, I’m from Joburg, lead me to your evidence!’, I am concocting a half-lie about making a documentary about school newspapers and other publications around the end of apartheid.
Mostly, I am counting on the fact that I have a tiny bit of an in. Grey College’s arch-rival is Paul Roos Gymnasium in Stellenbosch – which happens to be where I went to school. Which means that the Grey boys and I have a brotherly rivalry in common, on paper.
I want to learn about Grey College from a cream-of-the-crop, head-boy type. I find Jean Craven, who was head boy in 1990.
Jean is older and much buffer than I am, and the CEO of a wealth fund that appears to live up to the name. On Facebook and his website, madswimmer.com, the source of his vitality is documented. (‘What started off as a late winter night’s bet in a chalet on the French slopes in 2009, has sparked a group of brave individuals to embark on a series of incredible swims every year to raise funds for children in need,’ reads the site.)
From my cursory research, I am used to seeing Jean in a Speedo. In one of the site’s photo galleries, he is in Antarctica. He cuts through dark water as drifting ice looms. In another gallery, he is crossing from Asia to North America, and once again it seems cold for a swim. But Jean does it in pleasant places too, from the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea to Lake Malawi and Madagascar. It has ensured posture and muscular poise seldom found in men his age.
Jean lives with his wife and two daughters just down the road from me in leafy northern Johannesburg, and I visit there one Saturday.
As I pull up to his modern house, there is a young guy pacing the lawn while clearly giving instructions over his cellphone. He waves at me as I get out. I do not want to interrupt his determined call, but he beckons me over.
‘Is your father here?’ I am about to silently mouth, but he interrupts the call, extends his hand and says: ‘Deon, I’ll be just a moment.’
From up close, it becomes clearer that Jean is over forty.
‘Did your whole family go to Grey?’ I ask later.
‘My granddad was there in ’32,’ Jean says fondly, ‘my dad in ’60, my brother in ’85 and then me in 1990. Had I had sons, they might have been there too; their choice …’
Jean is a Grey Boy from the mould and still heavily involved with the school he left thirty years ago.
‘Would you say Grey College is the best school in the world?’
‘I would,’ says Jean, and nods earnestly, ‘like a true Grey Boy would.’ Then he quotes a former headmaster: ‘Grey College is not an institution; it’s a way of life.’
‘Why?’
‘Certainly it differentiates itself, at least from a visible point of view, in terms of the type of person and boy it wants to, you know, mould over the course of four or five years. You know: the etiquette, the manners … how to treat your fellow pupils, parents.’
And: ‘On top of that, you have a very rich tradition. It’s the third-oldest school in South Africa; 1855. Um, and boys only, I guess, which makes it, certainly for certain, a bit more special. Over the course of the last 160-odd years, it has had a phenomenal track record. Certainly a place to be proud of.’
Grey’s claim to be the country’s third-oldest school is an oft-repeated lie; it ranks fifth. First there were three boys’ schools in Cape Town: SACS (1829), then Wynberg Boys’ High (1841), then Bishops (1849). In 1855, both St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown and Grey College in Bloemfontein were founded. (My own alma mater only burst onto the scene in 1866.)
Never mind. It seems like my question to Jean has been answered, but his veneration is just gathering steam. ‘From a sporting point of view,’ he says, ‘I think most people, when they think of Grey, think about its sporting achievements, especially rugby, cricket – we’ve got quite a few famous Springboks that have come from Grey. So sport certainly does play quite a large role. Not only in Grey, but in a lot of other famous South African boys’ schools, sport does seem to top the agenda typically.
‘If you’re a good sportsman, Grey would have been a nice place to have spent your high-school years.’
I may seem inadequately impressed, because he tries something else. ‘Not that we don’t have very strong academics coming out of Grey. Historically we’ve always had a lot of the star pupils, certainly in the Free State and even in South Africa, coming from Grey. So one would argue that it has a pretty good balance. It’s not just about sport; academics certainly play a very large role too.
‘And with that, uh, culture, you know, we’ve got one of the best choirs, certainly in the Free State if not the country; a good band … Although naturally sports would pick up a lot of attention, one would not discount culture as well as academics.’
Then Jean tells me rugby stories – he was in Grey’s first team his last two years there. ‘Actually, we were talking about it the other day,’ he says. ‘In my whole school career, I’ve never lost a rugby game at Grey College, from the under-14As right through to matric, I’ve never lost a game, which is … I don’t think a lot of people can say that. I’m very, very privileged to have been able to, you know, have gone through that.’
‘Yes, but was it because of you or in spite of you?’
Jean bristles a little. ‘Rugby is a team game,’ he says. ‘The camaraderie … so much so that I even went back thirty years later to go and play for our Old Boys this year, which was an extreme privilege – to have the ability to pull a Grey College rugby jersey over my head again. I mean, who would have thought, at forty-seven, I’d still be playing rugby. I’ve still got a few pains and aches from that game six months ago.’
It is a four-hour drive from Johannesburg to Bloemfontein along the N1, and a good ten hours more down to Cape Town, if you do not speed and stop twice.
But I am only going as far as Bloemfontein, on a mission that is making me anxious. Big, male-dominated places tend to make me anxious anyway, and I am going to Grey undercover as someone who was not raped by one of its former teachers.
Like a Grey Old Boy (or Old Grey, as they call it) driving down from Gauteng, I take the Nelson Mandela Drive off-ramp from the N1 to arrive in a small and somewhat tired city that still manages to be the biggest place between Joburg and Cape Town. It is the capital of the Free State, a province that was once a Boer republic, and it has a fairly good university, an allegedly kleptocratic provincial government and one daily newspaper, Volksblad.
But