Into The Thorns
Chapter Two
Smell of The Hills
I was seven years and five months old when I was deposited on the hostel steps at Rhodes Estate Preparatory School. REPS (as it was called) is a boys boarding school and, in 1968, in true colonial tradition, was for whites only. The school is situated at the edge of the Matobo Hills, about twenty miles south of Bulawayo, and it was my home for the next five years. Like the twenty or so other kids who started school at REPS that year, I was awed at the immensity of the prospect facing me, and I was rendered weak with anxiety and homesickness. I look at seven-year-old children today and I cannot imagine sending them away to school for three months at a time. They seem like babies. But in rural Rhodesia in 1968 there were no choices, your mother packed your black metal trunk and away you went off to boarding school.
Cecil John Rhodes, the swashbuckling Englishman who made a fortune in the South African diamond mines and goldfields between 1870 and 1890, was instrumental in conquering and colonising the land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers once known as Munhumutapha. With little evidence of modesty he named this beautiful new land Rhodesia, and it was swept into the basket, along with numerous other acquisitions also labelled “British Empire”. This was in 1893. In 1965 however, the colonials decided that they wanted to rule themselves, and they declared independence from Britain, who wanted to hand their Rhodesian conquest back to the black Africans from whom they had taken it. A bitter war followed, between the black Africans on one hand, who were trained and backed by the communist Chinese and Russians, and the white colonialists on the other. White Rhodesia was placed under sanctions by the world powers, and trade, arms and fuel embargos made war a difficult thing for the Rhodesians to maintain. So, in 1980, after approximately forty thousand deaths, the county was handed back to the blacks, and Zimbabwe was born.
During his years of travel in Rhodesia, his new country, Rhodes fell in love with two places in particular, and he had dwellings erected at both of them. One was Inyanga, a verdant misty spot nestled amongst towering mountains and forests on Rhodesia’s eastern border with Mozambique. The other was the Matobo hills. Rhodes found a place in the hills which commanded breathtaking views over the broken granite koppies, and he named this spot World’s View. He was buried there in 1902 according to instructions in his will, and it was no easy task bringing his body all the way from Cape Town, so that his remains could lie in the place he had loved so well.
Also in Rhodes’s will were instructions to build a boys school on a piece of land near his summerhouse. World’s View is situated about six miles south of the school. Rhodes’s summerhouse, and the school, stand at the foot of a long low grassy ridge that runs in an east-west line about half a mile north of the beginning of the granite koppies. I found it curious that someone who loved the Matobo hills so much would choose to build a summerhouse, and designate land for a school, on ground which was near to but not actually within the hills themselves. Reps consisted of the boarding hostel which had five dormitories, a chapel, a classroom block with five classrooms, a dining·hall, kitchen, a hospital, and the main hall. Scattered about were also various small maintenance buildings like the groundsman’s office and there were also four sports fields, a swimming pool and tennis courts. 1 did not think so then, but it is a beautiful, well planned and well laid out school. Very English. Compared to some of the “town” schools in Bulawayo. it was a small school with only about one hundred and twenty pupils. The school’s rugby first fifteen was drawn from a total of 28 standard five boys. It was surprising, with so few pupils, that Reps always did so well at sport. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that everybody, no matter how fat, thin, short or weak, had to play sport. This was not the case with the town schools. Once the initial shock of boarding school had dulled a little, we ‘new boys’ as we were referred to, began to assess the situation we found ourselves in. Some kids were able to make friends easily, while the less gregarious ones chose to pull into themselves and go it alone, wracked with homesickness. A few kids, like myself, discovered that this place was rich adventure indeed. I too was horribly homesick, but really only at night or when we had nothing to do. Thankfully, at boarding school there are very few times when there is nothing to do.
like a blanket. No matter how hard I resolved, in bed at night, that I would make it through the next day without getting into trouble, trouble would find me like a twin. I cannot explain it, really. I’m positive that I never ever sat there and said to myself, “Right, lets see what kind of stupid risky thing I can go and do now so I can get thrashed”. It just seemed that it swooped down on me like an owl on a mouse. Of course the things that appealed to me, like shooting birds with a catapult – Reps was a National Parks area – sneaking into locked storerooms, stealing fruit off of mulberry trees in “out of bounds” areas, were “boys things”, and if I were faced with that time all over again I would do them. But it’s the other things. Breaking windows with pebbles shot from catapults, chopping the heads off red-hot-poker flowers in the school gardens, these things I cannot explain.
I’m pretty certain I was sent to Reps in particular, because it was a “strict discipline” school, and I was a problem child. The seniority system in both Reps, and later at Plumtree High School, was, I think, the strength of the discipline system. You could not, and would not, even speak to a pupil in a form above yourself without inviting abuse, both verbal and physical. You only spoke to these ‘seniors’ when spoken to. Of course the teachers and matrons were in charge, but much of the discipline and punishment was handed out by the pupils. Bullying was as common as our oatmeal porridge in the mornings. I cannot say if this boarding school seniority is a good thing or a bad thing. Children either could not take it, and left the school, or they did take it and they finished. Looking back now, obviously it’s not a good thing for the weak or somehow disadvantaged children, because children can be merciless to one another, and if you could not stand up for yourself you were doomed. I was insubordinate and rebellious to seniors trying to discipline me or give me a hard time, and in my five years at Reps they failed to get me straightened out. It was only at Plumtree (a sort of unofficially accepted high school for Reps pupils) that finally, in my second year there, I was made to realise that fighting the system was over. So ultimately, I would have to say that the English-type, boys-only boarding school system was a good thing for me personally, and stood me in excellent stead for endeavours later in life. It built things like self-reliance, discipline, strength, both physical and mental, and it taught one how to find the avenues of least resistance and how to avoid pitfalls.
Most Plumtree boys who went into the Rhodesian army had no problem coping with recruits’ courses or basic training courses, and many of them climbed the officer ranks efficiently and quickly. The army commander, General Peter Walls, was an ex-Plumtree schoolboy, and it is quite astounding to see how many of the army hierarchy, and commanders of the regular army units were ex-Plumtree boys, especially when one considers how small the school was (plus or minus 400 pupils). So even though the constant threat of seniority and beatings with ‘the cane’ (a piece of bamboo about six feet long) clouded my horizon, Reps school, situated at the edge of the wild Matobo hills, was my first glimpse of adventure.
I quickly became friends with a boy in that new class named Graham Robertson. Graham came from a ranch south of Marula, about 50 miles west of Reps. We both loved the outdoors and both of us were children born for trouble. Fate, or destiny, or pure coincidence, whatever you want to call it, plaited a rope that mixed our two lives together in a part of the world where political turmoil, guerrilla war and other violent circumstances, shredded families and friendships every day. Yet here we are, 38 years later, still close friends and still enjoying adventures in the same Matobo hills. When we left high school and went in to the army, Graham opted for an airborne infantry unit, and I went on an officer’s course. Seven months later, we found ourselves not only in the same airborne unit, but in the same commando! (Airborne equivalent of a company). One year later I met a cousin of Graham’s who lived in Salisbury – this was Margie, the woman who a few years later I was to marry.
Reps permitted the children to go out of the school grounds on Sundays on what were called “exeats”. There had to be a minimum of four in your group, and you had to “sign out” in a register with the duty teacher when you left the school grounds. In this register went the names of everyone in your group, and the name of the place you were going to. Most of the destinations were in, or right on the edge of the Matobo Hills. The kitchen supplied us with picnic lunches, which to a child at boarding school, was a treat and adventure all by itself! Those day-exeats back in the late sixties seemed such a big deal, the distances walked, the adventure, seemed so great. It’s hard to believe when I returned to the school more than twenty years later, how small the school and grounds actually were, and how close our exeat destinations were to the school. I would have sworn that these places were a good four or five miles away, but in reality the furthest was no more than two miles. But I suppose two miles, to a nine year old, with no teacher or adult present, is as good as ten miles to us today! After all these years, I still remember those exeat destination names – they gave the same thrill to us then, as Zanzibar, Timbuktu or Panama may give to adventure-dreaming adults today! There was Tabaccies, First Bru, Second Bru, Arboretum, Second sister, Tonking Rock, Chennels’ Dam, Sandy Spruit and Devil’s Arsehole. Young local African boys used to make small, carved baboons which they cleverly covered with dassie skin. Lucky-bean seeds (red with a black dot) were used for the eyes, and we admired these things greatly. We had no money, so entering into a trade was difficult. We finally solved the impasse by trading away our underpants and handkerchiefs, in our opinion the least important of our belongings. My wife found it strange when she first found out that I owned no underwear, but I think she found the explanation even stranger.
All these recollections, even today, bring back fond memories of what were indeed exciting times. These exeats were not without danger. Children can find mishap in an empty room, let alone in granite koppies, rusty fences, dip tanks and dilapidated buildings. One kid in our class fell down a steep rocky slope and smashed most of his teeth out in the process. Although they were highly illegal, Graham and I had several catapults with which we were deadly. When school term commenced, at least one of us would have smuggled some good rubber back in our school trunks, and we hoarded this rubber carefully. In order to make powerful catapults one needed either unperished red car-tube (the black one was less powerful) or what we called “mining rubber”. This was a highly elastic, powerful, square shaped (in section) rubber which we prized above all other kinds. We were experts at making catapults and we were experts in firing them too. If we were unable to find any suitable leather, we used to cut the tongues out of our shoes in order to make the “velletjie” – the small leather patch attached to the ends of the rubber which held your missile. (Usually a small stone.) We hid these catapults in secret hiding places in a stone wall behind the chapel, and we used them whenever we were able to sneak away from school duties. Whilst other kids were playing on jungle gyms or with marbles, Graham and I were shooting out light bulbs, windows, signs and sometimes other children. More often though we were doing our damndest to kill any kind of bird we could. We must have caused the Reps groundsman untold misery. If we weren’t shooting holes through his office windows, we were stealing rubber from the hosepipes. Thin rubber strips are used in Africa to repair cracks and holes in hosepipes. The headmaster of our school had the same surname as l did but to my knowledge was not a relative (probably much to his relief). His name was Ray Grant and he was, certainly to us in those days, a big beefy fellow. l think, looking back, that when he realised, after our seventh or eighth beating, that Graham and l were going to be regulars in the punishment line, he actually developed a fondness for the two of us. Ray Grant, like ourselves, loved the outdoors. He loved guns and he loved hunting and he loved shooting. He ran a shooting club for the standard five students (12 year olds) using .22 rifles, and the school had a nicely laid out shooting range. I remember Graham winning the Reps shooting trophy in 1972.
At Reps, if you were caught in some activity during the week that necessitated a thrashing with the cane, you were not beaten there and then. You had to wait until Sunday, after church and inspection, and then line up outside the headmaster’s office. The waiting, in my experienced opinion, was far worse than the thrashing itself. I would feel nauseous for days knowing what was coming on Sunday. The headmaster’s office was at the end of a long open veranda which ran outside the standard one dormitory. The kids destined for a beating had to line up on this veranda at the doorway to the office. Some kids used to snivel their way to the back of the line, but to Graham and I this made no sense; you were just prolonging the agony even further. Unless there were boys more senior to the two of us in the line, we would go first and second. It was a sickening feeling listening to the whip – clap, whip-clap of someone taking a caning only a couple of yards away behind the closed door. Sometimes you’d even hear the pleading whine of some snivelling wretch trying to evade the cane. It was funny recounting it afterwards, but it wasn’t funny when you were next. The drill was to take your punishment like a man, walk sedately out of the office (remember, a whole dormitory of standard ones was looking out the windows) until you reached the central passage which ran through the building, past the baths and out to the back toilets. Once you reached this passage no one could see you, and you could run like hell, rubbing your backside feverishly, all the way to the toilets where you would strip down and try your hardest to crane your neck around enough to see the rapidly swelling welts and, sometimes, cuts on your aching pink flesh. Once Graham and I were in standard four (eleven years old) and were regulars for Sunday canings, a complication arose. As I have said, Ray Grant had taken a liking to us, and one day he told us to remain behind, on the veranda, after our thrashing. We looked at one another, startled. Jesus. What now? After the beating, my backside on fire, I stood forlornly outside the office trying my hardest not to touch that stinging flesh in front of the other kids. Everybody in line was thrashed and sent away except the two of us. We heard clanking, the unmistakable sound of the safe being opened. Ray Grant came out with a couple of shotguns, a rifle, oil, cleaning rags and a push rod. We then passed an anxious, but pleasant half hour helping the headmaster clean his guns! All the while we were treated to his latest hunting stories! If it weren’t for the circumstances which found us there and our aching backsides, it would have been a pleasant enough chore for a Sunday morning. This guncleaning duty became a fairly regular diversion from normal school routine, and we would have looked forward to it were it not for that unpleasant thing which always preceded it.
Sunday, beatings aside, was our day! When the wake-up bell rang, we made our beds carefully, as this was inspection day. We had to dress in our “number ones” – grey flannel shorts, belt, long socks, black shoes, white shirt, tie and blazer. After breakfast we would stand next to the open wooden locker at the foot of our bed and wait for the headmaster. When he arrived, accompanied by our dormitory matron, he would stroll along stopping at each pupil. We would hold our hands up; palms upward, then turn them over, and then put them back by our sides. He would then look at our bed, inside our (recently tidied) locker and then at our shoes. If you had prepared properly, he would walk on. We had a few scruffy kids in our dormitory, however, that never ever made it through an inspection unscathed. After inspection we all marched down to the school chapel where we sang and sniggered stupidly for about an hour. After chapel we would run like mad things back to the dormitories and change into our khakis and “velskoene” (desert shoes), which was standard Reps attire. We were ready!
We could now collect our lunch boxes and sign out for “exeats”. How I loved that feeling of leaving the school grounds with my catapult tucked into my pants, my sheath knife on my belt, headed for a whole day of adventure into the Matobo hills. Many people look askance at us when we mention our knives at junior school. Any pupil, no matter what his age, was allowed a knife at this school. They were prized possessions and lay importantly in your locker on display. I never ever heard of a Reps boy being stabbed, or hurt, or threatened, by another pupil with a knife. On some exeats we tried fishing, but most of our trips were taken up with climbing and exploring the hills, shooting at lizards, birds and other groups of kids with our catapults. The groups of “townie” kids took a lot of flak from us with our “cattys” as we called them, and fights were common. We killed birds quite frequently and these were turned into “biltong”. We used to pluck the bird, no matter whether it was a dove or a honey sucker, cut the guts out, then spear the small carcass on a thorn, well hidden from view. With salt stolen from the dining room at meal times, we would carefully treat the meat. Two days later, voila! Biltong!
At about nine years of age Graham and I began to trap rats. We had no conventional pressed-tin spring traps, but we had several homemade traps that were surprisingly efficient. The trap we used most was a tricky affair created with a brick, or even a flat rock, a piece of string and a mealie pip. We caught many rats this way. Some of the bigger rats would still be alive, and part way out from under the brick when we arrived to check the traps in the morning. These we dispatched with our sheath knives. I still recall clearly, today, the feeling of excitement and anticipation when approaching those simple traps. I still feel the same excitement when checking leopard baits today! People often ask, “What in the hell did you want to catch rats for? What did you do with them?” I can only answer that it was our form of hunting. We loved it. This pursuit took us into the bush, or certainly, if not in the bush, out of the school buildings and into an environment where we could test our skills, our wits, against animals. It was exciting, and doubly so if we were trapping in an area which was “out of bounds”, -areas where schoolboys were not allowed. As to what we did with them. Our sheath knives were too large and blunt and cumbersome to skin rats, so we liberated a few pencil sharpener blades from sharpeners in the classroom. With these we were able to skin our trophies. We then salted them with table salt pocketed in the dining room, and we forced one of the junior boys in the class beneath us to store the stinking things underneath clothing in his footlocker. We had no plans for the skins past that point.
Another successful method, one which could deliver live rats, concerned the use of a jam tin. The kitchen used to receive government-issued food, and the jam (jelly to Americans) used to come in sealed silver tins about a foot high and about eight inches in diameter. Graham and I used to cadge these tins when they were empty, from the African kitchen staff. The tins were buried, the lip level with the ground in some secret carefully selected spot. We then had an option. The simplest method was stretching a piece of thin wire or string, over the top of the buried tin, with a mealie pip tied in the middle. Our prey would try like hell to get to the mealie pip and when they tried the tightrope walk, they ended up in the bottom of the tin. You could collect several rats or mice in one night this way, and if you wanted to find them dead you would leave about four inches of water in the tin. But the far more complicated, and therefore favoured method, was to erect a small seesaw at the side of the can. A flat thin piece of wood (stolen rulers broken to about eight inches long, were good) was wired just passed its middle point, onto a fulcrum. Picture a capital H. The ruler was wired to the crossbar of the H, the slightly longer, or heavier part, being on the ground. The shorter, lighter part, stuck up in the air at about a twenty-degree angle. The mealie pip was glued, or tied to the top of this short end. This pip would be out over the sunken tin. When the hungry rat walked the plank, he was tilted into the tin. We spent hours perfecting these things and derived much satisfaction from them. Relatives were allowed to take children out of the school grounds on Sundays, and usually these day trips were spent in the Matopos National Park, or at one of the many beautiful picnic sites in the hills. I had an aunt who lived in Bulawayo and occasionally she used to take myself and a friend or two out for the day. These were real “bonus” exeats as we got to eat stuff like sweets and cokes which we hardly ever saw at school, and we were able to spend hours climbing and exploring the giant koppies near World’s View where Rhodes was buried. This area is rich in Bushman paintings and we loved to pore over the fascinating scenes of ancient hunts and sift through the pieces of broken pottery on the floors of the caves. During the three-month school term there was a “half term” holiday which was usually about four days long. Those of us who lived a long way from Reps (I lived at Victoria Falls – about 300 miles away) were not able to go home, as most of the short holiday would have been spent travelling, so on these mid-term holidays, if I was not instructed to go to my aunt in Bulawayo, I would go home with Graham to his family ranch at Marula. If we got into “lots” of trouble at school, I do not know how to describe the amount of nonsense we got up to on those four-day long holidays at Marula. We were now armed with pellet guns and rifles and there were no seniors present. Those were excellent days, and the mystery, and secret places of the Matobo hills by now had me enthralled. The caves, the Bushman paintings, the ancient Kalanga grain bins hidden in the bushchoked crevasses, all these thrilled the ‘explorer’ in me. On Graham’s farm we had free reign to enjoy the koppies as much as we wanted. We were merciless in our decimation of the rock hyrax, and even though he denies it, I am sure that our excesses in these hills as schoolboys is what prompted Graham to ban the shooting of these interesting creatures on his ranch once be took over ownership of it. Today they are numerous, and I’m certain that they provide the bulk of the leopards’ food in these areas. By the end of our fifth year at Reps we had explored just about every forbidden area surrounding the school, we had mounted numerous exciting, nerve-wracking forays into the Agricultural Research Station grounds as well as into the Matobo hills past First Bru and Tabaccies.
Graham and I had painstakingly laid plans for an assault on my home stomping-grounds up at Victoria Falls for the school holidays. We had talked and talked of the exciting things we were going to do, and we were eagerly looking forward to the end of the school term, when a devastating blow fell. Ray Grant, he of the whistling cane and numerous hunting stories, realised that no good could come of the two of us loose together in the school holidays. He took it upon himself to ‘phone Graham’s parents and he warned them strongly about the trouble we were likely to cause, and Graham was barred from that trip. Probably a good thing too, looking back.
Victoria Falls was a small village back in 1968 and I don’t think that there could have been more than a hundred or so white families living there. For someone as hell-bent as I was for getting into mischief and disappearing into the outdoors, Victoria Falls was perfect. The whole of the Victoria Falls area lies inside a National Park and big game roamed constantly through the town. Elephant and buffalo came into contact almost daily with residents and the few tourists brave enough or stupid enough to be visiting the Falls during those years (Rhodesia being at war), and injuries were common. I spent much of my school holidays roaming the outskirts of the town, and when I was about fourteen or so, a friend and I started exploring the Zambezi river just above the Falls. This part of the river is clogged with jungled islands, and all of these were populated by elephant, bushbuck, bushpig, hippo and crocodiles. I became a skilled poacher and looking back now, I shake my head in dismay. My parents, in fact no one at all, had any control over us back then and the stuff we got up to makes me wonder how I am still alive today.
I remember one particularly unpleasant incident when I was about sixteen years old. My friend and I had been fishing and poaching on a large island just below what is known as Hippo Pools, about a mile above the lip of Devil’s Cataract which forms the western-most cataract of the Falls. We had a small ten foot boat powered by a twenty horsepower Evinrude motor which had cut out. My friend was standing on a rock, holding the boat while I tried to repair the engine. We could hear very little over the thunderous roar of the Falls, and when I looked up I saw that a Zambian police boat was making its way toward us. There were three people on board, and two of them were holding machine guns. One fellow was gesturing for us to come towards him. We were on the Zambian side of the river and it was obvious that they wanted to arrest us. The international boundary between Zambia and Rhodesia lay down the centre of the main channel, and anyone boating down to the islands at the lip of the Falls had to slide over onto the Zambian side occasionally. This was not good. Not only would we be dragged across to Zambia and cause an international incident, but we had a bushbuck and some large bream in the boat, which we had shot with a .22 rifle that morning. My friend Gary grabbed the rope tied to the front of the boat and we leaped into the fast running water, keeping the boat between ourselves and the Zambian police. We floated quickly downstream back to the islands where the Zambians could not follow because of the shallow rapids. How one of us was not taken by one of the numerous aggressive crocodiles there, I do not know.
In January of 1973 I entered Plumtree High School and was directed to Grey House, which was to be my boarding “house” – or hostel, for the next six years. Erroneously, I had assumed that Plumtree, as regards bullying and seniority, was going to be along the same lines as that which we bad experienced at Reps. I don’t think I have ever been so wrong about anything in my life. I was not caned by the teachers nearly so much as I was at junior school, but the sheer brutality of the seniority and bullying system shocked me. We were hung in sleeping bags out of the windows of moving trains, we were electrocuted, and we were thrashed, kicked, beaten and mentally abused. It was a torrid time for someone like myself who was unable to stay out of trouble and naturally rebellious. The seniors hated me and by God I hated them back. But it was not only the seniors. Children, as mentioned before, are horrible things to one another and the weak were unable to survive under these conditions. In my form alone, out of the twenty or so that entered Grey House as new boys in 1973, I think at least six got their parents to take them to another school after being teased and victimised mercilessly by the other children in the same dormitory. Us, in other words.
Graham had entered Milner, a different hostel to the one I was in, and that was probably a good thing. The last thing we needed, while trying to cope with all the dangers and pitfalls of a new school, was the stupid egging-on into naughtiness, that the two of us were famous for.
Plumtree is situated right on the country’s western border with Botswana, parallel to, and sixty miles west of Bulawayo. It is a dry dusty thorn veld area extremely unattractive in appearance and it falls into “semi desert” region which gradually merges into desert proper in Botswana. It sits right at the north western-most tip of the Matobo hill range, where the hills peter out into the sand and thorn scrub. If you climb the school chapel belfry and look south, you can see the purple koppies of the western Matobo about three miles away.
Surviving six years of Plumtree could be a book all by itself, so I will have to ignore the details of what was a very formative part of my life, and mention only those interludes pertinent to this book. Once again, interest and activities in the outdoors was encouraged, and like Reps, day-exeats on Sundays were eagerly looked forward to. A big problem for me, regarding Sunday exeats was the system of punishments or “impots” (imposition), as they were known. House prefects could hand out impots to students in their hostel. One impot meant you had to work for one-hour physical labour on Sunday, normally doing something in the hostel grounds like weeding or digging in the garden. Whilst carrying out your impot you were supervised by a duty prefect. It was not possible for me to make it through the week without impots. The more serious crimes, like “bunking out” (leaving the hostel at night, when you’re supposed to be in bed for example) attracted a beating with the cane, and unlike Reps, these beatings were issued on the spot or first thing the next morning, so at least you didn’t have to wait until Sunday. But the less serious offences, like having dirty shoes, or an untidy bed, or talking after the lights were turned out, all attracted impots. Some kids, like myself, were happier to be thrashed as and when we transgressed, rather than receive impots on Sundays. Canings, to me, by this time, were not such a big deal as they had been once upon a time. I had received many, and I was now a seasoned recipient. If a student received three impots, he was beaten two strokes, and still had to labour for one hour; if he received four impots, he was beaten four strokes, and still had to work in the garden for one hour. Five or more impots attracted the maximum – six lashes with the cane.
So this “impot labour” on Sundays seriously curtailed my opportunities for exeats in the first two years at Plumtree. Once pupils reach form three (fifteen years old) they have generally matured somewhat and don’t receive as many impots as they did in forms one and two. We were allowed to keep bicycles at school and this added a whole new dimension to Sunday exeats. We were now able to travel good distances from the school and my favourite destinations were Umhlanga (reed) and Tunduluka (wild plum) dams. Umhlanga dam nestles in amongst granite koppies about seven miles south-south-east of the school, and myself and three friends used to ride there on a rough dirt road as soon as we were done with chapel and inspection on Sundays. If someone had told me that thirty years later I would be making a living in this exact stretch of hills, I would have considered them unstable. At that stage in my life I definitely had no plans to return to anywhere near this place. Umhlanga dam, now sits right inside our hunting area and Graham’s record leopard was taken not more than six miles to the east of it.
Apart from Sunday exeats, I used to sneak off illegally on my own whenever the opportunity arose. I had several catapults hidden in the bush around the edges of the school grounds, and I would collect one of these, hide it in my shirt, and explore the countryside surrounding the school and Plumtree village. I could not fight the drug which was the thrill of seeing new “undiscovered” ground. I walked miles on my own through that unattractive bush around Plumtree, looking for birds nests, eagles nests, dry watercourses, fig trees and koppies. Large leafy fig trees stood prominently out of the thorn scrub, and these were fruit-eating bird magnets, as well as serving as a “find” – another secret place that I imagined was known only to me. Several miles west of Plumtree village was a corridor of land that ran along the border with Botswana. This was known as “no-mans-land” and served as a buffer zone between the two countries to help control illegal border crossings. It should be remembered that Rhodesia was fighting a guerrilla war at this time, and Botswana assisted the enemy by harbouring base camps where the guerrillas could prepare before infiltrating into Rhodesia. So it was probably not a clever thing I was doing, wandering around the bush on my own, way out of school bounds with nobody having any idea where I might be. In my last two years of school at Plumtree, I acquired first an air rifle, and then a .22 rifle which I hid inside the wall of my study, and I used these to hunt rabbits, duiker, doves and francolin. I was never caught with either of these weapons, which was quite surprising; as I had a good distance to go through the school grounds, until I was into the bush. Usually I transported my gun in a cricket bag – folks must have thought that I was serious about my cricket practice! Several years after I had left school I returned to attend the school’s event of the year, the annual sports day. Over a beer one evening I was chatting to Hannes Van der Westhuizen, who had been my favourite teacher and rugby mentor while I was still at the school. “You were a tricky bugger,” he said to me, “several of the teachers tried their damndest to catch you smoking, but never did!” “What made any of you think I was smoking?”
Hannes answered “Well, we saw you, all the time, sneaking off, out of the school grounds by yourself, we knew you were smoking!” How I laughed. I don’t know if Hannes believed me or not when I informed him that I had never ever been a smoker. I was everything else – poacher, bunking out of school grounds, drinking, the list is endless, – but they had been searching my study for cigarettes which weren’t there! I thought this was hilarious. Thank God they never found my guns.
The Rhodesian war escalated, and in my last year at Plumtree we were not allowed to go on exeats to many of the old haunts which had given me so much pleasure in the hills. Some of the students were issued with .303 Parker Hale rifles, in case the school was attacked by guerrillas. Straight away I realised that this meant I could range further afield and try for some kudu cows which I knew frequented a range of hills south of Plumtree town’s sewage dams. Ammunition was a problem, as we had to account for every round that we were issued. As it turned out I never did get an opportunity to poach anything with the school’s rifle, and disappointment at this failure festered in me. One morning, at about 11 o’clock while I was bunking class and sleeping on my bed on the form six balcony, the school was attacked by guerrillas. Or, more accurately some guerrillas fired a couple of dozen rounds into the hostel next to mine, and no one was injured. Apparently the school classrooms turned into a broken beehive with teachers and pupils hiding underneath desks and shouting orders all over the place. I raced downstairs to the housemaster’s office and collected my .303, and then returned to my bed which was a good vantage point, looking from the upstairs balcony over the Grey House gardens. I was more worried about being caught bunking class than being shot, but as it turned out, nobody was any the wiser. Although I did well at that school, both in sports and academically, I feel that it was relieved to see the back of me, and I left at the end of 1978 and joined the army in January 1979.
Graham had his share of misadventure during his years at Plumtree, and once he began smoking it was only a matter of time till he renewed acquaintances with our old friend the cane. He too achieved the academic qualifications he desired, but his school career ended under a bit of a cloud. There was some unpleasantness and misunderstanding involving drink, and Graham and three of his friends were unfortunately brought before the school authorities: I should mention that one of these fellows, on whom this ill luck had fallen, was none other than Trev Landrey, he of Denda Safaris at Matetsi where I spent so much time in the school holidays.
Nowadays, often when I’m driving through the towering granite koppies, or sometimes when I just sit and stare into the wonderful rock formations while I’m waiting for a majestic kudu to show himself, I think back over the years, and remember my early days at Reps and I can still feel the crackling winter mornings when icicles hung from the garden taps, and the hose pipes were frozen solid, white frost covering the front lawns and us small kids rubbing our freezing legs through thin corduroy pants, and dabbing at our pink, running noses. I remember of course the punishments, I remember the homesickness, I remember the big occasions of the swimming gala, the school play, the sports days. I remember being awarded school colours for sports, but the thing I remember most, the thing that is most easy to conjure up in my mind, and recall clearly, is the purple, balancing boulders, and the damp, lichen-smell, of the Matobo hills.
