Kabouter

 

Like a flower that blossomed in the right season I turned sixteen in the December after the summer of love - 1967. Having lived most of my life in need of it, I embraced the new ethic of love with enthusiasm.

1

In January 1968 I began my first term back at boarding school without my brother who had just matriculated. I travelled by train from Johannesburg to Capetown in floral shirt and bellbottoms, beads and floppy hat - a walking advertisement for the new culture of love, beauty & peace. I rang my uncle from the station and asked him for a lift to school - my cases were too heavy to bring on the train and then carry on the long walk from the station to school. He wasn't expecting me and he wasn't pleased. He was even more annoyed that we had to call at his home for me to change into my school uniform. He expressed his displeasure openly.

I felt rejected and alone that night unpacking my things into a four-bed senior boys' dormitory in the Junior Corridor. I had not been selected to be a prefect, a humiliation I shared with a handful of other boys in this final year. These were the extremely shy, the inadequate and the socially impaired and also those boys whose earlier years had been marred by constant minor delinquency. It also included my friend who, while he sang in the choir and was a keen student, sportsman and musician had the misfortune in 1968 to come from a family without a father - not due to divorce but death - however he still carried that stigma usually reserved for those very few boys from broken homes.
 

The first night of the year was always a sad, confused time. Good friends had left at the end of the previous year. No matter where we came from home was always warmer and kinder than this harsher environment. This was the start of another 300 days of brutality, hunger, rules and regulations, bells, more bells, polished wooden floors, early nights and early rising. The tyranny of a "military-style" environment imposed on underloved, young boys. Although not a prefect I was given my own table to supervise. Eight boys from 12 to 15 made up the tables each supervised by a senior boy. Not quite enough prefects to manage each table. The juniors under 11 - had their own tables at the end. There were only sixteen of them. They had three rooms in my corridor, their own preproom and their own common room. I stood self-consciously at my place at the head of the table and during prayers looked with interest around the room looking for the changes.

No-one really caught my eye. The usual despondent and frightened, disorientated youngsters trembling on the edge of the brutal and bizarre three weeks of initiation to which they were to be subject. But that's another story.

My eye alighted on a blaze of summer at the second juniors' table. The boy had his back to me. I craned around to see if I could catch a glimpse of his face but this was hidden. There was something uniquely appealing about this new boy. Maybe it was his slight frame - his almost girlish shoulders and posture. That dazzling fair hair. A softness apparent even across the room.

I ate my meal in a reflective mood. No-one it is true was very hungry. Most had probably eaten on the long journey to school. Some boys were from as far away as the copper belt in Zambia. One unfortunate arrived by air from England where his father worked at the Elstree Film studios. I was not the only unhappy boy at this school.
 

My room (as I have said) was on the Junior Corridor and I shared it with three prefects who were there to keep an eye on the Junior boys. After a shorter than usual prep (homestudy) session I was therefore able to go upstairs and find out a little more about the little fair haired boy from supper. He was in room 17 across the corridor from my room. Lights-out for the Juniors was at 8.30 pm so I had to wait until next morning to see him again.

2

As a matric. boy I didn't have to submit myself to daily inspection. I was trusted to see to my own things. My bed, locker etc. This gave me a few minutes to wander along the corridors when the younger boys were standing to attention at their beds waiting for the prefects to come and inspect their corners. I looked into room 17 - the little boys stood to attention thinking I was a prefect. I noted that Richard Solomon was in this room - a veteran now at 11, having been in the boarding house since he was 7! Jewish, with an older brother, Richard was popular with the other boys due to his relaxed nature, his friendly smile and (I think) his superb physique. An outgoing, pleasant boy, I thought he would make a satisfactory ally.

I caught up with Richard on his way across to the school buildings. He greeted me with his usual wide grin and I slipped my arm over his shoulders affectionately. Yes, he had some nice roommates. Yes, the new boy was in his room. He was very sad missing his family. His name was Simon. He was also 11 and in Richard's class. Of course we talked about lots of other things. Richard was flattered that a senior boy, a matric, was showing so much interest in him on the first school day of the year.

I spent the day in a dream, this was not so unusual. I didn't see many other new faces and none that affected me quite so much as Simon. Boarders always stood together in the face of the overwhelming mass of 1700 "day-bugs" . At lunchtime I noticed that Simon seemed animated. I hoped that having spent his first morning at school (in his case an entirely new school -as he had not been a day-bug) the boarding house felt a little bit more like home. The strangeness had started to wear off for me and I suspected it had for the other boarders.

School finished at 3 pm as usual, just as the day got too hot to stay indoors. I changed into my regulation khaki shorts and shirt and strolled through the ground floor of the boarding house. I saw Simon with a few other 11 year olds in the locker rooms and later outside. He queued up with the other Juniors to hand in his pocket-money . The queue was organized using the alphabet. That is to say on one day the boys with the surname "A" were in front and the "Zs" at the back. (Alternate days the "Z's" would be to the front.) Simon was in the middle next to a boy called John.

After the queue had disappeared I returned to the housemasters' rooms on a pretext. The exercise book with the names in it was by the door. I slipped in silently and retrieved it. It only took seconds to find his name " Simon George Charles James, born 23.4.56" - I repeated this to myself a few times until memorized. Outside it had become hotter. Small groups of junior boys were in the quad chatting. Simon was sitting on his own by the Masters' Entrance so I walked up to him and greeted him nervously. "Hello New-boy" - he squinted up at me in the bright sunlight - my heart stopped.

Simon was a beautiful boy from a distance. Close up he was angelic. I noted wide brows under a crown of white hair, not unnaturally white but a fine gold, almost silver. Between friendly blue eyes, fringed with rather long lashes, was a small button nose surrounded by pale freckles. His complexion was fair, almost peaches-and-cream but well-toned by the sun. His mouth was pretty. It suited his nose. His smile was shy and entrancing. His voice melodic and soft. "Hello." I fell in love. This I could not help. I had so much to give and wanted so much in return. I sat down on the low wall and smiled at Simon. How was he getting on? Was he alright? I had been here for many years but I remembered what it felt like to be a new-boy. He opened up under the warmth of my interest in him like a flower. So I learned that he was a Roman Catholic, that he lived with his family who he loved very much on the beach at Lookout Beach, 8 miles to the west. He loved his small local school at Carnis Bay - he was very homesick. My heart ached for this slight-framed boy. He seemed to lack the robustness of the other lads. I was alert to the danger of being thought a "bunny" - an older boy over interested in a younger, so I cut short this happy little session promising to see Simon later.

It was nightfall before I was able to. We were encouraged to tell the Juniors a story at bedtime and I readily volunteered. These poor little fellows, as young as seven, were away from home for up to 10 weeks at a time. No-one provided any of the "maternal" love and attention that I hoped they had been used to. The friendships forged at school often helped to replace this a little however and after a while, years in some cases, the boys adjusted to the new environment.

I chose room 17, of course, and was gratified by the welcome. I chatted to the four boys (including Richard and Simon.) I told them that I wanted to be a protector for them. I wanted to make them my special room. Again these sorts of liaisons were not unusual. The response was enthusiastic. No, I said, I couldn't get them night-time feasts or cocoa - even matrics couldn't get into the hallowed kitchens and food in the rooms was a serious disciplinary offense. Mind you many things were.

I was very happy in my new role. I felt a warmness within. I felt a softness that was like a warm cloud that extended from my inner self and wrapped these children in comfort and safety. I loved them all. I loved Simon especially. I tried to show him a little of my extra affection but not too much - so that he became alarmed. They were getting a little excited and I knew that this was dangerous, that a prefect would come along and throw me out and make them go to sleep. I hushed them and promised that I would stay after lights-out.

I chatted for a while, I don't remember what about. I encouraged them all to talk a little about themselves but to be truthful I only heard Simon's shy replies. The other three boys seemed to like him and this made me glad. The prefect on duty looked in and said goodnight to the boys and me. Prudently I decided to leave and join my friend in the prefects' bedroom. I explained that a boy in room 17 was seriously homesick and I had been comforting him and the prefect thanked me. He was a chap I was fond of called Peter. He was an attractive young man of 16 whose father was involved in the South African Liberal Party. This had just been outlawed by the authorities under the Suppression of Communism Act, mainly because the Liberals felt themselves unable to deny party membership to Africans and Coloureds. I did like Peter. He was one of the most intelligent boys at the school and very popular. He had none of the arrogance that comes from popularity however and I remember him with affection, learning some years later that he spent time in prison for refusing to join the apartheid army and unable to exercise the right I had had as an Englishman to leave the country as an alternative to call-up.

3

I saw Simon every day, and every day I fell deeper in love with him. He truly seemed very fragile - all of his 11 years had been spent in the protective bosom of a loving family in a place as close to paradise as any on the earth. Every evening I finished my chores as soon as I could and hurried up to Room 17 for an hour on the carpet at the bedside of the boy I loved. Simon was,as I have said, slight but he was not weedy. He had this sense of fragility (or lack of robustness) that was very endearing.Nonetheless he could probably have been a sportsman - very important at School or acquitted himself physically - it was not that kind of slightness. He was an earnest and intelligent child. Maybe the fragility was an illusion fed by my hopeless love (my anxiety to protect him maybe.) strangely as well my interest in him unlike Richard, or other boys at the school, was in no way sexual. He was beautiful and I loved to look at him but the roundness of his bottom, the fine, fair hairs on his arms, the gentle gaucheness of his legs in the regulation shorts seemed hardly visible to me. It was a deeply and unnervingly spiritual and pure love I felt. With hindsight I think that maybe Simon was the child that I wished I had been - beautiful, intelligent and loved - as well as the vulnerable child who I could love and who might love me.

I began to relax with the passing of time and spent more and more time in his company and the other boys saw this as a good example of an older boy befriending a younger for all the best reasons. And they were not wrong. I was however, 16, and deeply committed to the iconoclastic new philosophy of the Flower Children. I began to talk about this at night on the floor in Room 17. Simon knew a little of this new youth cult. I embroidered a little. I talked about cannabis, mellow-yellow etc. (Not that I knew much and this was before I began to use soft drugs myself.) I talked about my rock favourites - Jefferson Airplane and the Doors - the Beatles & Sgt Pepper. In isolated, conservative South Africa these were dangerously provocative and revolutionary topics. Part of their absorbing interest for me lay in my rejection of the claustrophobic isolationism of South Africa. My young friend seemed to share my interests. One Sunday he even brought me a plastic flower from home. I treasured that for many years until it became lost. I still mourn its loss.

4

Sundays were difficult for me. Simon lived quite close to the school and soon after breakfast his family arrived in a car to take him home for the day. That meant a long day - free after compulsory church - when I could not spend any time in the company of the boy I loved. From four in the afternoon onwards I waited at the car park. A glimpse was all I wanted. And how I loved to see him with his family feeling the warmth and love that they all shared. I was grateful to them for that. But how I missed Simon during those long holy days. One day I walked through the pine woods up behind the school then down through the vineyards that covered the foothills of Table Mountain up to the pass at Constantia Nek and then through to the western shore of the peninsula and to the little fishing town of Holderness Bay then up a winding cliffhanger of a road to Lookout Beach. I stood for a while staring down at the bay and then headed back for school worried that I might be spotted on the open road and also that I might miss the 5pm deadline for getting back. Besides Simon would be back at school soon.

Sunday nights I felt especially tender. The boys were upset after a day at home and I wanted to reassure them. And after dark I could not resist tucking them in . And when it was Richard's bed I know that it was more than my love-starved heart that jumped a little. Nevertheless I was a gentle and honest boy who would not have given into any form of lust involving another. So I confined myself to a pat of the bedclothes several layers above those sweet boy buttocks and when the boys told me I was kind I said that the school nurse had asked me to make sure they were tucked in. It was the gentlest and most innocent lie .... I know that I could never have breached the trust I had laid on myself. After many years as a devout Christian I rejected God and Jesus comprehensively by the age of 13 when my unhappiness remained unresolved and I felt that even this God had rejected me. By 16 I was remote from that belief but everything that was wonderful and kind and loving about Christianity remained with me in a sense, and what I had once thought of as the strength of the righteous Christian was in fact the strength of a boy who turned on a childhood of rejection and belittling - who confronted it while still believing it to be essentially valid - who refused to accept his own worthlessness even though his low worth seemed to be the basis of his very personality.

On Sunday nights I also broke with tradition and excused myself from Bible study in the evening. This was led by the Methodists and was a good opportunity to skip the boredom of prep and enjoy a film or two a singalong and more hot cocoa than usual. But I said that I was a Buddhist now - I had no idea what a Buddhist was and hoped no-one would ask me. Fortunately insular South Africa had no idea either and left me alone. So I joined the 10% of the boys who were Jewish and thesmaller number of Roman Catholics including my beloved Simon and stayed in an unusually relaxed preproom during the religious merriments of the faithful.

Fragments of Simon stayed with me. The early cassette tape recorder, one of the first released on the market, was lent to me by my father in what may have been a burst of kindness on his part sensing my misery at being the only one of six children being made to leave home and go to boarding school that year. The batteries were running flat but not before I was able to record Simon being interviewed by me as if on a newsreel -" Do you believe in Love?" Giggles ".. yes!" More giggles. A laugh and something else ineffably sweet from my beloved - a short sentence maybe. I really don't remember any more. But I do remember how frantically I looked for that tape a few weeks later and how I realized that my father had found it played it and wiped it. And I did not know why.

5

When the dark day came I was unprepared. I had done nothing to precipitate disaster. Maybe it was lurking in the wings. It was the Sunday that Simon went home and the Sunday he failed to return to school in the evening. The day when I saw his car with so much hope and an uplifted heart and then bewilderment and sorrow and growing apprehension as his parents met the masters in the Parents' Visiting Room for what seemed like hours. I think I listened at the door and I think I heard my name mentioned more than once. I think also that I heard angry voices. I remember taking the cassette recorder upstairs and hiding myself away outside Sister's room on the Sick-bay landing. I remember listening to Gomper by the Stones... and also to " It's so very lonely you're six thousand light years from home.." I remember the aching loneliness of that song and my sense of misery, fright and desolation. I remember the humiliation at the meal table that night when Richard was called up to the Headmasters' table and questioned by the Head and all the while the man was staring at me in a strange way. How that night I was told to get my things and move to the Head Prefects' room up on the Senior Corridor. How I was not to be allowed to go near the Junior Corridor or to speak to any boy not in the Matric year on pain of expulsion.

The horror and the shame are still with me two months short of thirty years later. But the overriding emotion that I remember was the realization that I would not be able to see Simon again, that he was gone. I think the masters said that he had told his parents that I had been advocating the taking of drugs, which to be fair maybe I had and there were darker things too...connected with my nighttime care of the boys... the tuckings-in.. my innocent tender care of these precious fellow children nevermore safe from harm than with me. Besmirched and sullied by the perverted fears of these adults whose conceptions of the care of 80 boys were rooted in military discipline - at their fear of the anger and the need of 80 underloved and rejected boys. Their determination to distance themselves from those boys and to control them at all costs. I hated and despised those men for their cruelty and their inability to understand me and my needs. I will never forget that anger and for this reason maybe they were right to be afraid. And their God was a part of my anger. Yes indeed. The God they sold me in the name of Love - the only time they or we were allowed to speak of such a thing.

6

I longed for Simon and I longed again for love. It would not be possible to turn the clock back and not for the first time I wanted just to die. Sixteen years old, intelligent, a sensitive, caring, loving human being desperate to love and to be loved and nothing more, and failingin this, and wanting to end that short life. I never again want to hear about the evils of man-boy love. The boy I was at six, at ten, at sixteen would have swum the Atlantic for a gesture of love from another human being. And would have climbed Table Mountain blindfolded and without a rope. Who at the age of 11, weary of the self-imposed restraints of an angry vengeful god, longed so much for love that he sought sexual contact with his peers and those older men who he perceived may have been able to love him - and who only met fear and the furtive signs of interest from the lonely piano teacher maybe who once just once dared to rest his hand on my thigh.... for which I was so grateful at the time... and which he never dared to do again.

I  longed so much for love that I forgot about my surroundings and immersed myself in an hippie dream unqualified by drugs. It was an effective anesthetic in its way. I had been rejected this time because I was a John the Baptist of a new religion of love and peace and brotherhood. I believed this version of my truth because it helped me to cope with those long and sorrowful nights of pain and humiliation. I once wrote a long letter to Simon's parents. George Roberts lived in the next bay and it was he who told me that Simon had been playing on the beach with a friend when an accident had happened and his young friend had been killed - dashed against a rock. I was appalled and terrified for Simon. I wanted to see him and to comfort him. I had such strong reactions of love and protectiveness. I sat down that night and wrote an eight page letter to his parents in which I poured out my heart and I reassured them that I truly loved their son and that if it would help I would leave the school I had attended for 11 years so that he could return. I never received the courtesy of a reply. No-one ever mentioned my letter. Maybe they just did not know how to. It was not after all the letter a pervert sends to the parents of his victim. How could it have been?

7

I endured the rest of the term until Easter. My family in one of those sudden surpise moves returned again to live in yet another hotel in Capetown. One night I went home and my father told me after a few beers or brandies or both that I could leave the school. Oh how I wished for a brief respite from that constant humiliation. Oh how much I wished for that.

Then I decided that it was time to create my own reality. I decided that I was leaving at the end of the term - that I would not be returning after Easter. I was intelligent enough to keep this knowledge a secret until the last day and then to go to every one that I knew (and was allowed to speak to) and announce that I would not be returning next term. I remember how surprised my maths teacher, one Shorty Leeman was. After all he was also my form master and this was the first he had heard of it.

My father was of course away so I had the entire holiday to plan my next moves. The afternoon before I was due to return to school I took a rucksack with a dozen apples, a candle, a stick of incense and a tin of baked beans and went to Wynberg along the back road. There in the Coloured Quarter I caught the bus to Holderness Bay; then I climbed along the coast road to Lookout. I found shelter in the beach-side toilets among the pines. The autumn nights were cool with the onshore sea breezes and a little protection was necessary. I feasted on apples and listened to "the Inner Light" and "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles on the cassette recorder. Then I climbed up the perfumed terraces to the little road with the white houses on it. It wasn't hard to find Simon's house. I went back to the shore and explored it from the beach. The garden went right onto the sands via a little gate. His father sat in a beach chair reading the paper. He saw me but could not have known who I was. A late summer visitor - he must have thought. I grew bold. I went again to the front of the house and walked up to the door.

In the wide open window by the front door I was looking into a bedroom with several beds then Simon entered the room, framed in the window. I tapped lightly on the wooden frame until I startled him. He looked shocked. He went quickly to the front door and opened it and came out into the evening garden. I was so overjoyed to see him I could not have been aware of his terror. He asked me where I was sleeping and I told him. He said he would see me there after school the next day but would I now please go away quietly so his parents would not see me. This seemed wise and besides I could deny him nothing. His face was pale and urgent and I think I read in it his concern for me and I felt reassured that indeed Simon had been an innocent victim as had I of the adult inability to comprehend boys.

The night was uncomfortable. If the urinals smelt I didn't notice and had incense burning. I tried to warm up the beans with the candle to little effect. My sleeping bag was not thick enough to mask the hard, cold, concrete floor. Somehow I slept. It was quite windy and the wind in the pine trees had a softness, a sweetness in it. I had a Bible with me. I think I was scared. I pressed a white flower in between the pages of the Gospel of John. Thirty years later that flower is still there and it is still fragrant. The 3rd chapter verse 16 "..for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life...." the white flower was from Simon's garden and it had been growing on the wall by his bedroom window.
 

The next day I warmed up in the sun. I stayed most of the day at the toilet block anxious not to miss Simon. I ate the last of my apples. He came in his school clothes - back again at his beloved Carnis Bay. He seemed more composed than the previous night. I was nervous but also happy to see him and so excited. We exchanged news and he listened gravely. He told me of the death of his friend and I didn't reach out to hold him but I wanted to. He seemed to have suffered so much. I tried to play the two Beatles' songs to him but the batteries were by now entirely flat. I think he had brought me some bread. He warned me that the police were keeping an eye on the toilets and the beach - something about a missing pair of sunglasses sounded authentic. I told him a little of my sufferings and Simon said that the school had told his parents that I was troubled by the recent nervous breakdown of my mother. (This was news to me as I knew she was ill but not exactly what the matter was. He seemed to know so much.) He urged me to go. He said the police would catch me. He did not want me to speak to his parents. They had got my letter. I must go. How could I refuse. I loved Simon far more than anyone else in the world. His white face looked up at me pleading. I agreed to go right away. He ran off through the trees and was gone from me once more.

I shouldered my backpack and climbed in the afternoon heat up the road that led to the cliff ridge between the two places. The path was steep, my pack heavy and my breath short. I looked up at the metal railing that marked the cliff edge. I think I wanted to go through it. I remember vividly cursing God with all the energy in my body - with everything in my heart and mind and I told God that I would embrace eternal damnation as the price for letting him know my true anger.

I went back to where I had come from.

I never saw Simon again.
 
 

kabouter
31.10.97

This is a true story - I wrote it honestly & changed names to avoid more hurt. I love Simon more each day than ever. Love has no end.
 
 

Update: I made contact with Simon a few years ago. He lives not far from me. He is gay and lived for many years with a male partner who died. One day we will have coffee together....