When I was in Grade six my mom and dad separated. This devastated my brother and I, as we really loved him as our dad. But my parents were both destructive drinkers and I guess they must have been faced with the ultimatum of separate or destroy each other. I was around 11 at the time, and like most kids at that age, I was still taking a lot of life’s lessons from mom but was gravitating more towards my dad. After all he was the only father I had ever known, the man in my life that I looked up to, and intended to follow.
Jannie, as everyone knew him, had met a woman whom we will call B for privacy sake. She was a dangerous woman with very little good in her in my opinion, and what good there was, I never saw. She was a nasty predator and quickly moved in for the kill…..literally.
We moved in with a friend of my mom’s in Umbilo, Durban, just a short way from Pickering Street. This friend of hers was one of the strangest characters I ever met named “Duimpie”.
A skinny, tattooed old man, who wore glasses and said very few words. My dad would get us on the weekend and my mom during the week. Even though I was still very young I could tell that my mom still loved him deeply and felt so rejected by him. It was only a year or two after their separation that events unfolded like a movie plot, a horror movie, that is. What was about to unfold would rock our world!
B and my dad’s best friend had become lovers, and no longer wanted my dad in the picture. They organised for one of the criminals in their network to murder him. Which in that area, was an easy task to accomplish.
One Friday night, as he came home from the local pub (the St James Hotel), his murderers were waiting for him inside his flat. They assaulted him with an ashtray to the head, resulting in him falling into a coma. He was found on Monday morning by the domestic worker. Dead at the age of thirty-three.
I was 12 when it happened. When we received the news, we were beyond shocked! He was the only dad we ever knew. He loved us boys, and I loved him as my father even though he was not my biological father, and now he was gone, taken from us. We felt robbed of so many years that we could have spent with him as our dad.
We were hurried by my panic stricken mom to the local mortuary, to identify the body. I will never forget seeing him lying in a glass box as though he was sleeping peacefully. It was really strange for me to see a dead person, and I am not sure why my brother and I were allowed in to identify my father when we were so young, it was a huge blow.
If I thought life was fun and games before, this only turned up the temperature. My dad was born in Cape Town and his family were still living there at the time, we flew down to Cape Town for the funeral. But first, my mom insisted that we stop by the funeral parlor where we could have one more look at his body.
My dad’s body had by this point undergone an autopsy and so the image we had of a peaceful sleeping looking dad, now changed more to resemble a horror film. He was buried in Swellendam cemetery, a fascinating place to visit. Almost every tombstone we walked by had the name Steyn on it. The slogan for the town was, “Swellendam is like a dirty dishcloth full of Steyn’s”. You can still visit this cemetery with all the tombstones belonging to different Steyn’s over time. I am grateful never to have met the murderers but have since been informed that they ended up dying of drug related diseases. As for B, she later became a prostitute, I saw her working the streets with my own eyes. A sad women, broken and lost.
After being paid out some of my dad’s pension fund money, my mom decided we should move to Cape Town to get a fresh start. We rented a house in an area called Goodwood and made an attempt to start over. I was in grade 8 and received a bit of welcomed attention being a Durban surfer boy in Cape Town. For a little while I quite enjoyed this new found attention.
I also decided to start soccer instead of surfing, seen as the water was freezing and we lived so far from the beach. After trying to fit in and start again I realised that I wasn’t actually enjoying the new surroundings, since we had little money and few friends. My mom soon got bored of sitting at home all day without friends to party with, so after a short six months, we packed up again and headed back to Durban.
We landed up back in Lionel House in Pickering Street and my mom managed to secure us a flat opposite the old one where my father was murdered. There we were again in Pickering Street, except now in flat 54 instead of 52. A traumatic and constant reminder of my dads murder. It set the scene for what lay ahead.
The years that followed were the toughest of our lives. My mom went completely off the rails, not that there were any rails or even boundaries to begin with. The drinking that started off with laughter and smiles, always ended with violent screams and broken glass. The usual old friends visited us again to continue the old lifestyle. Perhaps because I was the oldest, I seemed to bear the brunt of my mom’s anger and fits of rage. I was now at Brettonwood High School, which was a government funded local school. Depending on how late I arrived home, I would have to sit outside the flat on the staircase waiting for the ranting and raving to subside. If I dared go inside I was sure to be screamed at, sworn at, and in all probability thrown out or given a beating. This used to go on for hours, and as a result, I didn’t get much sleep, not nearly enough for a young boy in high school.
I was a laughing stock at school because I often slept on my desk. On one occasion the class including the teacher left and locked the door. I woke up to the ringing of the lunch time bell and had to climb through the window to get into the corridor. It felt like the whole school, came past the classroom, giggling at me. I was again called to the principal’s office, a place I had become accustomed to.
Once again, I found a strong ally that I needed to defend me when things got hot. Being sharp tongued and streetwise resulted in me getting into loads of fights with local school bullies and this new friend of mind stuck close. There was another young guy (we will call him Tom) who seemed to come from a broken childhood, just like me and needless to say we struck up a great friendship at school while we tried to outsmart our teachers time and time again, by bunking classes to go smoke cannabis or to hit the beach for a surf. Tom and I struck up a friendship with the headmaster and he seemed to give us his ear and sympathise with our cause.
Once, while bunking a few classes to run along the adjacent canal to a flat nearby and smoke, we returned to the school to find one of the groundsmen carrying our stashed school bags into the school and reporting us missing. We had to act quickly. I sent Tom to the principal’s office with a proposed story that during recess our bags had been stolen. Once that had been acknowledged by him we went off to class, but we were called in by our Head of Department (a wise, strong man, who knew a scam when he saw one). He was holding our bags in his hand and asked where we had been. We immediately reacted with glee that he had found our missing bags and began to thank him.
He looked at us over his glasses and said, “Hang on, the groundsman said he saw you two running over by the tennis courts.” We replied, “Yes, we were searching for our bags. Speak to the Principal and he will verify that we reported our bags stolen.”
He sent word and we were in the clear. Had he checked the class register we would have been dead in the water.
This adventure was only one of the times when we got into trouble. While the others worked hard in class, we escaped over the school walls to do what we wanted to do and borrowed everyone’s homework the next day to quickly scribble in before class. How we never failed a subject or class is a miracle in itself.
While my school days were filled with what I thought were fun times with Tom, my home life was in tatters. As a young teen I started trying to be the man of the house, not that I had a clue what that meant. My mom met several guys and even got married again for a few months. Ben was his name, drinking and beating was his game. Needless to say their romance was short lived. We stayed with him for a short period in the Albert Park area, no better that Pickering Street, in my opinion.
Once, in the care of one of my mom’s homosexual friends, while she was out, he took us to his accomplices’ home where they took advantage of my brother and me. It was a strange event that we never spoke about. A secret my brother took to the grave. Neither my brother nor I told my mom or anyone about what took place at the time, we were really confused about it. After many years and finally dealing with the issue I did tell my mom what took place, and she rang up her old friend to confront him. I received a frantic call from one of the men that had taken advantage of us that terrible day. He was trying to deny the incident out of fear of getting criminally charged. I simply told him that I knew what had happened and I would gladly point out the place in which it took place. I told him that I had forgiven him and that he needed to make right with God, because He was the judge of all deeds and He would punish us all for our un-repented sins. Silence followed that statement. End of conversation. I was set free and moved on.
After my mom and her husband got divorced, we returned once again to our Pickering Street flat. But this time things had changed quite a lot. Most of the massage parlors had closed and the pimps had moved or died. The rest had mellowed out with age but still stuck to what they did best, and that was of course to pimp. It was a dirty, dark street with very real reasons for fear looming every night in the shadows. I, for one, became a good runner, and would run home or to the beach to be safe.
By the time I was 13 my mom appeared to have lost her mind, as her poor choices and fits of rage continued. We were living off the welfare and they had tried to take us away from her a few times, but somehow my mom managed to keep us. My brother and I were placed together with two different foster families on two separate occasions. Deep down as a child, I had always wished that she had given us up for adoption like she did with her other five children. I used to day dream about what normal families were like. And then used to wonder how we ended up in the family we did. Seeing the families of children that I was at school with gave me a deep longing for a normal family.
A family with a mom and dad who loved each other and worked for their money in an honest way and who loved their children and enjoyed spending time with them. I longed for a family where my parents would like nothing more than to come and support me playing in a soccer match or in a surfing competition. I was never encouraged in sport, even though I was a gifted sportsman and so I never really applied myself in sports or continued despite my awards. My memories of sport day’s are of other children’s parents yelling, “go”, “run”, “well done”.
Surfing became my sport of choice; it was one that you could do alone, no team required. And it had a rebellious nature about it, which suited the carefree lawless type. My mother had never worked apart from before my conception. Although I remember that she did waitress for a short time, but used to get very drunk and spend her earnings on her drug and alcohol addictions. As a result, she would miss work, not return, or be asked to leave by the manager.