ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In September 2018, Collan Rex, the former water polo coach at Parktown Boys’ High School, found guilty of 144 charges of sexual assault and 14 of assault, was sentenced to 23 years in prison. It was one year longer than he’d been alive. The story made fro
ROBERT AND JILL
“WHY did you send him to Parktown?” I asked. They didn’t live far away, but there were a number of schools in the area with very good reputations, both monastic and co-ed.
“He got a scholarship,” she said. “There was a scout from Parktown on the side of the field when he was playing rugby in junior school. And he offered Rob a full scholarship. Part of the terms of that was that he had to live in the boarding house.”
Robert met us in the garden. He had that sleepy look that all teenage boys get, as though they’ve just been pulled out of hibernation. He was lean and athletic, as all the boys had been, healthy and sporty. He flopped down into a chair, arranging his limbs so he could pat the dog and still face forward.
“Do you want to talk alone?” Jill asked.
“Only if you two would prefer it?” I didn’t want to separate them – I knew she had been his rock. A lot of the boys had refused to allow their parents into the box in court with them, but Jill had been there with Robert throughout his testimony.
They looked at each other and then turned to me.
Together it would be. They were stronger that way.
As usual, everything went back to Grade 8. To that bloody, bloody camp. Robert spoke first.
“Obviously, coming into Grade 8 was scary, seeing all these big matrics. The first day we got there, our matrics already showed us who was boss. We had our first hostel meeting, basically to show people where they would be stepping out of line and how they’d need to fix it. You could see from the very first night that the matrics were establishing dominance over us. We were told that if we stepped out of line things were going to happen to us, and that we wouldn’t like them.”
The following day the Grade 8s went off on camp.
“We were nervous, but when we first got there it was all chilled and we offloaded our bags. We did activities and stuff. The first time we got bullied and initiation really took place was when some kid forgot to pick up a piece of litter he had dropped on the floor. We were told to all gather around this plaza and the matrics all started swearing and shouting at us. The deputy head boy took it to a whole new level.
He took one group of boys and then he made us go onto the gravel and start doing knuckle push-ups. And they weren’t just push-ups – it’s holding that position and your shoulders start to burn, which makes it worse, and you obviously want to quit, but if you do they’re just going to hurt you. My own matric was actually fine; I dropped to the floor and he came to me and told me what I was doing wrong. I said, ‘Sir, it’s hurting,’ and he said, ‘Stay strong – we know it hurts.’ So we did that for probably two to three hours. Our knuckles were bleeding after that. Although it didn’t happen to me on camp, a lot of boys got beaten. I got beaten up later, after we got back to the hostel.
“At camp, they used to wake us up at 3 am and were always playing tricks on us. The one time we went jogging around one of the sports grounds at the camp and our group just wanted to get back as fast as possible and be finished, but the matrics wanted all the boys to stay together as a whole group. They didn’t tell us that though. They wanted one group to show up as the strongest one and get back first so that they could say, ‘Oh, so you’re not a brotherhood! Now you’re going to do more PT.’ That took place on the final day there and obviously we had no energy for it. But we did it. We had to.’
I watched Jill as her son spoke. She was visibly emotional.
Before Robert had joined us, she had confessed that she felt enormous guilt over not pushing more to find out what was wrong, and had played it over and over in her mind, how he must have been feeling. Was he scared? Was he confused?
They had always been so close and then there was a disconnect, one she had not seen coming.
She took over the telling. “I remember the weekend after Robert went on camp. I came to school, and there was his friend *Scott sobbing, sitting on the pavement hunched up in a foetal position.
Robert was so tired that he didn’t know his name. He’d lost half his clothes and his sleeping bag, and he didn’t know what had happened to them. These boys came back wrecked, truly and utterly wrecked. The shouting and the physicality and the lack of sleep, it all added up on these newbie kids – it was the whole grade: 130 to 150 boys. That was my take, anyway. Robert refused to talk about it for weeks and weeks afterwards, and we as parents didn’t know what had gone on. And here’s where I feel like a terrible mother, when Robert couldn’t tell me why his academics were so poor, and he had to repeat Grade 8. I blamed it on laziness and I made him go on Grade 8 camp again. We had a new headmaster at that point, Mr Bradley, and he promised the parents there would be no initiation or bullying on this camp. But poor Rob went to the camp again expecting the worst.”
Jill is visibly distraught. I said to her what I would say to every parent, “There’s no way you could have known. You can’t blame yourself for that.” But she did, I could see that.
And I knew I would have done the same.
“It was my fault. I put him through that trauma of doing Grade 8 again. I said. ‘If you’re doing it again, you’re doing all of Grade 8, not just what you feel like doing.’ Hearing the extent of what had happened in that year, a lot of that stuff, I felt terrible. But the sexual abuse we didn’t know about until after all the Collan Rex stuff came out and the boys told us.”
I wonder what it must be like to carry that kind of burden as a parent, knowing you sent your son back into the jaws of the lion? I prayed I would never find out.
Robert took over from his mom. “They warned us on Grade 8 camp that if we spoke out we should expect the worst. They literally told us, ‘You are not a man if you speak up.’ But luckily during the second Grade 8 camp, I’d earned respect from the matrics of the new year so I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. And there was a noticeable difference between what we went through in Grade 8 the year before. The matrics weren’t giving us the same harsh forms of punishments.
SAM Cowen is a household name in talk radio, having graced the airways for almost three decades on stations such as 94.7, Radio 702 and Hot 91.9. She is also the author of bestsellers Waiting for Christopher and From Whisky to Water.
Brutal School Ties is her second collaboration with maverick publisher Melinda Ferguson.
“One thing I’ve noticed that was interesting: I was speaking to a Parktown boy who was going into matric this year and he said that they wanted to do the same thing to their Grade 8s. He might have forgotten what it was like.
“When you come back from camp, you don’t want to speak at all. I think we were still stuck in survival mode. A lot of us came from the same primary schools, so we knew each other, but we weren’t close after the camp. And the only time you start feeling close to the other boys in your grade is when the new Grades 8s come in.
“In the boarding house a lot of bad things happened. The matrics liked to make us do stuff. We got assigned our old pot and you had to clean his room. If he didn’t like you he would purposefully make so much mess that you didn’t have time to go back and clean your own room before inspection and then you’d get into trouble and have to do maintenance, which was a type of punishment. One master made us clean up his house and also pick up his dog poo. Luckily, my old pot was fine; I still talk to him to this day – he’s cool.
Back then they used to hurt you and stuff, but now it’s chilled.
¡ Brutal School Ties – The Parktown Boys’ Tragedy is published by Melinda Ferguson Books, an imprint of NB Publishers. The book retails at R260.