Fergie’s two O-levels... found on a results slip in a dusty old cabinet at her boarding school
As Oscar Pistorius is released from prison -- still protesting innocence -- his victim’s brother can barely contain his rage
SHE has topped the bestseller lists with her children’s books and romantic novels.
However, it has emerged that, contrary to previous reports, the Duchess of York passed only two O-levels when she sat her exams at a prestigious private school in Berkshire. Her University of London results, for June 1976, have been discovered in a dusty filing cabinet during a renovation.
They appear to have been accidentally left behind at Hurst Lodge School in Ascot, where the Duchess was a weekly boarder in the early 1970s, and which relocated to a different site five years ago.
Sarah, 64, who went on to write the hugely popular Budgie The Little Helicopter series of children’s books and top the Sunday Times Bestsellers List with two recent novels, was widely reported to have gained six O-levels.
She was a weekly boarder at the school, where fees were about £3,000 a year (equivalent to around £21,000 a year now). But the newly
‘She is proud she started out scrubbing toilets’
uncovered document shows that while the would-be Duchess gained an A in spoken English – the equivalent of today’s English oral GCSE – as well as a C in art, she only got Ds in English language, English literature and biology, which then counted as a fail. She also failed French and geography.
The results, along with a letter of thanks to the school for their best wishes following her marriage to Prince Andrew in 1986, were found during a recent renovation of the building by developers.
Last night, a source close to the Duchess, who is in talks with streaming giants over their TV adaptations of her Mills & Boon novels, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Academic qualifications are not the be-all and end-all and the Duchess is a firm believer in the importance of emotional intelligence and kindness. The Duchess has always been very open about her lack of a formal education and never made any claims to the contrary.
‘Indeed, she is proud of the fact she started out scrubbing toilets for a living and has ended up as a Sunday Times bestselling author in her 60s.’
It is perhaps unsurprising that Fergie, who lives at Royal Lodge, Windsor with her former husband, flunked her exams as her teenage years were a time of turmoil. Her mother Susan walked out on her husband, Major Ronald Ferguson, in 1972, leaving him to bring up their two daughters, Jane, then 15, and 13-year-old Sarah.
In her 1996 book My Story, the Duchess admitted to struggling in school: ‘My mind was anywhere but on studies in the summer of 1974. Mathematics eluded me, and I laboured on my English but couldn’t concentrate.’
In her 2011 book Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself, she also revealed she had learning difficulties.
‘I had myself evaluated by experts who confirmed I am ADHD and moderately impaired by dyscalculia [difficulty in understanding numbers],’ she wrote.
However, the Duchess also revealed she believed you could be ‘successful’ without passing exams.
‘I was very successful at school,’ she added. ‘I was made “head girl” – which is the equivalent of class president. I was winning netball captain. I was our class ringleader too, gregarious and dramatic with a flair for stirring up mischief.’
The Duchess left Hurst Lodge at 16 and took a course in shorthand, typing and bookkeeping at Queen’s Secretarial College in London.
Classmate Charlotte Eden, the daughter of former Conservative MP Lord Eden of Winton, has recalled: ‘We were both dunces at shorthand and typing. We used to sit at the back of the class and giggle.’
ADAM STEENKAMP vividly remembers marvelling, as did the world, at Oscar Pistorius’s history-making performance in the Olympic Stadium in 2012.
In his mind’s eye he sees him still – the Blade Runner, the first double amputee to run in the Games – lining up for his 400m heat in his wraparound shades and sicklelike prosthetic carbon-fibre legs called Cheetahs, shaped to curve like the hind legs of the fastest animal on land.
At the time, Adam probably felt a little stab of pride. Here was a man, South African like him, wowing the world on the track and off it, comporting himself in interviews with charming aplomb.
‘He was impressive, cool and inspirational,’ says Adam. Less than six months later, Pistorius began dating Adam’s 29-year-old sister, Reeva Steenkamp, a model, law graduate and anti-violence campaigner.
Had the news of their three-month romance not eluded him, Adam, now 47, would surely have approved. Why wouldn’t he? Back then, the handsome Olympic hero was everyone’s darling.
Although he was living 8,000 miles away in Britain, Adam was close to his sister, who was seven years younger than him. Reeva’s world was a dizzying whirl of parties, red carpets, modelling assignments and TV appearances, while her brother’s life in rural Suffolk was sedate and unremarkable.
Married with two young children, Adam was working at the time as an IT consultant at Cambridge University. Adam and Reeva spoke and emailed frequently, but
Reeva was guarded about her love life and Adam, laidback and tactful, knew better than to pry.
Recalling that period in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, it suddenly occurs to him, sitting in the front room of his home near Newmarket, that he must have had a vague notion that she was ‘seeing someone in the public eye’. Maybe, he says, a cousin had mentioned something, ‘or I might have seen a picture on the internet’.
The point is, odd as it might sound, he didn’t know for sure that his sister and Pistorius were dating. Confirmation came in February 2013, in the worst possible way.
A sketchy early-morning news report on his car radio made him gulp with panic. Oscar Pistorius… a shooting… an unnamed woman dead in his apartment.
Halfway to work, Adam pulled over and, in a layby in the heart of the English countryside, rang his father Barry in South Africa. All Adam could muster was his sister’s name, which sprang from his mouth as an anguished question: ‘Reeva?’
It was less his father’s words of reply than their tortured cadence that sealed it.
‘I knew instantly when I heard his voice,’ says Adam quietly, the emotion of that moment returning to him. ‘It was one traumatic morning.’
Shattered, Adam turned around and went home, packed his bags and made plans to join his father and relatives in South Africa. He went into ‘defensive mode’ and, he says, became ‘laser-focused’ on protecting them.
If unable to assuage their pain, he would at least try to shield them as much as possible from the maelstrom he knew was hurtling their way. And it did. The story of the fastest man on no legs, as he was known, and the shooting of his beautiful girlfriend drew global interest. Hearing news of his sister’s violent death – her murder, as it would later transpire – ended any feelings of good will Adam may have felt towards Pistorius. Instead, what began that morning was a ‘rollercoaster ride’ which has never ended. Commendably, Adam doesn’t talk in terms of hate and vengeance when discussing the case. A thoughtful man, he finds it ‘awkward and surreal’ to address the subject publicly – though he feels he has a responsibility to do so if only to raise awareness and perhaps help others.
Two days ago he was braced for what he calls the ‘emotional impact’ of the latest milestone in this tragic story: the release of Pistorius, 37, on parole after serving less than nine years for murder. The world craved images of the once-elite athlete looking grey and paunchy, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. For as well as finding God in prison, we are told he also acquired a voracious tobacco habit.
But dodging TV crews, he was smuggled out of Atteridgeville prison in Johannesburg in the middle of the night and hastened, not to real freedom, but to a garden cottage behind 15ft-high walls on the guarded estate of his rich, churchgoing Uncle Arnold, where he will live under strict conditions.
‘I couldn’t bear to have seen him,’ says Adam. ‘I was dreading that. And it’s gratifying to hear he is not allowed to speak to the media. I don’t want to hear his voice, his lies.
‘But moments such as this bring their own emotional impact. Things that never really leave you return to the surface and, once again, you feel them more sharply: the anguish and the pain and the sadness. I don’t break down, but you feel it.
‘The other thing about his release is that I don’t believe that justice has been done. The parole restrictions under which he will live will end in five years’ time when he will be truly free, still relatively young and with a life ahead of him.
‘Our pain, our sentence, will continue and it won’t end. I don’t think my anger and confusion will ever subside because we still don’t have all of the answers that I think we as a family wanted. So there will never truly be full healing.
‘And of course Reeva’s life was cut short – just when she was on the cusp of doing something great. She was one for fixing things, people too, and I think she would have utilised her public persona and her legal background to create something special. A charity, most likely.
‘For now we, her family, have to
I couldn’t bear to have seen him. I don’t want to hear his voice, his lies
keep going, to move on, and focus on positives.’
Something that would help them would be a frank admission of guilt from Pistorius. Adam accepts one is unlikely to be forthcoming. Still casting a shadow over all their lives is the simple question – why? What really happened on Valentine’s Night, 2013, at the athlete’s bachelor pad on a millionaires’ complex in the hills above Pretoria.
Some facts are beyond doubt. That Pistorius took his 9mm pistol from the side of his bed and, standing on his stumps from a distance of little more than 6ft, put four hollow-point bullets, designed to cause maximum damage, through a locked lavatory door.
Behind it, Reeva Steenkamp was standing. The first bullet struck her hip and she fell backwards on to a magazine rack. The second missed her, ricocheting off a wall. Reeva then crossed her arms over her head to protect herself. The third and fourth bullets hit her arm and head.
Not for a moment did Adam believe the athlete’s explanation that he thought Reeva was an intruder. Neither did his father Barry, who died last year, ‘having never come to terms with her death or the way she died’.
At the athlete’s 2014 trial, the prosecution claimed that there had been a row due to his perception that his girlfriend was flirting with another man. In a text message, a month before her murder, Reeva wrote: ‘I’m scared of you sometimes and how you snap at me and how you will react to me.’
Adam says it is inconceivable that anyone would entertain Oscar’s story.
A year before he died last September, Barry visited Pistorius in prison in the South African coastal city of Port Elizabeth seeking an admission of guilt.
Their ‘victim-offender’ dialogue was part of the rehabilitation programme that Pistorius had to undertake before being considered for parole. Adam says: ‘It was brave of my father to do this, incredible that he found the strength. I couldn’t have done it. But Pistorius stuck to his story.’
He adds: ‘I think the stress and trauma of all of it – not just from Oscar – accelerated my father’s deteriorating health. I’m surprised he managed to hold it together so long. Part of it was because he wanted to still be around to find out the truth.’
Pistorius will live under strict conditions until his sentence expires in 2029, confined to his home for certain hours of the day and banned from drinking alcohol. An official will keep an eye on him, whom the athlete will have to inform if he seeks job opportunities or moves to a new address.
He is also required to continue therapy on anger management and attend sessions on gender-based violence. Adam says he fears bumping into Pistorius, however implausible it sounds. ‘There’s always a chance that at some point in our lives our paths will cross,’ says Adam. How would he react? ‘I find that thought very hard to deal with… I don’t know.’
To armour himself against pain, Adam tries to focus as much as possible on Reeva. She was born to Barry, a racehorse trainer, and his second wife, June. Barry split from his first wife, Adam’s mother, when Adam was young. ‘I was there with Reeva from the start, from when she was born,’ says Adam. ‘We both lived on farms around horses, which were a big part of our lives.
‘We had a great relationship. I used to wind her up all the time. She was my little sister and I was protective of her. I would take her around and help with her little ponies, grooming and feeding. I suppose she picked up things from me about horses. Everything I learned came from my father.
‘And I suppose, too, she would have looked up to me as her big brother. We ran around in our shorts and gumboots and had so much freedom. I remember watching her in her gymkhanas and she would watch me in mine.’
Aged 13, Adam, his mother and stepfather left South Africa for a new life in Britain, leaving his father and Reeva behind. It was a difficult time but as the years passed Adam looked forward beyond measure to his visits to Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, where Reeva later moved with her parents.
‘Every time I went back Reeva was always there to meet me at the airport with outstretched arms,’ says Adam.
‘It was great to see her and see how she had changed. ‘When I was in my early 20s, I was a bit crazy, always the one wanting to go out and do all the things you shouldn’t.
‘But even though she was much younger, she was always the one with her head screwed on – and telling me off! She was steadfast and solid. And what became clear over time was how intelligent she was. There were, and still are, a lot of things that need to be fixed in South Africa. And she was very keen to make a difference.
‘I thought she was wonderful. Yes she was outwardly beautiful but inside, too, she was, well, just this special, caring person. I often think about what she would have achieved in this past decade.’
Just before her death she was planning to visit England to meet Adam’s children. ‘She was so excited when she became an auntie. She would have been brilliant with them. That she didn’t get the chance to meet them is a great regret.’
And so Adam and his family continue to live with their pain, always wary of where the next emotional bump is coming from.
Once, Adam enjoyed watching the Olympics and Paralympics on television.
‘Now they are a trigger,’ he says. ‘For obvious reasons.’
I often think about what Reeva would have achieved