The Class(less) of '83

The Class(less) of ‘83

So I’ve been sat on for the past few months, figuratively thank God, by a bunch of balding, paunching, middle-aged men who are trying to coerce me into attending our thirtieth high-school reunion.

Thirty years. That’s enough to make anyone want to hide under the bed for the next thirty.

The effort to get there is enough to put any sane person off. Why would anyone who lives in Cape Town  want to pay good money to get to Pretoria? Because that’s where I went to school. Boarding school. In a little patch of England, surrounded by moustaches and situated in the leafy suburb of Lynnwood Glen. Clearwater Road, if I remember correctly. And I do, because the bastards made me – us – run along it every Friday morning before breakfast, come rain, shine or frost. The course ran around the perimeter of the school – The Bounds, it was called, in typical Billy Bunter style. It made me despise running so much that it took a full-blown MLC for me to start again. It was only on my third Two Oceans half-marathon that I remembered why, and how much, I hated running. These days, I run only if I’ve had a bad curry the night before.

But back to the reunion. How much of it will be an adult iteration of the teenage cock-size comparison? My hired Getz would be excused only because it is hired, and so would escape comparison to the plastic surgeon’s Maserati. To the Lambo belonging to the mining magnate. And to the bald property guy’s Harley. Because surely they, and the trophy wives, are why we went to the school in the first place?

Which is odd in itself. Because nothing that was forced down our throats could have had much of a bearing on the Real World, least of all the commerce part of it. At least I had the good sense to switch from Latin to Geography in Standard Eight. I might struggle with the Vulgate these days, but at least I know what katabatic flow is. My old friends, clearly, have triumphed against all odds.

Compounding the thirtieth reunion is the coincidence of the school’s fiftieth anniversary. So I might find myself downing shooters with the guy who used to whip my arse with a towel, tightly wound and dipped in water, who was in Matric when I was a naïve and countrified 13-year-old. Or his friend, the first-teamer whose weapon of choice was the hockey stick. Or the other friend, who used to make conical darts of paper and Sello-tape and tip them with a small nail before blow-piping them at passing juniors through a length of curtain rod.

Yes, we’ll have a laugh about the worst First Rugby Team the school had ever known, which included me (most of the time) as the world’s most short-sighted loosehead – that’s how desperate we were. We’ll get all misty-eyed about how the senior boarders used to creep out of the grounds on Saturday nights and hitch a ride to town to get pissed at the Rose and Crown, sending the hairiest cohort to the bar to buy the drinks. At how we all coughed up our spleens behind the cricket nets as we shared our first joint. We’ll cry at just how bad the four of us in the official Rock Band actually were. We’ll howl at how our drunken Joseph threw up in Technicolour on the housemaster’s wife as she was showing him a few dance steps. I’ll remind the guys that while I didn’t have a fag-master who made me wash his cricket whites, mine was gay and got his rocks off by making me lie prone on the floor so that he could use my abs as a trampoline. Just as well I had abs in those days. 

And then we’ll pour another shooter.

I doubt I’ll meet up with the musicians, the artists, the actors and the writers who somehow made it through a regime that thrived on sporting proficiency, and included lessons on Saturday mornings, without losing their creative spark. Or who left a school which couldn’t accommodate a passion that didn’t include a ball of some sort.

I can’t go.

I have a shoot on that weekend for an ad that sets out to convince Ghanaians, who don’t drink very much, that should they begin to do so, they should drink our beer. 

But even if I didn’t have a shoot, I couldn’t go. 

I had great friends at the time, and then I ended up in Cape Town via Jo'burg, Grahamstown and Dubai. Others went to New York, London, Sydney, Toronto – the usual. Some of them stayed in Jo’burg or Pretoria, or moved to Nelspruit or Botswana. Some died through accident or disease. We lost touch, grew up, raised families, built careers, grew beards. Established our own little bubbles of life, and – mostly – stopped being the creative, interesting dreamers we were then. It would all be too sad to compare successes and failures thirty years on – as Roger Waters said (in 1983, in fact): “I see myself in every stranger’s eyes". And that would be just plain scary.

I have Facebook. I have Twitter and LinkedIn. I can see how old, fat, thin, rich, poor, we’ve all become. I can see how many times the guys have got divorced, remarried, made fortunes, lost them, made them back. I can tell them that I’m still married to my first wife, have two great kids, a career that is as far removed from working in a bank as an amoeba is from Ridley Scott, and a novel on the shelves that needs all the publicity it can get. 

I can celebrate my schoolmates and their achievements. 

But I can’t go back to celebrate a place where no big person, other than my English teacher, could understand, respect or appreciate what I was trying to become.