Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

Darryl was the only one who knew; the delicious secrecy of it was killing him more than it was me, but I had sworn him to silence with the threat of bodily harm. He’d agreed, but grilled me endlessly on details. The rumours started to fly soon after a school party at my house when she’d arrived unexpectedly, had a couple too many drinks and was all over me. So, a couple of months later, when the headmaster caught me and a friend red-handed bunking at a café, he saw his chance and delivered a stern ultimatum. “Bring your parents to see me about this matter, or don’t come back to school,” he said. I couldn’t face my parents, either over the issue of bunking or the other small matter of diddling the English teacher, so I chose right there in his office not to go back to school.

It wasn’t the first time I had run into a little trouble at school. I had attended most of the schools in the surrounding towns, and been in a new high school almost every year. To me it was fun—each year I was checking out the scene, and I was the new boy in school.

We lived on a 15-acre plot about 30 kilometres out of town, in a beautiful old farmhouse, built with 40-centimetre-thick brick walls and high Dutch gables on either side of the tin roof. It had huge spacious rooms and creaking yellowwood floors; it was the original farmhouse of the folk who had owned the thousands of surrounding acres that had been subdivided over the years and sold off into smaller plots.

An imposing set of brick-pillared gates led onto a dirt driveway that wound through an orchard of mixed fruit trees and the two acres of garden and immaculate lawn that was my mother’s pride, and which she maintained like a park. The garden itself was surrounded by a three-metre thorn hedge that was two metres wide in places. Behind a vine-covered four-car garage was a secondary driveway that led through a wood of tall black wattle trees and a huge woodpile to four acres of fenced paddocks where we had a couple of horses, a few mules, donkeys, cows, pigs, about 30 sheep and a flock of peacocks that roamed free, calling with their unnerving voices and leaving their beautiful feathers scattered around the farm and on my mother’s cherished lawns.

All the African staff lived in neat brick houses at the back of the farm. My brother and I would spend hours playing soccer with the black kids on the green grass next to the dam. Afterwards we would sometimes sit at their fires with them and eat mieliepap {maize porridge (Afrikaans)} until my mother called us home long after dark. As we grew older and saw that we were all travelling different paths in life, the soccer stopped. I missed it.

When it was high-school time, my brother and I were sent to a private school in Benoni, the town closest to us. It was a Jewish school, as it happened, with a good academic reputation. My brother and I were the only Christian kids in the school for a while, but it was a gas. We rubbed shoulders there with the kids of the local doctors and lawyers. All was going well until, for some reason I can’t remember, I broke the nose of an exchange student from Israel. It was my first year in high school and he was a senior. So I changed schools, by popular request.

We were pranksters and would go out of our way to pull cruel and elaborate tricks on each other or on unsuspecting friends, like the time I was kitted out with dark glasses and a white cane and led to a girl’s house, where I sat quietly sipping coffee in the living room while Marlon and Darryl told her and her parents how I had tragically lost my sight and my girlfriend in a motorbike accident. The girl fell in love with me and my tragic story, but was furious and in tears when she saw me a week later singing ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ on stage at a small nightclub without either my white cane or my sunglasses. She never spoke to Marlon again.

It was all rather fun until, at the ripe old age of 15, I got the girl down the road into trouble. Somehow word of it reached the headmaster (who was a world-class prick) so he and his deputies summoned me to his office, called me names and dragged what was left of my good name through the mud.

It turned out that the girl wasn’t pregnant after all. That was a good thing for me, as her father was one of the original members of the Hell’s Angels in South Africa; he raised fighting dogs and cockerels on their plot; he was one mean cat. Lance and I set a relay-running record over that little business that stood for many years.

My folks decided to send me to a popular private college-type school in the middle of downtown Johannesburg. It occupied an entire office building. We could wear our hair long, smoke at breaks, and had no real uniform except a tie. By some great stroke of luck Darryl was sent to a similar establishment a block away from mine. We were having a blast, and would commute the 50 kilometres to Johannesburg by train with the busy morning work crowd. The freedom of the new college was agreeable and we were starting to figure out the downtown girls.

Everything went well for the first four months. Then, on the way home from band practice one night, we stopped for a smoke and were suddenly confronted by a truckload of cops and all arrested for possession of marijuana. At 16, I honestly didn’t give a shit—but I did feel bad about letting my folks down.

The next lucky public high school to draw my custom was in Kempton Park. Here I met Taina. She was the drum-majorette leader, and I would watch her leading her troupe of marching girls behind the brass band, dressed in a short-skirted uniform, tossing her mace high into the air and catching it like a circus trick, all without missing a step. She was a doll. All the older guys were trying to date her but I, being the new boy in school, with a bit of a reputation, was the one who snagged her.

I would pick her up at her five-acre plot just outside of town and have to face her father who looked like a ferocious Afrikaans version of Elvis Presley with jet black hair, thick pork-chop whiskers and a thicker waist line. He had beefy forearms covered in a mat of black hair, yellow eyes like a cat and was mean as hell. I understood why nobody was dating her. He would sit at the dining-room table with a bottle of whisky at his elbow and warn me not to bring her home later than eleven. He could be violent but he somehow took a shine to me and soon I was slugging down Johnny Walker with him each time I picked Taina up. I discovered he was a diamond in the rough—as long as you weren’t black, that is.

It was an uneasy time in South Africa. The country had been in a declared state of emergency for a couple of years by then; the state of emergency gave the police the power to arrest and detain people at will.

The black political parties—the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had been banned years before because of their communist ties. Powerful bombs were being detonated at shopping malls and bus stops in protest, but it was mostly blacks who were getting killed in these blasts. There were rocket attacks on industrial installations; the appalling murder and rape statistics ranked us among the worst in the world. The riots in the black townships had been going on for a couple of years now, since the 1976 Soweto uprising, and were getting worse. Many times we could see the thick black smoke rising in columns in the townships many miles away as thousands of blacks rioted in the streets, burning and stoning anything in front of them. A lot of blood was being shed in the name of apartheid. The police would not allow reporters into the townships, but the word was that they would cheerfully shoot hundreds of the rioters. The rioters, too, would kill or burn alive any white or—even quicker—any black in their path whom they suspected of collaborating with the apartheid system.