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not quite belong.
    I had arrived in England only five years previously, along with my recently widowed mother and my six year old sister Susie. We had moved to the same house in Durham where my mother had grown up. Everyone assumed we were part of the white flight escaping the final death throes of apartheid and the blood strained transition to African majority but our reasons were more personal, stemming from my mother’s wish not only to be close to her increasingly frail mother, but also to be as far away as possible from the hospitals in Kimberley in South Africa, where my father had spent his last six months, slowly dying of cancer.
    But if South Africa was no longer home, nor was Durham really. We were the outsiders with the funny accent – a funny accent that many of our neighbours still associated with an evil regime. I was one of just a handful of kids to join my school in Year 9, and I quickly came to appreciate the sharp divide within it between the kids from the local council estates and the offspring of Durham’s academic and professional classes who clustered around the university. Neither group recognised me as one of their own, and I felt ill at ease with both. Back in South Africa, my father had founded and run a small mining equipment firm, but when he died my mother had been forced to sell his business to his former partners for a knockdown price, which was then reduced still further by exchange controls and a rapidly devaluing currency. Even as a teenager, I could tell that we were sliding down the socio-economic ladder, and that my mother’s solution – working as a shop assistant in a delicatessen – hardly slowed our descent.
    I responded by being an over-conscientious pupil, obsessed with transforming my C grades into Bs and sometimes even As, to the delight of mother who saw university as a route back to middle class respectability, but to the detriment of my already limited social life. Outside of the classroom, my main interest was rugby. It was the sport I had most enjoyed when I had lived in South Africa and the only one I had been any good at. When my father had been ill, it had been the one topic we could always talk about; I had even inherited his role on the rugby pitch – playing out on the wing, using my natural speed to make up for my lack of size. In Durham, however, rugby only added to my weirdness, because my school played only football. Therefore twice a week my mother had to drive me to a rugby club on the far side of the city where none of my school friends ever set foot.
    It was my love of rugby that drew me to Bristol. I knew it was a good university but I also knew it was a rugby university, in the middle of rugby country. My teachers told me it was an aspirational target, but that merely added to its appeal. By sheer hard work, I scraped a place to read History, only to have my triumph threatened by another family upheaval.
    My Gran had died a few months previously and my mother had found comfort in the arms of an old family friend and fellow South African émigré called Pete Du Toite. Pete had been working for De Beers in London but was due to move on to the diamond mines in Western Australia, and before he left, he proposed to my mother and suggested we all come out with him.
    In many ways, this was the best thing to happen to my family in a long while. Pete clearly made my mother happy and he had always been kind to my sister and me. And whilst my mother was not marrying him for his mining engineer’s salary alone, I knew it would give her the financial security she craved. Nor did Australia seem such a bad place to make a fresh start: it promised South African weather without South African politics, suburbs full of the barbecues and swimming pools we had known and enjoyed in Kimberley, and even a successful rugby side. But going there immediately would have meant throwing away my hard-earned place at Bristol University. So instead I decided to accept the university’s