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dying, of judgement, of hell and heaven. Education for them was the pursuit of a reign of terror. The dirty little secrets of the native gods which promised fun, excitement, escape, horrified them and they fought them tooth and nail.
    If this strengthened the boys’ sense of coming doom, of impending Armageddon, that was because they were so naturally adapted to it. They grew up with it, it came as no surprise to learn that the end of the world was at hand, though there was no way they could have explained this to the uncomprehending Flemish immigrants who simply couldn’t understand how it was possible to be hated by anybody, except perhaps the French. The Margaret Brethren taught lonely, sudden violent death as the Wages of Sin. But white children of a certain sort, born in South Africa, then as now, knew of a wider and more general catastrophe, that the world was very likely to end in violence and sooner rather than later. One noted atone’s mother’s knee that the end of the world very probably was at hand and it was only a question of time before the avenging hordes swept down from the north.
    Whether this was true or not didn’t matter. It was believed. It was an article of faith.
    And then there was the deep loathing which the Margaret Brethren instinctively felt for the wayward and disreputable Father Lynch, another of the highly impressive qualities about him that attracted to him his altar servers.
    Blanchaille was among the first. Blanchaille’s mother lived three thousand miles away and sent him to the hostel when he was seven. She had been destitute and so the hostel, and the Margaret Brethren across the road, waived their fees and took him in in the name of Catholic charity. Blanchaille’s father, a Mauritian sailor, had deserted his mother when she fell pregnant and never returned and yet she kept his name and passport, drew one for her son later which she renewed religiously, placing her faith in the French connection, clearly determined that her son would one day return to his motherland in triumph, like Napoleon. This foreign document embarrassed Blanchaille and he hid the passport for years. No one else had one. It looked strange and besides he wasn’t going anywhere. No one was going anywhere. The others teased him about it, calling him Frenchie. But after he’d hidden it they forgot about it and began calling him Blanchie instead, a name that stuck. Trevor Van Vuuren appeared to have no parents but he had an elder brother who worked on the whalers and drove a bottle-green MG sports, which was all terrifically exciting. Zandrotti’s father was a crooked businessman, a building contractor handling large commissions in the Government road programme. He made it his business to add rather too much sand to his cement and eventually catastrophe overtook him when bridges began collapsing across the country. A huge hulking man, he’d arrive in his blood-red Hudson Hornet to visit his skinny knock-kneed little son with his spiky hair and his ghostly pallor. Zandrotti Senior made these visits specifically for the purpose of abusing and ridiculing young Roberto. This so impressed the Margaret Brethren that they presented Zandrotti Senior with his very own scapular of the Third Order of St Francis, a devotional association to which they were vaguely attached for reasons never made clear except that Margaret of Cortona had been fond of it. His father, as Roberto later explained, had absolutely no culture and repaid the honour by making his mistress dance naked on a table for a visiting delegation of Portuguese Chianti merchantswearing the scapular as a G-string. This story so delighted Father Lynch that he suggested that since the scapular had bounced up and down on what he called ‘the lady’s important point of entry’, they should return it in the same wrapper to the Margaret Brethren challenging them to touch it to their nostrils and try to identify the