Most of this memoir is filled with laughter, madness, and general absurdity. And that’s how I want to keep it. But beneath all the chaos and charm, there’s a steady undercurrent that can’t be ignored: anxiety. Not the modern, casual “bit stressed” kind—more the bone-deep, irrational, panic-in-your-chest kind that dogs you before you even have a name for it.
Looking back now, I can see it was always there. I was an overly sensitive kid, hypersensitive really—one of those tightly wound little humans absorbing emotional signals I couldn’t possibly decode. Even during the Waverley days, fear was quietly camped out in the background. I remember vividly sitting around imagining what it would be like to live inside an iron lung. I must’ve overheard something about polio and my imagination did the rest. Same with Helen Keller—I didn’t just think about her; I became her in my head: blind, deaf, and dumb, trapped in darkness. I’d lie awake at night with this unexplainable weight in my chest, convinced some unseen fate was hurtling toward me.
Of course, I didn’t understand any of it at the time. But as an adult, I can see that I was picking up on some very real undercurrents. In Waverley, there was the looming anxiety surrounding my father’s legal troubles—the exchange control violations, the threat of prison, and the eventual midnight escape. Later, in Mallorca, it was my mother’s heartbreak, barely disguised under a thin veil of normalcy.
Not long after we arrived, Kirsten—yes, that Kirsten—took my mom aside and announced that she and my father were in love. She suggested my mom pack up and head back to South Africa. Subtle, right? My mom confronted my dad. He admitted to the affair but insisted it was meaningless, just another one of his “episodes,” and that we’d be fine. Spoiler: we weren’t.
In those early Mallorca years, my mom had no friends, no network, no support. And I became her entire emotional world. Niels would later call it “Mollycoddling.” He wasn’t wrong. I’ve already mentioned how she was still dressing me at seven. One morning, as she did just that, I asked her—completely sincerely—“Why do you hate Kirsten so much?”
“Because she’s going to take your father away,” she replied.
That kind of sentence changes the air in a room. It lodges itself in you.
Then came the night it all fell apart. My mom was reading to me on the couch at Campo de Rosas—probably James Herriot or The Lord of the Rings—when the phone rang. She went to the entrance hall to answer it. I remember the gasp. It was Steen, Kirsten’s husband. He’d hired a private detective. And yes, they were staying together. In Copenhagen. In the same hotel room.
Even if I didn’t understand all the pieces, I felt every tremor. I felt her heartbreak like it was my own. That was the climate I grew up in—emotional tectonics shifting constantly beneath my feet.
One particular episode stands out. It was either Christmas of ’76 or ’77—definitely before I got my motorbike. We flew to London to visit my mom’s lifelong friend, Pam McGrath, who lived in a tiny basement flat on Sloane Street. It was a basement apartment with windows looking out at street level but to me, it was heaven. Warm, safe, filled with the gentle murmur of British television and the smell of proper tea.
We later met up with Niels and drove up to Yorkshire to visit my aunt and uncle, Dillis and Bernard, at their ancient stone farmhouse in the Dales. Niels brought along a hydrofoil kite—basically a flying mattress on strings—and we flew it for hours in the wind-whipped fields near The Grange. Everything about that trip should have been joyful. And it mostly was.
But anxiety doesn’t need a reason.
At some point I developed a pain in my back. Nothing major—probably just a muscle from wrestling with the kite—but my brain latched onto it. Cancer. I convinced myself I was dying. A few nights later, I felt a flutter in my chest and became convinced I was having a heart attack. Bear in mind, I was maybe eight years old. But Uncle Bernard had recently had a heart attack, and I’d clearly overheard enough to make it my own.
I bolted down the stairs, where the adults were playing bridge, and declared, “I’m having a heart attack.” To their credit, they didn’t laugh. My mom calmly took me back to bed and reassured me. But the next morning, I begged her to take me to the local doctor.
He gave me a full check-up—listened, tapped, peered, prodded—and then took my mom aside. I only found out what he said much later: “There’s nothing wrong with this child. Physically. What’s his home life like?”
Bullseye.
He’d seen it all before. There wasn’t anything wrong with my body. But the world I was trying to grow up in was rattling my nervous system from the inside out.
From that moment, I became obsessed with sleep. Back in Mallorca, I insisted on going to bed by eight o’clock—even in summer. I somehow knew, deep in my bones, that enough sleep was the one thing that could keep the fear from gaining ground. And for a while, it worked. The anxiety went underground. Or maybe I just got better at running away from it—on my bicycle, on my motorbike, into the pine forest with Bruce, or under the surface of the sea with a spear gun.
Eventually, my mom announced we were going back to South Africa. And I supported her. Of course I did. But by then, home had become a place I tried to spend as little time in as possible. I loved her. I wanted to protect her. But the atmosphere in that house was suffocating.
I remember one Christmas, sitting at the table with my mom and dad—everyone pretending everything was fine. I just wanted to run. Anywhere.
Looking back now, that pain in my back wasn’t a tumor. The flutter in my chest wasn’t a heart attack. But the fear was real. It always was.
And it never really went away.
But anxiety has a way of mutating. It doesn't always come as a panic or a racing heart. Sometimes it sneaks up as something stranger—something that makes you feel like your very self is slipping sideways.
The next time I remember a real clash with it was just before we moved back to South Africa. It was the end of a class at King’s College. The bell rang, and I bent down to pick up my satchel, and then—bam. Out of nowhere—I was hit with the bizarre, overwhelming thought: Whose hand is that?
It sounds completely ridiculous, I know. But in that moment, it didn’t feel funny. It felt terrifying. I stared at my hand and genuinely didn’t recognise it as mine. It was like my brain had briefly short-circuited the connection between self and body. The feeling passed quickly, but it left a nasty aftertaste.
Then it happened again. We were out on the boat, anchored in some bay, and I reached for the suntan oil. Same thing. That weird electric buzz of who am I? how am I me? washed over me like a rogue wave. I looked out at the coast and suddenly, nature seemed totally real—but people, including me, felt completely off. Alien. Almost like we were a strange species that had wandered into the wrong world.
At the time, I didn’t have words for it. I just knew it was awful. Years later, I learned there are words for it: depersonalization. Derealization. Disassociation. But as a kid, it just felt like my own brain was turning on itself—like I was unravelling from the inside.
Looking back now, I know it was just anxiety, dressing up in a new costume and waiting to jump out from behind the curtain. But at the time, it felt like a portal into something bigger and darker—and I wasn’t equipped to understand it.
There would be more of this, later—especially when I got back to South Africa. But in Mallorca, this was the last big flare-up before the next chapter began.