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overseas tour. If Lukas could hold out — save your voice, don’t sing so loud, mime, pretend, I advised — who cared if any of us came back in ’77. We had started together in ’74 and we wanted to finish at least the ’76 year and Europe together. Lukas, as dispassionate as ever, said we were all too precious about Europe. He couldn’t understand why we wanted to travel abroad before we’d even seen half of our own country. If my voice goes, it goes, he said, and I’m not complaining about the swelling in my balls. No use crying over spilling the milk, he joked, and anyway, their farm Swaargenoeg with its sheep and horses was all he really cared about.
     
    Each day of the week we sang for almost two hours: an hour in the morning and another before dinner and prep. As a key tour or performance drew near, the Senior rehearsals were to be extended to six days a week and, if required, up to three hours per day. Till now we had not yet been required to spend the additional hours. But Lukas, Bennie and I already dreaded the two months before Europe. We had heard and seen so much of Seniors’ pre-overseas rehearsals, first as Juniors and then as Secondaries: hours upon hours; conductors’ tempers boiling over; voices and violence booming through the school; canes flying; tears; threats; exhaustion. From the outset we had known there would be no escape. Mr Cilliers, in telling us of the new repertoire, had made no secret of the enormity of what lay in store: a programme almost entirely new; June and July a four-week Transvaal and Cape tour. Then, to celebrate the school’s twentieth anniversary, an end-of-year performance of the Solemn Mass with full orchestra and the SABC Philharmonic Choir in honour of Prime Minister B.J. Vorster. And finally, after that, a three-week tour of Europe! My first ever trip overseas and the school’s first since Israeli and European reviews had begun calling it the best boys’ choir in the world.
    Dominic and Mervyn, eternally enamoured with music, never sounded anything but sheer excitement at the prospect of the whole arduous year. Quite certain that Beethoven’s Mass had never been performed by a boys’ choir, Dominic felt that therein already lay for us an historic challenge. Lukas, sardonic and distant, said we’d survive the musical regime as we always had. Bennie said he couldn’t care two hoots as long as the European pay-off was good: he wanted only to go to Amsterdam where we’d heard blue-movie theatres bloomed on every street corner just like in the kaffir kingdom of Lesotho close to where his mother lived. Dominic had been to London and Amsterdam more times than he could remember and said he hadn’t seen more than a couple of porn shops and they were in districts we certainly wouldn’t be allowed near. Dominic himself had always been refused access to the porn places but while he waited outside his mother and father held up pictures and all kinds of sex toys for him to see through the shop windows.
    It was the very idea of going to Europe — how epic and impressive the notion in and of itself — that so appealed to me.
    ‘We’ll be going to Europe, did you know?’ I asked Lena on the phone after the announcement, knowing well she had already overheard Bokkie’s excited response.
    ‘Just don’t get an even bigger head, Karl,’ Lena said. Besides Bok, when he took the rhinos to Texas, I was going to be the first in our family to experience overseas. Of course Aunt Siobhain had been back to Ireland a few times and Uncle Michael accompanied her oncefrom Tanzania when he first went to meet her family in Dingle. But neither Bok’s nor Uncle Michael’s trips were what I’d call overseas tours. Mine was going to be a Grand Tour of Europe, like something from a novel or a movie. And to think that I’d almost not returned to this place! I smirked. Saying goodbye to Dom and the others at Jan Smuts last year I was dead sure I wasn’t coming back. And then, on