attempted murder relating to an incident in 2011 in which he and two other police officers had allegedly fired on suspects inside a minibus. The state’s case was, for now, in disarray.
Pistorius had won round one of the legal battle and now, instead of wearing a green prisoner’s uniform, he would be in his own clothes, eating his own food, sleeping in his own bedroom at his uncle’s place – for he could not bear to go back to live in his own home. His family would be there to comfort him when images of Reeva stormed his guilty mind – but he would seek comfort, too, in the ghostly presenceof another woman, one who had shaped his character, leaving a deeper imprint than Reeva or any other of his lovers had ever done: his mother, Sheila. Tattooed in Roman numerals on the inside of his right biceps were the date on which she was born and the date on which she died.
4
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it
.
SIGMUND FREUD
F ROM THE start, Sheila Pistorius had had no intention of enrolling her son in any kind of special school for children with disabilities. Pistorius spent his primary years at a regular school, and when adolescence beckoned she presented him with the challenge of attending Pretoria Boys High School, where the best and the toughest went.
It was a school that produced champions, high achievers, many of whom would excel in later life in sports, politics, business and the law. A South African institution established in 1901 and famed throughout the land, Pretoria Boys High had been conceived in conscious imitation of the strict and venerable British public school model, and for most of its years it had been a whites-only institution. But around the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison the school began admitting black children and soon acquired a reputation for enlightenment, so much so that at Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994, an event that drew heads of state from all continents, its students were invited to serve as waiters.
In 2000, when Pistorius was thirteen and a year away from starting high school, he and his mother had a meeting with the headmaster,Bill Schroder. Schroder was a giant of a man, in whom benevolence and toughness impressively combined. He took a paternal interest in his boys while also presiding over a regime where old-fashioned caning continued as a punishment of last resort. He took the school’s founding motto
Virtute et Labore
, virtue and work, seriously and held firm in his defense of the values those words embodied.
But during that meeting, held in the sanctum sanctorum of his study, Schroder felt unusually ill at ease. Sheila Pistorius, then forty-two years old, was an attractive woman with a big smile and an ebullient personality. Schroder, more accustomed to inspiring awe than succumbing to it, vividly recalled the encounter years later. He had met more parents than he could remember, but this one, he said, ‘was THE most amazing woman – quite remarkable, with a special light about her’.
The school buildings and grounds were unlike anything Pistorius had ever seen or imagined. A forbidding stone archway at the entrance, a Victorian-style red-brick main building, Latin inscriptions on walls, names engraved on wood of the alumni who had fallen in the two world wars, a hundred acres of land with rugby and cricket fields where some of the finest South African sportsmen had honed their talents. It was a scarily imposing scene when glimpsed through the eyes of a child, and all the more so when across a desk there sat a formidably large man of authoritarian demeanor. Yet the boy appeared quite at ease, listening quietly as Schroder and his mother discussed his future prospects, his academic strengths and weaknesses, the sports he would play.
Mention of sports reminded the headmaster of the reason
Pistorius had won round one of the legal battle and now, instead of wearing a green prisoner’s uniform, he would be in his own clothes, eating his own food, sleeping in his own bedroom at his uncle’s place – for he could not bear to go back to live in his own home. His family would be there to comfort him when images of Reeva stormed his guilty mind – but he would seek comfort, too, in the ghostly presenceof another woman, one who had shaped his character, leaving a deeper imprint than Reeva or any other of his lovers had ever done: his mother, Sheila. Tattooed in Roman numerals on the inside of his right biceps were the date on which she was born and the date on which she died.
4
If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it
.
SIGMUND FREUD
F ROM THE start, Sheila Pistorius had had no intention of enrolling her son in any kind of special school for children with disabilities. Pistorius spent his primary years at a regular school, and when adolescence beckoned she presented him with the challenge of attending Pretoria Boys High School, where the best and the toughest went.
It was a school that produced champions, high achievers, many of whom would excel in later life in sports, politics, business and the law. A South African institution established in 1901 and famed throughout the land, Pretoria Boys High had been conceived in conscious imitation of the strict and venerable British public school model, and for most of its years it had been a whites-only institution. But around the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison the school began admitting black children and soon acquired a reputation for enlightenment, so much so that at Mandela’s presidential inauguration in May 1994, an event that drew heads of state from all continents, its students were invited to serve as waiters.
In 2000, when Pistorius was thirteen and a year away from starting high school, he and his mother had a meeting with the headmaster,Bill Schroder. Schroder was a giant of a man, in whom benevolence and toughness impressively combined. He took a paternal interest in his boys while also presiding over a regime where old-fashioned caning continued as a punishment of last resort. He took the school’s founding motto
Virtute et Labore
, virtue and work, seriously and held firm in his defense of the values those words embodied.
But during that meeting, held in the sanctum sanctorum of his study, Schroder felt unusually ill at ease. Sheila Pistorius, then forty-two years old, was an attractive woman with a big smile and an ebullient personality. Schroder, more accustomed to inspiring awe than succumbing to it, vividly recalled the encounter years later. He had met more parents than he could remember, but this one, he said, ‘was THE most amazing woman – quite remarkable, with a special light about her’.
The school buildings and grounds were unlike anything Pistorius had ever seen or imagined. A forbidding stone archway at the entrance, a Victorian-style red-brick main building, Latin inscriptions on walls, names engraved on wood of the alumni who had fallen in the two world wars, a hundred acres of land with rugby and cricket fields where some of the finest South African sportsmen had honed their talents. It was a scarily imposing scene when glimpsed through the eyes of a child, and all the more so when across a desk there sat a formidably large man of authoritarian demeanor. Yet the boy appeared quite at ease, listening quietly as Schroder and his mother discussed his future prospects, his academic strengths and weaknesses, the sports he would play.
Mention of sports reminded the headmaster of the reason
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