The Power of One

TWELVE

Dee or Dum woke me up at a quarter to five every morning with coffee and a rusk. Shortly after five I strapped my leather book bag to my shoulders and was off at a trot to the prison some three miles down the road.

I was let in the gates without equivocation, as regular as the milkman and just as harmless. The guards, with an hour and a half to go before the nightshift ended, waved from the walkway on the wall. They were weary from the boredom of guard duty, and I was the first tangible sign after the grey dawn that the long night was almost over.

I learned that the greatest camouflage of all is consistency. If you do something often enough and at the same time in the same way, you become invisible. One of the shadows. Every recidivist knows this. In prison, to be successful, plans have to be laid long term. Habits have to be established little by little, each day or week or month or even year, a minute progression towards the ultimate goal. When a routine is finally set, authorities no longer see it for what it is, a deception; but accept it for what it isn’t: an authorised routine. The prisoner enjoys the advantage over his keeper of continuity. Warders change, get promoted, move elsewhere. But old lags, those prisoners who remain inside with long sentences, have the advantage of time to plan. In prison, the old lag is the real authority. The warder unwittingly depends on the old lags to run the prison system, for it is they who restrain the younger prisoners who lack the patience to go along with the system or who see violence as the only solution to getting what they want. A prison without this secondary system of authority can be a dangerous and unpredictable place.

I found myself a part of this shadow world, brought into it with great patience over a long period by an old, toothless lag known as Geel Piet. Translated from Afrikaans, his name simply meant Yellow Peter. In fact, it was more than simply a name. Geel Piet was a half-caste, or a Cape Coloured, neither black nor white, treated as a black man but aspiring in his soul to be a white one. Geel Piet was the limbo man of Africa, despised by both sides. He was also a recidivist, an incorrigible criminal who freely admitted that it was hopeless for him on the outside. Geel Piet was the old lag who exerted the most influence in the shadow world of the prison.

My prison day began in the gymnasium at five-thirty a.m. where the boxing squad, under the direction of Lieutenant Smit, assembled for callisthenics. There were twenty of us altogether and this included four other kids between eleven and fifteen. Seniority went by weight, with Klipkop, who had defeated Jackhammer Smit on points over ten rounds and was now the lowveld heavyweight champion, the most senior, down to myself at the very bottom of the ladder.

Lieutenant Smit stood in the boxing ring with a whistle in his mouth and to a series of whistles we would perform a routine of exercises familiar to everyone. These were interspersed with push-ups and sit-ups at any interval Lieutenant Smit wanted them. Each session of push-ups and sit-ups was of longer duration than the previous one. Lieutenant Smit was a big believer in push-ups to strengthen the arms and the shoulders and sit-ups to strengthen the gut muscles. He also liked fighters, and contended that the Boer made a better fighter than boxer and that most prison warders were naturally aggressive and better equipped to be fighters. He said toughness and determination overcame skill in the ring. The boxers from Barberton prison were known throughout the lowveld and as far as Pietersburg and Pretoria as tough men to take on.

Lieutenant Smit was true to his word and for the first two years he would not allow me to step into the ring. ‘When you can throw a medicine ball over Klipkop’s head, then you will be ready,’ he said. The first of my goals was set, and for the fifteen minutes after callisthenics, when all the other boxers were paired off with sparring partners, I worked until I could no longer lift my arms.

After a five-minute shower I reported to the prison hall for my piano lesson with Doc, and at seven-thirty we would both go into breakfast at the warders’ mess.

Doc had a special status in the prison. While he lived in a cell, he could come and go as he pleased, he ate in the warders’ mess, and wasn’t required to do any special work. ‘You just play the peeano, professor,’ Kommandant Van Zyl had said, ‘that’s your job, you hear?’

Doc often wandered into the gymnasium to watch the squad going through its paces. He knew that I yearned to box, to stand up against another person in the ring. While he made it clear that he didn’t understand why I should have such a need, he respected my ambition and soothed my impatience with musical analogies. ‘In music you must first do the exercises, always first the exercises. If you do the exercises goot then you have the foundations. You cannot build a good musician on a bad foundation. I think with this boxing business it is the same. Ja, I think this is true.’

And so I did all the things required of a boxer and practised on the punching bag until the whole armoury of punches was as familiar to me as the piano scales. That old punching bag took a terrible hiding on a daily basis over those first two years. I would imagine it cowering as it saw me approach, sometimes even whimpering. ‘Not too many of those deadly uppercuts today, Peekay!’ Or, ‘Oh no! Not the right cross. I can’t take any more right crosses.’ I’m telling you, man, that big old punching bag learned to respect me all right.

But it was the speedball which I grew to love. Gert, the young warder who spoke no English, was also on the boxing squad and we’d become firm friends. He’d modified an old punching ball in the prison workshop so that it stood low enough for me to reach.

I can remember the first day when, after many weeks of practice on the speedball, I achieved a continuity of rhythm, the ball a blur in front of my boxing gloves. I imagine Fred Astaire or Bojangles must have felt the same way when they got their first complete tapdance sequence from their taps.

After several weeks Lieutenant Smit walked over to watch me. My heart pounded as I concentrated on keeping the speedball flurried, a blurred, rhythmic tat-tat-tat-tat of leather on leather. ‘You’re fast, Peekay. That’s good,’ he said and then walked away. Two years later when I mastered a difficult passage in a Chopin prelude, the thrill was minor compared to Lieutenant Smit’s praise. They had been the first words he had specifically directed at me in the six months I had been on his squad.

Doc’s Steinway was kept in the prison hall, a fairly large room with a sprung wooden floor used mostly for tiekiedraai dancing and other events in the lives of prison officers and their families. There was also an upright French Mignon piano, for Doc’s Steinway was not to be used except to play classical music. This was an express order from Kommandant Van Zyl, who pointed out that a peeano of such superior qualities should not be expected to play tiekiedraai or to accompany the banjo or accordion. Naturally his wishes were respected and the Steinway became a symbol of something very superior which, in the eyes of the prison officers and their families, elevated them and gave them a special social status. Doc and I, the only two people who played on the Steinway, were included in this status. While my own playing was elementary and far from competent, it was respected as proper music and was referred to as my gift. The fact that the great German professor of music gave me lessons was the only confirmation needed that I must be a budding genius. Doc was kind enough never to contradict this opinion. While being the most honest person I have ever known, he was not a fool. He quickly learned that every small advantage in the prison system was mental capital in the bank, but it was a shame that his brilliance as a teacher was wasted on such inferior clay.

I visited the cactus garden most days on my return from school and every Sunday after church I went with Dee and Dum to clean Doc’s cottage and work in the garden. Doc and I discussed the progress of the cactus garden in detail from a chart prepared by him of every succulent and cactus species in the garden. Considering there were several thousand, it was an intellectual task of some brilliance. In correcting the chart, which took me some weeks, I found that he had only made eleven errors. Taking a small patch of garden at a time from the chart, I reported on its progress. Doc made notes on the comings and going of blossoms and instructed me when to thin or separate plants. The separated plants I put in a hessian bag and brought it to the prison where Doc had started a second cactus garden. Sometimes insects ate a cactus bloom and I’d capture a specimen in a matchbox and bring it to Doc for identification. If it was within my capacity to do anything about them, he instructed me in their elimination. This was rare. Doc believed all creatures had a place in the system and, in the end, everything sorted itself out. It was only when an insect appeared in such numbers that it was likely to disrupt the ecology of the garden that he instructed me to act. He would liken this to a locust plague which, though a natural thing, was a riotous act of nature which should be contained. In these cases he supplied the know-how, Mrs Boxall or my granpa supplied the materials and Dee and Dum supplied the labour. Usually the enemy was overcome. The girls saw this as part of their Sunday outing and took great pride in their work. They enjoyed the business of working with the soil, though I dare say so much effort on something as silly as a cactus must have left them bemused.

Marie, the little nurse from the hospital, had been invited home soon after my jaw incident and had become firm friends with my mother. She loved needlework and would sit for hours chatting away to my mother and doing buttonholes and making shoulder pads and bits and pieces. It seemed certain she would soon fall into the clutches of the Lord.

Being a farm girl she understood Dee and Dum and to my surprise only bossed them about a little. She taught them to cook a number of new dishes, including pumpkin scones and cornbread and they soon became my favourites. I took her to see Doc’s cottage one Sunday afternoon; the two black girls were silent for most of the way. When we arrived at the cottage, Marie started to tell them what to do; their faces grew longer and longer as the afternoon progressed. At last even I saw the mistake I had made, and Marie, much to the delight of Dee and Dum, wasn’t invited again. I think they both liked Marie a lot, but there are certain things between women that mustn’t be tampered with. Doc’s house wasn’t his any more, it belonged to Dum and Dee, and Marie’s imperious instructions were those of an intruder, or even a guest who had forgotten her manners.

Marie brought sweet potatoes for me from her farm, and fresh eggs, sometimes even a leg of pork, a churn of farm butter or several pounds of home-cured bacon. She always brought a large bunch of cured tobacco leaf for my granpa. He smoked a Rhodesian blend called African Drum and hated the sharp, raw, unblended tobacco from Marie’s farm, though he was much too polite to tell her. He would hang it by the stems from the ceiling of the garden shed. Occasionally he added a couple of large leaves to a forty-four-gallon drum filled with rainwater which stood directly outside the shed. The tobacco-infused water was used for aphides on the roses. But the water required only a tincture of tobacco, and the supply hanging from the ceiling grew alarmingly. Eventually it was to become one of the most important factors in my rise within the prison system.

For the first year Geel Piet, the half-caste, was a part of morning piano practice, for he was always in the hall on his knees, polishing the floor. After a short while he became entirely invisible, a shadow in the background who greeted Doc and myself with, ‘Goeie Môre, Baas en Klein Baas.’ He followed this with a toothless smile and then a soft cackle as though the day was perfect and he couldn’t think of any place he’d rather be. Doc, who was no racist, and I who had mixed with servants all my life, both returned his greeting. It was forbidden to talk to any of the non-European prisoners and our careless replies must have been a great encouragement to the old man.

Geel Piet was small and battered-looking. His left eye hung lower than his right and the bottom eyelid drooped, showing more of the eye than one would normally see. Both eyes were permanently bloodshot and somewhat weepy. His nose had been completely flattened and his deep yellow face was criss-crossed with scars. A section of his bottom lip had been cut away, leaving a purple wedge of scar tissue to droop in a line of permanent disappointment from the corner of his mouth. He stood around five foot two inches on his buckled legs, for they were more than simply bandy, the result of having been broken several times and no doubt carelessly mended. Had he been able to straighten them he might well have been four or five inches taller. In the process of surviving, Geel Piet had achieved an outward appearance which would have made it near impossible for him to last for very long outside the jail system. He had worn out his luck in the outside world, if indeed he’d ever had any. Born in District Six, the notorious coloured township in Cape Town, Geel Piet had been in and out of jail for forty of his fifty-five years. He took pride in the fact that he knew the workings, at an intimate level, of every major prison in South Africa, and he was the grandmaster in the art of camouflage. Should a warder beat him for whatever imagined reason, Geel Piet bore no animosity, no hate. He had long since transcended both, and regarded a beating as self-inflicted because it resulted from some piece of carelessness. Geel Piet had no sense of morality, no sense of right or wrong. He existed for only one reason, to survive the system and to beat it. To gain more from it than he was entitled to. He had long since realised that, for him anyway, freedom was an illusion. He had accumulated years of sentences, he wasn’t quite sure or no longer cared how many, and was realist enough to know that he was unlikely to survive the system at his age and with his deteriorating health.

After all the years of incarceration he was a polished performer, no less a maestro at his profession than Doc was at his. Perhaps more so, for as a procurer Geel Piet was a genius.

Geel Piet ran the prison black market, in tobacco, sugar, salt and dagga (cannabis). In the end, he controlled the mail coming and going from the prison and thus the money brought in. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of boxing and a rare gift for spotting errors of style and weakness in performance. My desire to become a boxer was all too apparent, but it is a sixth sense to men who have to survive on their wits, and who have to sniff the air before every move and wager everything on a chance observation or a cunning guess, that told him I was an easy mark.

It took just over a year for Geel Piet to ingratiate himself to the point where I would unknowingly begin to serve him. Our entire relationship was built upon small conversations eked out over weeks until an understanding formed which eventually led to the conspiracy that made me present him with a leaf of tobacco.

I had been culling a patch of Euphorbia pseudocactus, a cactus-like plant which grows close to the ground and is extremely thorny. It has a habit of spreading quickly under ideal conditions and it had started to invade territory in the cactus garden which didn’t rightly belong to it. Because of the thorns I had put Doc’s cutting in a galvanised bucket which I’d brought from the garden shed at home. Almost without thinking I had lined the bottom of the bucket with a large tobacco leaf which was covered by the thorny cactus for Doc’s prison garden. Something must have made me do it: perhaps Geel Piet, somehow, with his patience and snatches of seemingly unconnected dialogue. Tobacco is, after all, the greatest luxury and the most essential commodity in the prison system. With the war on, the normal shortage behind the walls had become severe, so that it was more highly prized than ever.

I was never searched as I entered the prison, although on this particular day, carrying a bucket rather than a bag, a mildly curious guard wanted to know what was in the bucket and had come on over to take a look. In fact I had not been worried, having entirely forgotten about the tobacco leaf. ‘Funny how he likes all these ugly plants, hey?’ the guard said, for Doc’s cactus garden was directly outside the warders’ mess and was the butt of many a joke, most of them about cactus being just the sort of plant for a prison. ‘If the prisoners revolt we’ll all hide in the professor’s garden, those blêrrie Kaffirs wouldn’t be game to try to get us out.’

I had taken the bucket through to the hall after the squad workout and as usual Geel Piet, who was becoming more and more useful and who, over the ensuing year would assume the place of personal servant to Doc, took the bucket with the cuttings to Doc’s garden. He had returned with it, his permanently broken face wreathed with smiles. ‘I will help you to be a great boxer,’ he simply said. And that was how it all got started.

I broached the subject of the tobacco with my granpa when I returned home that afternoon after school. I did not really think about the moral issue involved. After a year of going in and out of the prison each weekday I had come to understand the system. Morality was suspended, war existed between two sides and even aged eight I could see the odds were heavily biased towards one of them. The prison warders were an extension of the kids at the hostel: a brutal force confronting a defenceless one where crimes supposed or otherwise were being paid for. The idea of committing further petty crime in this sort of atmosphere and being brutally, often savagely punished was bizarre and quite unreal. Doc and I were not a part of either side, we were an audience who would, from time to time, make a decision to enter the play. While we couldn’t change the plot, we could relieve the actors of their tedium.

My granpa was generally suspicious of unquestioning moral rectitude, preferring to judge each item as it came to him; as prepared to have Inkosi-Inkosikazi cure his gallstones as he was to give the Boers credit for being musicians and good shots. We sat on one of the steps leading up to a terrace. Between much tamping, tapping and lighting of pipe and staring into the distance over the paint-faded and rust-stained roof, and after ascertaining that I was never searched, he decided that the prisoners should have the tobacco.

‘Poor black buggers, it’s worse for them than it was in England in the seventeenth century. Most of them are in for crimes that deserve no more than a tongue lashing.’

He was wrong. Barberton was a heavy-security prison and most of the prisoners, except for the politicals, had committed crimes that were worthy of formal punishment in any society. It was the administration of the prisoners’ life that was the real crime, and it was not unusual for a prisoner to be beaten to death for a comparatively minor infringement of prison rules. Such occasions were discussed among the warders quietly, almost secretly, but with an inner glee.

I think my granpa was partly influenced by the thought that the mounting stock of tobacco leaves from Marie’s farm would start to dissipate and that in some small way he too was fighting the sort of injustice he abhorred. He carefully instructed me in the use of tobacco-infused water for insect control, and gave me a note to Doc explaining how it was done. The plan was for Doc to set up his own drum beside the cactus garden and infuse it with two tobacco leaves at rare intervals. In the event of a single load of tobacco entering the prison being discovered, Doc, a non-smoker, could quite easily explain its destination.

Doc had requested to remain in Barberton prison rather than be transported to an internment camp in the highveld. The thought of being away from his beloved mountains, his cactus garden and his piano was more than he could bear, and I’m sure our friendship also played a large part in his reluctance to leave Barberton. Kommandant Van Zyl, who had come to regard Doc as the personal property of the prison and a constant thorn in the side of the English-speaking town, was more than happy to co-operate. I think in the end the military authorities must have given up trying to extricate him from the civil prison system, and Doc spent the remainder of the war under the benign supervision of the Kommandant.

Of course, Doc was co-conspirator in what became a sophisticated smuggling system. Being in the prison constantly he was there when the work gangs returned at night and left again at dawn. He was forced to see an aspect of Africa he had never witnessed. Doc was a man who preferred not to take sides in any issue other than one of the intellect. Rather than face the dilemma of black and white confrontation and the pre-ordained decision of white superiority, he had chosen to avoid it altogether by not having servants or any dependence on Black Africa. But he was also a compassionate and fair-minded man and the unthinking brutality of the warders offended him deeply. Both of us lacked the wisdom or the knowledge of the baser side of men, though I probably had more experience of this than Doc did. We saw the brutality around us not as a matter of taking an emotional side, or of good versus evil, but as the nature of evil itself, where good and bad do not come into play. We were simply intellectually forced to take the side of the prisoners. Man brutalised thinks only of his survival. Geel Piet was as ruthless as his oppressors and of necessity a great deal more cunning. The power the tobacco and the other things which later came into the prison gave him was enormous, and he used it to ensure his own survival and to serve his own ends as ruthlessly and as carelessly as the warders used their superiority.

As it turned out he spoke English passably, but had chosen Afrikaans to make his mark with me, knowing that Doc would then not be in a position to understand what he was saying and therefore to see through his long and carefully planned campaign. His next conquest after me was to be Doc. He became the perfect servant to him, a humble man who strove to anticipate Doc’s every need while never intruding into the world Doc and I shared as expatriates of an orderly social environment.

Geel Piet successfully contrived to get into the gymnasium while the squad was working out. At first he was a familiar shadow, hardly noticed, polishing the floor or cleaning the windows. Then gradually over a year he became the laundry boy, picking up the sweaty shorts and jockstraps and the boxing boots in the shower room and returning them the next day freshly laundered and polished. By the time I could throw a medicine ball over Klipkop’s head, Geel Piet had established himself as an authority on boxing. The lieutenant gave him the job of supervising the progress of the kids in the squad, only occasionally taking over when he felt it necessary to establish his superiority by deliberately contradicting an instruction from Geel Piet to one of us.

The standard of the young boxers improved measurably under Geel Piet’s direction for, despite his background, the old lag was a maker of boxers. When he hadn’t been in prison he’d worked in gymnasiums, and somewhere in the dim past had been the coloured lightweight champion of the Cape Province. He had a way of teaching kids that made even the Boer kids respect him, though at first it was only their fear of Lieutenant Smit that prevented them from refusing to be coached by a blêrrie yellow Kaffir.

From the first day Lieutenant Smit agreed that I could begin to box I was under Geel Piet’s direction and he treated me like new clay. From day one Geel Piet concentrated on defence. ‘If a man can’t hit you, he can’t hurt you,’ he’d say. ‘The boxer who takes chances gets hit and gets hurt. Box, never fight, fighting is for heavyweights and domkops.’

It wasn’t what I had been waiting for two years to learn. But Doc persuaded me Geel Piet was right, and the logic, even to an eight-year-old, was irrefutable.

It was some weeks before I was allowed to get into the ring with an eleven-year-old from the squad. The boy’s nickname was Snotnose, Snotnose Bronkhorst, because there was always a snolly bomb hovering from one or both of his nostrils. He was a big kid and a bully but he had only been with the squad for a few weeks and he lacked any real know-how. He had pushed me away from the punching ball, and I had tripped over a rubber mat and fallen. Picking myself up I had squared up to him, when Lieutenant Smit, seeming not to have noticed the incident, said he wanted to see us in the ring. My heart thumped as I realised that the moment had come.

We climbed into the ring and it was Hoppie and Jackhammer Smit all over again, in size if not in skill. But to my satisfaction I had absorbed a great deal over the past two years and even more over the six weeks Geel Piet had been coaching me. Snotnose chased me all over the ring, taking wild swipes, any of which, had they landed, would have lifted me over the ropes. Over a period of three minutes I managed to make him miss with every blow while never even looking like landing one myself. After three minutes Lieutenant Smit blew his whistle for the sparring session to stop.

I noticed for the first time that most of the squad had gathered around the ring and when the whistle blew they all clapped. It was one of the great moments of my life.

Peekay had completed his two-year apprenticeship. From now on it was all the way to the welterweight championship of the world.

I turned to walk to my corner before climbing out of the ring, and sensing something was wrong I ducked just as a huge fist whistled through the air where my head had been a second before. Without thinking I brought my right up in an uppercut, using all the weight of my body behind the blow. It caught Snotnose Bronkhorst in the centre of the solar plexus and I could feel my glove sinking deep into the relaxed muscles of his stomach, forcing the air from his ribcage. He staggered for a moment and then, clutching his stomach, crumbled in agony onto the canvas, the wind completely knocked out of him. The cheers and laughter from the ringside bewildered me. Looking over the heads of the squad I saw Geel Piet, unseen by any of them, dancing a jig in the background, his toothless mouth and funny lip stretched wide in uncontained delight.

Throwing caution to the winds he yelled, ‘We have one, we have a boxer!’ The coloured man’s intrusion into the general hilarity caused a sudden silence around the ring.

Lieutenant Smit advanced slowly towards Geel Piet. With a sudden explosion Smit’s fist slammed into his face. The little man dropped to the floor, blood spurting from his flattened nose.

‘When I want an opinion from a fucking Kaffir on who is a boxer around here, I’ll ask for it, you hear?’ Then, absently massaging the knuckles of his right hand, Smit turned back to the squad. ‘But the yellow bastard is right,’ he said. ‘Get into the showers now, make haste. Bronkhorst, you are a domkop,’ he added as Snotnose rose shakily to his feet.

I was still standing in the ring, a little bewildered at the fracas I had caused. I watched Geel Piet crab-crawl along the gym floor, making for the doorway. When he reached it he got unsteadily to his feet and looked directly at me. Then he grinned, and without raising his hands gave a furtive thumbs-up sign, a movement so slight it would have gone unnoticed to a casual observer. To my amazement, the expression on his battered face was one of happiness.

On my way to school that morning Snotnose Bronkhorst sprang from behind a tree and gave me a proper hiding, although I managed to get him with a right cross that snapped his head back as well as a solid uppercut in the balls which made him release me so that I could run for it.

It had been my experience that the Snotnoses of this world were a plentiful breed and I thought it might be a good idea to learn street fighting as well as boxing. Geel Piet, I felt sure, would show me how to fight dirty as well.

But I was wrong. Perhaps I was the first human clay Geel Piet had been responsible for shaping into a boxer, but it was more likely pride; he was a purist and he knew the corruption that turns a boxer into a fighter and a fighter into a street brawler.

‘Small boss, if I teach you these things a street fighter knows, you will lose your speed and you will lose your caution and when you lose your caution you will lose your skill.’ His face split into a grotesque smile. ‘It will take longer to win as a boxer, but you will stay pretty.’

I was disappointed. Being tough was one of the ambitions I had set for myself. Being pretty certainly wasn’t on my list of priorities! How could you be tough if you had to bob in and out like a blowfly? ‘Please, Geel Piet,’ I begged, ‘just teach me one really rotten dirty trick.’ After some days of nagging he agreed.

‘If I teach you one, then you must promise not to ask again, you hear?’

‘It’s got to be a proper one, the worst in the book, you’ve got to promise that too?’

‘Okay, man, I will teach you the Sailor’s Salute. It is the best dirty trick there is. But you got to know timing also to get it right. A boxer can know this trick and still be a boxer.’

‘Promise it’s the worst one of all?’

‘Ja, man, I’m telling you for sure. It is so rotten the police use it all the time so they can say in the charge book they never laid hands on you. Its other name besides the Sailor’s Salute is the Liverpool Kiss.’ He held the flat of his hand three inches from his brow and with a short, lightning-fast jerk of his head his forehead smacked loudly onto the hand. ‘Only you do this against the other person’s head, like so.’ He drew me towards him and in slow motion demonstrated the head-to-head blow. Even in slow motion he nearly took my head off and my eyes filled with tears. It was the head butt Jackhammer Smit had used to floor Hoppie, and now I knew why Hoppie had gone down so suddenly.

‘Do it to me also,’ Geel Piet said, patting his forehead with the butt of his hand. I did so and received a second severe blow to the head. I was beginning to have misgivings about street fighting. It sure wasn’t like fighting a punching bag.

But over the next few weeks I perfected the Liverpool Kiss. The quick grab of the punchbag and a lightning butt to the imagined head of an opponent. Every now and again Geel Piet allowed me to practise on him and he grinned when I got it right. ‘Once you got it, you got it for life. But only use it quick and as a surprise. If you get it right you kiss your opponent to sleep with just one little tap, no problems, man.’

School had one disadvantage. I was two classes higher than my age group and so friends were hard to make. The kids of my own age thought of me as a sort of freak and in fact, with my early school background and now my prison experience, I was a lot tougher than any of them. Doc and the jaw incident had made me somewhat of a celebrity but I kept mostly to myself, being a shy kid and the smallest in my class. I acquired a reputation for superiority without having to earn it and so was left pretty much alone. I wasn’t aggressive, and when a challenge came from a boy called John Hopkins and his partner Geoffrey Scruby, supposedly the two toughest kids in my class, I tried to avoid the fight they demanded, mostly because I was arrogant enough to believe that my status as future world welterweight champion made it inappropriate for me to be a street fighter. The Judge and even the jury had been so much tougher than these two that it never occurred to me actually to be frightened of them. The English-speaking kids at school had no idea of my boxing or prison background, as the small contingent of Afrikaans kids in the school seldom mixed with the English and almost never spoke with them, other than to challenge them to fight. The two ten-year-olds badgered me for some days and so I took the problem to Geel Piet, who immediately understood my dilemma.

‘Small boss, it is always like this. This is what you must do. You must make them feel you are scared. Tell them, no way man. Tell them you don’t want to fight. Let them get more and more cheeky, more and more brave. Even let them push you around. But always make sure this happens when everyone is watching. Then after a few days they will demand to fight you and they will name a time and place. Try to look scared when you agree. You understand?’ Geel Piet held me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘More fights are lost by underestimating your opponent than by any other way. Always remember, small baas, surprise is everything.’

It happened just as he said, a constant badgering during break, then a few pushes in front of everyone. Protests from me that I didn’t want to fight. Finally a demand that I be behind the bioscope after school where I could choose either of them to fight.

When I got to the small yard behind the town cinema where all the official school fights took place, it was packed, with at least fifty kids crowded around John Hopkins and Geoffrey Scruby. All of them were English-speaking with the exception of Snotnose Bronkhorst, who had somehow got wind of the fight. To my surprise he stepped up to me and said in Afrikaans, ‘I’m here to be your second, these are all Rooineks, you can never tell what they’ll do.’

I looked at him in surprise. ‘I’m also a Rooinek.’

‘Yes I know, man, but you’re a Boer Rooinek, that’s different.’

I elected to fight Hopkins who seemed delighted as he was the bigger of my two tormentors and had not expected to be chosen.

The kids formed a ring and Snotnose, who didn’t know a lot of English, simply said, ‘Okay! Make quiet! Fight!’

Hopkins threw a haymaker at me and missed by miles and I landed a hard blow to his ribs. He looked surprised and shook his head and came rushing in again swinging at my head. I ducked in under his punch and caught him hard on the nose. He stopped dead in his tracks and brought his hand up to his face. I hit him with a left and then a right to the solar plexus and to my astonishment he started to cry.

‘All over!’ Snotnose held up my hand as Hopkins, sniffing and thoroughly humbled, walked back into the crowd. I pointed to Geoffrey Scruby. ‘Your turn now, Scruby,’ I said, feeling a rush of adrenalin as I saw his fear.

‘I’m sorry, Peekay,’ he said softly. I had won. Just as Geel Piet said. Suddenly the crowd loved me. And I liked the feeling a lot.

Then Snotnose stepped up.

‘Does any of you blêrrie Rooineks want to fight him?’ he asked. There was complete silence and nobody stirred, not even the bigger kids. ‘You’re all yellow, you hear!’ he snarled, then he turned slowly and looked at me with a grin on his face. I grinned back. He seemed an unlikely ally but he had stood by me. ‘Okay then, I will,’ he said. There was a murmur of apprehension through the crowd. They were clearly shocked at the idea, I must say I was pretty shocked myself.

‘It’s not fair. You’re much bigger than him,’ Geoffrey Scruby said. ‘And older,’ someone else shouted.

‘Shurrup, man, or I fight you.’ Snotnose walked up to Scruby and stabbed him in the chest with his forefinger. Then he turned and squared up to me.

It had been four months since we’d first met in the ring and he’d learned a fair bit about boxing in the meantime. I tried to stay out of his way, dancing around him, making him miss. But he hit me a couple of times and it hurt like blazes. I was connecting more often than he was, aiming my blows carefully, but I knew it was only a matter of time. First with your head then with your heart, first with your head then with your heart, Hoppie’s words drummed through my brain as I tried to stay alive. Snotnose had tried to come in close on one or two occasions, but soon learned that this evened things up. At close range I was much the better boxer. So he stood his distance and picked his shots, knowing that a big punch had to get through sooner or later. All I could do was to try to make him miss. The kids, now on my side, were yelling their heads off trying to reach me with their encouragement. But I think they all knew the Boer was too tough and that the outcome was inevitable.

‘Come closer, Boer bastard. Are you scared or something,’ I taunted. Snotnose stopped in his tracks and his eyes grew wide. With a roar of indignation he bore down on me. I stepped aside at the last second and he missed knocking me over. As he turned to come back at me his head was lowered so it was on a level with mine. He had his back to the bioscope wall and I had mine to the crowd. I stepped in, and using both hands grabbed him by the shirtfront and gave him a perfectly timed Liverpool Kiss. The blow was so perfect I felt nothing. Snotnose simply sat on his bum, completely dazed. He just sat there in the dirt quite unable to comprehend what had happened. The crowd hadn’t seen it either. They were behind me and my hands flying up to grab his shirtfront must have looked like a two-fisted attack. Forever afterwards it was retold that way; ‘Then Peekay said, “Come closer, you Boer bastard,” and with two dazzling punches to the jaw he knocked Snotnose Bronkhorst out.’

To my surprise Snotnose started to sniff and then got up unsteadily and made his way through the crowd and down the side of the building. He stopped halfway down the alley and shouted in Afrikaans, ‘I’ll get you back for this, you Rooinek bastard!’ The English kids jeered as he walked away, but I knew better. One doesn’t allow a Boer to lose face and expect to get away with it. Though, to my amazement, even Snotnose came to believe that he had been punched.

After the fight with Hopkins and Snotnose Bronkhorst my status at school improved immeasurably. While there were no more than sixty Afrikaans pupils, the sons and daughters of Noordkaap miners, farmers, men who worked in the saw mills at Francinos Rust and the warders’ kids, they tended to be bigger than the English kids and much more aggressive. Most of the English boys had at some time or another suffered at the hands of one of the Boers. I was seen as being the one kid who had successfully fought back and won. A single victorious ship on an ocean of defeat.

Occasionally a Boer boy of roughly my size would cross the lines to challenge me and after school the back of the bioscope building would be packed with kids. The Boer kids on one side and the English on the other with my opponent and myself sandwiched in between. The prison guys formed a clique of their own, not sure where they belonged but seemingly glad when I won. Geel Piet was a good coach and as I was never matched with one of the prison kids, my superior boxing skill allowed me to win. Whereupon a bigger Boer kid would challenge one of the English boys of roughly the same size and usually manage to beat him, which restored the racial status quo.

The prison kids explained that it was acceptable to be beaten by me as I was a sort of honorary Boer who spoke the taal and was also one of them. That came first. Even Snotnose left me alone unless we were sparring in the gym when he would go all out to try and hurt me.

This position of semi-neutrality had a great many advantages. In times of war there always has to be a go-between, someone whom both sides are prepared to trust. I was accepted by everyone as a brain and so I ended up doing the negotiation between the Boers and the English, often sorting out differences, arranging sides for rugby or kleilat, marble contests and bok-bok, an exceedingly rough game based on strength and endurance which the Boers, despite having fewer boys to choose from, usually won.

With some forty kids of my own age I was now undisputed leader, a situation I must confess I found to my liking. Being somebody after being nobody for so long was a heady experience but I also found it, on occasion, a bit onerous. Fights had to be settled, bullying stopped and the small kids set straight when they did things wrong. And then there was the tobacco crisis.

The tobacco crop on Marie’s farm failed. This left a period of three months when the curing shed was empty. Marie kept apologising for this, as though it were somehow her fault: the more my granpa protested that he didn’t mind the more guilty she seemed to become. By this time Geel Piet had become undisputed quartermaster for the prison. To tobacco we had added sugar, salt and a letter writing business which was getting news in and out of the prison to and from all over South Africa. Postal orders would come in from outside contacts. Prisoners would order sugar, salt and tobacco and Geel Piet would add thirty per cent to the groceries and charge threepence a cigarette. Tobacco was by far the greatest luxury because it was rationed due to the war. It was, of course, unavailable to the casual purchaser and impossible for an eight-year-old to buy under any circumstances. The little I brought in leaf form was carefully rolled into slim cigarettes. A single cigarette in a week of hard labour was a luxury beyond the imagination of the average prisoner. Somehow I understood how such a small thing as a cigarette, a tablespoon of sugar or a teaspoon of salt made the difference between hope and despair. A prisoner with a cigarette safely stashed in a used .303 cartridge case up his anus considered himself rich. These cartridge cases were highly prized, they were after all, in conjunction with his anus, the only private storage space a prisoner had. We kids gathered them from the rifle range at the army camp and they were the only item which Geel Piet actually gave away; as the prisoner’s pantry they were essential to his business.

Letters were becoming a big thing at the prison and Doc wrote most of them as Geel Piet dictated to him. The little man could remember the contents of entire letters, together with the addresses of a dozen or more black prisoners at a time. Doc would write them at night. He would then write out a sheet of music theory for my homework and attach the letters to the back of it. Any search would have quickly revealed them but Doc was not a naturally cunning man and I think in his mind he regarded my music book as somehow, like the Steinway, above the possibility of question.

The letters were much of a muchness, men not accustomed to writing are apt, in any language, to reduce their words to simple formalities such as telling their families they were all right and enquiring after the health and welfare of the wife and kids, all the small, important human things that make us all, in the end, exactly the same. Some would include a request for money, although most knew this to be impossible and were too proud to impose such a burden on their families. It was not unusual for a family not to know that a husband had been arrested or where he was detained. He had simply disappeared and was often sent to a prison some distance from the place of his arrest. To trace him without the co-operation of the police was nearly impossible and so the letters provided a vital link in the spiritual welfare of the prisoners.

Mrs Boxall acted as post mistress and I must say she ran a pretty slick operation. The letters would be dropped in after school. Using the large square stamp used for marking the inside covers of books and which said BARBERTON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY, de Villiers St, Barberton, we stamped a blank envelope, attached a postage stamp to it and included it in the original letter with instructions to the receiver to use it as the return envelope. We also wrote the name of the sender on the inside of the return envelope. This was done because we often received letters which started, Dear Husband and carried no other identification. Finally Mrs Boxall or I would address the outgoing envelope and send it off.

She explained these elaborate precautions to me. ‘The world is full of sticky beaks. If we get a lot of letters addressed to the library in primitive handwriting, the post master just might smell a rat. I’ve been sending our overdue notices to country members for years which include return addressed envelopes using the library rubber stamp; he won’t suspect a thing.’ And he didn’t. The system worked perfectly and returned letters were taken into the prison and locked away in Doc’s piano stool, to which only he and I had a key, though I’m sure Geel Piet could have picked the lock any time he chose to do so.

The money prisoners received from outside was generally in the form of a postal order for two shillings. As all incoming mail was opened by Mrs Boxall, she cashed the postal orders and put the money back into the envelopes and wrote the names of the recipient on the front. I pasted the envelope back together using the large pot of library glue and a slip of rice paper to cover the slit where the envelope had been carefully opened using Mrs Boxall’s letter knife. The knife had a handle striped red and white like a barber’s pole, and on the blade on one side was written, Have you written to your sweetheart? and on the other, A souvenir from Brighton 1924. I used to wonder who had Mrs Boxall for a sweetheart, but I think I already knew it was nobody.

And so a regular mail system in and out of the prison was established with Mrs Boxall cheerfully paying for the stamps and stationery. She would often sit and read a letter to one of the prisoners from a wife, written by someone who could write in English, and as she read it to me the tears would roll down her cheeks. The letters were mostly three or four lines, often in a huge, uncontrolled childlike hand.

My Husband Mafuni Tokasi,

How are you? The children are well. We have no money only this. The baas says we must go from this place. There is no work and no food. The youngest is now two years. He looks same like you. We have no other place to go.

Your wife Buyani

A postal order for two shillings in the letter meant that the whole family might not have eaten for two days or more. Mrs Boxall would wipe her eyes and say her conscience was quite clear and even if she was arrested she knew she was jolly well doing the right thing. She badgered friends and people coming into the library for clothes and these she sent off to needy families, even sometimes sending off a postal order of her own to a prisoner’s family. She referred to prisoners as ‘Innocents, the meat in the ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful State’. Her code for these families simply became the word ‘sandwich’. ‘We need more clothes for the sandwiches,’ or ‘Here’s a poor sandwich for whom we’ll have to find half a crown.’ She kept a forty-four-gallon drum in the library which had a six-inch wide slot running almost the width of its lid like a huge money box. On the side was written: Cast-off clothes for the Sandwich Fund. People would bring lots of stuff and no one ever asked what the Sandwich Fund was.

‘People feel they ought to know, so they don’t dare ask,’ she would say. She once told me that the sandwich was named after the Earl of Sandwich, who was a terrible gambler and because he was always so busy gambling he had no time to take meals. To overcome the problem his butler had made him two hunks of bread with something in between them. These were the first sandwiches. ‘If anyone ever asks we’ll say it’s the famous Earl of Sandwich Fund for the poor. That ought to shut them up, don’t you think, Peekay?’

Eventually someone must have asked, because the Earl of Sandwich Fund became the most social of all the war effort funds in Barberton. Even more important than knitting socks for prisoners of war. At the Easter and Christmas fête held in Coronation Park, Mrs Boxall and I ran a sandwich stand where cakes and other delicacies donated by the town’s leading families were sold. My mother sent pumpkin scones baked by Dee and Dum who were also allowed to work on the stand. Mother made two identical pinnies and caps for them and they worked from dawn until dusk laying out cakes on the trestle tables and cutting and buttering bread and making sandwiches.

Because I was on the boxing squad and regarded as one of the prison kids, the wives of the warders baked for days for the sandwich stand and gloated when their cakes and cookies were the first to go. Boer baking was generally superior to that of the town’s leading socialites. The rather snobbish Earl of Sandwich Fund sandwich stand earned enough to pay for the entire mailing system and to send money and clothing to a great many destitute families.

When the tobacco crisis came we solved it through the Earl of Sandwich Fund. Mrs Boxall sent a note to the headmaster of our school requesting that children bring in cigarette butts from home. She even managed to get the butts from the sergeants’ mess at the army camp. Everyone assumed the recycled tobacco was going to the prisoners of war as Mrs Boxall simply referred to them as prisoners. Some kids brought half-packets of unsmoked cigarettes from a parent’s precious ration, a sacrifice to the war effort. I took half a packet of smokes to Geel Piet, who thought all his Christmases had come at once. The bags of butts were taken to Doc’s cottage where Dee and Dum, their noses masked by a dish towel, spent Sunday afternoon shredding the week’s tobacco supply. Geel Piet never had it so good. When the new crop came from Marie’s farm, it was with some dismay that he was forced to switch back to straight tobacco leaf.

What I didn’t know was that little by little the prisoners had pieced it all together and I had been given the credit for everything. I was enormously surprised when one day I passed a gang of prisoners who were digging a large flower bed in the town hall gardens to hear the chanter, who was calling the rhythm so the picks all rose in unison and fell together, change his song at my approach.

‘See who comes towards us now,’ he sang. ‘Tell us, tell us,’ the rest of the work gang chanted back. ‘It is he who is called the Tadpole Angel,’ the leader sang. ‘We salute him, we salute him,’ they chorused.

I glanced around me to see whom they were singing about, but there was no one to be seen. The warder, who recognised me, obviously didn’t know Zulu. He called out to me, ‘How things going, man?’ and I replied, ‘Very good, thanks.’ The warder, who was bored, obviously wanted me to stop for a chat.

‘He who is a mighty fighter and friend of the yellow man,’ the leader continued. ‘The Tadpole Angel, the Tadpole Angel,’ the chorus replied, their picks lifting on the first Tadpole Angel and coming down on the second. I realised with a shock that they were talking about me.

‘I hear the lieutenant is going to let you fight in the under twelve division in the Lowveld Championships in Nelspruit this weekend.’

‘Ja, I’ll be the smallest, but he thinks I’ll be okay.’

‘We thank him for the tobacco, the sugar and the salt and for the letters and the things he sends to our people far away.’ ‘From our hearts, from our hearts,’ came the chorus.

‘Nine is not very old, man, eleven can be blêrrie big with a Boer kid.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I am ten in two weeks.’ I was trying to hide my embarrassment at the salutation going on around us.

‘Ja, man, and the kid you fight will be most likely twelve in two weeks,’ he said gloomily.

‘I have to go, I’m late for the library.’ I wanted only to get away from the chanting of the prison gang.

‘You’ll be okay, man, I seen you sparring, you fast as buggery.’ He looked at me closely and grinned, ‘You is a funny bloke, Peekay. Now why you blushing like mad suddenly, hey?’

‘He is the sweet water we drink and the dark clouds that come at last to break the drought,’ the leader sang. Up came the picks, ‘Tadpole Angel.’ Down they went in perfect unison, ‘Tadpole Angel. We salute him, we salute him.’ I started to run towards the library and broke out in a sweat, my embarrassment consuming me.

I tackled Geel Piet about the matter the next morning and he admitted that this was my name. ‘It is a great compliment, small baas. For them you are a true angel.’

Doc was listening, as Geel Piet and I now spoke in English when we were with him. ‘Ja, and for you we are all angels, Geel Piet.’ He chuckled. ‘You are a rich man I think, ja?’

Geel Piet made no attempt to deny it. ‘Big baas, it is always like so in a prison. If I am discovered I will be killed, so I must have something for risking my life. Thirty per cent is not so much, in Pretoria and Johannesburg it is fifty per cent, in Robben Island and Pollsmoor it is sixty per cent.’

‘I think you are a skelm, Geel Piet, but we will say no more.’ Doc, like Mrs Boxall, had come to realise how important the letters were and how the small amount of contraband made life bearable for men who were shown no compassion and whose diet of mealie meal and a watery stew of mostly cabbage and carrots with an occasional bit of gristle floating on the surface was only just sufficient to sustain them though not sufficient for the brutally hard work on the farms or the saw mills or the granite quarries. He had also come to accept the role Geel Piet played in the distribution system, knowing that without it chaos would ensue. ‘Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.’ Doc sighed and took out his bandanna and wiped his face as though trying to wipe the prison atmosphere from his skin. ‘When man is brutalised in such a place like this always he is looking for small signs. The smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.’

While the food allocated for each prisoner was insufficient to keep a man doing hard physical labour, whoever hired a gang was expected to supply a meal at noon. It was this meal which kept the prisoners alive, for the regulations required it to be a vegetable and meat stew consisting of eight ounces of meat per prisoner and a pound of cooked mealie pap. I sometimes heard the warders discuss a scam whereby they tried to get a contractor to cut the rations in half, pay the warder ten shillings and save himself ten shillings. This only worked when gangs were hired for short periods, otherwise the men soon grew too weak to work. It was a big risk. Lieutenant Smit rotated warders so they had a different gang each week and couldn’t set up a scam. The prison authorities depended on this one good meal a day from outside so they could cut rations on the inside. Although, I must say Geel Piet told me this story and so it is not necessarily the entire truth. If a warder was caught in a scam he was not only dismissed but drafted into the army. Nobody in the boxing squad ever tried a scam, they were all Lieutenant Smit’s men and, even more than the good musicians, were considered special, seldom having to go out with gangs and mostly getting guard duty on the day shift.

While no more than a quarter of the prisoners were Zulus, they held the highest status in the prison. Work songs were mostly composed in Zulu and it was always a Zulu who called the time and set the working pace. Zulu is a poetic language and while many songs are traditional, the ability to create spontaneous new lyrics to capture a recent incident or pass information on was almost always handled by a Zulu prisoner whose gift for poetry was greatly respected.

Even among the old lags this method of passing on information was used. When a warder spoke an African language in this part of the world it was seldom Zulu, more likely to be Shona, Shangaan or Swazi and even these would only be spoken by warders who came from farms. Townsfolk do not learn an indigenous African language other than Afrikaans and sometimes a language developed for use in the mines, known as Fanagalo, which is a mixture of several African languages as well as Afrikaans and English.

I asked Geel Piet why the word ‘Angel’ was prefaced with the word ‘Tadpole’. At first he seemed not to know, or at least pretended not to, but I understood enough of Zulu naming to know that nothing is accidental and a name is chosen carefully so that it is a good description of status or of some characteristic which unmistakably belongs to the recipient.

For instance, Klipkop did not know that his nickname was ‘Donkey Prick’. This came about from his habit of using a long rubber truncheon which he used with the least excuse. Most warders used their fists on prisoners. Their logic for doing so was quite simple, punishment administered with the fist was unofficial or, as the warders called it, friendly persuasion, while the truncheon was used when reports needed to be made. Klipkop was the exception, as heavyweight champion of the lowveld he had to take good care of his hands, so he took to using the donkey prick for casual punishment. As he was also complaints officer it didn’t much matter. ‘A man like me can’t afford to break a pinkie or something on some stinking black bastard’s kop,’ he would explain defensively, for even outside the prison a man was expected to use his fists on a Kaffir, reserving the sjambok for serious misdemeanours.

I recall walking down a long winding passage in the interior of the prison administration building where half a dozen old lags could always be found on their knees, their kneecaps swathed in polish rags, as they shone an already immaculate corridor floor. Long before we even sighted them I could hear one of them sing out, ‘Work hard and keep your heads down, Donkey Prick is coming,’ and back would come the chorus, ‘Donkey Prick, Donkey Prick.’ As we passed, each prisoner would stop polishing briefly, and bringing his hands together in a gesture of humility would smile and say, ‘Good morning, baas, good morning, small baas.’

Knowing there was some reason for ‘Tadpole’ before ‘Angel’ I persisted in questioning Geel Piet about it. ‘It is like this, small baas. The professor is known as Amasele (the Frog), because he plays his peeano at night when the prison is quiet. To the Zulus the frog makes always the loudest music at night, much louder than the cricket or the owl. So it is simple, you see. You are the small boy of the frog, which makes you a Tadpole.’ It was a perfect piece of Zulu naming logic.