The Power of One

SIXTEEN

Mrs Boxall promised to talk to my mother about the new letter writing arrangements in the prison. These were to take place on a Sunday morning and I had some real doubts about being allowed to partake in them. Sundays were difficult for me, it was a day filled with taboos, beginning with Sunday school and church in the morning and ending with evening service, which consisted of a short message from Pastor Mulvery and then ‘a precious time’, when the congregation witnessed for the Lord. I wasn’t allowed to do anything except the Lord’s work on a Sunday, but as I wasn’t a born-again Christian any of the Lord’s work I might do, like reading the Shangaan Bible to Dee and Dum, wasn’t creating any bricks for my mansion in the sky. Reading the Bible was regarded as the most superior type of work for the Lord. I was required to read three pages of the New Testament every day and ten pages on Sunday, and I did my compulsory Sunday reading during Pastor Mulvery’s Message from the Lord. You’d think if something was called a message from the Lord, it would be a proper message, such as you might give to a person. But Pastor Mulvery’s messages rambled all over the place threading bits of the scripture together and frequently leading to wildly unusual conclusions which tended to prove Pastor Mulvery was right while all the gospel scholars since St Paul were wrong. He would call the Catholic Church the ‘Catlicks’ and they were his special target. He would go to endless trouble to demonstrate that the Catlicks had perverted the Word of God. He would point out that the Latin scholars who had translated the St James version into English from an original Catlick translation had not understood the original Greek translation of the original Hebrew. As Pastor Mulvery knew no Latin and no Greek and certainly no Hebrew and never gave examples of the corrupted Words of God in Latin or Greek so that I could at least check his accuracy with Doc, he was able to build some pretty impressive arguments against the perfidy of the Catholic Church. I can tell you one thing, you wouldn’t have wanted to be a Catlick on a Sunday evening service with Pastor Mulvery delivering one of his messages.

Because reading the Bible on Sunday didn’t count for my heavenly brick account, I was expected to find other kinds of good deed stuff. Each Sunday evening my mother would question me closely about this. Sometimes I really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for things to claim, like praying for Hitler. Which I hadn’t done of course, but it sounded good and was unusual enough to throw my mother off the scent.

In fact praying for Hitler created a real crisis at that evening’s debate. Marie, who was always there for supper on Sundays, said praying for Hitler wasn’t valid coming from me, as it was a case of one sinner praying for another. My mother then debated with her as to whether a sinner praying for a sinner was an okay idea. My granpa said he thought it was time he was excused from the table so that he could go to his room and pray for fewer debates of this sort. My mother then said, as it was Sunday, she was not going to tell him how rude and hurtful his remark had been.

So getting to the prison for two hours every Sunday to take dictation wasn’t simply a question of Mrs Boxall asking my mother. A great deal of toing and froing to the Lord would have to take place and my fear was that the Lord was going to be hard put to see that taking dictation from a bunch of criminals was the very best possible use of my indentured Sabbath.

My fears proved to be correct and the scheme had to be delayed a month while my mother and the Lord came to grips with the small print. A major investigation such as this one would begin by looking for a precedent in the Bible. In this regard I scored a direct hit when I pointed out that St Paul, in his Epistles, had written from prison in Rome. This was just the sort of material my mother liked to take with her when she had a chat with the Lord and so I expected an early reply from Him. My granpa said later that my St Paul research was a stroke of genius. But, it turned out, the Lord wasn’t all that satisfied because Paul was a born-again Christian, personally converted on the road to Damascus, and he was in prison under an unjust Roman regime. The prisoners in Barberton prison were criminals being punished by a just regime. The point here was that Paul was doing the Lord’s work while I was potentially aiding the devil writing letters from hardened criminals, bound to be up to no good, spreading a network of subterfuge and intrigue throughout South Africa.

To my wife, Umbela,

I send you greetings in my shame. Who is putting food in the mouth of our children? It is hard in this place, but one day I will come to you again. The work is hard but I am strong, I will live to see you again.

Your husband

Mfulu

I wasn’t able to tell my mother how innocent the letters really were because she didn’t know about the previous letters or the tobacco, sugar and salt. So for the next week I read the New Testament like mad. There had to be something in there to help me. Pastor Mulvery was always taking bits and pieces of disconnected scripture and putting them together to mean just about anything; surely I could do the same.

I took the problem to Doc but for once he wasn’t much help. He pointed out according to the great German Lutheran scholars the prison writings of St Paul probably took place about AD 63. Which was nice to know, but no help whatsoever.

Doc’s mind was far too logical for this kind of thing so I took the problem to my granpa who, after my telling opening move with St Paul, seemed anxious to see that the debate was conducted fairly. We sat on the steps of one of the rose terraces, my granpa tapping and tamping and lighting and staring squinty-eyed through the blue tobacco smoke over the rusty roof into the pale blue beyond. After a long time he said, ‘All I know about the Bible is that wherever it goes there’s trouble. The only time I ever heard of it being useful was when a stretcher bearer I was with at the battle of Dundee told me that he’d once gotten hit by a Mauser bullet in the heart, only he was carrying a Bible in his tunic pocket and the Bible saved his life. He told me that ever since he’d always carried a Bible into battle with him and he felt perfectly safe because God was in his breast pocket. We were out looking for a sergeant of the Worcesters and three troopers who were wounded while out on a reconnaissance and were said to be holed up in a dry donga. In truth I think my partner felt perfectly safe because the Boer Mausers were estimated by the British artillery to be accurate to 800 yards and we were at least 1,200 yards from enemy lines. Alas, nobody bothered to tell the Boers about the shortcomings of their brand new German rifle and a Mauser bullet hit him straight between the eyes.’ He puffed at his pipe. ‘Which goes to prove, you can always depend on British army information not to be accurate, the Boers to be deadly accurate, the Bible to be good for matters of the heart but hopeless for those of the head and, finally, that God is in nobody’s pocket.’ He seemed very pleased with this neat summary which nevertheless wasn’t a scrap of help to me.

However, on Sunday night three weeks after Mrs Boxall had first approached my mother, my granpa elected to play a part in the supper debate. My mother opened by saying the Lord was ‘sorely troubled’ over the whole issue which had ‘weighed heavily upon her’. She liked to use words like ‘sorely troubled’ and ‘weighed heavily’ in her debates and I knew they impressed the pants off Marie.

Marie’s cousin had lost her husband in a shooting accident leaving her with a small child. My mother had comforted Marie by saying that she would ask the Lord to ‘bind up the wounds of her heart and pour in the balm of His comfort. That He would be Husband to the widow and Father to the orphan.’ Marie sniffed a bit and said they were the most beautiful words she had ever heard.

My granpa cleared his throat. ‘Were there not a couple of chaps who were crucified on either side of Christ, thorough scallywags as I recall?’

‘The Word refers to them as thieves who were crucified beside the Lord, though I don’t see that they have anything whatsoever to do with the matter,’ my mother replied, her irritation thinly disguised. ‘I do not recall it saying in the Bible that they wrote home from jail.’ I knew that my granpa’s opinions on biblical matters, coming as they did from a sinner who had steadfastly refused to accept Christ into his life, were not very highly regarded.

‘I seem to remember that Christ forgave one of them, promising him a berth in heaven right there on the spot. Or am I mistaken?’

‘Goodness! The Lord does not promise people “berths” in heaven,’ my mother said sharply. ‘“Verily I say unto you, today shalt thou be with me in paradise”, is what the Lord said.’

‘It seems to me, from that remark, that Christ has no objections to convicted felons entering the kingdom of God,’ he declared.

‘Of course he doesn’t! That’s the whole point. Jesus was sent to save the most miserable sinners amongst us. His compassion is for all of us, His love everlasting and His understanding infinite. Seek His forgiveness and you’re saved. You’re no longer a murderer or a thief, you’re one of the Lord’s precious redeemed. The thief on the cross beside Him was saved when he confessed his sins, he was washed by the blood of the Lamb.’

‘Hallelujah, praise his precious name,’ Marie offered absently.

‘And the prisoners here in Barberton. Like him, could they also be saved?’

‘You know as well as I do they could,’ my mother said primly.

‘How?’

‘By accepting Christ into their lives, by renouncing the devil and…’ my mother stopped and looked straight at my granpa. ‘You know very well how.’

‘Oh I see. You are going to make it possible?’

‘Well, no. The Anglicans and the Dutch Reformed have got the prison ministry and they do absolutely nothing. It’s iniquitous. We’ve prayed a great deal about this, prayed that the Lord would make it possible for the Assembly of God missionaries to have the prison concession so that they can spread his precious word and bring the gospel to those poor unfortunate sinners.’

‘Has it not occurred to you that the Lord may have answered your prayers?’ my granpa asked.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Well, if the lad has direct access to the prisoners, could he not distribute tracts and that sort of thing?’

It was a master stroke. In return for being allowed to take dictation on Sunday at the prison, I was required to take gospel tracts in Sotho and Zulu from the Assembly of God missionaries and give one to each prisoner after he had dictated his letter to me. My mother and Marie had scored another major triumph, first the hospital and now the prison; they were earning recognition as a couple of hardcore fighters in the Lord’s army. What’s more, my time on a Sunday was counted as first-class work for the Lord.

I don’t exactly know how it happened but I did it just the once, then it suddenly got done all the time. One of the prisoners had said that tobacco was sorely missed, and the next week I cut a piece of tobacco leaf exactly the same size as a tract and slipped it inside one. The next thing I knew Dee and Dum were slipping these neatly cut squares of tobacco leaf into every tract, and I would take a whole bunch with me and sort them into their four African languages and put the various piles in the drawer of the desk at which I sat, leaving an ‘innocent’ pile of Sotho tracts in front of me on the desk. After one of the people had dictated his letter to me I would hand him a tract from the drawer. This was Doc’s idea and on two occasions the warder who attended the letter writing sessions absently picked up a tract, looked at it in a cursory manner and then returned it to the pile on the desk.

Letter writing suddenly became very popular and those of the people who didn’t have anyone to write to would ask me to write to King Georgie. When I asked them what they wanted to say to the King of England it was almost always the same thing.

Dear King Georgie,

The people are happy because you are our great king. I send greetings to the great warrior across the water.

Daniel Mafutu

After a while a letter to King George was simply a euphemism for a tract. One tract and contents made two cigarettes and were an unimagined luxury. Not only had the Tadpole Angel contrived to continue the supply of tobacco into the prison, but the people no longer had to pay for it and it came together with paper to roll it in. For a generation afterwards, cigarettes in South African prisons were known as ‘King Georgies’ and some old lags still use this expression today. And of course the mystique which surrounded the Tadpole Angel continued to grow; nothing, it seemed, was impossible for him. More importantly for the Kommandant, the letter writing experiment proved to be a huge success and before the summer was over he had been made a full colonel and also received a commendation from Pretoria for his work in prison reform. The Assembly of God missionaries kept up the supply of tracts and even had them translated into Swazi and Shangaan. When I told Doc that King Georgies now came in Swazi and Shangaan he smiled and said, ‘God’s ways are mysterious, Peekay. I think because the people cannot read they now send smoke signals up to God.’

It was not long after Geel Piet’s death when Lieutenant Borman started to complain of piles. ‘Now I’m in administration I sit too much,’ he’d say to any person who’d listen. ‘I can’t eat steak, it hurts too much passing through, man, there’s even blood in my shit.’ It was true he seemed to be losing weight and Captain Smit advised him to see a doctor. ‘It’s only piles, my old man was a train driver, he had the same thing.’ His wife sewed a special cushion for him which he brought to work and sometimes he’d walk around carrying the cushion in case he suddenly had to sit somewhere.

‘It’s God’s justice,’ Gert confided to me, ‘Geel Piet wasn’t the only one he’s used the donkey prick on.’ He giggled, ‘I hope the bugger can’t sit for six months!’

No one said anything but you could see it in their eyes, those of us who had been in the gym that night all knew Borman was under a curse.

Geel Piet had once told me how prisoners could think so hard that, collectively, they could make things happen. Like when they knew I had beaten Killer Kroon hours before anyone brought the official news of my win. How they always knew when there was to be a hanging minutes after a judge had issued the warrant, sometimes hundreds of miles from the location of the prison where the hanging was to take place.

‘Ja, it is true, small boss, I have seen it heppen lots of times,’ Geel Piet had said gravely. ‘Sometimes, when there is enough hate, this thinking can kill. The people will think some person to death. Such a death is always long and hard, because the thinking takes place over a long time. It is the hate; when it boils up there is no stopping it, the person will die because there is no muti you can take to stop this hating thing.’

Anyone who is born in rural Africa is superstitious and the warders, who were mostly backwoodsmen, were particularly so. We all watched Borman as he started to shrink. His extended gut remained, but everywhere else the flesh started to fall off him. He seemed to age in front of our eyes and the thinner he became the more vicious he was with the prisoners.

Another prisoner died mysteriously and after a short enquiry Borman was put on a charge and suspended from duty pending the enquiry. Shortly afterwards he experienced a severe rectal haemorrhage and was rushed to Barberton hospital where the surgeon, in an attempt to stop the bleeding caused by a rupture to the wall of the bowel, packed his rectum with giant cotton swabs – a procedure known to be about as excruciatingly painful as it is possible to experience. The doctor’s cursory examination revealed the presence of a fungating growth.

Within weeks of leaving prison Doc was fit enough again to head for the hills and we would climb away from the town at first light every Saturday morning. We’d breakfast on hard boiled eggs and yesterday’s bread with a thermos of sweet, milky coffee high up on a ridge somewhere or beside a stream. Sometimes we’d make for Lamati Falls, a smallish waterfall ten miles into the hills and we’d wait for the morning sun to whiten the water where it crashed into a deep pool which stayed icy cold throughout the year. Doc was like a small boy, the years seemed to fall away from him as we scampered up the sides of mountains or slid down into deep tropical kloofs, where giant tree ferns and the canopy of yellow-wood turned the brilliant sunlight into twilight and where the soil was moist and smelt both of decay and new life at the same time.

Doc was busy taking the photographs for his new book and sometimes we’d hunt all day for a single perfect specimen. It was good to be working with Doc again. He was an exacting task master who, when we found a specimen to his liking, demanded to know the soil types and the shales, the rocks and the other botanical plants which grew within a radius of fifty feet, the direction of the wind and the hours of sunlight the cactus or aloe he was photographing would receive. Some days we’d communicate all day in Latin and in this way Doc gentled me into Ovid, Cicero, Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and Virgil. Mrs Boxall countered this with the English poets. Wordsworth, Masefield and Keats were her favourites, with Byron, Tennyson and Walter de la Mare, if not her favourites, a matter of essential education for a gentleman. I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but that personally he found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry into music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.

It was a lopsided sort of a catch-as-catch-can education, added to by Miss Bornstein who had been busy preparing me for a scholarship to a posh private school in Johannesburg. An education well beyond my mother’s income as a dressmaker. I was not yet twelve, the minimum required age for entry into a secondary school, and I had languished in standard six for three years during which Miss Bornstein had privately educated me in ‘all those things there’s never time to learn at school’.

A month before my twelfth birthday I sat for the scholarship exam to the Prince of Wales School, and at the end of the term to my absolute mortification Mr Davis, the headmaster of Barberton school, announced that I had received the highest scholarship marks this school had ever given. That I would be starting as a boarder at the commencement of the first term in 1946. Doc, Mrs Boxall and Miss Bornstein had trained me well, if sometimes a little erratically. I was to find at the Prince of Wales School my knowledge in some things exceeded that of the senior forms and even the masters themselves, while in others I was no better than the brighter chaps in my form. But above all things I had been taught to read for pleasure and for meaning, as both Doc and Mrs Boxall demanded that I exercise my critical faculties in everything I did. At twelve I had already known how to think for at least four years. In teaching me independence of thought they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child, besides love, and they had given me that also.

And so the last summer of my childhood came to an end. I also sat for the Royal College of Music Advanced Exams and passed, although my marks weren’t spectacular. I think this was as much as Doc expected from me. He knew I had no special gift for music and what I achieved had been simply out of love for him. For his part he had fulfilled his contract with my mother, for whom my passing the exam was confirmation of my genius. In my mother’s mind I had become the logical successor to the young Artur Rubinstein, and it was one of the major disappointments in her life that at boarding school I would elect to play in the jazz band. Jazz was the devil’s music and another indication to her that I had hardened my heart against the Lord.

Before Geel Piet died he had been teaching me how to put an eight-punch combination together. I worked solidly all summer on this combination and at the championships held in Boksburg I retained the under twelve title, though this time without effort, even stopping a bigger kid in the second round on a TKO. Killer Kroon had not entered the championship even though he would have been in the division above.

Everyone, even Doc, seemed pleased that I had won a scholarship to the Prince of Wales School in Johannesburg, though I think he was trying very hard to be brave about the break-up in our partnership. Writing for the Goldfields News, Mrs Boxall really went to town in her column, ‘Clippings from a Cultured Garden’, writing about the town’s budding intellect and its finest flower which turned out to be me. News of my pass in the Royal College of Music exams had me declared a blossoming musician. In the Afrikaans section of the paper my name appeared as the winner of the Eastern Transvaal under twelve boxing title. My mother declared, ‘Our cup runneth over!’ but if I would accept the Lord into my heart her joy would be a hundredfold what she was feeling now. But I could see she was pleased, especially when she started to receive invitations to tea from the town’s most important families and her dressmaking business picked up so much that she only had time to accept the juiciest invitations.

I kept my apprehension about returning to boarding school to myself; it seemed I would once again be the youngest kid in the school, though this aspect anyway now left me unconcerned. If they had a Judge at the Prince of Wales School, all I could say was he’d better be able to box. In fact, the only question I asked about the school was about boxing. The reply came back that boxing was a school sport and the boxers were under the instruction of Mr Darby White, ex-cruiserweight champion of the British Army.

The final crisis of that last summer of childhood came when the clothing list arrived from the Prince of Wales School. As she read it the tears started to roll down my mother’s cheeks. Marie was there on her afternoon off from the hospital so it must have been a Wednesday. My mother read the list aloud. ‘Six white shirts with detachable starched collars, long sleeve. Three pairs of long grey flannel trousers (see swatch attached). Six pairs grey school socks, long. One school blazer (see melton sample attached), school blazers or blazer pocket badge and school ties obtainable from John Orrs, 129 Eloff St, Johannesburg. One grey V-neck jersey, long sleeves. Shoes, with school uniform, brown. Shoes, Sunday, black. Blue serge Sunday suit, long trousers.’

‘We don’t have the money, we simply don’t have the money,’ she kept repeating.

‘Ag man, jong, where’s your faith?’ Marie said indignantly, not impressed by my mother’s tears. ‘The Lord will supply everything, just you see. We going to pray right now, go down on our knees and give the precious Lord Jesus Peekay’s order. C’mon let’s do it now!’

My granpa rose from the table and excused himself but I was obliged to kneel with Marie and my mother. Marie must have reasoned that, as a heathen, my prayers wouldn’t have too much impact, because she took the clothing list from my mother and handed it to me. ‘We going to pray out loud to the Lord, it’s always best when you need something bad to pray out loud. When I tell you, you read out the list, okay?’

I nodded, grateful that I wouldn’t have to pray out loud.

‘Precious Lord Jesus, we got a real problem this time,’ Marie began.

‘Praise the Lord, praise His precious name,’ my mother said.

‘You know how clever Peekay is and how he has won a thing to go to a posh school in Johannesburg for nothing.’

‘Precious Saviour, hear thy humble servants,’ my mother said, attempting to bring a bit of tone into the whole affair.

‘Well we got lots of trouble, man, I mean Lord,’ Marie continued, ‘the clothing list arrived today and it broke our hearts.’

‘Precious Jesus! Blood of the Lamb!’

‘The cupboard is bare, there are no clothes for school hanging up in it. What we need, Lord Jesus, Peekay is going to say right now, so please listen good and you talk up, Peekay, so the Lord can hear, you hear? He’s going to tell you now, Lord,’ Marie prayed, cueing me in.

I must say I’d never been quite as close as this to the Lord before and I was quite nervous. ‘Ah er… six white shirts with detachable starched collars, long sleeve,’ I read. ‘Three pairs of grey flannel trousers (see swatch attached).’

‘Show him the swatch, man,’ Marie whispered urgently. I didn’t know quite what to do so I held the swatch of grey flannel up to the ceiling. After a few moments, when I reasoned the Lord had had a good enough look, I continued, ‘Six pairs of grey school woollen socks, long.’

‘Only three pairs, man! What about the three pairs you already got for school here?’ Marie said in a stage whisper.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Only three pairs, please.’ My mother had stopped punctuating Marie’s remarks and I looked at her. At first I thought she was crying, her face was all squished up and she was holding her hand across her mouth. Then I realised that she was desperately trying not to laugh. I started to giggle.

Without opening her eyes Marie admonished me. ‘Peekay, stop it! God will punish you! It’s hard enough asking the Lord for you, you are not even being born again an’ all that! But if you laugh we got no chance.’ Her voice became conciliatory. ‘Sorry, Lord, he didn’t mean it, you got my word for it, it won’t happen again. Go on, start reading again, the Lord hasn’t got all day you know!’

I went on reading the list and also showed the Lord the swatch of green melton blazer cloth. When I got to the bit about school badges being obtainable from John Orrs, 129 Eloff Street, Johannesburg, Marie whispered again.

‘You don’t need to give Him the address, He knows where it is.’ I finally got to the blue serge suit. ‘That’s his Sunday suit for going to church, Lord,’ she said, to remind the Lord that I was still within his grasp every Sunday. My mother threw in a few more ‘Praise the Lord, praise His precious name’s and the request for the contents of my clothing list was over: the rest was now up to the Precious Redeemer.

Marie’s eyes blazed with faith and I could see she was pretty pleased with the way she had asserted herself. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that the Lord would provide. My mother also seemed considerably cheered up and called for Dum to make tea. I must confess, not being a Christian, I didn’t share their confidence. There seemed to me to be a whole heap of clothes in that list and all I had was three pairs of grey socks, two pairs of gym pants and the tackies. These latter items had appeared in a separate list titled ‘Sport and Recreation’, which included two rugby jerseys, house and school colours, rugby socks, rugby boots, white cricket shirt and shorts form one and two, cricket longs form three onwards. The optional section on this list included cricket boots and white cricket sweater with school colours. It seemed an amazing collection of clothes for one person.

I mentioned the clothing crisis to Doc. Not that he could have helped. Doc, at best, lived hand to mouth with just enough over for an occasional book and film for his Leica camera. But he mentioned it to Mrs Boxall and Mrs Boxall mentioned it to Miss Bornstein and the two women went into action.

Miss Bornstein called me over at the end of class and asked me to copy out the clothing list. I did so and handed it over to her. She read it for a moment. ‘What about these swatches, can you get the grey and the green swatch, Peekay? Even if you cut off a little, it’s absolutely necessary for me to have them.’ I promised to get hold of the swatches somehow, feeling pleased that the matter of my school clothes wasn’t singularly in the Lord’s hands any longer.

‘We don’t have very much money,’ I said, for the first time in my life realising that money was important. I knew we were poor but it hadn’t seemed to matter much. I’d had the occasional penny to spend on nigger balls, large black and extraordinarily hard balls that sucked down into layer after layer of different colours and which would last a good two hours in the mouth. My friends were generous with their sweets so I’d never really felt poor or needed money. I always somehow managed to save up four shillings for Christmas and old Mr McClymont at the drapery shop would give me four ladies’ hankies and a man’s one as well as a bandanna for Doc. The ladies’ hankies would go to my mother, Mrs Boxall and Dee and Dum while the man’s was for my granpa. They always looked surprised when they got them, but I don’t suppose they were. The only alternative to a handkerchief was a cake of Knights Castile soap and I couldn’t see the value in something that wore out after a few baths. When they went to clean Doc’s cottage on a Sunday Dee and Dum spread their hankies carefully over the top of their heads in the African fashion, they could never understand why white people would blow the stuff from their noses into such a pretty piece of cloth. Sunday at Doc’s cottage was their big outing and they liked to look pretty. When they got there they removed the hankies of course, but they never once used them for blowing into. I think they liked their hankies better than anyone, although I know Doc liked his bandanna which was always a red one.

‘There are lots of ways to skin a cat,’ Miss Bornstein said. ‘This town isn’t going to let its enfant terrible go to boarding school looking like a ragamuffin.’

Between Miss Bornstein and Mrs Boxall the cloth for my trousers and blazer and blue serge suit just appeared, although I expect old Mr McClymont had a hand in it somewhere. Then Miss Bornstein sprung her surprise. Old Mr Bornstein, who had become Doc’s formidable opponent at chess, had been a tailor in Germany. He would cut the cloth and do the hand work if my mother would do the machine work. The suit was easy because ‘a suit is a suit, already’ but we needed a blazer to make sure that mine was cut and tailored in the same way as those purchased from John Orrs, 129 Eloff St, Johannesburg. Miss Bornstein said children tend to pick on you if you’re different and it was important to get everything just right. Mrs Andrews had sent two of her sons to the Prince of Wales School and she still had a school blazer which she gave to Mrs Boxall. Old Mr Bornstein took it apart to see how it was made and did a whole lot of tut-tutting about the poor workmanship. He then cut the blazer to my size and as the badge, which was three ostrich feathers sticking out of a crown, was almost new he cut it carefully around the edges and sewed it onto my new blazer so well that you would have needed a magnifying glass to see where he’d done it. Mrs Boxall sent to Johannesburg for two red, white and green striped school ties which were her special present. All my shirts were cut from a pair of cotton poplin sheets Miss Bornstein said her mother had never used. Old Mr Bornstein knew just how to make the collars so that the starch collars donated by old Mr McClymont fitted perfectly. Marie and her mother knitted me three pairs of socks for Christmas. Only the brown and black shoes remained, and at the prison Christmas party for all the warders Captain Smit handed me a large parcel from the boxing squad. Inside were a pair of new brown shoes and a pair of black ones and a brand new pair of boxing boots. ‘Magtig, Peekay, we are all proud of you going to that posh Rooinek school in Johannesburg, just don’t get all high and mighty on us all of a sudden when you get back, heh.’ Everyone laughed and cheered and I felt the sorrow of leaving people I loved. Even old Snotnose had become a good friend over the years and I would miss them all a lot. The Kommandant stood up and recounted the first day he’d met me and said that I had proved that English and Afrikaner were one people, South Africans. That perhaps with my generation the bitterness would pass. He said I was a leader of men and that even the prisoners respected me for my letter writing. There was some more clapping and, shaking at the knees, I thanked them all. I can’t remember what I said but I promised I would never forget them and I never have.

Only one more incident is worth recording in that long, last summer of childhood. My mother and Marie had already testified to the congregation about the Lord’s miraculous answer to their prayers. Only the requested V-neck long sleeve mid-grey jersey was missing from my kit, but as it was summer in Johannesburg, my mother knew that the Lord would provide in time for winter. Which He did. Four knitted jerseys were pushed into her hands by separate dear, sweet, Christian ladies less than a fortnight later.

On the same night my mother and Marie also testified that the Lord had once again blessed their work in the hospital. For several weeks they had worked for the salvation of a dear man who was dying of cancer of the rectum – a man still in the prime of his life, struck down by this terrible disease. They told how they had testified to him and had seen him wrestle with the devil, how they had wept for him and pleaded with him to take the Lord Jesus into his heart and how finally, after a massive rectal haemorrhage and with the hours running out, Lieutenant Borman had surrendered his life to the Lord Jesus and had gone to meet His Saviour in paradise.

Lieutenant Borman died knowing what it felt like to have a donkey prick jammed up your arse until your entrails spill out.