The Power of One

SEVENTEEN

It wasn’t until I went to boarding school the second time that I learned that survival is a matter of actively making the system work for you rather than attempting merely to survive it.

My partner from the very first day at school was Hymie Levy. Hymie was Jewish of course, which was a very rare occurrence at the Prince of Wales School.

I was wrestling my heavy suitcase off the train at Johannesburg Central Railway Station when he walked towards me.

‘Hey you, stop! If you want to build muscles take a Charles Atlas course.’ He signalled for the black porter to take my suitcase. ‘Howzit? I’m the token Jew. Who are you?’

‘Thanks, my name’s Peekay,’ I said, proffering my hand.

He took it almost absently. ‘Hymie… Hymie Levy, what’s your first name, Peekay?’

‘It’s just Peekay, first and second,’ I replied.

Hymie stopped in his tracks. ‘Just one name, you’re not bullshitting me now are you?’

‘Ja, that’s right, just one.’

Hymie seemed to be thinking as we continued together down the platform. ‘I like that, no complications. Me, I’ve got the whole catastrophe, Hymie, Solomon, Levy, you can’t get more kosher than that, kings and priests, not bad insurance for a kid whose parents escaped the Holocaust by pretending they were Roman Catholics.’

I had no idea what he was talking about but he seemed a nice sort of chap. All the Jews I’d ever known were pretty nice. Harry Crown and old Mr Bornstein and of course Miss Bornstein. It seemed a pleasant coincidence that the first kid I should meet from the Prince of Wales School was a Jew.

We were supposed to meet the school sergeant at the station and I was glad to have someone who was so obviously confident along with me. We heard him before we actually saw him. ‘Prince of Wales new boys over here! Ahaaat the double!’

‘Christ, Peekay, look at that!’ Hymie said pointing to a large man wearing a scarlet tunic. Despite ourselves we straightened up a bit and Hymie ran a comb through his dark, brylcreemed hair which was swept up in the pompadour style of the time and ended in a ducktail at the back.

As we drew nearer we could see four other kids who had formed a line in front of the big man who stood to rigid attention, his pace stick clasped under his armpit. The top half of his face was hidden from view under the shiny black peak of a red-banded guardsmans’ cap. The only thing that protruded from under the peak was a large waxed moustache. On the right sleeve of his military tunic were three gold sergeant’s stripes above which sat a brass crown. His trousers were of black serge with a red stripe running down the sides of each leg leading directly to a pair of highly polished black boots which appeared to be rooted to the platform. A white shirt with celluloid collar and black tie completed his uniform.

Hymie tipped the porter who added our suitcases to a pile already stacked on the platform and we joined the four other boys to stand, more or less at attention, in front of the school sergeant.

I was tired and except for cleaning my teeth and splashing the gritty feel of the train journey from my face I hadn’t washed since the morning of the previous day. The Barberton train had left at four o’clock that afternoon, its single school carriage pulled by the coffee pot to Kaapmuiden, where it was shunted onto the school train which would travel through the night to Pretoria and Johannesburg. Several other Barberton boys and girls went to school in Pretoria, while one boy wore the navy blue blazer of St Johns College and another the black and white stripes of Jeepe High, both Johannesburg schools. I was the only one going to the Prince of Wales and, I must say, I had felt constrained and thoroughly out of place in long pants, starched collar, blazer, tie and a strange straw hat called a boater.

It was a big send-off, much bigger than anyone had expected. Of course my mother, Granpa, Marie and Dee and Dum were there, also Doc and Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein and old Mr Bornstein and all the kids from the boxing squad, who clapped and howled and whistled when they saw me in my uniform. Snotnose and Bokkie pretended to fall on the ground they were laughing so much, in particular at my straw boater. Gert finally had to tell them to behave, but I could see he also thought I looked pretty funny in my fancy Rooinek school clothes. But the really big surprise came when a prison truck arrived and from it climbed the prison brass band. They set up their stands in the middle of the platform and commenced to play.

‘It’s the Kommandant’s idea, Peekay,’ Captain Smit said. ‘He wanted to give you a big send-off. You know, man, he is very proud of you.’ He paused for a moment, ‘So am I, I got money on it, you going to be the welterweight champion of the world one day. Don’t let that Rooinek school change that, you hear?’ He gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘You’re a proper Boer, little boetie, we all counting a lot on you.’

At last the guard blew his all-aboard whistle and I said goodbye to everyone and climbed into the carriage. Dee and Dum and Marie were all having a bit of a sniffle and my mother would have too if she hadn’t thought she ought to set an example for Marie. Doc was burying his nose in his red bandanna and pushing it all over the place. When the guard blew his final whistle and the band struck up with ‘Now is the hour for us to say goodbye’ nearly everyone started to blub and I was pretty choked up myself.

I recalled how I had last boarded a train to leave a part of my life behind me, how I had fallen over with my clown tackies stuffed with newspaper, and how Hoppie Groenewald had dusted me down and lifted me up the steps, explaining how he too was always falling down the stupid things. ‘No worries, little boetie, Hoppie Groenewald will look after you.’

Now here I was, dressed in a starched collar, hand-tailored blazer, long pants and highly polished shoes. Gert had shown me how to polish boots prison-style until you could see your face in them. The coffee pot’s chuffa-chuff-chuffing drowned the band, and then the farewell party soon grew so small I could hardly make out Dee and Dum still waving. I looked up to see the hills and in particular the hill behind the rose garden where I had met Doc the day I had gone to grieve for the loss of Nanny. I was once again alone in a railway compartment headed for a new adventure.

After the train left Kaapmuiden I lay awake for a long time in the top bunk of my compartment listening to the wheels saying ‘First-with-the-head-and-then-with-the-heart. First-with-the-head-and-then-with-the-heart.’ It was as though Hoppie was coming to me on this second train ride into manhood. The night rushed past the window, black light broken only occasionally by a pinpoint as we roared past a cooking fire in an African village.

Every once in a while the train would whistle at something in the dark and I knew the sound would carry for miles across the veld. ‘First-with-the-head-and-then-with-the-heart. First-with-the-head-and-then-with-the-heart.’ The hectic lickity-clack finally put me to sleep.

Now we were standing in front of this huge old soldier who looked like a recruiting poster for the Great War. With his pacing stick still held under his arm he removed a small spiral-bound note pad from the top lefthand pocket of his tunic and flicked it open. Pulling his head back and squinting down his nose, he looked at each of us in turn. I wondered why he didn’t simply lift the peak of his cap so that he could see properly.

‘Righto then, my name is Bolter, Mr Bolter to Mrs Bolter if there was a Mrs Bolter which there ain’t, thank Gawd! Sarge to you lot. Answer your names as I call them out!’ He shouted this information at us as though he were addressing the entire length of the platform. I could see that the five guys around me were just as scared as I was. He glanced down at the pad in his hand. ‘De la Cour!’ A pale looking kid with curly blond hair stuck his hand up in the air. ‘Not your hand, lad! You only raise your hand when you want a pee! Present Sarge! Or just, Sarge!’

‘Present, Sarge,’ de la Cour said softly.

‘Look lively now, lad. Put some Marmite into it!’ He glanced briefly at his note pad. ‘Atherton!’

‘Present, sir!’ the kid next to me shouted so that we all jumped.

‘Don’t call me sir!’

‘Present, Sarge,’ the blond boy with pale blue eyes said, this time more quietly.

‘Atherton? You have a brother at school, in forty-three?’

‘My cousin, sir,’ Atherton replied.

‘Sarge! When I want to be a gentleman I’ll bloody well tell you. It’s obvious, Atherton, all the brains in your family went to your cousin.’

‘Yes, Sarge,’ Atherton said, his face a deep beetroot.

‘Best fly-half in the school’s history, got his colours in form four, let’s hope you follow in his footsteps, Mr Atherton. If you do I shall forgive you this one indiscretion. Now look sharp, lad.’

Sergeant Major Bolter consulted the tiny notepad once again. ‘Peekay!’

‘Present, Sarge!’

‘Peekay? No initial, just Peekay? What sort of a name is that, pray tell?’

‘It’s what I’ve almost always been called, Sarge.’

‘Well I’m afraid that won’t do, it’s not Christian, lad. A gentleman always has two names at the very least. That is if he isn’t a lord. You’re not a lord or a duke, are you?’

‘No, Sarge. It’s just my name. Miss Bornstein wrote to the school and explained.’

Sergeant Major Bolter sighed deeply and bowed slightly towards me with a pretend smile on his face. ‘Oh she did, did she now? Well that’s settled then, isn’t it? I mean if Miss Bornstein asked, we can’t quibble over a small matter like a gentleman’s Christian name and surname being one and the same, can we?

‘I’m not a gentleman either, Sarge,’ I said, my voice trembling slightly. I knew I was in trouble but I thought it might be best to clear up any misconceptions in one hit. The kids around me giggled with the exception of Hymie who gave me a light nudge with his elbow.

The sergeant major’s moustaches seemed visibly to bristle as he drew himself up to his full height. ‘I’m the only one around here who’s allowed not to be a gentleman, lad,’ he announced, as though the subject was closed to further discussion.

‘Ryder!’ A boy with dark hair and piercing blue eyes jumped to a sort of attention.

‘Present, Sarge! It’s Cunningham-Ryder, Sarge, with a hyphen.’

Sarge looked at him and gave a meaningful sigh. ‘And, Mr Cunningham-Ryder with an ’ifin, do we have a Christian name to go with our double-barrelled moniker?’

‘Yes, Sarge. George Andrew Sebastian, Sarge.’

‘Well, now, that’s more like it, ain’t it, lads? Cunningham-Ryder has three Christian names and two surnames and Peekay has none. What do you say to that?’ The relief I felt at being passed over was short-lived, the bastard was going to have another go.

Levy gave me a small dig with his elbow. ‘Perhaps Cunningham-Ryder can give Peekay one of his names, Sarge?’ he said. We all turned to look at him, stunned at his audacity.

‘What’s your name, lad?’ Sergeant Major Bolter asked softly, which did nothing to conceal the terrible menace in his voice.

‘Levy, Sarge. Hymie Levy, and I’m not a gentleman or a Christian. I’m a Jew. My dad had to pull all sorts of strings to get me in.’ He wore an ingenuous expression as he looked directly at the sergeant major.

We all fought back our laughter, but to our surprise Bolter didn’t explode. Turning to his notepad, he said, ‘Levy, here at the Prince of Wales School everyone is a Christian and a gentleman and that includes both you and Mr Peekay.’ He glanced up. ‘Johnson!’ We all looked over at a small freckle-faced boy with red hair who stood next to Levy with his mouth slightly open. ‘Johnson!’ Sarge repeated, raising his voice several decibels. The kid with the open mouth had to be Johnson, he was the only as yet unnamed one among us, but he remained silent, his terror-stricken gaze fixed on the large man. With a sort of stop-start jerky movement he raised his hand.

‘Do we want to do wee-wee, lad?’ I could see Sarge was growing impatient with us all.

‘No, sir,’ Johnson gulped the words out.

‘Do not call me sir, you piss-wit!’ Sergeant Major Bolter yelled and several people walking along the platform stopped to stare at him. And that’s how ‘Pissy’ Johnson came to get his nickname.

I was enormously impressed with Levy. I had never met a Jewish person my age or someone who couldn’t become a Christian even had he wanted to. I knew instantly I liked him. As it transpired Hymie Levy was to become my closest friend, while Paul Atherton, Pissy Johnson and ‘Cunning-Spider’, which is how Cunningham-Ryder was to become known, were the group with whom I mostly went around.

The school charabanc driven by Sarge had taken us through the sky-scrapered streets out through a place called Hillbrow where we followed a tram down into increasingly quieter suburbs. We left the tram at its terminal and drove into a leafy suburb named Houghton where the houses, set in perfectly manicured lawns and brilliant gardens, were bigger than any I had ever seen. The top of the charabanc brushed against the cool dark oak trees that lined the quiet streets. We passed an occasional nanny wheeling a baby carriage with large wheels that even sported springs. All the nannies wore identical black dresses with a starched white pinny and all the baby carriages seemed to have come from the same factory. I wasn’t much for symbols, my life had somehow contrived to be a mixture of people so that social status meant very little to me. Nevertheless I sensed that I was entering a new kind of world with a different set of rules.

We turned into a gateway, through a huge open gate with the crown and three ostrich feathers outlined in its wrought-iron design, and continued down a roadway bordered on each side by giant English oaks. On the way to Wellington House, one of the three boarders’ houses at the Prince of Wales School, we passed an emerald green cricket pitch with a rotating hose chit-chit-chittering a jet of water in a large circle around the pitch. On the far boundary, neatly enclosed by a white picket fence, stood a small white pavilion, behind it grew another row of giant oaks and beyond them rose several sets of rugby posts, still further yet the neo-gothic clock tower of the main school rose above the trees. It seemed the perfect place for a posh school but I was not at all sure that it was the perfect place for the future welterweight champion of the world.

Hymie Levy had seated himself beside me on the ride to school and had set about explaining his theory of survival. We were, he decided, odd-bods, he a Jew and me with only one name. Odd-bods, he asserted, were always singled out by plebeians, the worst kind of which were middle-class, Anglo-South African Protestants, who undoubtedly made up the remainder of the school. I wasn’t quite sure whether belonging to the Apostolic Faith Mission qualified me as a Protestant but I had to agree with him that my background was probably different from that of the other guys in the bus. From my previous bout of boarding school I had already learned that being different doesn’t pay off. This time I was determined to enter the school environment on my own terms. There wasn’t too much I was frightened of and I was fairly confident that I could compete intellectually. It was time to remove my camouflage, all my life I had let others provide for me and while I loved the people who had nurtured and built me intellectually, I felt that emotionally it was time to provide for myself. Everyone on the intellectual side of my life seemed to agree that an exclusive private school education was what I needed, while those on the physical side, mainly the boxing squad, were more than a little dubious about an elitist Rooinek school education. I had been torn between the two, never clearly deciding who I was, changing my camouflage to suit. I had accepted an education at an elitist boarding school while at the same time nurturing my ambition to become the welterweight champion of the world. It didn’t take too many brains to figure out that world champion boxers are not spawned within a system designed to educate upper middle-class Christian gentleman.

I placed less importance on my intelligence than on my prowess as a boxer. If the Prince of Wales School tried to disabuse me of my ambition to be the welterweight champion of the world, then the intellectual nourishment it might furnish as compensation would not be sufficient incentive for me to remain. But I wasn’t about to let this happen. No more camouflage for Peekay, I would simply be the best. I hadn’t discussed this with either Doc or Miss Bornstein. I was on my own again and I had to do my own thinking, so when Hymie started on about beating the system I knew immediately what he was on about.

He passed me a stick of Spearmint and commenced talking again. ‘Now my theory is that to beat any system you have to know it intimately. Rebellion is senseless and being pointedly different only leads to persecution, the only way to control any system is from inside it the way the Jews have always done.’

‘It didn’t seem to help them with Hitler,’ I said. I didn’t know much about the Jews in Nazi Germany but Miss Bornstein had told me a little and had added that Old Mr Bornstein actually felt guilty for escaping the Holocaust.

‘A-ha, that was different. Hitler’s Nazi party presented an impossible problem for the Jews of Germany. After all, you can’t undermine a system from within when you’re excluded from it in the first place, can you?’

Hymie’s point was not well made. I was to learn that he was obsessed with the Holocaust, that it sometimes clouded his otherwise excellent judgement. I could never quite understand why he possessed this obsession, his parents had escaped from Warsaw before the Jews were incarcerated in the ghetto or were even unduly persecuted. Hymie had never known any real racial prejudice, yet he had a strong sense of alienation as well as, it seemed to me at times, of guilt.

Doc had taught me well and I wasn’t about to let Hymie get away with a cheap shot like that.

‘Every system tends to be mutually exclusive, they’re all about keeping someone or something out, by keeping the Jews out of the Nazi party Hitler was acting typically. No system wants to be undermined or abused and therefore it is constantly on guard to exclude those who would destroy it. If, as you say, it is a common Jewish tactic to invade from within then this should have been possible even with the Nazi party. We have to conclude that the Jews failed to defeat Hitler, failed to defeat the system and as a consequence paid a terrible price. It wasn’t an exception at all.’

Hymie grinned. ‘Hey! You can think. I’m not used to that in a goy. Here, shake a paw.’

I allowed the compliment and shook his hand, although I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. ‘What’s a goy?’

‘A Christian, a gentile. Hey, can we be friends, I mean proper friends, Peekay?’

‘Sure,’ I said, not really meaning it.

‘You see, you’re different. I know that now. And I’m certainly different, I always have been, but being a Jew at a school like this makes me even more so. I reckon we’ll need each other.’

‘What for? You mean to beat the system?’

‘No, no, to use it. I’ve got a hunch we’ll be a terrific combo.’

I wasn’t sure he was right. I still had a problem. While I had all the physical and intellectual equipment needed to succeed within the system, I lacked one thing. Money. The only way I could succeed without money was by being a loner. Friendship with this particular tribe of Christian gentlemen required resources. You were expected to pay your way. The only other way was by ingratiation, but I was damned if that was ever going to happen to me again. Pisskop was still the dark shadow of Peekay, still alive in my mind; come what may, I would never again stoop to conquer.

Added to this was the fact that I was basically a loner. Other than Doc, and when I was small, Granpa Chook, I’d never been in the position of having a partner and I’d never really had a best friend who was my own age. Having an immediate friend in this strange new environment sounded nice, but it also made me feel vulnerable.

‘Have you honest and truly only got one name?’ Hymie asked suddenly.

‘Well sort of, you see I’ve only ever used one name. One name is me.’

‘They won’t let you get away with it you know, the system can’t handle things like that.’

‘It’s just going to have to,’ I replied, sounding a lot braver than I really was. I longed suddenly to ask Doc what he would advise under the circumstances, though I already knew the answer. He would simply have said that a man has the right to any name he wants to give himself; if a man is saddled with a name he didn’t choose, how can he possibly be free for the rest of his life? ‘We got to be who we got to be. Absoloodle!’ he’d conclude after we had carefully and fully discussed the matter. Doc was not a man to make compromises on important issues such as determining who a person really is in his own mind.

‘I bet you’re good at sport. Me, I’m rotten,’ Hymie said.

‘I’m okay.’

‘What’s your best sport,’ Hymie asked, humouring me, ‘rugby?’

‘No, I box.’

Hymie jerked back in his seat, plainly shocked. ‘You what?’

‘I’m a boxer.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. Why man, that’s positively Neanderthal.’

‘You could get badly hurt saying that to the wrong boxer,’ I grinned.

Hymie reeled back in mock terror, ‘Careful, man, in a court of law a boxer’s hands are considered lethal weapons.’ He was suddenly serious again. ‘I tell you what, I’m a gambler and you’re a boxer, that’s yet another reason why you and I have to stick together, Peekay.’

‘What do you gamble on?’ I asked.

Hymie sighed. ‘I’m a Jew. People expect Jews to be good with money. So what do Jews do? They oblige. My old man is filthy rich and he’ll give me all the money I need. But that’s the very problem, you see. I have to make my own, it’s an intellectual thing not a greedy thing. I’m not really a gambler, gamblers are stupid, making money is simply a way of keeping myself mentally fit, can you understand that?’

‘No.’

‘Are you rich, Peekay? I mean your parents?’

‘Hell no, I won a scholarship here. My mum’s a dressmaker.’

‘Well, that’s why you don’t understand. For me money is like boxing is for you, it’s my way of getting even with the world. For a rich Jew money is a weapon, unless I know how to make it on my own I will be defenceless.’

I was suddenly fascinated. It wasn’t that Hymie’s philosophy was the antithesis of all I’d been taught, although I knew the Lord was against money and definitely in favour of the poor. It was just that, well, Doc and Mrs Boxall, or even Miss Bornstein, had never mentioned money or its importance in the scheme of things. I’d been forced into thinking about money for the first time when the list for my school clothes had arrived and I had already worked out that not having any at a boarding school for the sons of the rich was pretty well going to shape my school career.

‘Are you very good at making money?’ I asked Hymie.

‘About as good as you are at boxing,’ he replied.

‘You’ve got yourself a partner, Hymie. Money is something I have to learn about.’

Hymie grinned, ‘It’s a deal, Peekay. I had a feeling you were a bloody good boxer.’

I was by nature a fairly quiet sort of a guy and had no trouble getting on with things. As a new boy I was at the bottom of the heap but was fortunate enough to be selected as the fag for the head of the house, Fred Cooper, who was also the second prefect of the entire school and the captain of the First XV Rugby. This immediately gave me some extra status amongst the other new boys all of whom, like me, were allocated to a school or house prefect.

Fagging was hard work and we were on standby for the school and house prefects from first bell at six a.m. until lights out at nine-thirty. No chore was thought too menial and a prefect had only to yell from his study and all the fags within hearing distance would have to come running. Last new boy to arrive did the chore. In addition to this, each fag had a list of duties he was obliged to perform for his personal prefect. He made his bed, shone his shoes, cadet and rugby boots, washed his rugby togs or during the summer blancoed his cricket boots, and if he was an officer in the cadet corps polished his Sam Browne and brasses, laid out his clothes, tidied his study, ran his messages and made trips to the tuck shop on his behalf.

The first tanning I received was for scooping the tiniest dab of cream off the top of a cream bun I was delivering to Fred Cooper. At least it started with the tiniest scoop and then, in an attempt to smooth the scooped part, I took one or two more small scoops on the end of my finger. By the time I arrived at Fred Cooper’s study, the bun looked somewhat re-arranged.

‘You rotten little bugger! You’ve been norking my cream bun,’ Cooper yelled at me.

‘My hand slipped over it and I had to lick it off sort of, sir,’ I explained, not quite willing to tell an outright lie.

‘Shit! Did you lick my bloody bun, Peekay?’

‘No, sir, just my hand.’

‘Close the door, boy. We have an excellent way to train slippery hands.’ Cooper reached for the cane which hung behind the door. ‘How many times do you reckon it slipped?’ he asked.’

‘Not many, sir,’ I said fearfully.

‘Not many is once or twice or three times, tell me, man?’

‘Once?’ I said hopefully.

‘Right, bend down.’ I bent down holding my knees and proffering my arse. Whack! ‘That’s one for your slippery hand.’ Whack! ‘That’s one for your slippery tongue.’ Whack! ‘And that’s one for your poor memory.’ Cooper returned the cane to the back of the door and pointed to the cream bun on his desk. ‘Eat it! And go and get me another one with your own money.’

I stood looking at the cream bun with its shiny brown top and cream-filled centre. This was my first major crisis. ‘I… I don’t have any money, sir.’

Cooper turned back to his book. ‘Use those slippery fingers of yours to find some,’ he said, dismissing me.

I left his study holding the offending cream bun gingerly in my hand. Pocket money was drawn every Wednesday after lunch and every Saturday morning, but as I hadn’t been given any for the term, the fact that it was Tuesday meant two things: none of the other fags would have any money this late in the week and even if I could borrow some I had no possibility of paying it back.

My arse stung like hell, but I hardly noticed it in my anxiety. Hymie Levy was waiting at the end of the corridor which led to the sixth form studies.

‘Christ, Peekay, I could hear it from here, that bastard sure blasted arse!’

‘I’m in deep shit,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got to buy Cooper another cream bun and I haven’t got any money.’

Hymie shrugged, ‘Easy, man, I’ll give it to you.’ Then he pointed to the bun in my hand, ‘What’s that? That’s a cream bun!’

I explained to him what had happened. ‘Sorry, but I can only accept a loan if you’ll let me do something to pay it off,’ I added.

‘Don’t be stupid, Peekay. Pay me tomorrow after pocket money.’

It was the first time I had had to admit that I had no money whatsoever.

‘You mean nothing? No money at all?’ Hymie was clearly astonished. He dug into the change pocket of his grey flannels and produced a two-shilling piece. ‘Here, take it, you can pay me back when you leave school.’

‘Bullshit, Hymie, that’s in five years.’

Hymie grinned, ‘I’m a Jew, remember, we’re supposed never to forget.’

‘You’re also a pain in the arse, Levy. Keep your two bob, I only need threepence anyway. Bugger it! I’ll go and throw myself on Cooper’s mercy.’

‘What, and get your bum blasted again? Give us that bun. Here, hold this.’ He carefully lifted the top half of the bun and handed it to me. Then, using his forefinger, he spread the cream from the centre of the bottom half of the bun to the edges, piling the cream high on the edges. He held out his hand for the top and replaced it onto the bottom half, squeezing lightly with his forefinger and thumb to force both halves together. As he did this the cream squirted out of the sides as natural looking as you please. He handed the fully restored cream bun back to me, a satisfied grin on his mug.

‘Gee thanks, Hymie. I owe you man,’ I said, relief flooding over me.

‘Don’t thank me, Peekay. It took two thousand years of persecution by bastards like Cooper to make me smart, I really ought to thank him.’

It was the first time we’d beaten the system, although of course it was Hymie who had really done so. After I’d given Cooper his ‘new’ bun, we retired behind the bogs and laughed our heads off. Then Hymie took out his miniature chess set and we battled it out for the next hour. We were evenly matched players; his cunning was matched by my years of memorising all Doc’s games plus my having a reasonable grasp of the niceties of the game. We were in the school first chess team right from the start, which wasn’t earth shattering news, the Christian gentlemen were not exactly breaking down the doors to join the chess club.

Boxing presented a problem. It wasn’t a major sport at school and therefore not compulsory. Only about twenty boys out of the six hundred in the school took part. Darby White, the gym master and ex light-heavyweight champion of the British army, had turned six of these twenty into a fairly good boxing team, although I soon learned that we only boxed the Afrikaans schools as the other English schools didn’t go in for boxing. No other boxer in the school of any weight had been trained as well as I had been or came close to my skill. Sarge was also very keen on boxing and he and Darby White would work the squad together. While the school team was said to be game, morale was pretty low when I arrived. The school had won only six individual bouts in five years and none in the past two years, let alone a boxing match. The red, white and green ribbon, which was the school colours and which had been tied around the handle of a massive wooden spoon and hung from one of the beams in the gym, was beginning to fade, the spoon having been in permanent residence with the Prince of Wales School so long.

Darby White would sometimes look up at it a little wistfully and say, ‘I don’t expect ever to win the schools trophy but I’d just like to lose that dirty great wooden ladle for just one year.’

I told Hymie about this and he immediately became interested. Hymie’s interest in sports was zero, but he couldn’t resist an intellectual challenge. ‘How good are the other chaps in the squad?’ he asked. I was forced to admit that they were pretty average. The kids in the prison squad back home could have taken them with one arm tied behind their backs. ‘How good a coach is Darby White?’ Darby White wasn’t Geel Piet but he knew his boxing and he was certainly as good as Captain Smit.

‘I think he’s lost his enthusiasm, but he seems to know his onions,’ I replied.

‘You need a manager and I know just the chap,’ Hymie said. That was the nice part about Hymie, he never bragged but he was absolutely certain of his superiority. It crapped a lot of people off, but Hymie had prepared himself for a life where the slings and arrows were fairly frequent and he didn’t seem to give a damn whether or not he was liked. ‘Persecution is the major reason for a Jew to exist. If it didn’t happen we’d soon be as intellectually inferior as you lot,’ he’d say.

I asked Hymie how he proposed to turn possibly the weakest school boxing team in the world into a winning combination. He looked at me and for once the slightly cynical grin left the corners of his mouth. ‘We need only one winner for a start. One guy you can rely on to win. The rest is easy, the rest is only good management. When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.’ He placed his hands one on each of my shoulders. ‘How many fights have you won in the ring, Peekay?’

‘Thirty-four,’ I replied.

‘How many have you lost?’

‘Well… none,’ I said, a little embarrassed.

‘You’ll do nicely. There’s nothing a gambler likes better than a certainty.’

‘This is the highveld, the standard is much higher than in the lowveld where I’ve done all my boxing, sooner or later every boxer gets beaten.’

‘Sure, sure, but let’s do all we can to delay that moment as long as possible. Peekay, I smell money in that boxing team.’

‘You mean by becoming an integral part of the system, me boxing and you managing, and then making it work for us?’

‘I love a fast learner,’ Hymie said.

When Darby White and Sarge saw me work out I could see they were enormously impressed. ‘Where’d you learn to box, son?’ Darby White asked.

Without thinking I answered, ‘In prison, sir.’

It was a reply Darby White would never grow tired of recounting. To my often acute embarrassment it became his favourite boxing story and given the slightest opportunity, he’d recount it to the coaches from the other schools.

Sarge was second in command of the boxing squad and acted with Darby White as a second or alone when Darby was refereeing a fight. As a young guardsman with the Coldstream Guards he’d been quite a useful amateur in his day. Later he’d worked as a second under the famous English trainer Dutch Holland of the Thomas à Becket Gymnasium in south London. Dutch Holland was the best cut-man in England and Sarge claimed to have learned the art of stemming an eye bleed from him. A cut eye would usually stop a fight in school boxing, which wasn’t always fair as the better boxer could lose on a TKO when he was ahead on points. Sarge could work miracles with a cut-stick, cotton wool swabs, adrenalin and vaseline. In fact, his special skill as a cut-man was one of the weapons Hymie was to use in his campaign to lift the boxing squad out of last place in the schools competition.

Hymie had himself elected as the manager of the boxing squad by the simple expedient of volunteering for the job. No first form boy had previously held this job. The managers of the various major sports, cricket, rugby, swimming, shooting and, of course, boxing, were invariably chosen from fifth form boys who, while not being sportsmen, were known to be brains, hence these positions came to be known as ‘swot spots’ and the fifth form boy honoured with a swot spot would invariably become a school prefect in the year following.

However, the swot spot for boxing had become a school joke and was therefore seen as not worthy of a brain. It was considered extremely poor form to apply for it, and Darby White had for the past four years rejected the few applicants on the basis of them not being known brains and therefore simple opportunists. In putting his case for the swot spot in boxing, Hymie pointed out to Darby White that as he was in the school senior chess team he qualified in the brain department and besides, with a first former in the job, Darby could look forward to five years of continuity, with all the advantages of long-term planning.

Hymie’s arguments were persuasive. The most telling of them being that we couldn’t do any worse than we were doing, so Darby might as well give him a go. Darby White only jingled his balls in his white duck trousers furiously for about two minutes before agreeing. Darby was quite unable to make a decision of any sort without putting both hands into his trouser pockets and giving his balls a tumble, the longer the process the more complicated the decision.

My first fight was as a flyweight, although at one hundred and two pounds I was a very light one and would be fighting a kid who weighed nearly ten pounds more than me. It took place in the school gymnasium a month after the term had begun. Home matches drew little attention from anyone at the school. School spirit did not extend to boxing, it was a recognised fact that we always lost and only the boxing squad and first form boarders, conscripted to watch, would be present to see the tripe walloped out of the Prince of Wales team. These one-sided bouts were privately referred to as ‘two-fisted attacks from the hairy backs’. As in: ‘Another seven to zero two-fisted attack from the hairy backs.’ The malevolence between Afrikaans and English-speaking South Africans continued unabated, with the English still feeling mightily superior. The fact that only Afrikaans schools boxed was further reason to dismiss the boxing team as being somewhat déclassé and not worthy of the finer traditions of the school. Darby White in his white ducks and singlet, with his belly spilling over the old tie which held his trousers up, and Sarge in his jazzy hotel doorman’s uniform and silly pace stick, were looked upon as a comic opera team by the remainder of the mortar and gowned teaching staff. Nothing was ever said, but you simply knew that those who laboured in the field were not equal to those who laboured in the mind.

While only the handful of Prince of Wales kids attended that first fight, the gym was packed with kids from the opposition school, an Afrikaans high school named Helpmekaar, which translated into English means Help each other. Helpmekaar enjoyed a huge reputation in all sport except cricket. Its boxing team was said to be the best in South Africa and had won the South African schools Boxing Championships the year before.

At one hundred and eleven pounds the kid I was fighting was just one pound short of being a bantamweight. I didn’t mind as I was used to fighting guys heavier and bigger than me and had fought tougher looking kids than him before. But Hymie was concerned, this was the first time we were going into business together and at the weigh-in he’d looked worried.

‘Ten pounds is a lot to give away, this Geldenhuis guy is supposed to be shit hot.’

‘C’mon, Hymie, he’s a new boy just like us, how would they know? How’s the book going?’

‘Great, that’s the problem. I’ve been taking bets in the toilet from the Helpmekaar chaps all night and I’ve got you at ten to one against four to one on Geldenhuis and they’re falling over themselves to bet on their man.’

‘That’s great, did you tell the first form boarders to bet on me?’

‘Ja, they’re all pretty excited, but their bets aren’t anywhere near enough to cover us if Geldenhuis wins. Christ, Peekay, I must be mad. It’s not having all the facts that’s pissing me off. We have no form on Geldenhuis, none on you for that matter, we’re making book in the dark, that’s just plain dumb.’

‘We’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s start by trusting each other.’

‘No offence, Peekay, but next time first the facts and then the trust.’ It was perhaps the most important thing Hymie ever said to me. Hymie was the supreme example of Hoppie’s dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. It was to be the basis of our business operations from that time on.

Geldenhuis was solidly built around the shoulders and I knew I’d have to stay away from his right, which he kept throwing straight from the shoulder as he shadow boxed while waiting for the fight to begin.

Geel Piet had warned me that some boxers throw shadow punches before a fight to deceive their opponent into thinking they lead with a left or a right when in actual fact it’s the other way around. The idea is to surprise your opponent in the first few seconds and so unsettle him. I studied the big kid and decided there wasn’t any subterfuge in his shadow boxing, he was much too confident to bother with any tricks. His leading hand was the left and I noticed he held his right too low, leaving his jaw unprotected. His slightly more open stance suggested that he saw himself as a fighter. In which case he would come out hard and fast hoping to nail me early with a good punch.

For my part I would always ‘just sit on the pot’, as Geel Piet called sitting quietly on the tiny three-legged corner stool waiting for the fight to begin. ‘Tell them nothing, jong,’ he had said, ‘just sit and watch, watch very carefully. I’m telling you, man, you can tell a lot about a boxer even before he throws a punch, if you watch him carefully.’

The bell for the first round went and after we’d touched gloves the Helpmekaar kid came at me fast. He was hard eyed and I could sense he planned to make short work of the fight. I saw the first straight left coming from a mile off and allowed it to miss the side of my head by a fraction. A near miss with the leading hand often gives a boxer the confidence to try again immediately with a similar punch, thrown even harder than the first it invariably throws the boxer slightly off balance. The second straight left came right on time and as it whistled past my ear his right dropped to the level of his chest leaving his head wide open. I stepped in and with my body slightly turned to maximise the power, the right hook I threw landed flush on the point of his chin. He was already off balance, moving into my punch, and he hit the canvas hard, sprawling on his back. While the blow carried all my strength behind it, it was also a perfectly timed punch and a gasp went up from the Helpmekaar crowd while a wild cheer rose from our first form boarders.

The kid on the canvas sat up as the ref began to count. There was no way I could have knocked him out but he was clearly shaken. Young guys are too proud to stay down for the compulsory eight count and he jumped to his feet glowering at me. The surprise had been on the other foot and I now expected him to move around me for a while, waiting for a chance to use his superior strength to nail me with a few solid blows to the head. First you’re going to have to catch me, you Boer bastard, I thought. The referee went through the compulsory eight count, then wiped his gloves and told us to box on.

I was so obviously lighter than the other kid and now, looking into his eyes, I suddenly realised that he had regarded the blow as a fluke and had no intention of boxing smart. He moved straight at me again with his right still held too low. He was telegraphing the punch to come by watching the point of my chin. Christ, he’s going to try the left lead again. As Geel Piet would say, ‘Some fighters you can read better than a book but, ag man, the story has no blêrrie imagination.’

The straight left came hard and missed, merely flicking my ear. I brought my right across his left and hit him on the side of the jaw, only just missing the point. I followed with a left hook into his solar plexus and he sat down hard, the seat of his pants seeming to bounce as he hit the canvas. I cursed myself, you don’t get too many chances for a really good right cross in a fight and I hadn’t set myself correctly. Nevertheless it was a good punch and the left had dug in just below the ribs where it really hurts.

Geldenhuis was strong and game and was back onto his feet in a second. He waited for the compulsory eight, and as the ref wiped his gloves he warned him that one more knock down meant the fight was over. I knew I’d have to be lucky to get a third crack at him and decided it was time to box, to wear him down jab, jab, jab, waiting for the chance to come under his left lead to land a series of solid punches under his heart. That way, if he wasn’t enormously fit, I’d sap his stamina to give me another crack at him in the third and final round. The bell rang for the end of the round and I returned to my corner to find Darby and Sarge grinning from ear to ear.

In the second round I simply boxed him. His style was exuberant and I waited for him to grow impatient as I kept him at his distance with constant jabs to the face. Towards the end of the round he must have realised that the fight was slipping away and he seemed determined to knock me down, even if it meant taking a couple of punches on the way. He came at me with both hands swinging. I think he expected me to move away so that he could nail me in a corner. But I stood my ground and hit him with a straight left which pushed him back against the ropes. I followed in with Geel Piet’s eight-punch combination, two good scoring shots to the head one of which opened a cut above his eye, the next bang on the nose, one more into the cut and the rest neatly placed under his heart. To my surprise, when the bell went for the end of round two, the Helpmekaar guys gave me a round of applause.

Geldenhuis didn’t come out for the third round. The referee had examined the cut above his eye and stopped the fight. I’d won a TKO, the first win for the Prince of Wales School in two years.

It didn’t seem to matter that we lost the other seven fights, though all had lasted the distance. The boxing squad, generally outclassed, hadn’t fought with such spirit and determination for years. Sarge was walking around flashing his mouth full of gold teeth and saying in a whisper that carried for yards, ‘Bloody marvellous, that ought to show those bloody Boers who’s boss.’ You’d have thought we had won the match.

The boxing coach from Helpmekaar came over and patted me on the back. ‘Who taught you to box, son?’ he said in English.

‘I learned in Barberton, Meneer,’ I replied in Afrikaans.

He looked suddenly smug. ‘Magtig. I knew you were too good for an Englishman! I’ve never seen a kid your age throw an eight-punch combination. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen any kid throw an eight-punch combination. Who taught you to box, man?’

‘Meneer Geel Piet,’ I replied.

‘Well I wish we had him at Helpmekaar, that’s all I can say, man.’

‘I don’t really think you would have wanted him,’ I replied, but he seemed not to hear me.

‘You’re an Afrikaner, what are you doing in a school like this?’ Without waiting for an answer he continued, ‘Listen, we could arrange for you to come to Helpmekaar, you’d be with your own people, we can organise a boarding scholarship.’

‘I’m English. A Rooinek,’ I said quietly. For the first time in my life I felt enormously proud about something. Perhaps it was wrong to be proud, but I’d waited a long time to come to terms with being a Rooinek.

The coach from Helpmekaar looked at me for what seemed like a long time. ‘Well you don’t box like an Englishman. Don’t desert your own kind, son. Englishmen don’t talk Afrikaans the way you do, I know, I’m a language teacher as well as a boxing coach.’

‘I am English,’ I replied in English, ‘honestly, sir.’

‘Well, Englishman, I doubt that there’s a kid in your weight division anywhere in South Africa who could beat you, that is, if this Rooinek school doesn’t bugger you up.’

He turned away abruptly, walked over to where Darby White was standing juggling his balls and looking pleased with himself. I could see they were both looking at me and Darby White had a proprietorial grin on his face.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned to see the big kid I’d fought. He wore a large pink elastoplast patch over his left eyebrow. ‘Howzit?’ He stuck his hand out. ‘Jannie Geldenhuis. No hard feelings, okay? You won fair and square, man,’ he said in English with a thick Afrikaans accent.

‘Thanks for the fight,’ I replied in Afrikaans as I shook his hand.

He grinned and seemed pleased that I’d replied in Afrikaans. ‘Ag man, I don’t think I even hit you once, I’ve never done that before. It’ll teach me a blêrrie good lesson, you looked such a little bugger, I thought I had a easy fight on my hands.’

I smiled at him. ‘You’re such a big bastard I thought I was going to get a hiding.’ Gert had always said that a man should be magnanimous in victory and Jannie Geldenhuis seemed like a nice bloke.

‘Ja, that was the blêrrie trouble, man, so did I.’ He grinned again. ‘Just you wait, man, I’ll get you back on the rugby field, what possie you play?’

‘Scrum-half. By the way, my name’s Peekay.’

‘Ja, I already know. Me too, I’m also a scrum-half. Alles van die beste, Peekay.’ He turned to go and then turned back and rubbed the point of his jaw, ‘Jesus, you hit me a beauty in the beginning of the first round!’ Then he went to join his school mates.

‘Ja, so long, Jannie,’ I said, pleased it had ended this well.

Hymie walked up just as Geldenhuis departed. ‘Howzit? What did the hairy back want, your autograph?’

‘Nothing. He just said no hard feelings, he’d see me on the rugger field.’

Hymie grinned, ‘I’ll say no hard feelings, we’re rich!’ He frowned suddenly, ‘But we’ve still got to hate the bastards.’

‘Shit, Hymie, not after it’s over!’ I said grinning.

‘It may only have been a boxing match to you!’ Hymie pointed to the wooden spoon hanging from the beam above our heads. ‘To me it’s the beginning of getting rid of that! We can only do that by learning to hate.’

I sighed. ‘Hymie, you’ve got to learn there are good Boers and bad Boers, just like everyone else. You can’t just lump them all together.’

‘The only good Boer is a dead Boer!’ Hymie snorted.

‘The only good Kaffir is a dead Kaffir is where that came from,’ I said, chiding him for his lack of originality.

‘Yeah, them too,’ he added ruefully.

‘Christ, Hymie, you’re a Jew! How can you say things like that?’

Hymie laughed, ‘I’m a very complicated Jew,’ he said. ‘Peekay, if we’re going to win against those Boers we’ve got to learn to hate them. Don’t you even understand the fundamentals?’

‘Bullshit!’

‘Yeah, it is. You’re right, it is bullshit.’ He looked at me and grinned again, ‘But for Christ’s sake, don’t tell the others, we’ve got them thinking they can win, that the enemy isn’t invincible.’

He was the only one on the boxing squad who hadn’t congratulated me and I wondered why. I was to learn that Hymie was the world’s best persuader, he could pump courage and spirit into a dejected boxer, soothe his battered ego and recover his self-esteem. Hymie soothed words on and gently massaged them in as though they were a magic balm. But he only used them this way for a pre-determined purpose and only with people he considered less than his equal. A light pat on the back was all I ever got. Hymie considered me his equal and he allowed me to share his superior intellect, which was usually two or three jumps ahead of anyone else.

‘Well tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’ Hymie asked.

‘How much? How much did we make?’

Hymie grinned, ‘Enough for you to buy Cooper several hundred cream buns if you ever have to again. I reckon we’ll get a fiver out of it each.’

‘Jesus, Hymie, that’s wonderful!’

‘It’s only the beginning, Peekay. This time we gambled and won. Next time you fight we’re going to know the form. We’re going to know everything it is possible to know about your opponent. Every time he scratches his bum we’re going to analyse why. The making of money should never be left to chance.’

After my solo victory against Helpmekaar, Atherton, Cunning-Spider and Pissy Johnson immediately joined the boxing squad, along with twelve of the other new boys. It soon became apparent that Pissy Johnson was totally uncoordinated and would never make a boxer, but Atherton and Cunning-Spider were natural athletes and quickly caught on. Hymie called the new boys ‘the Wooden Spoon Goons’, swore us all into an elaborate brotherhood and elected himself President for Life and me Captain.

Hymie knew the value of a little mystique, the initiation into the Wooden Spoon Goons involved the exchange of everyone’s blood except his own. He swore each of us into the brotherhood and then instructed me to swear him in as President for Life. He had personally composed the protocol for the ceremony and when his turn came he handed me a slip of paper to read which went like this: ‘Do you, Hymie Solomon Levy, solemnly agree to fight with all your wit and skill and nerve to restore The Prince of Wales School to its former boxing glory?’ This came as somewhat of a surprise to all of us as we had no idea there had been any former glory to restore us to.

‘I do,’ Hymie said.

‘Do you agree to act selflessly without thought of personal glory or gain as the President for Life of the Wooden Spoon Goons?’ I wondered how he managed to reconcile this with our business arrangements.

‘This I do solemnly declare to do,’ Hymie said in an impressive flourish of grammatical construction.

‘In consideration for so doing and in the year nineteen hundred and forty-six in the reign of His Gracious Majesty King George the Sixth, I, Peekay, Captain of The Wooden Spoon Goons, declare Hymie Solomon Levy, President for Life.’

Hymie had confided to me in a rare moment of introspection that in naming him his parents had thrown the whole bloody Polish ghetto at him. ‘Why couldn’t they have given me just one Goy name, like Derek or Brian or Arthur or something?’ It was the only time I ever heard him question his Jewishness.

Later, as we were walking back to Wellington, I ribbed him about the restoring us to our former glory bit in the swearing in ceremony and also mentioned the no personal gain clause in his oath as president for life.

Hymie stopped and turned to face me. With an exaggerated sigh, as though he had seriously come to doubt my sagacity, he said, ‘For Chrissake, Peekay, don’t you read history? It doesn’t matter how much of a crap-up a country makes, by the time it gets into history it’s been turned into glorious tradition. It’s the same with an institution, you can’t go having the school losing on its boxing team generation after generation, history simply doesn’t allow for that sort of truth. Of course we’ve got a glorious tradition, because if we haven’t we have now and as Wooden Spoon Goons we’re going to have to restore the Prince of Wales to its former glory, whatever the fuck happened in real life.’

‘Wow!’ as Doc would say. ‘No doubtski aboutski, Hymie Levy was the absoloodle best!’

‘As for the personal gain, our primary purpose is to restore the school to its former boxing glory, there is no thought of not doing so if we can’t make a quid out of it. That’s what I mean by no thought of gain. We are not creating a business situation, we are merely exploiting one. Not to do so would be tantamount to sheer neglect, almost criminal if you ask me.’

There had been one strange happening at that first fight against Helpmekaar. Sarge had approached Darby White just before the fight to say that about a dozen blacks, all very neatly dressed and very clean, were standing outside the gymnasium and wanted permission to come in and watch. Darby, with much juggling of his balls, was reluctant. If they were caught on the streets without a note from their employers they would violate the pass laws which put a nine o’clock curfew on all Africans. He didn’t want to have a run-in with what he referred to as ‘the constabulary’, which if you have ever had any dealings with the South African Police Force is a very benign way of describing one of the toughest paramilitary forces in the world.

However, all the blacks showed him notes from their respective employers and he finally allowed them to stand by the door with Old Jimbo, the boot boy from School House who hadn’t missed a fight at the school for twenty years. The boxing coach from Helpmekaar came over and protested and to our surprise Darby replied that the boys, like Old Jimbo, were school servants and welcome to stay.

My fight was first, and after I had been given the decision over Jannie Geldenhuis and the excitement had died down a bit I looked up towards the door. Except for Old Jimbo and a very tall man, the Africans were no longer there. Upon seeing me looking in his direction the tall black man raised his hand in a clenched fist. ‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’ he shouted and was gone.

‘What the hell was that all about?’ Sarge said, looking up from cutting the tape on my gloves. ‘Sounded like some sorta war cry. Ungrateful blighters, they’ve all gone ’ome after the first fight.’

It was the first appearance of the people.

At first my black fan club, as it was to become known, was only a dozen or so but when the venue permitted it, it would grow to several hundred and later a great deal more than that. The legend of the Tadpole Angel was spreading.

After a few weeks, it became obvious that my identity had somehow been revealed to the school servants through the same weird osmosis in Africa that makes news penetrate prison walls, travel over mountains and into the townships until it becomes a part of the very air itself. And so a subtle change began to take place. The best cuts of meat appeared on the juniors’ table and seconds were always brought first to where I sat. I found that my chores had been taken over. I would go to Fred Cooper’s locker to get his rugby gear out for washing or his cricket boots for cleaning, only to find that they’d been done. His Sam Browne and brasses always shone like a mirror and even the laces in his rugby boots were washed. Only the morning chores, such as making Cooper’s bed, were left to me, as there were no dormitory servants around first thing in the morning. My own gear was always spotless and back in my locker clean or polished by the time we got back to Wellington from the main school each day for lunch. On one occasion my football jersey had been ripped, I had made a hopeless job attempting to repair it and it concerned me greatly. I knew with certainty that my mother could not afford to replace it. I arrived back at Wellington for lunch to find that it had been neatly machine darned, washed and ironed and was as good as new.

I spoke often to the school servants in their own languages but they never for one moment admitted to anything. They had heard the legend, knew the myth and had simply reacted without needing direction from anyone. In fact, I knew there would be no interested party looking after me, no concerned group of ex-prisoners. Africans don’t work like that, each simply acted out his feelings, responding to what he or she felt. The legend of Onoshobishobi Ingelosi was sufficient in itself, it fed off my presence and not because of anything I would consciously do. In fact, despite my desire to do so, there was nothing I could do to stop it. My boxing was the needed proof of my status as a warrior and the fact that I only fought the hated Boer, yet another.

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one which is moulded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

The boarders put my privileged position down to my near fraternal attitude to the school servants, which nicely explained their anxiety to help me. I was, I was beginning to understand, a natural leader, and leaders, I have found, need never explain. In fact the less they explain the more desirable they become as leaders. Except to Doc, I had never been given to explaining myself and this was taken as strength by those who followed me. In truth, my reluctance to share my feelings was born out of my fear as a small child when I had been the only Rooinek in the foreign land of Afrikanerdom. I had survived by passing as unnoticed as possible, by anticipating the next move against me, by being prepared when the shit hit the fan to take it in my stride, pretending not to be hurt or humiliated. I had learned early that silence is better than sycophancy, that silence breeds guilt in other people. That it is fun to persecute a pig because it squeals, no fun at all to beat an animal which does not cry out. I had long since built the walls around my ego which only the most persistent person would ever manage to climb.