The Power of One

EIGHTEEN

I was the youngest kid in the first form but, what with one thing and another, I was clearly seen to have a bright future at the Prince of Wales School. My boxing win had made me a hero amongst the first form boarders who, elated by the financial gain from betting on me, had become devoted fans and who now exaggerated the fight in their constant retelling of it to any of the day boys who cared to listen. The next two matches had been away from the school and these I had also won and the boarders had once again shared in the spoils. Although we didn’t have enough information on the two boxers I fought, my opponents were comparatively easy and as both had been beaten by Geldenhuis we took the chance of giving the Afrikaans punters more than attractive odds to back their own fighter, with the result that we turned both matches into nice little earners.

The retelling of these two fights, by Hymie in particular, made them out to be gladiatorial bouts which made the first fight against Jannie Geldenhuis seem like a kissing match. By the time the next home match took place there was standing room only in the school gym and the fifty or so Africans who had turned up were obliged to watch the fight through the large bay windows.

To the delight of the school crowd, I won what turned out to be an easy fight. The other kid was very aggressive, prepared to take any sort of punishment to get a punch in. He was said to have won his first three fights inside the distance. But he came at me wide open on three occasions in the first round and I sat him on his pants in the middle of the ring three times. Three knockdowns was all it took to win a fight. The school was further vindicated when our light-heavyweight, Danny Polkinhorne, won on points in a brawling but thrilling three rounder.

Hymie and I had started a register on every boxer the school fought against, in every weight division. I would sit with him during a fight and describe the opponent fighting one of our boxers. I would talk about his footwork and his style, his weaknesses or strengths in ring craft, and his personality in the ring. I would point out those boxers who dominated the space they boxed in as if they owned the ring, and those who seemed to be fighting in borrowed space. We would separate the stand-up fighters from the boxers. We would note those who cut easily around the eyes. Hymie would jot down every punch thrown in a fight, how many and what they were. Our notes would end with my summary of the entire fight and of the boxer, noting the punches he liked to throw the most and how many he threw during a fight. Boxers were obliged to weigh in before stepping into the ring and Hymie would record their fighting weight and compare it with the next time they fought. We kept all these records in a big leather-bound accounting book, on the cover of which was embossed in gold: Levy’s Carpet Emporium, 126 Church Street, Pretoria. ‘Carpet fit for a Prince’. In this book, written in Hymie’s neat, already mature handwriting, we would add to a boxer’s profile every time he fought against the Prince of Wales School.

In a remarkably short time Hymie began to grasp the niceties of boxing. While I could remember the most minute details of almost every fighter, Hymie quickly developed the ability to anticipate with uncanny precision the way a boxer would fight the next time he appeared in the ring. He had an unerring instinct for a boxer’s weakness and so we were able to prepare our own boxers to fight an opponent to exploit these. Of course, it also allowed us to set the odds on a fight with a high degree of success. Business was booming, for while the Prince of Wales boxers were still regular losers, the odds we offered meant our losses were well contained and that after a short while we could usually depend on one or two wins to pick up the big money.

After the first year when we had boxed every school twice and I was still unbeaten, it became difficult to get a bet against me. The Afrikaans kids weren’t fools and we were forced to offer more and more attractive odds on my opponent to the point where we were taking unnecessary risks and it was beginning to put me under pressure. In a fight against Geldenhuis towards the end of the second year where the odds were twenty to one on Geldenhuis beating me, I only narrowly won on points.

The Afrikaners had wised up. Profits were down. With our juniors beginning to win they could no longer hedge their bets against me by taking shorter odds on some of the other fighters. Hymie decided it was time to quit the bookmaking business.

‘It’s time to get out, Peekay. There are two important rules of business, knowing when to get in and when to get out. Of the two, knowing when to get out is the most important. We’ve got bigger fish to fry.’

I’d enjoyed two years of regular pocket money and I didn’t relish the prospect of being broke again. ‘These fish we are going to fry, what are they?’

‘I’m buggered if I know,’ Hymie said, ‘but something will come along, business is simply a matter of opportunity and money. If you’ve got the capital, sure as tomorrow is Tuesday, an opportunity will come along.’

We’d built up a considerable bank over the first two years, fifty percent of everything we made went into our capital which was earning interest in the Yeoville branch of Barclays Bank.

That’s when I had the idea. ‘Hymie, we’ve got fifty quid in the bank and we’re getting two and a half percent on our money, which isn’t very much, I mean one pound ten a year, it’s nice but it isn’t world shattering.’

Hymie laughed, ‘There was a time not so long ago …’

I cut in, ‘Yeah, I know, one pound ten was a lot of money, more than I’d ever owned. But listen, pocket money’s on Wednesday and Saturday, by Tuesday and Friday everyone’s broke.’

We were sitting on a bench under the oak trees bordering the cricket field and Hymie jumped up in alarm. I could see he was upset and he leaned over me and gripped the back of the bench on either side of me. ‘Peekay, are you crazy! Don’t you understand? I’m the token Jew around here! What the fuck do you think the Christian gentlemen are going to say? A money lender! Me? Christ, Peekay, the whole purpose of my education at this goy school is so that sort of stigma can be removed from my Jewishness. I’m here for the politics and the polish. I’ve already had several hundred years training in usury!’

‘That’s all the banks do, isn’t it?’ I replied. ‘If you want a loan from a bank you’ve got to go cap in hand and they don’t even have to earn it in the first place, people just give it to them for a lousy two and a half percent interest and they then turn around and lend it for seven percent, that’s nearly two hundred percent profit. That isn’t usury?’

‘Peekay, you don’t understand, when the banks do it it’s business, when a Jew does it, it’s exploitation!’

‘I see, so a Jew can’t own a bank?’

‘Of course he can. Rothschild, one of the world’s most famous banks, is owned by a Jewish family, the Rothschilds are one of France and England’s most respected families.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, ‘they started in Frankfurt-on-Main in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century as money lenders!’

‘Christ, Peekay, I don’t need to do this, there are other ways to make a quid, you’ll see.’ Hymie was clearly distressed. ‘In the meantime you can borrow from our capital for pocket money.’

‘You don’t need to do this, but I do. I’m not going to use our capital, I can earn my own way. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your sensibilities, Hymie, but I’ve climbed into the ring twenty-five times in the last two years to support our bookmaking business, it’s your turn now.’

Hymie released the bench and straightened up, clasping his hands behind his back as though he was preparing to give me a lecture.

‘Do you know why I really came to the Prince of Wales School, Peekay?’ He didn’t wait for my answer before continuing. ‘Let me tell you. When the Prince of Wales, I mean the then future King, came to Pretoria there was a reception held for him by the Red Cross. My old man supplied the red carpet for the occasion. The deal was free carpet for an invitation. He stood in line and the Prince shook his hand. He never quite got over it. It was as though he’d touched the face of the Almighty. He’d made it. He’d reached the social pinnacle. He was a gentleman at last. A gentleman with a heavy Polish accent, but a gentleman no less. He bought his own carpet back from the Red Cross for a huge sum and carpeted the lounge room at home. I don’t think one day of my life went by without at least one mention of the fucking carpet: “A Prince already, with his own feet walked on zat carpet my boy!”’ Hymie mimicked. ‘Then he read in the paper that there was a Prince of Wales school in Johannesburg and that the Prince was to lay a wreath at the school’s war memorial, he decided that if he had a son he would bring him up as the perfect English gentleman… correction, perfect Jewish English gentleman. This school, and Oxford to follow, is going to make me the first “respectable” Jew in our family since Moses bawled in the bullrushes. I’ll tell you something, Peekay, if he had had to carpet every classroom, all three boarders houses and the school quad to get me in here he’d have thought it was a bargain.’

‘What you’re saying is that by becoming money lenders we fuck up everything?’

Hymie grinned, ‘Yup! That’s about it.’

‘Well then we’ll call it a bank. Look, Hymie, it meets every criterion we’ve established for a business. There is a known need for our services. The risk factor is small and easy to control, our creditors can hardly default can they? We don’t have to borrow capital and the profits are reasonable and regular. As Doc would say: “No doubtski aboutski,” it’s perfect and it’s honest… well sort of.’

‘What will you do if I say no?’ Hymie asked.

‘I’d find it very difficult to come to terms with your answer. Now let me tell you a story. The guy who taught me boxing was a Cape Coloured and by any standards a bad bastard. He’d spent more time in prison than out on the street. He was the worst kind of recidivist. By any standards the scum of society. He lied, cheated and robbed. He’d also been beaten up more times than you and I have had hot breakfasts. He was the ultimate loser. That’s how the world saw him. That’s how they judged him.’

‘You’re talking about Geel Piet, aren’t you?’ Hymie said.

‘Ja, well Geel Piet was just about the best friend I ever had. He died for me. A warder named Borman rammed a two-foot baton up his arse until he haemorrhaged to death. Geel Piet could have saved himself simply by confessing that it was me who smuggled the prisoners’ mail into the prison. But he didn’t. I didn’t see him as any of the things he was supposed to be. I saw him as one of the best human beings I am ever likely to know. Christ, Hymie, it’s not what a man does, it’s what a man is that counts!’

We called it the Boarders’ Bank, but it simply became known as the Bank and was an immediate success. Interest was at ten per cent per week and loans were never extended beyond a fortnight. Which was long enough for any kid to write home for money if he got himself into a financial fix. In the four years we remained at school we didn’t incur a single bad debt. The funny thing was that not only the boarders but also the day boys regarded the Bank as a valued institution. Moreover, Hymie’s antecedents never entered into it, although the Bank formed the basis of some of his more spectacular future financial ploys. I could say our spectacular successes, but Hymie was the real wizard and I remained the sorcerer’s apprentice. The Bank also formed the basis for my pocket money; a source of great personal pride to me. I’d solved the major emotional problem confronting my school career and, unencumbered with money problems, was now free to forge ahead.

By the time we had reached form three, the younger boxers were beginning to win on a regular basis and Atherton and Cunning-Spider had each won six of their last seven fights, Atherton as a lightweight and Cunning-Spider as a light-welterweight. Hymie’s Wooden Spoon Goons were building a reputation and gaining a whole heap of respect from the Afrikaans schools. The Prince of Wales School was no longer a joke and the Boer War was often won by the English these days. That was the year we finally lost the wooden spoon and the faded green, red and dirty white ribbon was removed and replaced with the colours of another school. Hymie had achieved his first objective which he told the Wooden Spoon Goons was only, ‘A small pimple on the great hairy arse of my ambition for the gentlemen Christian boxers.’

In the three years it took to lose the wooden spoon, I earned an exaggerated reputation as a boxer amongst the Afrikaans schools on the Witwatersrand. I started to fill out and by the time I was fourteen I was fighting as a bantamweight. Every fight, at school or away, was attracting the people. A match a hundred miles by bus or train from the school would attract just as many Africans as one at home where the boxing bouts had been moved away from the gym to the school hall. Here the Africans were allowed to sit at the very back of the hall separated from the whites by a wide corridor. During the summer it was popular to have the boxing out of doors, usually with the ring set up on a rugby field. At these times the blacks would be allowed to watch the fights, even those held at the most racist Afrikaans schools, where they were kept well separated from the white spectators. It was at one of these out of town Afrikaans schools that I first heard the word ‘apartheid’ used to describe the place where the black spectators were allowed to sit and I have often since wondered if I had witnessed the first use of a word which would become universal as an expression of oppression.

The boxing matches at these outdoor venues usually started at six just as the sun was beginning to set and were all over by eight when it was still light enough on the highveld not to need lights over the ring. It was at another of these outdoor fights that we invented the famous ‘sun-blinder’. The Prince of Wales boxer simply used the ring so that his opponent could be turned to face into the setting sun which would momentarily blind him. The idea was to work an opponent round and then time a punch just as the hapless boxer moved into the direct line of the late afternoon sun. If a boxer was clever enough on his feet this simple expedient could be made to work half a dozen times during a fight, often earning the extra points required to get the decision. The gentlemen Christians had no compunction about doing this to their opponents, after all this was the Boer War and no quarter was given or expected. Hymie got the idea from a movie he had seen which showed how the Battle of Britain Spitfires had come out of the sun to pounce on unsuspecting German aircraft.

The people would watch the fights in silence until it was my turn to fight and then invariably a soft, almost imperceptible hum would begin, growing in volume and, in the African manner, always in perfect harmony. Then a leader would take up a chant which might go something like this: ‘He is the chief who comes in our dreamtime, the caster of spells and the bringer of wisdom.’

‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’ the people would chorus in reply.

‘He can dance in the dew without leaving footprints and stalk the wind until it howls to be free.’

‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’

‘His blows are like the summer thunder and his lightning strikes his foes!’

‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’

‘For cunning he matches the thin moon and for wisdom the full, for is he not Lord of the dark and the light, the day and the night?’

‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’

‘He will win for the people, he will win for all the people, in all the tribes, the people are all his people!’

‘He will win, he will win, he will win for the people, Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi! Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!!’

Once the fight started there would not be a sound from the black spectators and after I had won the tall black man who had been present at my first fight in the school gym would raise his hand in the fisted salute. ‘Onoshobishobi Ingelosi!’ he would shout and the blacks would silently leave. I was later to hear that the absolute silence during a fight was so they could not be accused of barracking for me and in so doing incur the wrath of my opponent’s people and thus be banned from attending. In fact the absolute silence from the African stands was uncanny and made a contribution to unnerving my opponents.

Hymie was quick to realise the potential of the black audience and in return for admitting them to the boxing matches at the Prince of Wales School they were required to sing. This was thought no hardship, as most Africans love to sing and soon a tradition was born. Hymie also persuaded Darby White to move my fight up so that I was higher on the bill. This meant that the black audience would be able to stay as late as possible while still allowing them time to be home by nine o’clock curfew.

Parents and members of the public began to attend these summer evening fights and the Afrikaans schools were forced to do the same as us to attract white spectators. The fights became popular events, with the African singing a big drawcard leading, as it did, to what was soon regarded as the feature of the entertainment, the chant that preceded my bout.

It is an indication of the enormous dichotomy between white and black that for the first three years no white spectator bothered to ask for a translation of what was being said in the chants. People seemed intrigued by the fact that a small white boy had gathered a huge black following but they simply put this down to my skill as a boxer. The presumption of the white man knows no bounds in Africa. The full story would never come out but somewhere along the line the words Onoshobishobi Ingelosi were translated to mean Tadpole Angel.

The Tadpole Angel quickly became my fighting name among the whites and also, to my extreme mortification, with the kids in the Afrikaans schools. Translated into English it was a dumb name and my embarrassment increased when it was further modified by an anti-following of Afrikaners who referred to me as ‘little angel’ and even sometimes as ‘Mama’s little angel’.

Though not large in number, I was conscious of this very vocal group who, like the much larger group of blacks, attended every fight, but who came in the hope that Mama’s little angel, the Kaffirboetie, would come to a sticky end at the hands of one of their own kind.

By contrast, the people saw the name in only one light. I was fighting for them against the Boer. The tangible evidence of the enemy in the form of the dissident group of Afrikaners only served to increase their fervour. Their numbers multiplied each week and their chants grew more elaborate and beautiful. In fairness it must be said there were whites who were on my side, adult Afrikaners who loved to see me box and didn’t give a damn about my being a Rooinek.

The fact that I hadn’t been beaten wasn’t as big a deal as it may seem, there were several kids from other schools who enjoyed unblemished records.

My mind was permanently focussed on a single fixed point, the welterweight championship of the world. I thought about it so often, reaffirmed my determination so frequently, that hardly an hour of my life passed when it wasn’t in my thoughts. To lose a fight would be a backward step, a hair-line crack in my armour. The only way it was going to happen was for me to come up against a boxer who was a helluva lot better than me. Not just more talented but also a lot better trained.

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched on a whole heap of other responses a fourteen-year-old can’t really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn’t think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.

Doc and Mrs Boxall had taught me to think. Mrs Boxall in the general sense and Doc in the particular. Doc’s life was a constant pre-occupation with minutiae, his eye sought always what lay hidden yet was important, he knew that nature guards her secrets jealously, that acute observation begins with a questioning mind. ‘Always to ask questions, ja this is so, maybe the answers come slow, but always they are coming if you wait with your head and your eyes.’

Geel Piet taught me to anticipate the problems likely to occur in any situation and to review the answers to them long before disaster struck. His mind was a network of emergency plans. While small boys are not natural pessimists, he nevertheless taught me the value of a routine which, when practised a thousand times, becomes an automatic reaction to a crisis.

Over all this lay Hoppie’s dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often left me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me. Only Doc was allowed to know all of me with nothing held back.

But even Doc was lost to me when sex lightning struck and puberty arrived in a surge of lust. The superior equipment my mentors had given me and which I had unknowingly used so effectively to perfect my camouflage was suddenly useless. Nothing I had been taught prepared me for the onset of my sexual drive. I found myself more completely a loner than ever, but this time I was trying to keep the lid on an emotional cauldron that threatened to boil over and drown me.

I woke each morning with a rigid tent pole which, in the school tradition, I took to the showers, using my erection as a hook over which to drape my towel. While I joined in with the general hilarity at those of us who had been struck by sex lightning, I knew I was faking it. Buried deep where I hoped he would never surface lay Pisskop and his hatless snake and, while circumcision was too common among the guys at the Prince of Wales to cause embarrassment, my dick was the part of my anatomy that had started all my problems and now it was behaving in a manner over which I had absolutely no control.

Sex had never been discussed at home but among the guys in the boxing squad it was referred to as ‘doing it’. Snotnose was said to be almost doing it to Sophie Smit, Captain Smit’s daughter, having given her tits a feel-up in the dark at a Saturday matinee and, it was hinted, a feel down there, as well.

I knew enough about the ways of the Lord to know that if I should find myself in the fortunate position of being able to do it to Sophie, I would be committing a mortal sin. Though I freely admit, even in my pubescent state with my brains turned to meat loaf, I was aware that the chances of my achieving a supine Sophie were just about non-existent, I knew that the Lord, heavily backed by my mother, wasn’t the sort of person who settled for innocence by omission. My case was hopeless. Even for a sinner I was sinning at an alarming rate. Not only in my head but also behind a closed toilet door where I actively fantasised doing it to Sophie Smit.

The fact that I wasn’t a proper born again Christian somehow made it more important that I practise restraint. It became a test of character which I was failing on a daily, sometimes twice daily, not to mention nightly basis. I tried to keep it down to a minimum, promising myself after each time it happened that I was definitely cured, and this had been the last time my fingers would play a tune on the pork flute. Ha, ha… some last time! No matter how hard I tried to reform my wicked ways and to concentrate on other things my tent pole would erect at the most awkward times and I would need to sneak off to seek relief.

The trouble was that Hymie seemed not to have been struck by sex lightning at all. He talked dirty in the usual schoolboy way, though never in the same explicit terms as the constantly randy group around him. Not that I was among these big mouth fantasisers, my sex life was clandestine, a furtive business. But what the others claimed out loud they’d like to do with the Vargas girls in Esquire magazine was simply a paraphrase of what I felt myself. Cunning-Spider, Paul Atherton and Pissy Johnson were also sex struck though, I felt certain, not as badly as me. Hymie on the other hand seemed to sail through puberty like a bloody eunuch.

I don’t want to go on about it; but it was an awkward enough time and, because it disrupted the carefully constructed pattern of my existence, it forced me to think about other aspects of my life.

Hitherto I had never questioned the motives of the adults around me, nor had I felt any reason to question the conventional wisdom they assumed was correct for me. Now I was beginning to see that the plans for my future were being largely made by other people. That in return for being allowed to dream my boxing dream, I was allowing others to map the road ahead for me. I was perceived as a winner and everyone likes to help a winner. I could sense that I was clever enough to win most of the glittering prizes yet to come and this would inevitably lead to a life of privilege, to doors being opened, barriers lowered, places made for me as I was passed from hand to hand among the rich and the privileged until I melded perfectly, indistinguishable from those few who, in the white man’s Africa, have so much power over the many who have none.

Doc had taught me the value of being the odd man out. The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

At fourteen I had no hope of seeing things quite as clearly as this, but I instinctively understood that power is beguiling and man does not lightly give it up. To maintain it he will bend the truth and warp his values. I was a child of Africa, a white child to be sure, but nevertheless Africa’s child. The black breasts which had suckled me, and the dark hands which had bathed and rocked me, left me with a burden of obligation to resist the white power which would be the ultimate gift from those who now trained me.

I saw this same sense of aloneness in Hymie. I sensed his Jewish alienation and I understood the intelligent, clear-eyed pessimism that seemed a part of everything he did. He had inherited loneliness. Despite his need for me, he knew himself ultimately to be on his own. Though we never spoke of it, our friendship was forged on this common knowledge. We had instinctively come together to learn, each from the other, those lessons we needed to use the power within us effectively, to think and act differently from those around us.

To win took on a new meaning. It was still part of my fierce-eyed determination to become the welterweight champion of the world, but in the years to follow winning would become the ultimate camouflage as I trained to be a spiritual terrorist. To achieve this new and barely understood aim, I had to appear to be damn near perfect in everything I did even at the risk of appearing to be a bit of a pain.

Each week I received a letter from Doc, Mrs Boxall and Miss Bornstein. While I wrote home fairly regularly, I think my mother must have been too busy sewing to write very often. Sometimes on the bottom of Doc’s letters would appear two inky thumb prints under which Doc would write in his small neat hand, From Dee and Dum who ask who is washing your clothes and baking rusks for your coffee in the morning? Dee and Dum continued to make the sojourn to Doc’s cottage for the weekly clean-up and he had grown very fond of them. Doc’s letters were about the hills and his beloved cacti, and while I had continued my piano under the instruction of the school music master, he never mentioned music in his letters. I think Doc knew I was destined for other things. Mrs Boxall would write all the town gossip, and she said that the Assemblies of God had supplied two young missionaries who could speak four African languages between them to take on the prison letters. She was still in charge, determined that God would not be allowed to interfere with the perfectly lovely business of writing a letter to your loved ones. In one of her letters she had added that the people sadly missed King Georgie and that letter writing had fallen off a fair bit after I had left.

The Earl of Sandwich Fund had started to spread and Mrs Boxall was elected chairwoman of seven different groups which had started prison rehabilitation work among black prisoners in South Africa. Many of these early members of the Sandwich Fund were to become the leaders of the Black Sash movement, a movement among South African women which started in the mid fifties to protest against apartheid and injustice against the black people. It continues as one of the few voices of freedom coming out of this sad land; a voice muted from protest against a regime afraid to hear the just and anguished cries of the people.

Miss Bornstein was determined to develop my intellect and insisted on knowing in some detail exactly which books we were reading, maths we were doing and, in fact, everything. I had written to her about Hymie and she included him in her letters which would consist mostly of pages and pages of questions and discussion points. Finally she would always include in her weekly letter a chess move for each of us from old Mr Bornstein who in the six years we were at school we never managed to beat.

Hymie would groan loudly when the weekly letter arrived plump with questions. He’d hold his hands to the side of his face and rock in an exaggerated manner. ‘Oy veh!’ he’d say, imitating his granma, ‘the only reason I elected to come to this institution for Christian gentlemen was to get away from Jewish women, now I’m at fucking correspondence school with one!’ But Miss Bornstein had a way, even at long distance, of involving one’s pride and the interest she stimulated in her letters put Hymie and myself far ahead of anyone else in the A class at school.

Hymie was the first to use what became a famous expression throughout the school. We were in ‘Mango’ Cobett’s history class and Mango, an asinine man who taught with a very highbrow bias and was a dreadful snob, was talking about the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Mango carried the nickname because he had an oval-shaped head with fine blond hair which clung to his skull and a sharp blond goatee, the whole assemblage resembled a well-sucked mango pip. Though South African born, he was an avowed anglophile and spoke in a dewy-eyed manner about the bravery of Lord Cardigan in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

From the back of the class where we both sat Hymie interjected, ‘According to Miss Bornstein, he demonstrated a lamentable lack of control over the French, he also lacked common sense and a sense of responsibility to his men, sir.’

There was a stunned silence, Mango’s mouth was half open and he could hardly believe his ears.

‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan was also completely out of his depth, in fact, a bumbling old fool,’ Hymie added.

Mango Cobett finally regained his voice. ‘According to whom, Levy?’

‘According to Miss Bornstein of the famous Jewish correspondence school, sir,’ I interjected. The classroom broke into an uproar.

‘Shut up! Everyone shut up at once!’ Mango Cobett yelled. The classroom quickly murmured down into silence. Both Hymie and myself were known as brains and Mango wasn’t game enough simply to punish us with a couple of hours’ detention without first asserting his superior historical perspective.

‘I was unaware that the Jews played a part in the Crimean War. I take it your Miss Bornstein is a history scholar of some distinction, perhaps a better source than The Invasion of the Crimea by A. W. Kinglake.’ He picked up one of the books which lay on the desk in front of him and held it high, squinting slightly as he read the spine. ‘William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1864. I’d say that was from the horse’s mouth, wouldn’t you?’

‘More like the horse’s arse, sir,’ Hymie quipped, and the classroom broke up again.

Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea was one of the volumes my granpa had at home along with the complete works of Charles Dickens and I’d read both volumes of Kinglake’s account when I was eight. According to Miss Bornstein, Kinglake’s account was remarkable but she had also read the Russian and French accounts and now felt the official British version was heavily jingoistic and apt to blame the French and the Turks while allowing that Lord Raglan, the British Commander in Chief, though competent, was somewhat inexperienced and asserting Lord Cardigan to be a man of great sagacity and leadership skills. Miss Bornstein, Hymie and I had been conducting an involved correspondence on the very volumes Mango was quoting from.

‘According to Miss Bornstein, A. W. Kinglake was commissioned by the War Office to write the series, which was never a good start. The book has been republished several times and the 1864 version, slightly amended, was the fourth edition. More appeared after the first Boer War when the Transvaal had regained its independence, previously having been shamefully annexed by Britain after gold had fortuitously been discovered. The history was meant to remind the British of their recent glorious past so that they wouldn’t dwell too heavily on the trouncing they’d received from a handful of determined farmers who aimed straight and didn’t form into a square to fight. According to Miss Bornstein it is rather long on glory and somewhat short on the true facts. The volumes were republished again, just two years before the declaration of the second Boer War. They were, of course, ideally timed and put the British public in the mood for another territorial rape and pillage in the name of Queen and Empire.’ Hymie had exactly quoted a passage in one of Miss Bornstein’s letters, it was word perfect, even comma perfect.

Mango Cobett’s usually deathly pale face had flushed a dark red. ‘Are you challenging the integrity of one of the finest historians to come out of the British Isles, Levy?’

‘No, sir,’ Hymie said. ‘Miss Bornstein is.’ The class broke into spontaneous laughter again.

‘Shut up! Shut up!’ Mango yelled. ‘I’ve heard enough!’ The class settled down and a flushed Mango Cobett commenced to walk up and down the length of the classroom. ‘The Battle of Alma, the first in the Crimea, where the British took the Russian General Menshikov head on, Russians 9,000 dead, British 2,000! Those, gentlemen, are the facts.’

I jumped in. ‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan lost control of the Battle of Alma almost from the moment it started. He set the frontal attack and then lost control while the French climbed the steep cliffs near the mouth of the river and outflanked Menshikov with few casualties.’

‘Nine thousand Russians, two thousand British!’ Mango said emphatically.

‘Two thousand dead in three hours!’ I retaliated. ‘The French lost less than two hundred men.’

‘The Russians were peasants without any training and fought in dense columns. Menshikov had scrambled eggs for brains,’ Hymie said, to the delight of the classroom.

Mango Cobett pressed on. ‘The Battle of Inkerman, Russians 11,000 dead, the British 2,640!’ He leaned on the figure forty to emphasize his exact knowledge of the numbers involved.

‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan exercised no influence on the course of the fighting. The Battle of Inkerman was called the “Soldiers’ Battle” because units were committed to the battle piecemeal and the soldiers had to work it out for themselves,’ Hymie replied.

‘The Russians on the other hand were commanded by General Russian eggs himself,’ I said smugly, causing the class to laugh once more.

‘That will be enough, Peekay,’ Mango said, not too happy about arguing on two fronts. ‘We have one more battle to go, the Redan.’

‘Ah, the Redan! According to Miss Bornstein …’

‘Quiet, Levy!’ Mango demanded. ‘The Russian losses are not known but are thought to be twice that of the British.’

‘The British lost five thousand men at the Redan, and again Lord Raglan lost control of the battle,’ I said, determined that he should not be allowed to cover up the British losses.

‘Lord Raglan was a very sick man and died of cholera ten days after the Redan. He can’t be entirely blamed for the huge losses,’ Mango retorted.

‘You’ve missed the Charge of the Light Brigade, sir,’ Hymie said with a grin.

‘Ah yes, Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, a mistake, a question of a misunderstanding and an ill-drafted order.’

‘And under pig’s-trotters-for-brains Lord Cardigan, seven hundred mounted troopers charged into the valley of death and four hundred died!’

‘I don’t like your attitude, Levy, Lord Cardigan was a member of the British aristocracy and is not subject to schoolboy humour. While we’re on the subject, Peekay, Menshikov was a respected Russian general and also above your puerile wit. You will both see me outside the masters’ common room at the conclusion of school. Your attitude to this history lesson has been reprehensible to say the least.’ The bell went for recess and the colour drained back out of Mango Cobett’s face. As we were leaving the class he had one last jibe. ‘Let me assure you both, England did not conquer half the known world including this country because she placed stupid commanders in the field.’

‘According to Miss Bornstein…’ we both began, and Hymie finished… ‘that’s not true.’

The expression was born. From that moment on, any boy in the Prince of Wales School who disagreed with a statement made by a master would signal his disagreement by prefacing it with, ‘According to Miss Bornstein…’ It caused so much exasperation amongst the teaching staff that it was eventually taken to the head, St John Burnham MA (Oxon), known as Singe ’n Burn, who prided himself on being a liberal educationalist. To the mortification of the masters and in particular Mr Hemming the senior English master, Singe ’n Burn declared the expression, ‘A legitimate paraphrase for a dissenting opinion.’ And so the expression, ‘According to Miss Bornstein,’ was officially written into the school vocabulary.

We arrived outside the masters’ common room just after three o’clock armed with Miss Bornstein’s two letters on the subject of the Crimean War. But Mango refused to continue the argument and simply gave us two hours of detention and a two thousand word essay to write on the Crimean War. He added that the next indiscretion would result in a visit to the head.

Hymie said in disgust, ‘I told you history was all bullshit. There goes another generation of Christian gentlemen school boys who will grow up to believe the Charge of the Light Brigade was one of England’s finest hours.’

‘But it was,’ I said.

‘It was what?’ Hymie said, not sure he’d heard me correctly.

‘It was one of England’s finest hours. What’s important is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.’

‘Bullshit! If the Jews had played that game we’d have been extinct fifteen hundred years ago.’

‘You have to be a Christian gentleman to understand,’ I kidded him.

‘Do me a favour, Peekay, don’t just read history, feel it. Try to imagine being an ordinary guy on a half-starved horse, your regiment decimated by cholera, you’ve got a lance in your hand and are looking into the barrels of the Russian artillery holding the Vorontsov Ridge at Balaclava. Do you know why the English managed to conquer half the globe? Because they were so bloody stupid! Some halfwitted lord jumped up in a general’s uniform would simply advance on a position and expend men, he didn’t care, they were only yeomen and slum slush, cannon fodder. He just kept sending them in and so help me they kept on going, until eventually he won. You call that bravery? I call that two things, murder and stupidity. The generals murdered their men and the men were too stupid to resist.’

‘And too brave, it wasn’t just stupidity.’

Hymie ignored my interjection. ‘History makes it all okay. History forgets the vomit and the shit, the blood and the horses with their guts blown away, the cries of men as they shit their pants and drowned in their own blood. The Charge of the Light Brigade is celebrated because it was the most obviously stupid, most spectacularly stupid, most stupendously stupid sacrifice of men until the brilliant British generals finally topped it for sheer cold-blooded slaughter in the trenches in Flanders and on the cliffs above Gallipoli.’

Hymie changed course suddenly. ‘Hitler murdered six million Jews. He had to round them up and rail them to the death camps and the world wept for man’s inhumanity to man. But underneath it all there is the feeling that the Jews should have fought, should have resisted, should have died defending their kith and kin, should have died like men. All the women and children and the cobblers and tailors and small shopkeepers who believed that they were Germans and Poles and Hungarians, who believed passionately in logic and order, in Kant and Spinoza, and in minding their own business and never getting involved and most of all, in never volunteering to be stupid, should have turned into a fighting machine that takes pride in dying.

‘Because they didn’t go chasing a piece of coloured bunting around the place, history may yet judge them cowards.’ Hymie sniffed and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. I had never seen him quite as upset and angry before.

‘When a British general looking for a new swatch of ribbon for his chest sent men into battle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then again in the Great War Englishmen volunteered to go. They actually handed themselves over into his care and in return for their trust he was just as careless with their lives as the Jew killers of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Belsen and the other death camps were with the lives of my kind. But when it was all over, the world, or the English-speaking world anyway, cheered their Christian gentlemen heads off. More tradition had been made, more regimental bunting to hang in St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. More bullshit.’ He sniffed again and grabbed me by the shoulder.

‘You know something, Peekay? History stinks and it’s bastards like Mango Cobett who add to the putrefaction by believing the crap that’s written. Take my word for it, in another thirty years the Germans will claim that only a handful of SS caused the Holocaust unbeknownst to the good burgers who stayed at home and knitted socks for Jewish prisoners of war.’

To Mango Cobett’s credit, the detention essays Hymie and I wrote on the Crimean War shared the history prize that year. Miss Bornstein’s evidence was too conclusive.

With her weekly letters, some of them up to twenty pages, Miss Bornstein had the happy knack of instigating a line of reasoning which would stimulate us both. We’d rush to the school library to follow its course. By the time we were in form three we were fairly skilled researchers and were given permission to spend Wednesday afternoons at the Johannesburg Public Library.

Form three was a big year for us. It was the year the boxing team lost the wooden spoon and also the year we published, with the help of a typist and the Gestetner machine in Hymie’s father’s carpet emporium, The Miss Bornstein School of Correspondence Notes. Results fully guaranteed or your money back. Peekay & H. S. Levy. 5/-. There were two books, one for form one and the other for form two.

Hymie and I had argued furiously about the price. Five shillings was outrageous when a science textbook cost only two shillings.

‘If we charge what it appears to be worth we’d be lucky to get sixpence,’ he admitted. ‘Good business is when people perceive something to be valuable, and the best way to encourage this perception is by guiding their thinking.’

‘You mean by charging outrageously?’

‘Now wait a mo, Peekay, that’s not quite fair. Value for money is when the customer is satisfied that he has made the right purchase decision. Or do you disagree?’

I was forced to agree. ‘Well then, what are we promising with the Miss Bornstein School of Correspondence Notes, for form one and two?’

‘The promise is on the cover, but the bloody promise holds good whether we charge them sixpence or ten bob.’

‘Not so. A five bob price tag means at least two things: that the information in the notes is important and rare and that by following it, success is guaranteed. The second promise is convenience, all the information they need is between two covers, they don’t have to schlep through a dozen textbooks, the authors have done all the mental legwork for them. If we charged them sixpence they wouldn’t value the book and so it wouldn’t work for them.’

‘Shouldn’t we dress them up a bit? For two bob a copy we could probably afford to have them printed with a hard cover. At least that way the value would be perceived to be better?’

Hymie looked at me in astonishment. ‘Peekay, are you mad? Do you want to kill business in one year?’

‘What do you mean?’

Hymie picked up a copy of our textbook and holding it by one corner he shook it violently. The staples in the centre margin gave way and the pages flew apart.

‘There you are, look at that! They’re rubbish, we’ll never get away with this,’ I protested.

‘Bullshit, they’re perfect, they’ll only just hang together for one year. If we have them properly printed and bound the guys will sell them at the end of the year to the incoming form. Where would our business be then?’

Hymie was right, despite the price there wasn’t a kid in either form who didn’t purchase a copy and no one asked to have their money refunded. We were a good business combination with the added advantage of being generally popular; in particular, my ability in the boxing ring and, to a lesser degree, on the rugby field created quite a large following among my peers. Doing business with the Bank when you were broke became the norm for both day boys and boarders, so that every time we went out into another business venture the reception we got was usually pretty good. We referred to this accumulation of goodwill as our ‘Image’, a word I discovered in an American book on business practice and which had not then gained the currency it enjoys today.

I must say, while Mango Cobett was a bit of a buffoon and a terrible snob, Singe ’n Burn, the head, had taken care to staff the school with liberal thinkers. He was less interested in turning out what he referred to as ‘the private school product’ than he was in encouraging individuals to emerge. He would refer to his idealised person as a Renaissance man. A boy who delighted in learning for its own sake, the inspired amateur in the gifts of the body and the spirit. The complete man, superior by virtue of his curiosity and the careful nurturing and harvesting of his gifts. A man who was modest and unassuming because he had no need to hide his thoughts or his deeds from others, nor had he the need to seek their approval.

Singe ’n Burn was an Englishman coming to the end of what is usually referred to as a distinguished career. To parents he represented all the values of the English public school system, coming as he did from Winchester where he had been a senior house master. For the board of governors he epitomised a system of privilege which they held in great esteem and desired him to emulate as faithfully as possible.

In his twenty years as headmaster of the Prince of Wales School Singe ’n Burn never quite came to terms with the wealthy South African schoolboy. In a curious way the boys shared the belief in their social superiority with their English public school counterparts, though perhaps the basis for this superiority was different.

In the first instance, like all white South Africans, English and Afrikaans, they believed that God had ordained their superiority as white men. To this was added their proxy Englishness and their absolute belief in the right of wealth and privilege. Perhaps, after all, not so different from their English cousins.

Singe ’n Burn’s pupils came to him with minds already narrowed, bigots with their dislike and distrust of the Afrikaner intact. Among them was the unspoken belief that they were the intellectually and culturally superior of South Africa’s two white tribes. To this was added their spoken belief that they were of a higher species than the blacks. This corruption of the spirit had taken place in the cradle and the task of driving the racist out of the boy was fruitless. St John Burnham was forced to take in largely shallow minds to be fattened with sufficient information to pass the matriculation exams. Alas, the potential for a Renaissance man to emerge from this intellectual scrubland was severely limited.

Yet for twenty years Singe ’n Burn had kept his dream alive. While most of the boys from the Prince of Wales School were interchangeable with the product of any of the private schools in South Africa, that is, equipped for a society where money and social position were important, he kept for himself just six boys each year. They were the raw material for his Renaissance men, a handful of brilliant boys who were known as St John’s People, pronounced ‘Sinjun’s People’. These boys were selected in form three for special tuition under the direction of Singe ’n Burn, who elected to neglect the many for the precious few. Sinjun’s People were the roses amongst the tangle-weed and the school’s considerable reputation as a nursery for the country’s future leaders had been built on these half-dozen carefully nurtured young minds brought to flower in Sinjun’s hothouse.

Brains alone did not qualify a boy to be one of Sinjun’s People, though intellect played a significant part in the training to come. ‘It is the spirit of the boy, an unselfconscious ability to maintain his status among his peers while remaining true to himself in his beliefs, opinions and actions,’ is how Singe ’n Burn would explain it at the first headmaster’s assembly at the beginning of each year.

There was always a great deal of speculation in form three and, indeed, among the rest of the school when the election of Sinjun’s People took place just prior to the Easter break.

I had prepared myself in my old way for a disappointment and had I not been among the chosen six it would hurt my pride enormously but I knew I would survive. The betting on me being included was pretty high. But I didn’t share this general confidence, not for reasons of false modesty, but because of my boxing. While the boxing team had given the school a new status, compared to cricket and rugby it was a sport of small importance. Several of the masters considered it unsuitable for a school of our reputation, and but for Darby and Sarge it would probably have been phased out. I had maintained my position as one of the brains of the school but had never left any doubt that boxing came first in my immediate ambitions. I was certain this would count against me. In my final interview with Singe ’n Burn he had noted that my boxing appeared to come first, ahead of my competence as a musician and as a promising young scholar. ‘Your boxing? Is this an obsession with you, Peekay? Where do you propose to take your skill? I must say it seems an unlikely future pastime for a gentleman, even though Lord Byron was said to have been a talented boxer.’ When I replied that I intended to be the welterweight champion of the world his eyebrows had shot up and he had looked at me over his steel rimmed spectacles. ‘Hmm,’ was all he said by way of reply.

Hymie was also among the fifteen candidates to be interviewed by the head. While he was regarded as a powerful intellect Hymie was generally thought to be too brash, and was therefore regarded by most of the schoolboy punters as being a long shot. When I queried him on his interview with Singe ’n Burn, he seemed reluctant to talk about it and so I didn’t question him any further.

Sinjun’s People were traditionally selected in order of merit, and this provided Hymie with a business opportunity that was to be one of our greatest successes. Apart from doing some of the legwork and sharing in the considerable profit, I played no part in its formation. We called it ‘Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred’. As a punter you could bet two ways, by paying a shilling you could nominate any three successful candidates from the list of fifteen finalists, regardless of order. The winners, for there were certain to be more than one, to share a pot of thirty pounds. Or if you took two bets or more you qualified to enter Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred which carried a prize of one hundred pounds and required only two successes, the names of the boys in first and second place on the Sinjun’s People list.

It was clever stuff, every boy believed he knew at least three certainties and so had an excellent chance to share in the thirty-pound pot. Most punters couldn’t resist doubling their bets for a crack at the big money, one hundred pounds if there was only one winner and a guaranteed twenty quid if there were more. Many of the kids, in particular day boys, put ten shillings and a pound on in an effort to get as many combinations right as possible. Even in this haven for little rich boys, a hundred quid represented a fortune. There wasn’t a kid in the school who didn’t have at least two bets going.

We set up office in the main school bogs for an hour before school and at lunch break every day for a week before the final selection of Sinjun’s People. The queue outside the toilet stretched well into the playground and anyone observing the toilets must have wondered whether an outbreak of the runs had struck the school.

Hymie took the money while I acted as pencil man, the guy who wrote down the bets. Tension was high on the last day before the following morning assembly when Sinjun’s People were announced. The excitement had helped a little to quell my fears for us both. Hymie, by his own admission, considered himself a doubtful candidate. ‘Shit, Peekay, it’s obvious, I’m too much of a gunslinger and not enough of a poet to please Singe ’n Burn.’ Privately I agreed, his wheeler-dealer reputation and my boxing preference counted heavily against us. In Hymie’s case the betting showed this; not once did his name appear in the one/two combination whereas mine did so frequently.

We’d taken bets totalling a staggering one hundred and ninety pounds, win or lose we’d made a neat profit of sixty quid. We’d worked out the odds on someone taking out Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred and they were small but certainly not impossible, whereas we knew we’d have several winners in the thirty-pound pot. A perfect scam and good business to boot. A guaranteed profit, a number of satisfied winners and the chance to make a huge profit in the event of Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred not having to pay out. You had to hand it to Hymie, it was copybook stuff.

I could hear my heart beating furiously as I stood next to Hymie in headmaster’s assembly the following morning. The hymn chosen before morning prayer was, ‘O God our Help in Ages Past’, a favourite, although today it seemed to go on for about twenty minutes. The prayer which followed was a long-winded affair about humility in honour and fortitude in times of disappointment. It had obviously been carefully chosen by Singe ’n Burn for the occasion. Then followed a host of trivial school housekeeping notes, including an admonition to stay away from the swimming pool which was being emptied for repainting over the Easter break, and an aside about more boys signing up for their beginner’s life saving certificate.

At last Singe ’n Burn cleared his throat for the major business of the day. Standing on the platform in a black gown with purple lining, he had removed his mortarboard so that the light caught his snowy white hair. At a time when short back and sides was the national norm his hair fell almost to his shoulders and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles sat on the end of his long, impressive nose. St John Burnham MA (Oxon) was the most headmasterly looking headmaster I have ever seen, better even than anything out of a Billy Bunter comic.

The entire school was deadly quiet, apart from the fifteen candidates, there wasn’t a boy present who didn’t have money resting on the outcome of the next few minutes. Singe ’n Burn cleared his throat and began.

‘Each year the school council allows me a very special personal indulgence. I am allowed to choose from the third form those half dozen boys who will become Sinjun’s People.’ He paused to look up into the stained glass windows at the rear of the hall, as though asking for divine guidance. ‘Now, you will all know that I do not take this task lightly. It is, after all, as much a sadness as it is a celebration, for while six are to be chosen, nine who have made it to the finals will be asked to step aside. It is these nine good men and true who make my task an almost impossible one. After all, who is to say I’m right? I feel sure someone else, choosing in my place, might select six boys equally equipped and talented, though different to those I have chosen. All the candidates this year were exceptional young men, all deserve to be included, but alas, there are only six places. My congratulations to you all and a word of solace for those of you who do not become Sinjun’s People.’ He paused and directed our attention to the nineteen twenty-nine scroll of honour painted in gold leaf on a panel in the centre lefthand side of the hall. ‘The name at the very top of that nineteen twenty-nine scroll of honour belongs to the present South African High Commissioner to London, a brilliant diplomat and scholar and the youngest man ever to hold this position. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if some day he becomes our prime minister.’ He paused again to gain maximum effect for the words to follow. ‘This brilliant boy was not elected in his day to be among Sinjun’s People.’ His eyes seemed to travel across each row as he looked down at us over the tops of his spectacles. ‘I had intended to read Rudyard Kipling’s great poem “If” to you at this juncture but was reminded that it is part of your English curriculum this term and therefore well known to you all. I shall spare you a repeat performance. Let me conclude by saying, in my experience the glittering prizes in life come more to those who persevere despite setback and disappointment than they do to the exceptionally gifted who, with the confidence of the talents bestowed upon them, often pursue the tasks leading to success with less determination.’ He paused and from inside his gown he produced a sheet of paper.

‘The following boys from the third form have been chosen to be Sinjun’s People for the remainder of their tenure at the Prince of Wales School. My congratulations to you all.’ He glanced down at the piece of paper he was holding and commenced to read: ‘Levy H. S., Lyell H. R., Quigley B. J., Minnaar J. R.…’ I had punched Hymie in the ribs when his name came up, but now I could feel my face burning and a huge lump grew in my throat. I was sure I would suffocate… ‘Eliastam P. J.,’ the head paused to clear his throat and then looked up over the assembled boys. Time hung like cobwebs in the air and the paper he’d been holding seemed etched like a white tombstone floating in space.

‘And Peekay,’ he said finally.

I felt weak in the legs and it took all my strength of will not to start crying on the spot. I had made it. I was the sixth part of Sinjun’s People.

Atherton, Cunning-Spider, Pissy Johnson, Hymie and I celebrated by feasting on Perk’s pies, cream buns and Pepsi-Cola all that afternoon before Atherton, Cunning-Spider and Pissy Johnson had to leave for the four o’clock roll call. Sinjun’s People were not required to attend roll call and as they left playfully cursing us, we looked suitably upset though secretly we felt enormously privileged.

Nine punters had won on the first bet sharing the thirty-pound pot between them. There were no winners on the second bet. Hymie himself had been the wild card, and while some of the punters might have selected him for inclusion in their first bet, none had thought to place him first or second in Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred. The fact that my name had appeared most often in either the first or second slot meant that most of the bets were not even close. We had cleared one hundred and sixty pounds on the deal.

After the others had left for roll call I turned to Hymie. ‘Okay, smartarse, how did you do it?’ I said, delicately licking the excess cream squirting from the side of my last cream bun.

‘How did I do what?’ Hymie said dreamily, upending a Pepsi into his mouth in an attempt to hide his grin.

‘You know what I’m talking about! You knew from the betting that your chances of being selected in the number one spot were considered zero. Even I wouldn’t have put you there. With you in the number one spot we had to win the big money. How did you do it?’

He removed the Pepsi from his mouth and placed it on the floor beside him. ‘It was partly luck, but mostly my usual good judgement,’ he said in his unassuming way.

‘Christ you’re a humble bastard, Levy! Okay, tell me the good judgement part first.’

‘Well I guess we should have been happy with a sixty quid profit, with a reasonable chance of winning the big money as well. But there was still an element of luck involved. I had somehow to work out a way whereby the betting was completely honest, but the punter’s chance of winning was cut down and ours increased.’

‘You greedy bugger, Levy.’

‘No, not greedy, I just don’t like to gamble, but I do like to win and to win you have to make the odds negligible. Now, you take the horses. There are roughly fifteen horses in a race and over the whole of last year I analysed the results of every race run at Turfontein racecourse. In that entire time the first and second favourites won in correct sequence one hundred and four times in eight hundred and thirty-two races, that means the bookmaker has eight chances of winning to one of losing. That’s good, but not good enough.’

‘Yeah, sure, but we had sixty quid marked off for a profit anyway. That’s a damn good week’s work.’

‘I know, but the whole thing lacked intellectual excitement. It didn’t depend on my wits.’

‘Hymie, you can’t have it both ways. You want a totally safe scam but you still want to get an intellectual kick from winning.’

‘That’s what I’ve told you before. With a Jew making money for its own sake, it is a matter of intellectual survival.’

‘Okay, I accept that; so tell me, man, how did you fix it?’

‘Fix it!’ Hymie exploded. ‘Are you calling me a cheat?’

His outburst was totally unexpected and I was shocked. ‘Ferchrissake, Hymie, you know what I mean,’ I said quickly, trying to hide my embarrassment.

Hymie sighed, ‘In the end it’s always the same, the gentile believes the dirty Jew is cheating, that’s right isn’t it?’

‘Bullshit, Hymie! That’s not what I meant, I’m truly sorry. You know how I feel about you.’

Hymie held my gaze for a long time. ‘Yeah, I do,’ he said with a grin, ‘but thanks for saying it anyway.’

‘Well go on,’ I said, greatly relieved and anxious to leave the incident and continue the conversation.

Hymie continued. ‘It does rather seem like a fix, doesn’t it? But all I did was tamper a little with human nature.’

‘You’ll have to explain that.’

‘Well, when you told me about your interview with Singe ’n Burn… how he had questioned you about your boxing.’

‘I don’t understand. What had that to do with setting up the multiple of one hundred bet?’

‘Well, you know my theory of a winner. Find one winner and you can build everything around him? Well, you’ve always been my one winner and with the strong likelihood of your placing in the number one slot for Sinjun’s People, Levy’s Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred would have been much too risky. It meant the punter had only to get one more correct name to win.’

‘But I told you the boxing issue might have eliminated me all together.’

‘Not a chance, old buddy! There was never any chance that you wouldn’t be chosen, but I was willing to bet that Singe ’n Burn wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to give you your first tutorial.’

‘My first tutorial?’

‘Christ, Peekay, sometimes you’re thick. Singe ’n Burn is a self-confessed liberal thinker, deeply suspicious of the obsessive personality. That’s the whole point of his Renaissance man, moderation in all things even in moderation. He was signalling his disapproval by placing you in sixth possie.’

‘Jesus, Hymie, you took the trouble to think all that out?’

‘Thinking is never any trouble, you should try it sometime.’ He grinned suddenly, ‘Besides, I might have been wrong, Singe ’n Burn might have just dropped you one slot and you’d still be up there in one of the top two positions. I had to put us completely out of danger. I had to get myself chosen, not just chosen, but elected to the number one slot. You see, even if you were in the number two position and as a rank outsider, a non-contender, I was in the number one slot, that would make it impossible for anyone to get a correct sequence. Nobody in his right mind would combine a hundred to one shot in with a certainty when both places counted together for the win.’

‘You’ve got me. How the hell did you make it happen?’

‘Well, I’d figured out how Singe ’n Burn was going to react with you and when you know the man you know the thought process. The opposite to an obsessive personality, in this case yours about boxing, is a well-adjusted one. The epitome of a well-adjusted personality is modesty and a willingness to sacrifice your own ambition for the greater good of the whole. What was it that Christ said? “No greater love hath a man than he lay down his life for a friend”.’ Hymie gave a little laugh, ‘So when Singe ’n Burn discovered personal sacrifice together with generosity of spirit to be a fundamental part of my character, I knew I had the number one possie in the bag.’

‘And just how did you prove this to him? I mean, those two personality traits are not exactly obvious in you,’ I added with a tinge of sarcasm.

Hymie turned to me, an embarrassed look on his face. ‘I don’t think you’re going to like this next bit much. We were talking about the importance of friendship and I brought up my friendship with you. Singe ’n Burn then asked me about your obsession with boxing.’ He paused, ‘Are you sure you want me to go on?’

‘I think I know where this is leading, but I can’t stop it now, go on.’

‘Well, I told him about your childhood, your last boarding school, the prison, although I promise I didn’t tell him about the Tadpole Angel, just Geel Piet and the boxing, just some of the stuff you told me.’

‘Jesus, Hymie, that was confidential.’

‘Yeah, I know, I mean I knew it was, but you’d never actually told me not to tell anyone.’ Hymie paused, ‘Christ, Peekay, you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘I’ve never been ashamed of anything in my life, except when I was made to feel that way the first time I went to boarding school. It’s… well, it’s just that I don’t want any Christian gentleman feeling sorry for me because my mum hasn’t two bob to her name.’

Hymie jumped to his feet and grabbed me by my blazer lapels. ‘You bloody fool! They’d do anything to be like you. So would I. To have done the things you’ve done, led the life you’ve led. Believe me, being rich in a Jewish household isn’t a lot of fun. Everything is overdone. Too much love, too much money, too much food, too much care, too much reminding you that you’re different, that you’re Jewish. I’ve been bored since I was five years old! Bored by the predictability of being born into a wealthy middle-class Jewish home. You can have my twelve bedrooms and six bathrooms. I’ll swap you my old man’s five cars and three chauffeurs for a fortnight with Doc.’

I suddenly realised that I was making far more of a meal over his indiscretion with my past than he had made when he thought I had accused him of cheating.

‘Okay, we’re quits, you smooth-talking bastard,’ I said, grinning. ‘Now, get on with the story. How, for instance, did telling him all this talk him into giving you the number one spot?’

‘I simply told him that I was a Jew, which I suppose he knew already but it didn’t hurt to remind him. That my father was enormously rich. That I had enjoyed and would continue to enjoy every possible privilege. That I would be sent to Oxford where I would read law and well blah, blah, blah. The future for me was all sewn up.’

‘So?’

‘This is the worst part. I told him that if I was selected to Sinjun’s People and you were not, that I wished to forfeit my spot in your favour.’ He looked at me querulously, waiting for my anger.

I was silent. I knew with a sudden certainty that Hymie, after hearing the results of my interview with Singe ’n Burn, had grown concerned that my boxing obsession would eliminate me from Sinjun’s People. That he’d ridden to the rescue, prepared to sacrifice any chances he might have had to ensure my inclusion. In the process he had read Singe ’n Burn brilliantly and had capitalised handsomely on the situation.

‘You’d have done that anyway, wouldn’t you? You’d have been prepared to give up your chances even if the scam hadn’t been there.’

‘Hell no! No bloody fear!’ he said in alarm. ‘Christ, Peekay, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, where would the Jews be if all of a sudden they started making sacrifices for the bloody Christians!’

‘Thanks, Hymie,’ I said.

‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Peekay. If you’re trying to tell me I wasn’t doing all this for mercenary motives I resent it. Don’t you think I’m capable of thinking up a ploy as good as this one turned out to be?’

‘On the contrary, you had it figured out so that whatever happened you influenced the game.’

Hymie blushed, which I’d never seen him do before. ‘No point in leaving things to chance; much too risky,’ he said with a deprecating grin.

‘Christ, the number one spot always belonged to you anyway.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Look, why don’t we take a tenner each for the holidays?’ He handed me a ten-pound note. ‘I’ll put the rest in the bank, I’ve got big plans for next term we’ll talk about after the holidays.’