Mrs Boxall had become a firm favourite at the prison. The Kommandant, who had become a colonel because of Doc’s concert, decided he liked prison reform and had allowed her to start a Sunday morning school for the prisoners. She had negotiated with the Kommandant to reward progress with King Georgies. The Pentecostal missionaries, who had agreed to do the teaching in return for a fifteen-minute sermon every Sunday, disagreed violently with the distribution of tobacco to students who excelled. Their God was neither a consumer of strong drink nor a user of tobacco. They were forced to conclude that God worked in mysterious ways when attendance and scholastic effort increased markedly with the introduction of King Georgies as an incentive. A prisoner would study for every limited moment he had during the week for the reward of one cigarette. With the result, many blacks left prison able to read, write and do simple arithmetic. Mr Bornstein, Miss Bornstein’s father, had converted the Earl of Sandwich Fund into the Sandwich Foundation and already one little old lady had left it a bequest of two thousand pounds. The letter writing sessions still continued, and during the holidays I’d take over from the missionaries and Marie’s father’s tobacco leaf would once again be fitted into the folds of the tracts and given out with every letter. In fact during every school holiday letters to King George, which of course we never posted, became very popular again. The Tadpole Angel was back in town and Gert used to swear that trouble in the prison was almost non-existent during these periods.
Gert, with encouragement from Mrs Boxall, had tackled English and now spoke it fairly well. He’d become very attached to Doc and Mrs Boxall and made sure that the repairs around Doc’s cottage or Mrs Boxall’s house were done and that Charlie’s motor was kept going. Every time I’d get home it would be the same thing, ‘I’m telling you, man, only chewing gum and axle grease is holding that old tjorrie together, one day I’m just going to have to take it to a cliff top, say a prayer and push it over. Only it won’t be able to make it up the hill in the first place!’ But under Gert’s concerned and tender care Charlie kept going.
Klipkop had been transferred to Pretoria and Gert, to his enormous surprise, had been given the job of assistant to Captain Smit. As a consequence he had earned his corporal’s stripes. He was now the prison heavyweight and would be fighting for the vacant title at the next championships. The giant Potgieter, who had continued to beat Gert in the final of the two subsequent championships after Gert’s original defeat in Nelspruit, had turned professional.
The Lowveld Championships had been expanded and were now known as the Eastern Transvaal Championships, bringing in some of the bigger towns and making it tougher for the Barberton Blues. As they always occurred during the December school holidays, it was important to Captain Smit that I take part as a member of the Blues.
Regular boxing against the Afrikaans schools during term had made me a much better boxer, although I personally longed for the magic of Geel Piet, who knew how to make me think better in the ring. Whereas Darby White and Sarge, like Captain Smit, were honest carpenters, Geel Piet had been an artist and I missed his uncanny understanding of how to exploit my personality in the ring.
I felt I wasn’t growing as a boxer. Yehudi Menuhin once said that playing the violin is like singing through your limbs; Geel Piet had had the ability to make boxing seem the same, each punch the result of perfect timing, continuity, controlled emotion and intelligence. If I was to become the welterweight champion of the world, I knew I’d soon have to find a coach who thought beyond schoolboy boxing.
The holidays were packed. I’d be at the prison at five-thirty a.m. for boxing, and Captain Smit would make me go three rounds with two of the other kids. Mostly with Snotnose and Jaapie, both heavier than me but really the only two boxers who could box well enough to push me. Both would itch to have a go, both were fighters in the Smit tradition, and both were very tough. It called for all my ringcraft to stay out of trouble. Halfway through the second round, Captain Smit would blow his whistle and one of them would step down and the other come in. This meant each of them only boxed one and a half rounds and so they’d go flat out, prepared to take a few punches to get a good one in. Captain Smit was convinced that it was the only way to increase my speed and keep me sharp.
After an hour and a half in the prison gym I’d head for Doc’s cottage, where either Dee or Dum, who took it turn about, would have delivered breakfast. By the time I arrived at eight, the coffee would be made and a loaf of fresh bread would be on the table, together with eggs and bacon, plopping away on the back of the stove waiting for me to arrive. Doc was, after all, still a German and he expected me to be exactly on egg and bacon time. The girls loved the holidays and they’d spoil me rotten, with baking and fussing and generally cooking up a storm. Doc always claimed he put on several pounds when I was around.
Doc and I would sit outside on his stoep for breakfast and we’d plan the weekend hike. This usually meant repeating an old trail. Doc would bring out his notepad and we’d discuss the last time we’d done the planned walk, which might have been five years before. We’d discuss every specimen we’d found then and sometimes even leave the table to check the progress of some long forgotten succulent we had collected. Doc was still tied to the Steinway and his little girl students during the week, so our long walks had to take place over the weekend. Though I’m sure, after a while, he’d have had it no other way, the planning and the discussion over his notes became just as important to him as the excursions themselves. At nine he’d give me a piano lesson, shaking his head at the bad habits I’d acquired under the direction of Mr Mollip, the Prince of Wales School music master. ‘This Mr Muddleup, you are sure he teaches pianoforte?’ he would say, shaking his head. ‘I think maybe the banjo yes? He would spend the rest of the holidays getting me back into some sort of musical shape.
The first time I played St Louis blues for Doc I had expected to shock him out of his pants. In fact it was meant as a joke. Instead he nodded quietly. ‘Ja, that is goot.’ I turned to look at him in surprise. ‘But to play black, the music must come from your soul not out from your head, Peekay.’ He indicated that I should rise from the piano stool, and seated in my place he played the piece in the same haunting way as Hymie’s seventy-eight of Errol Garner.
‘Bloody hell, Doc, where’d you learn to do that!’ It was the first time I’d sworn in Doc’s presence but he seemed not to notice. ‘Okey-dokey, Mr Schmarty-Pantz, who is a person called W. C. Handy?’
‘He sounds like a lavatory brush,’ I said flippantly.
‘Mr W. C. Handy wrote this music, and now you want to play it without heart and even without knowing who is the composer! Would you do this to Beethoven or Bach? No, I think not. But now Mr Schmarty-Pantz thinks to play the black man’s music is easy.’
‘Sorry, Doc, it was only a joke. I only wanted to shock you.’
‘Then to shock me you must play me bad music, not play me good music badly,’ he said softly.
I was the one who had been shocked and Doc had in the process taught me once again to do my research and my thinking before I did my judging. ‘Where’d you learn to play like that, Doc?’
Doc laughed. ‘So long ago, ja, when I write my first book on cactus in North America, I was in New Orleans. I had no money so I played fifteen minutes classical every night in a fancy cathouse, the Golden Slipper. Ja, this is the name of that place. After I play comes every night a jazz band and soon we talk and so on and so forth and they think the German professor is very funny, but not my music, the rich people who come to this cathouse, they don’t understand Mr Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms. But the black men, they understood. I teach them a little of this and a little of that and they teach me a little of that and a little of this,’ he touched the keys and played a couple of bars of blues music. ‘It was here I meet Mr W. C. Handy and later also Mr Willie Smith.’