‘Just a bad cold, Peekay. It was nothing.’
‘It was pneumonia!’
‘Ja this is true, but some pneumonia is big, some is small, this was a pickaninny, a very small pneumonia for sure and absoloodle.’ He rose again from the chair. ‘Come I make coffee, Peekay.’
‘Marie will tell me how bad it was.’
Doc threw up his hands. ‘Marie! Such a person! “Professor you must give your life to Jesus, there is not much time. You must choose between the eternal damnation of hellfire or the love of Jesus Christ.” I think maybe I stay a little longer here, miss, I say to this Marie. I think she was quite a lot disappointed. Ja, I think so,’ Doc said, chuckling as he poured a mug of strong black coffee for me, holding the coffee pot in both hands to stop himself shaking.
We sat on the verandah sipping our coffee in big tin mugs, Doc’s only half full so that he wouldn’t spill it. He was up to all his tricks to hide his frailty. We said very little, I could see Doc was happy I was back and I felt I would give him strength. We talked about the crystal cave of Africa, which Doc now regarded as our greatest discovery.
‘It is good we are together again, Peekay. On Christmas Day I will be eighty-seven years old.’
‘Doc, you’ve got to live until I’m welterweight champion of the world, you’ve got to make it until you’re at least ninety-four or five!’
Doc chuckled at the urgency in my voice and rose slowly from his chair. ‘Come, I show you Pachypodium namaquanum. It grows so big, maybe we have the world champion here also.’
As we walked together into the cactus garden, Doc still tall and straight as Pachypodium namaquanum himself, there seemed to be a little more spring in his step. ‘Next week we will go into the mountains, Peekay, it has been too long.’
We did, mostly skirting the foothills and taking the easy paths, but Doc seemed to gain strength and was much better by the time I returned to school in mid-January.
TWENTY-ONE
Nineteen forty-eight was a great year in South Africa’s history. Princess Elizabeth had recently toured and we’d all stood beside the road and waved flags and caught a glimpse of our future Queen as she rode past in a long black open Rolls-Royce.
It was the year South Africa got white bread, an event which excited a lot more people than catching a glimpse of the future Queen of England.
History will tell of how the election of the Nationalist Party, who still hold power in South Africa forty years later, was the turning point when the Afrikaner once again became the dominant force in the country. History is bound to treat this event with great pontification, showing how the struggle between the two white tribes of Africa reached its climax. In fact the turning point came, not because of an ideological clash between white and white, but because the Nationalists promised to bring back white bread to replace the healthier wholewheat loaf which had been introduced during the war. An already overfed white minority elected to vote on its stomach. Within a week of being elected, the Nationalists kept their promise and white South Africans derived great satisfaction from knowing that for once they had a new government which kept its word. Meanwhile, the black South Africans prepared to bend their backs to the sjambok and for the invention of a new game where they voluntarily fell on their heads from the third storey of police headquarters to the pavement below. It was curious that the whites, renowned for their sporting prowess, never learned how to play this game and there isn’t a single instance of a white South African becoming proficient at it. Nobody ever got their Springbok blazer for this new national game, even though a lot of very good heads played it with great courage.
Hymie, in a grim pun, said the election of the Nationalists to power was one of the crummiest moments in the history of any people.
Nineteen forty-eight was the year South Africa lost all hope of joining the brotherhood of man. Yet the black man held his humiliation and his anger at bay. It was not until nineteen fifty-two, four years later, that Chief Lutuli of the African Congress and his counterpart, Dr Monty Naicker of the Indian Congress, led the black and coloured people in the first defiance campaign where the words, ‘Mayibuye Afrika!’ became the cry of the black man asking for an equal share of justice and dignity for himself and his family.
Private schools have a habit of carrying on regardless, oblivious of social or political change. Had it not been for a boxing incident which led to the establishment of a Saturday night school for Africans, the Prince of Wales School would certainly have remained smugly wrapped in its cocoon of privilege and white supremacy.
The incident happened during the ten-day Easter break in nineteen forty-nine. Hymie’s parents decided to spend Jewish passover with relatives in Durban. Hymie elected to stay home and invited me to spend the short holidays with him. I wrote to Mrs Boxall who wrote back to say Doc was well so I agreed. The cook and the rest of the staff would take care of us and one of the chauffeurs would drive us the forty miles from Pretoria to Johannesburg every day to work out in Solly Goldman’s gym.
Solly protested but we insisted he be paid extra for the holidays. Hymie’s entrepreneurial sense extended to all things. He’d go to Barclays Bank in Yeoville on Saturday morning and demand a brand new five-pound note. Keeping it unfolded he’d place it beside the week’s entry in a large leather-bound ledger. On Sunday morning, after I’d worked out we’d go into Solly’s ramshackle office and Hymie would open the ledger where he had written in his neat, precise hand: Paid to S. Goldman five pounds for services rendered. He would make Solly sign the ledger and remove the five-pound note from the page. Then they’d shake hands solemnly like a couple of little old men, whereupon Solly would get his revenge by stuffing the pristine five-pound note carelessly into the back pocket of his dirty grey flannels.
Solly was a very natty street dresser but in the gym he always wore a sweatshirt and the same old grey flannels, tied around the waist with a frayed brown striped tie.
‘Why do you go to all that trouble when he just shoves it into his back pocket?’ I once asked Hymie.
‘So he’ll stick it carelessly into his back pocket. Every week my stupid ritual and his defiance reminds him not to take us for granted. Every time he sticks it into his back pocket like that I know he won’t.’
On the third day of the Easter holidays Solly asked whether he could see Hymie and me in his office. He pointed to two old cane upright chairs and, pushing a pile of papers out of the way, sat on the corner of a desk covered to a depth of six inches in evenly distributed paper. In addition to boxing bills, unopened letters and general paper clutter, there was a bronze cup about ten inches high green with verdigris, a telephone and a large desk blotter added to the mess. The telephone sat on top of the desk blotter which was covered with coffee rings and hundreds of names and numbers. If anyone had ever replaced the top layer of blotting paper Solly’s gym would have ground to a halt.
‘You’ve had an offer of a fight for Peekay in Sophiatown next Saturday night. It’s not my decision, mind, but it can’t do the lad no ’arm.’
‘Sophiatown! You mean the black township?’
‘Yeah, I’ll admit it’s a bit unusual, it’s a young black bantam who’s just turned pro.’
‘Solly, are you crazy? Peekay’s an amateur, he can’t fight a pro!’
‘The black kid’s not from up here, he isn’t registered in the Transvaal yet. Technically he’s an amateur here. Anyway, if the fight takes place in a native township, who the hell’s going to know?’