And so I practiced on the punch bag until the whole armory of punches was as familiar to me as the piano scales. That old punching bag took a terrible hiding on a daily basis over those first two years. I would imagine it cowering as it saw me approach, sometimes even whimpering, “Not too many of those deadly uppercuts today, Peekay!” Or, “I can’t take any more right crosses.” I’m telling you, that big old punching bag learned to respect me, all right.
But it was the speedball I grew to love. Gert, the young warder who spoke no English, was also on the boxing squad and we’d become firm friends. He’d modified an old punching ball so that it stood low enough for me to reach.
I can remember the first day when, after many weeks of practice on the speedball, I achieved a continuity of rhythm, the ball a blur in front of my boxing gloves.
After several weeks Lieutenant Smit walked over to watch me. My heart pounded as I concentrated on keeping the speedball flurried, a blurred, rhythmic tat-tat-tat of leather on leather. “You’re fast, Peekay. That’s good,” he said, and then walked away. They had been the first words he had specifically directed at me in the six months I had been on his squad.
Doc’s Steinway was kept in the prison hall. There was also an upright Mignon piano, for Doc’s Steinway was not to be used except to play classical music. This was an express order from Kommandant Van Zyl, who pointed out that a peeano of such superior qualities should not be expected to play tiekiedraai or to accompany the banjo or accordion. The Steinway became a symbol of something very superior, which, in the eyes of the prison officers and their families, gave them a special social status. Doc and I, the only two people who played on the Steinway, were included in this status. The fact that the great German professor of music gave me lessons was confirmation that I must be a budding genius. Doc was kind enough never to contradict this opinion.
I visited the cactus garden most days on my return from school and every Sunday after church I went with Dee and Dum to Doc’s cottage. Doc and I discussed the progress of the cactus garden in detail from a chart prepared by him of every species that grew there. There were several thousand. Taking a small patch of garden at a time, I reported on its progress. Doc made notes and instructed me when to thin or separate plants. The separated plants I brought to the prison, where Doc had started a second cactus garden.
Marie, the little nurse from the hospital, had become firm friends with my mother. She loved needlework and would sit for hours chatting away to my mother and doing buttonholes. It seemed certain she would soon fall into the clutches of the Lord. She taught Dee and Dum to cook pumpkin scones and corn bread and they soon became my favorites.
Marie brought sweet potatoes for me from her farm, and fresh eggs, sometimes even a leg of pork or home-cured bacon. She always brought a large bunch of cured tobacco leaf for my granpa. He smoked a blend called African Drum and hated the raw, unblended tobacco from Marie’s farm, though he was much too polite to tell her. He would hang it from the ceiling of the garden shed. The supply grew alarmingly. Eventually it was to become one of the most important factors in my rise within the prison system.
For the first year Geel Piet, the half-caste, was a part of morning piano practice, for he was always in the hall on his knees, polishing the floor, a shadow in the background who greeted Doc and myself with “Goeie môre, baas en klein baas.” He followed this with a toothless smile and then a soft cackle. Doc and I both returned his greeting. It was forbidden to talk to any of the non-European prisoners and our replies must have been a great encouragement.
Geel Piet was small and battered-looking. His nose had been flattened and his face was crisscrossed with scars. He stood around five foot two inches on his buckled legs. Had he been able to straighten them he might well have been four or five inches taller. In the process of surviving, Geel Piet had worn out his luck in the outside world, if indeed he’d ever had any. Born in Cape Town’s District Six, he had been in and out of jail for forty of his fifty-five years. He took pride in the fact that he knew every major prison in South Africa, and he was the grand master in the art of camouflage. Should a warder beat him for whatever reason, Geel Piet bore no animosity, no hatred. He regarded a beating as self-inflicted because it resulted from some piece of carelessness. He had long since realized that, for him anyway, freedom was an illusion. He had accumulated years of sentences, and was realist enough to know that he was unlikely to survive the system at his age and with his deteriorating health.
Geel Piet ran the prison black market, in tobacco, sugar, salt and dagga (cannabis). He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of boxing.
My relationship with Geel Piet was built upon small conversations eked out over weeks until an understanding formed that eventually led to the conspiracy that made me present him with a leaf of tobacco.
I had put cuttings of Euphorbia pseudocactus from Doc’s cottage garden in a bucket from the garden shed at home. I had lined the bottom of the bucket with a large tobacco leaf, which was covered by the thorny cactus for Doc’s prison garden. Something must have made me do it: perhaps Geel Piet, with his snatches of seemingly unconnected dialogue. Tobacco is, after all, the greatest luxury and the most essential commodity in the prison system. With the war on, the normal shortage behind the walls had become severe; it was more highly prized than ever.
I was never searched as I entered the prison, although on this particular day, as I was carrying a bucket rather than a bag, a mildly curious guard had come over to take a look. I had entirely forgotten about the tobacco leaf. “Funny how he likes all these ugly plants, hey?” the guard said, for Doc’s cactus garden was directly outside the warders’ mess and was the butt of many a joke.
I had taken the bucket through to the hall after the squad workout and Geel Piet took it with the cuttings to Doc’s garden. When he returned, his broken face was wreathed with smiles. “I will help you to be a great boxer,” he simply said. And that was how it all started.
I broached the subject of the tobacco to my granpa when I returned home that afternoon after school. I did not really think about the moral issue involved. After a year of going in and out of the prison each weekday I had come to understand the system. War existed between two sides and I could see the odds were heavily biased toward one of them. The prison warders were an extension of the kids at the boarding school: a brutal force confronting a defenseless one.
My granpa, between much tamping, tapping and lighting of his pipe and staring into the distance, and after ascertaining that I was never searched, decided that the prisoners should have the tobacco.
“Poor buggers, most of them are in for crimes that deserve no more than a tongue lashing.”
He was wrong. Barberton was a heavy-security prison and most of the prisoners had committed crimes worthy of formal punishment in any society. It was the administration of the prisoners’ life that was the real crime. It was not unusual for a prisoner to be beaten to death for a comparatively minor infringement of prison rules.
Doc had requested to remain in Barberton prison rather than be transported to an internment camp in the highveld. The thought of being away from his beloved mountains, his cactus garden and his piano was more than he could bear, and I’m sure our friendship also played a large part in his reluctance to leave Barberton. Kommandant Van Zyl, who had come to regard Doc as the personal property of the prison and a constant thorn in the side of the English-speaking town, was more than happy to cooperate, and Doc spent the remainder of the war under his benign supervision.
Doc was coconspirator in what became a sophisticated smuggling system. Being in the prison constantly, he was there when the work gangs returned at night and left again at dawn. He was a compassionate and fair-minded man and the unthinking brutality of the warders offended him deeply. Man brutalized thinks only of his survival. The power the tobacco gave Geel Piet was enormous, and he used it as ruthlessly as the warders used their white superiority.
Geel Piet successfully contrived to get into t
he gymnasium while the squad was working out. At first he was a familiar shadow, hardly noticed, polishing the floor or cleaning the windows. Then gradually he became the laundry boy, picking up the sweaty shorts and the boxing boots in the shower room and returning them the next day freshly laundered and polished. By the time I could throw a medicine ball over Klipkop’s head, Geel Piet had established himself as an authority on boxing. The lieutenant gave him the job of supervising the progress of the kids in the squad.
The standard of the young boxers improved under Geel Piet’s direction, for the old lag was a maker of boxers. When he hadn’t been in prison he’d worked in gymnasiums, and somewhere in the dim past had been the colored lightweight champion of the Cape Province. He had a way of teaching that made even the Boer kids respect him, though at first it was only their fear of Lieutenant Smit that prevented them from refusing to be coached by a blerrie yellow kaffir.
From the first day Lieutenant Smit agreed that I could begin to box I was under Geel Piet’s direction. From day one he concentrated on defense. “If a man can’t hit you, he can’t hurt you,” he’d say. “The boxer who takes chances gets hit and gets hurt. Box, never fight, fighting is for heavyweights and domkops.”
It wasn’t what I had been waiting for two years to learn. But Doc persuaded me Geel Piet was right.
It was some weeks before I was allowed to get into the ring with an eleven-year-old from the squad. The boy’s nickname was Snotnose Bronkhorst. He was a big kid and a bully but he had only been with the squad for a few weeks and lacked any real know-how. He had pushed me away from the punching ball, and I had tripped over a rubber mat and fallen. Picking myself up, I had squared up to him, when Lieutenant Smit, seeming not to have noticed the incident, said he wanted to see us in the ring. My heart thumped as I realized that the moment had come.
We climbed into the ring and it was Hoppie and Jackhammer Smit all over again, in size if not in skill. But I had absorbed a great deal over the past two years and even more over the six weeks Geel Piet had been coaching me. Snotnose chased me all over the ring, taking wild swipes, any of which, had they landed, would have lifted me over the ropes. I managed to make him miss with every blow while never even looking like landing a decent punch myself. After three minutes Lieutenant Smit blew his whistle for the sparring session to stop.
I noticed for the first time that most of the squad had gathered around the ring and when the whistle blew they all clapped. It was one of the great moments of my life.
Peekay had completed his two-year apprenticeship. From now on it was all the way to the welterweight championship of the world.
I turned to walk to my corner before climbing out of the ring and, sensing something was wrong, I ducked just as a huge fist whistled through the air where my head had been a second before. Without thinking I brought my right up in an uppercut, using all the weight of my body behind the blow. It caught Snotnose Bronkhorst in the center of the solar plexus. He staggered for a moment and then, clutching his stomach, crumpled in agony onto the canvas, the wind completely knocked out of him. The cheers and laughter from the ringside bewildered me. Looking over the heads of the squad, I saw Geel Piet, unseen by any of them, dancing a jig in the background, his toothless mouth stretched wide in delight.
Throwing caution to the winds, he yelled, “We have one, we have a boxer!” The colored man’s intrusion into the general hilarity caused a sudden silence around the ring.
Lieutenant Smit advanced slowly toward Geel Piet. With a sudden explosion Smit’s fist slammed into his face. The little man dropped to the floor, blood spurting from his flattened nose.
“When I want an opinion on who is a boxer around here, I’ll ask for it, you hear?” Then, absently massaging the knuckles of his right hand, Smit turned back to the squad. “But the yellow bastard is right,” he said. “Bronkhorst, you are a domkop,” he added as Snotnose rose shakily to his feet.
Still standing in the ring, I watched Geel Piet crab-crawl along the floor, making for the doorway. When he reached it he got unsteadily to his feet and looked directly at me. Then he grinned, and gave a furtive thumbs-up sign. To my amazement, the expression on his battered face was one of happiness.
On my way to school that morning Snotnose Bronkhorst sprang from behind a tree and gave me a proper hiding.
It had been my experience that the Snotnoses of this world were a plentiful breed and I thought it might be a good idea to learn street fighting as well as boxing. Geel Piet, I felt sure, would show me how to fight dirty.
But I was wrong. Geel Piet knew the corruption that turns a boxer into a fighter and a fighter into a street brawler.
“Small baas, if I teach you these things a street fighter knows, you will lose your speed and caution and when you lose your caution you will lose your skill.”
I was disappointed. Being tough was one of the ambitions I had set for myself. How could you be tough if you had to bob in and out like a blowfly? “Please, Geel Piet,” I begged, “just teach me one really rotten dirty trick.” After some days of nagging he agreed.
“Okay, man, I will teach you the Sailor’s Salute. It is the best dirty trick there is. But you got to know timing to get it right. A boxer can know this trick and still be a boxer. The police use it all the time so they can say in the charge book they never laid hands on you. Its other name is the Liverpool Kiss.” He held the flat of his hand three inches from his brow and with a lightning-fast jerk of his head his forehead smacked loudly onto the hand. “Only you do this against the other person’s head, like so.” He drew me toward him and in slow motion demonstrated the head-to-head blow. Even in slow motion he nearly took my head off and my eyes filled with tears. It was the head butt Jackhammer Smit had used to floor Hoppie, and now I knew why Hoppie had gone down so suddenly.
“Do it to me also,” Geel Piet said, patting his forehead with the butt of his hand. I did so and received a second severe blow to the head. I was beginning to have misgivings about street fighting.
But over the next few weeks I perfected the Liverpool Kiss. The quick grab of the punch bag and a lightning butt to the imagined head of an opponent. Every now and again Geel Piet allowed me to practice on him and he grinned when I got it right. “Once you got it, you got it for life. But only use it quick and as a surprise.”
School had one disadvantage. I was two classes higher than my age group and so friends were hard to make. The kids of my own age thought of me as a sort of freak. In fact, with my early school background and now my prison experience, I was a lot tougher than any of them. Doc and the jaw incident had made me somewhat of a celebrity but I kept mostly to myself, being a shy kid and the smallest in my class. I was left pretty much alone. I wasn’t aggressive, and when a challenge came from a boy called John Hopkins and his partner Geoffrey Scruby, supposedly the two toughest kids in my class, I tried to avoid the fight they demanded. The Judge and even the jury had been so much tougher than these two that it never occurred to me to be frightened of them. The English-speaking kids at school had no idea of my boxing or prison background, as the small contingent of Afrikaans kids in the school seldom mixed with the English. Hopkins and Scruby badgered me for some days and I took the problem to Geel Piet, who immediately understood my dilemma.
“Small baas, it is always like this. This is what you must do. You must make them feel you are scared. Tell them, no way, man. Let them get more and more cheeky. Even let them push you around. But always make sure this happens when everyone is watching. Then after a few days they will demand to fight you and they will name a time and a place. Try to look scared when you agree. You understand?” Geel Piet held me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “More fights are lost by underestimating your opponent than by any other way. Always remember, small baas, surprise is everything.”
It happened just as he said, a constant badgering during break, then a few pushes in front of everyone. Protests from me that I didn’t want to fight. Finally a demand that I be beh
ind the town cinema after school, where I could choose either of them to fight.
When I got to the small yard behind the cinema where all the official school fights took place, it was packed with at least fifty kids. All of them were English-speaking with the exception of Snotnose Bronkhorst, who had somehow got wind of the fight. To my surprise he stepped up to me and said in Afrikaans, “I’m here to be your second. These are all Rooineks, you can never tell what they’ll do.”
I looked at him in surprise. “I’m also a Rooinek.”
“Yes, I know, man, but you’re a Boer Rooinek. That’s different.”
I elected to fight Hopkins, who seemed delighted as he was the bigger of my two tormentors and had not expected to be chosen.
The kids formed a ring and Snotnose, who didn’t know a lot of English, simply said, “Okay! Make quiet! Fight!”
Hopkins threw a haymaker at me and missed by miles and I landed a blow to his ribs. He looked surprised and came rushing in again, swinging at my head. I ducked in under his punch and caught him hard on the nose. He stopped dead in his tracks and brought his hand up to his face. I hit him with a left and then a right to the solar plexus and to my astonishment he started to cry.
“All over!” Snotnose held up my hand as Hopkins, sniffing and thoroughly humbled, walked back into the crowd. I pointed at Geoffrey Scruby. “Your turn now, Scruby,” I said, feeling a rush of adrenaline as I saw his fear.
“I’m sorry, Peekay,” he said softly. I had won. Just as Geel Piet said.
Then Snotnose stepped up. “Does any of you Rooineks want to fight him?” he asked. There was complete silence and nobody stirred, not even the bigger kids. “You’re all yellow, you hear!” he snarled; then he turned and looked at me with a grin on his face. I grinned back. He seemed an unlikely ally but he had stood by me. “Okay then, I will,” he said. There was a murmur of apprehension through the crowd. They were clearly shocked at the idea. I must say I was pretty shocked myself.
The Power of One Page 18