“It’s not fair. You’re much bigger than him,” Geoffrey Scruby said. “And older,” someone else shouted.
Snotnose turned and squared up to me.
It had been four months since we’d first met in the ring and he’d learned a fair bit about boxing in the meantime. I tried to stay out of his way, dancing around him, making him miss. But he hit me a couple of times and it hurt like blazes. I was connecting more often than he was, aiming my blows carefully, but I knew it was only a matter of time. First with your head, then with your heart, first with your head, then with your heart, Hoppie’s words drummed through my brain as I tried to stay alive. Snotnose had tried to come in close on one or two occasions, but soon learned that this evened things up. At close range I was much the better boxer. So he stood his distance and picked his shots, knowing that a big punch had to get through sooner or later. All I could do was to try to make him miss. The kids were yelling their heads off, trying to reach me with their encouragement. But I think they all knew the Boer was too tough and that the outcome was inevitable.
“Come closer, Boer bastard. Are you scared or something?” I taunted. Snotnose stopped in his tracks and his eyes grew wide. With a roar of indignation he bore down on me. I stepped aside at the last second and he missed knocking me over. As he turned to come back at me his head was lowered so it was on a level with mine. He had his back to the cinema wall and I had mine to the crowd. I stepped in, and using both hands grabbed him by the shirtfront and gave him a perfectly timed Liverpool Kiss. The blow was so perfect I felt nothing. Snotnose simply sat on his bum, completely dazed, quite unable to comprehend what had happened. The crowd hadn’t seen it either. They were behind me and my hands flying up to grab his shirtfront must have looked like a two-fisted attack. Forever afterward it was retold that way: “Then Peekay said, ‘Come closer, you Boer bastard,’ and with two dazzling punches to the jaw he knocked Snotnose Bronkhorst out.”
To my surprise Snotnose started to sniff and then got up unsteadily and made his way through the crowd. He stopped halfway down the alley and shouted in Afrikaans, “I’ll get you back for this, you Rooinek bastard!” The English kids jeered as he walked away, but I knew better. One doesn’t allow a Boer to lose face and expect to get away with it. Though, to my amazement, even Snotnose came to believe that he had been punched.
After the fight with Hopkins and Snotnose my status at school improved immeasurably. While there were no more than sixty Afrikaans pupils, they tended to be bigger than the English kids and much more aggressive. Most of the English boys had at some time or another suffered at the hands of one of the Boers. I was seen as the one kid who had successfully fought back.
The prison kids explained that it was acceptable to be beaten by me as I was a sort of honorary Boer who spoke the Taal and was also one of them. Even Snotnose left me alone unless we were sparring in the gym, when he would go all out to try to hurt me.
And then there was the tobacco crisis. The tobacco crop on Marie’s farm failed. This left a period of three months when the curing shed was empty. Marie kept apologizing for this; the more my granpa protested that he didn’t mind the more guilty she seemed to become. By this time Geel Piet had become undisputed quartermaster for the prison. To tobacco we had added sugar, salt and a letter-writing business that was getting news in and out of the prison to and from all over South Africa. Postal orders would come in from outside contacts. Prisoners would order sugar, salt and tobacco and Geel Piet would add thirty percent to the groceries and charge threepence a cigarette. Tobacco was by far the greatest luxury. The little I brought in leaf form was carefully rolled into slim cigarettes. Somehow I understood how such a small thing as a cigarette, a tablespoon of sugar or a teaspoon of salt made the difference between hope and despair.
Letters were becoming a big thing at the prison and Doc wrote most of them as Geel Piet dictated to him. The little man could remember the contents of entire letters, together with the addresses of a dozen or more black prisoners at a time. Doc would write them at night. He would then write out a sheet of music theory for my homework and attach the letters to the back of it.
The letters were much of a muchness, men telling their families they were all right and inquiring after the health of the wife and kids. It was not unusual for a family not to know that a husband had been arrested or where he was detained. So the letters provided a vital link in the spiritual welfare of the prisoners.
Mrs. Boxall acted as postmistress. The letters would be dropped in after school. With the stamp used for marking the books, which said: BARBERTON MUNICIPAL LIBRARY, de Villiers St., Barberton, we stamped a blank envelope, attached a postage stamp to it and included it in the original letter with instructions to the receiver to use it as the return envelope. We also wrote the name of the sender on the inside of the return envelope. This was done because we often received letters which started Dear Husband and carried no other identification. Finally Mrs. Boxall or I would address the outgoing envelope and send it off.
She explained these elaborate precautions to me. “If we get a lot of letters addressed to the library in primitive handwriting, the postmaster just might smell a rat. I’ve been sending out overdue notices to country members for years. The notices include return addressed envelopes using the library stamp. He won’t suspect a thing.” And he didn’t. The system worked perfectly and returned letters were taken into the prison and locked in Doc’s piano stool, to which only he and I had a key, though I’m sure Geel Piet could have picked the lock anytime he chose to do so.
The money prisoners received from outside was generally in the form of a postal order for two shillings. As all incoming mail was opened by Mrs. Boxall, she cashed the postal orders and put the money back into the envelopes and wrote the name of the recipient on the front.
And so a regular mail system in and out of the prison was established with Mrs. Boxall cheerfully paying for the stamps and stationery. She would often sit and read a letter to one of the prisoners from a wife, written by someone who could write in English, and as she read it to me the tears would roll down her cheeks. The letters were mostly three or four lines.
My Husband Mafuni Tokasi,
How are you? The children are well. We have no money only this. The baas says we must go from this place. There is no work and no food. The youngest is now two years. He looks same like you. We have no other place to go.
Your wife Buyani
A postal order in the letter meant that the whole family might not have eaten for two days or more. Mrs. Boxall would wipe her eyes and say even if she was arrested she knew she was jolly well doing the right thing. She badgered friends and people coming into the library for clothes and these she sent off to needy families, even sometimes sending off a postal order of her own. She referred to prisoners’ families as “innocents, the meat in the ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state.” Her code for these families simply became the word “sandwich.” “We need more clothes for the sandwiches,” or, “Here’s a poor sandwich for whom we’ll have to find some money.” She kept a forty-four-gallon drum in the library that had a wide slot like a huge money box. On the side was written: “Cast-off clothes for the Sandwich Fund.” People brought lots of stuff and no one ever asked what the Sandwich Fund was.
“People feel they ought to know, so they don’t dare ask,” she would say. She once told me that the sandwich was named after the Earl of Sandwich, who was always so busy gambling he had no time to take meals. To overcome the problem his butler had made him two hunks of bread with something between them. These were the first sandwiches. “If anyone ever asks we’ll say it’s the famous Earl of Sandwich Fund for the poor.”
Eventually the Earl of Sandwich Fund became the most social of all the war effort funds in Barberton. At the Easter and Christmas fêtes held in Coronation Park, Mrs. Boxall and I ran a sandwich stand where cakes donated by the town’s leading families were sold. My mother sent pumpkin scones baked by Dee and
Dum, who were also allowed to work at the stand. The rather snobbish Earl of Sandwich Fund sandwich stand earned enough to pay for the entire mailing system and to send money and clothing to a great many destitute families.
When the tobacco crisis came we solved it through the Earl of Sandwich Fund. Mrs. Boxall sent a note to the headmaster of our school requesting that children bring in cigarette butts from home. She even managed to get the butts from the sergeants’ mess at the army camp. Everyone assumed the recycled tobacco was going to the prisoners of war as Mrs. Boxall simply referred to them as prisoners. The bags of butts were taken to Doc’s cottage, where Dee and Dum spent Sunday afternoon shredding the week’s tobacco supply. Geel Piet never had it so good. When the new crop came from Marie’s farm, with some dismay he was forced to switch back to straight tobacco leaf.
What I didn’t know was that little by little the prisoners had pieced it all together and I had been given the credit for everything. I was enormously surprised one day, as I passed a gang of prisoners digging a large flower bed in the town hall gardens, to hear the chanter who was calling the rhythm so the picks all rose and fell together change his song at my approach.
“See who comes toward us now,” he sang. “Tell us, tell us,” the rest of the work gang chanted back. “It is he who is called the Tadpole Angel,” the leader sang. “We salute him, we salute him,” they chorused.
I glanced around to see who they were singing about, but there was no one. The warder in charge, who recognized me, obviously didn’t know Zulu. He called out to me, “How are things going, man?” and I replied, “Very good, thanks.” He obviously wanted me to stop for a chat.
“He who is a mighty fighter and friend of the yellow man,” the leader continued. “The Tadpole Angel, the Tadpole Angel,” the chorus replied, their picks lifting on the first “Tadpole Angel” and coming down on the second. I realized with a shock that they were talking about me.
“I hear the lieutenant is going to let you fight in the under-twelve division in the lowveld championships in Nelspruit this weekend.”
“Ja, I’ll be the smallest, but he thinks I’ll be okay.”
“We thank him for the tobacco, the sugar and the salt and for the letters and the things he sends to our people far away,” sang the leader. “From our hearts, from our hearts,” came the chorus.
“Nine is not very old, man. Eleven can be blerrie big with a Boer kid.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I am ten in two weeks. Look, I have to go, I’m late for the library.” I wanted only to get away from the chanting of the prison gang.
“You’ll be okay, man, I seen you sparring.” He looked at me and grinned. “You is a funny bloke, Peekay. Why you blushing like mad, hey?”
“He is the sweet water we drink and the dark clouds that come at last to break the drought,” the leader sang. Up came the picks, “Tadpole Angel.” Down they went in perfect unison, “Tadpole Angel. We salute him, we salute him.” I started to run toward the library, my embarrassment consuming me.
I tackled Geel Piet about the matter the next morning and he admitted that this was my name. “It is a great compliment, small baas. For them you are a true angel.”
Doc was listening, as Geel Piet and I now spoke in English when we were with him. “Ja, and for you we are all angels, Geel Piet.” He chuckled. “You are a rich man, I think, ja?”
Geel Piet made no attempt to deny it. “Big baas, it is always like so in a prison. If I am discovered I will be killed, so I must have something for risking my life.”
Doc, like Mrs. Boxall, had come to realize how important the letters were and how the small amount of contraband made life bearable for men who were shown no compassion and whose diet of mealie meal and a watery stew of mostly cabbage and carrots was only just sufficient to sustain them. He had also come to accept the role Geel Piet played in the distribution system, knowing that without it chaos would ensue. “Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother,” Doc would say. “When man is brutalized in such a place like this, the smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.”
While the food allocated for each prisoner was insufficient to keep a man doing hard physical labor, whoever hired a gang was expected to supply a meal at noon. It was this meal that kept the prisoners alive, for the regulations required it to be a vegetable and meat stew consisting of eight ounces of meat per prisoner and a pound of cooked mealie pap.
While no more than a quarter of the prisoners were Zulus, they held the highest status in the prison. Work songs were mostly composed in Zulu and it was always a Zulu who called the time and set the working pace. Zulu is a poetic language and the ability to create spontaneous lyrics to capture a recent incident or pass information on was almost always handled by a Zulu prisoner whose gift for poetry was greatly respected.
Knowing there was some reason for “Tadpole” before “Angel,” I persisted in questioning Geel Piet about it. “It is like this, small baas. The professor is known as Amasele (the Frog), because he plays his peeano at night when the prison is quiet. To the Zulus the frog makes always the loudest music at night, much louder than the cricket or the owl. So it is simple, you see. You are the small boy of the frog, which makes you a Tadpole.”
TWELVE
While Geel Piet was growing rich, he had also become indispensable to the boxing squad, a demanding and resourceful coach. The squad kids had been turned into clever boxers, natural aggression combined with real skill. The Barberton Blues hadn’t lost a fight in two years.
How I got my first real fight was a matter of sheer luck. The championships in Nelspruit were in August, only days before my tenth birthday. I had tried to persuade anyone who would listen that ten was almost eleven and one year wasn’t much to forfeit. But Lieutenant Smit wasn’t the sort of man who changed his mind. The two under-twelves were Snotnose Bronkhorst and Fonnie Kruger, both two years my senior and much bigger.
Geel Piet claimed he saw intelligence and speed in me that more than made up for my lack of size. He was a fanatic about footwork. “You must learn to box with your feet, small baas. A good boxer is like a dancer: he is still pretty to watch even if you look only at his feet.” He taught me how to position myself so the full weight of my body was thrown behind a punch. “If they do not respect your punch they simply keep going until they knock you down, man. A boxer must have respect.”
I longed to have a real fight against an unknown opponent. In two years I had never missed a day of boxing and I had worked with all my heart and soul for the moment when I could climb into a boxing ring with an opponent whose every blow, unlike those of my sparring partners, could not be anticipated.
On the Monday of the week of the championships Snotnose didn’t turn up at the gym. After the session Lieutenant Smit and Geel Piet talked earnestly for quite a time, every so often looking in my direction. Finally Geel Piet came over to me. “Ag, man, I’m a heppy man today, small baas. You got your first fight, man! Bronkhorst he is sick, you got his place.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Snotnose had jaundice, which had been going around school. I went to hug Geel Piet, but he quickly sidestepped. “No, no, small baas, the lieutenant will come over and beat me.” He grinned. “Better go over quick, man, and thank him.”
I ran over to where Lieutenant Smit was talking to Klipkop. “Th-thank you for the fight, Lieutenant Smit,” I stammered. “I will try my hardest.”
“That won’t be enough,” he said in a brusque voice. “You’re going to get your head knocked in, but it will do you good. Nobody should win their first fight.”
Geel Piet told me to bring my tackies in the next morning so they could be properly cleaned for me to wear at the fight. Using a piece of string, he measured my chest and waist. When I got home after school I told Dee and Dum my tackies should be put next to my satchel
so I wouldn’t forget them, as Geel Piet needed to clean them. Dum got up quietly from the floor. She returned a few moments later with my tackies. They were spotless. “Who does this yellow man think he is?” she asked. “Does he think we let our baas go around in dirty things?” I had to explain that Geel Piet did all the things for the boxers. “He will not wash your clothes or clean your tackies,” Dee said. “It is a woman’s work and we will look after the clothes of him who belongs to our own kraal,” Dum added.
I wasn’t at all sure how my mother would take the news of my inclusion in the squad. Boxing was never mentioned, and as far as she was concerned my early-morning journey to the jail was in order to take piano lessons. She had been very busy lately with a commission to make three ball gowns. I knocked and entered the sewing room. It seemed full of a plum-colored taffeta gown that was almost finished. My mother rose and held it against her body and she looked just how I imagined Cinderella must have looked when she went to the ball. The skirt billowed from the narrow waist and as she moved, the taffeta caught the light and rustled.
“Such an extravagance. I can’t imagine where they found the material in the middle of the war.” She kicked the skirt to reveal a second layer of net in peacock blue.
“You look beautiful,” I said, not thinking to flatter her.
My mother laughed. “That’s the trouble with the things of the devil, they are often tempting and very pretty,” she said with a sigh.
I had forgotten for a moment that dances were high on the Lord’s banned list. My heart sank. If dancing was frowned upon by the Lord, what would he think of a boxing match? I immediately consoled myself with the knowledge that God was a man, and therefore He’d like boxing a lot better than dancing.
“You’ve come about the boxing, haven’t you?” my mother said.
“Yes, Mother.” I was unable to conceal the surprise in my voice.
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