one of the intellect. Rather than face the dilemma of black and white confrontation and the pre-ordained decision of white superiority, he had chosen to avoid it altogether by not having servants or any dependence on Black Africa. But he was also a compassionate and fair-minded man and the unthinking brutality of the warders offended him deeply. Both of us lacked the wisdom or the knowledge of the baser side of men, though I probably had more experience of this than Doc did. We saw the brutality around us not as a matter of taking an emotional side, or of good versus evil, but as the nature of evil itself, where good and bad do not come into play. We were simply intellectually forced to take the side of the prisoners. Man brutalised thinks only of his survival. Geel Piet was as ruthless as his oppressors and of necessity a great deal more cunning. The power the tobacco and the other things which later came into the prison gave him was enormous, and he used it to ensure his own survival and to serve his own ends as ruthlessly and as carelessly as the warders used their superiority.
As it turned out he spoke English passably, but had chosen Afrikaans to make his mark with me, knowing that Doc would then not be in a position to understand what he was saying and therefore to see through his long and carefully planned campaign. His next conquest after me was to be Doc. He became the perfect servant to him, a humble man who strove to anticipate Doc’s every need while never intruding into the world Doc and I shared as expatriates of an orderly social environment.
Geel Piet successfully contrived to get into the 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 over a year he became the laundry boy, picking up the sweaty shorts and jockstraps 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, only occasionally taking over when he felt it necessary to establish his superiority by deliberately contradicting an instruction from Geel Piet to one of us.
The standard of the young boxers improved measurably under Geel Piet’s direction for, despite his background, 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 coloured lightweight champion of the Cape Province. He had a way of teaching kids 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 and he treated me like new clay. From day one Geel Piet concentrated on defence. ‘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, and the logic, even to an eight-year-old, was irrefutable.
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, Snotnose Bronkhorst, because there was always a snolly bomb hovering from one or both of his nostrils. He was a big kid and a bully but he had only been with the squad for a few weeks and he 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 realised 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 to my satisfaction 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. Over a period of three minutes I managed to make him miss with every blow while never even looking like landing one 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 centre of the solar plexus and I could feel my glove sinking deep into the relaxed muscles of his stomach, forcing the air from his ribcage. He staggered for a moment and then, clutching his stomach, crumbled 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 and funny lip stretched wide in uncontained delight.
Throwing caution to the winds he yelled, ‘We have one, we have a boxer!’ The coloured man’s intrusion into the general hilarity caused a sudden silence around the ring.
Lieutenant Smit advanced slowly towards 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 from a fucking Kaffir 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. ‘Get into the showers now, make haste. Bronkhorst, you are a domkop,’ he added as Snotnose rose shakily to his feet.
I was still standing in the ring, a little bewildered at the fracas I had caused. I watched Geel Piet crab-crawl along the gym floor, making for the doorway. When he reached it he got unsteadily to his feet and looked directly at me. Then he grinned, and without raising his hands gave a furtive thumbs-up sign, a movement so slight it would have gone unnoticed to a casual observer. 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, although I managed to get him with a right cross that snapped his head back as well as a solid uppercut in the balls which made him release me so that I could run for it.
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 as well.
But I was wrong. Perhaps I was the first human clay Geel Piet had been responsible for shaping into a boxer, but it was more likely pride; he was a purist and he knew the corruption that turns a boxer into a fighter and a fighter into a street brawler.
‘Small boss, if I teach you these things a street fighter knows, you will lose your speed and you will lose your caution and when you lose your caution you will lose your skill.’ His face split into a grotesque smile. ‘It will take longer to win as a boxer, but you will stay pretty.’
I was disappointed. Being tough was one of the ambitions I had set for myself. Being pretty certainly wasn’t on my list of priorities! 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.
‘If I teach you one, then you must promise not to ask again, you hear?’
‘It’s got to be a proper one, the worst in the book, you’ve got to promise that too?’
‘Okay, man, I will teach you the Sailor’s Salute. It is the best dirty trick there is. But you got to know timing also to get it right. A boxer can know this trick and still be a boxer.’
‘Promise it’s the worst one of all?’
‘Ja, man, I’m telling you for sure. It is so rotten the police use it all the time so they can say in the charge book they never laid hands on you. Its other name besides the Sailor’s Salute is the Liverpool Kiss.’ He held the flat of his hand three inches from his brow and with a short, 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 towards 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. It sure wasn’t like
