game based on strength and endurance which the Boers, despite having fewer boys to choose from, usually won.
With some forty kids of my own age I was now undisputed leader, a situation I must confess I found to my liking. Being somebody after being nobody for so long was a heady experience but I also found it, on occasion, a bit onerous. Fights had to be settled, bullying stopped and the small kids set straight when they did things wrong. 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 apologising for this, as though it were somehow her fault: 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 which 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 per cent to the groceries and charge threepence a cigarette. Tobacco was by far the greatest luxury because it was rationed due to the war. It was, of course, unavailable to the casual purchaser and impossible for an eight-year-old to buy under any circumstances. The little I brought in leaf form was carefully rolled into slim cigarettes. A single cigarette in a week of hard labour was a luxury beyond the imagination of the average prisoner. 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. A prisoner with a cigarette safely stashed in a used .303 cartridge case up his anus considered himself rich. These cartridge cases were highly prized, they were after all, in conjunction with his anus, the only private storage space a prisoner had. We kids gathered them from the rifle range at the army camp and they were the only item which Geel Piet actually gave away; as the prisoner’s pantry they were essential to his business.
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. Any search would have quickly revealed them but Doc was not a naturally cunning man and I think in his mind he regarded my music book as somehow, like the Steinway, above the possibility of question.
The letters were much of a muchness, men not accustomed to writing are apt, in any language, to reduce their words to simple formalities such as telling their families they were all right and enquiring after the health and welfare of the wife and kids, all the small, important human things that make us all, in the end, exactly the same. Some would include a request for money, although most knew this to be impossible and were too proud to impose such a burden on their families. It was not unusual for a family not to know that a husband had been arrested or where he was detained. He had simply disappeared and was often sent to a prison some distance from the place of his arrest. To trace him without the co-operation of the police was nearly impossible and so the letters provided a vital link in the spiritual welfare of the prisoners.
Mrs Boxall acted as post mistress and I must say she ran a pretty slick operation. The letters would be dropped in after school. Using the large square stamp used for marking the inside covers of books and 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,
She explained these elaborate precautions to me. ‘The world is full of sticky beaks. If we get a lot of letters addressed to the library in primitive handwriting, the post master just might smell a rat. I’ve been sending our overdue notices to country members for years which include return addressed envelopes using the library rubber 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 away 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 any time 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 names of the recipient on the front. I pasted the envelope back together using the large pot of library glue and a slip of rice paper to cover the slit where the envelope had been carefully opened using Mrs Boxall’s letter knife. The knife had a handle striped red and white like a barber’s pole, and on the blade on one side was written, Have you written to your sweetheart? and on the other, A souvenir from Brighton 1924. I used to wonder who had Mrs Boxall for a sweetheart, but I think I already knew it was nobody.
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, often in a huge, uncontrolled childlike hand.
A postal order for two shillings 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 her conscience was quite clear and 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 to a prisoner’s family. She referred to prisoners 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 half a crown.’ She kept a forty-four-gallon drum in the library which had a six-inch wide slot running almost the width of its lid like a huge money box. On the side was written: Cast-off clothes for the Sandwich Fund. People would bring 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 a terrible gambler and because he 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 in 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. That ought to shut them up, don’t you think, Peekay?’
Eventually someone must have asked, because the Earl of Sandwich Fund became the most social of all the war effort funds in Barberton. Even more important than knitting socks for prisoners of war. At the Easter and Christmas fete held in Coronation Park, Mrs Boxall and I ran a sandwich stand where cakes and other delicacies 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 on the stand. Mother made two identical pinnies and caps for them and they worked from dawn until dusk laying out cakes on the trestle tables and cutting and buttering bread and making sandwiches.
Because I was on the boxing squad and regarded as one of the prison kids, the wives of the warders baked for days for the sandwich stand and gloated when their cakes and cookies were the first to go. Boer baking was generally superior to that of the town’s leading socialites. 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. Some kids brought half-packets of unsmoked cigarettes from a parent’s precious ration, a sacrifice to the war effort. I took half a packet of smokes to Geel Piet, who thought all his Christmases had come at once. The bags of butts were taken to Doc’s cottage where Dee and
