around my waist but there was hardly any strength left in him and he leaned heavily on me, his gloves working up and down my waist. The thumb of his glove must have caught the elastic band of my boxing shorts for they slipped neatly over my hips and fell to my ankles. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t step backwards for fear of falling, anyway his arms and weight made it impossible to move. So I just stood there and hit him again and again as he draped his arms over me, my bare arse pointed at the crowd. Then he gave me a last desperate push and I tripped over the shorts caught around my ankles and fell down. I tried to pull my pants up with my boxing gloves but without success. The crowd was convulsed with laughter and Killer Kroon was standing over me with his hands on his knees, head hanging. He was rasping and wheezing and trying to take in air.
‘No knockdown!’ Meneer de Klerk shouted. ‘Get back to your corner, Kroon!’ He grabbed me by the wrist and jerked me to my feet and then pulled my pants up. I had been covering my snake with my gloves. In those days nobody wore underpants and I was bare-arsed and fancy free in front of everyone. But I didn’t care a damn, the only thing that mattered was Killer Kroon in the ring with me. I would have fought him with no clothes on if necessary. Meneer de Klerk wiped my gloves on his pants. ‘Box on,’ he said. I turned to face Killer Kroon’s corner. He was standing with his back to me and his chest was still heaving. Suddenly a towel lofted over his head and landed at my feet. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Kroon’s corner was throwing in the towel, the fight was over! Meneer de Klerk moved quickly over to me, and with a huge grin on his face held my hand aloft. ‘Winner on a technical knockout, Gentleman Peekay!’ he announced. The crowd stood up for the second time and shouted and cheered and Lieutenant Smit and Klipkop jumped into the ring. Klipkop lifted me up and held me high above his shoulders and turned around in the ring and everyone went wild.
Meneer de Klerk had moved over to Kroon’s corner and now he came back to the centre of the ring and held his hand up for silence. The timekeeper rang his bell until the crowd quietened down. Klipkop put me down again. ‘The Lydenburg squad want me to say that Martinus Kroon retired because of an asthma attack.’ A section of the crowd started to boo and there was general laughter. ‘More like a Rooinek attack!’ someone shouted. The bald referee held up his hand once more. ‘I just want you to know that I had the fight scored two rounds to none for Gentleman Peekay and I also had him ahead on points in the third round. The technical knockout stands. Let me tell you something, this boy is going to be a great boxer, just remember where you saw him first.’ The crowd whistled and stomped and cheered again and Lieutenant Smit held my hand up and then we left the ring. Doc was crying and I had to sit down and hold his hand for a bit and then we went together to the showers. But first Doc and I shared the last two pumpkin scones.
‘I think Geel Piet and the people will be very happy tonight,’ Doc said as he handed me a towel. ‘I go to get you a soft drink? What colour do you want?’
‘But we haven’t got any money,’ I said.
‘That’s what you think, Mister Schmarty Pantz!’ Doc fished into the pocket of his white linen suit and produced two half-crowns.
‘Five shillings! Where’d you get that?’ I said in amazement.
He grinned slyly. ‘I am making this bet with a nice man from Lydenburg.’
‘A bet! You bet on me? What if I’d lost? If I’d lost you couldn’t have paid him!’
Doc dropped the coins back into his coat pocket with a clink and then scratched his nose with his forefinger. ‘You couldn’t lose, you was playing Mozart,’ he said.
I asked for an American cream soda. It was the drink Hoppie had bought in the cafe at Gravelotte after we’d changed the tackies at the Patels’ shop and it was still my favourite. It was also the closest I could come to sharing my win with Hoppie. If Geel Piet and Hoppie could have been there, everything would have been perfect. Not that it wasn’t perfect. But more perfect.
FOURTEEN
By the time we got to the last fight of the evening, the Barberton Blues had won five of the eight finals and only the heavyweight division remained. Naturally it was the event from which the crowd expected the most and they were not disappointed. Gert was matched with a giant of a man called Potgieter, a railway fettler from Kaapmuiden who was six foot seven and a half and weighed two hundred and eighty-nine pounds. Gert was no lightweight and at six foot one he weighed two hundred and twenty.
Potgieter was a better boxer than he first appeared and in the first round he had Gert hanging on twice, but Gert won the round by landing more clean punches. In the heavyweight division a knockdown did not mean the end of the fight and in the second round Potgieter, way behind on points, connected with an uppercut under the heart which doubled Gert up like a collapsed mattress before he dropped to the canvas. The bell went at the count of five but it looked all over for him anyway.
To our surprise he came out for the final round and started hitting Potgieter almost at will. The big man knew he was behind on points so he dropped his defence, confident he could take anything Gert dished out. Gert dished out plenty and there was blood all over the giant’s face and one eye was completely closed. He smiled throughout the fight, a grotesque, dangerous-looking smile from a mouth that was missing the front teeth. Gert’s straight left and right were working like pistons into a face that was moving relentlessly forward. Potgieter chopped his way to within range of Gert and finally managed to trap him in a corner. The uppercut seemed to be in slow motion as it caught Gert on the point of the jaw. The warder was out cold even before his legs had started to buckle and we thought he’d been killed. The referee counted him out and Klipkop and Lieutenant Smit lifted him unconscious from the floor and carried him to his corner. Gert had, as usual, fought with too much heart and not enough head. If only he had known about Mozart.
It was after ten o’clock when we left Nelspruit. We kids huddled together in the back of the utility, sharing two rough prison blankets. The indigo night was pricked with sharp cold stars. We’d spent what energy remained in lavish praise of each other and of the glorious Barberton Blues, and now we were silent and sleepy. Klipkop drove this time, as Gert was not in such good shape and had gone home in the thirty-nine Chevy with Lieutenant Smit.
Bokkie, Fonnie, Nels and Maatie were soon sleeping fitfully. Jolts woke them momentarily, their dulled eyes opening for a minute before heavy lids shut them down again. I was enormously tired as well, but couldn’t doze off. In my mind each of my three fights kept repeating themselves. I played them back in sequence as though they were scenes on a loop of film which I was able to edit in my imagination, snipping here, joining there, remaking the fights, seeing them in my mind as they should have been.
I didn’t know it then, but this ability totally to recall a fight scenario made me a lot more dangerous when I met an opponent for the second time. In the years ahead I also taught myself to fight as a southpaw, so I could switch if necessary in the middle of a fight, as though it were entirely natural for me to do so.
It was nearly midnight when the ute stopped outside our house. Everything was in darkness. I crept around the back because the kitchen door was never locked. A candle stub burned on the kitchen table and on the floor, each rolled in a blanket, lay Dum and Dee. I tried to tiptoe past but they both shot up into sitting positions, like Egyptian mummies suddenly come to life, the whites of their eyes showing big with alarm.
They were overjoyed at my return and switched on the light to examine me. They burst into tears when they saw my swollen ear and it took some effort to calm them. When I told them that I had won, they showed only polite joy. They clucked and tut-tutted like a pair of old abafazi around a cooking pot and declared they’d be up at dawn to look for poultice weed against the horrible bruises which were undoubtedly concealing themselves all over my body. Despite my protests, for I was almost too tired to stand up, Dum sat me down and washed my face, hands and feet with water from a kettle kept warm on the stove. Dee dried me on a coarse towel and at last I was allowed to totter off to bed.
At Sunday School the next morning Pastor Mulvery noticed my fat ear and gave me a lightning on/off smile showing his escape-attempting front teeth. ‘Have you been listening to the devil again, Peekay?’ He hee-hawed quite a lot over his clever joke and no doubt repeated it to the Lord later. He always said you had to tell the Lord everything.
I remained unsaved, unborn again, despite the fact that I was officially slated in the minds of every lady in the church as my mother’s special prayer burden. I guess if they’d known what was going on in the prison they’d have mounted a whole revival campaign to try and bring me to the Lord. Once I asked in Sunday school if black was
