The Power of One

throw myself on Cooper’s mercy.’

‘What, and get your bum blasted again? Give us that bun. Here, hold this.’ He carefully lifted the top half of the bun and handed it to me. Then, using his forefinger, he spread the cream from the centre of the bottom half of the bun to the edges, piling the cream high on the edges. He held out his hand for the top and replaced it onto the bottom half, squeezing lightly with his forefinger and thumb to force both halves together. As he did this the cream squirted out of the sides as natural looking as you please. He handed the fully restored cream bun back to me, a satisfied grin on his mug.

‘Gee thanks, Hymie. I owe you man,’ I said, relief flooding over me.

‘Don’t thank me, Peekay. It took two thousand years of persecution by bastards like Cooper to make me smart, I really ought to thank him.’

It was the first time we’d beaten the system, although of course it was Hymie who had really done so. After I’d given Cooper his ‘new’ bun, we retired behind the bogs and laughed our heads off. Then Hymie took out his miniature chess set and we battled it out for the next hour. We were evenly matched players; his cunning was matched by my years of memorising all Doc’s games plus my having a reasonable grasp of the niceties of the game. We were in the school first chess team right from the start, which wasn’t earth shattering news, the Christian gentlemen were not exactly breaking down the doors to join the chess club.

Boxing presented a problem. It wasn’t a major sport at school and therefore not compulsory. Only about twenty boys out of the six hundred in the school took part. Darby White, the gym master and ex light-heavyweight champion of the British army, had turned six of these twenty into a fairly good boxing team, although I soon learned that we only boxed the Afrikaans schools as the other English schools didn’t go in for boxing. No other boxer in the school of any weight had been trained as well as I had been or came close to my skill. Sarge was also very keen on boxing and he and Darby White would work the squad together. While the school team was said to be game, morale was pretty low when I arrived. The school had won only six individual bouts in five years and none in the past two years, let alone a boxing match. The red, white and green ribbon, which was the school colours and which had been tied around the handle of a massive wooden spoon and hung from one of the beams in the gym, was beginning to fade, the spoon having been in permanent residence with the Prince of Wales School so long.

Darby White would sometimes look up at it a little wistfully and say, ‘I don’t expect ever to win the schools trophy but I’d just like to lose that dirty great wooden ladle for just one year.’

I told Hymie about this and he immediately became interested. Hymie’s interest in sports was zero, but he couldn’t resist an intellectual challenge. ‘How good are the other chaps in the squad?’ he asked. I was forced to admit that they were pretty average. The kids in the prison squad back home could have taken them with one arm tied behind their backs. ‘How good a coach is Darby White?’ Darby White wasn’t Geel Piet but he knew his boxing and he was certainly as good as Captain Smit.

‘I think he’s lost his enthusiasm, but he seems to know his onions,’ I replied.

‘You need a manager and I know just the chap,’ Hymie said. That was the nice part about Hymie, he never bragged but he was absolutely certain of his superiority. It crapped a lot of people off, but Hymie had prepared himself for a life where the slings and arrows were fairly frequent and he didn’t seem to give a damn whether or not he was liked. ‘Persecution is the major reason for a Jew to exist. If it didn’t happen we’d soon be as intellectually inferior as you lot,’ he’d say.

I asked Hymie how he proposed to turn possibly the weakest school boxing team in the world into a winning combination. He looked at me and for once the slightly cynical grin left the corners of his mouth. ‘We need only one winner for a start. One guy you can rely on to win. The rest is easy, the rest is only good management. When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.’ He placed his hands one on each of my shoulders. ‘How many fights have you won in the ring, Peekay?’

‘Thirty-four,’ I replied.

‘How many have you lost?’

‘Well… none,’ I said, a little embarrassed.

‘You’ll do nicely. There’s nothing a gambler likes better than a certainty.’

‘This is the highveld, the standard is much higher than in the lowveld where I’ve done all my boxing, sooner or later every boxer gets beaten.’

‘Sure, sure, but let’s do all we can to delay that moment as long as possible. Peekay, I smell money in that boxing team.’

‘You mean by becoming an integral part of the system, me boxing and you managing, and then making it work for us?’

‘I love a fast learner,’ Hymie said.

When Darby White and Sarge saw me work out I could see they were enormously impressed. ‘Where’d you learn to box, son?’ Darby White asked.

Without thinking I answered, ‘In prison, sir.’

It was a reply Darby White would never grow tired of recounting. To my often acute embarrassment it became his favourite boxing story and given the slightest opportunity, he’d recount it to the coaches from the other schools.

Sarge was second in command of the boxing squad and acted with Darby White as a second or alone when Darby was refereeing a fight. As a young guardsman with the Coldstream Guards he’d been quite a useful amateur in his day. Later he’d worked as a second under the famous English trainer Dutch Holland of the Thomas a Becket Gymnasium in south London. Dutch Holland was the best cut-man in England and Sarge claimed to have learned the art of stemming an eye bleed from him. A cut eye would usually stop a fight in school boxing, which wasn’t always fair as the better boxer could lose on a TKO when he was ahead on points. Sarge could work miracles with a cut- stick, cotton wool swabs, adrenalin and vaseline. In fact, his special skill as a cut-man was one of the weapons Hymie was to use in his campaign to lift the boxing squad out of last place in the schools competition.

Hymie had himself elected as the manager of the boxing squad by the simple expedient of volunteering for the job. No first form boy had previously held this job. The managers of the various major sports, cricket, rugby, swimming, shooting and, of course, boxing, were invariably chosen from fifth form boys who, while not being sportsmen, were known to be brains, hence these positions came to be known as ‘swot spots’ and the fifth form boy honoured with a swot spot would invariably become a school prefect in the year following.

However, the swot spot for boxing had become a school joke and was therefore seen as not worthy of a brain. It was considered extremely poor form to apply for it, and Darby White had for the past four years rejected the few applicants on the basis of them not being known brains and therefore simple opportunists. In putting his case for the swot spot in boxing, Hymie pointed out to Darby White that as he was in the school senior chess team he qualified in the brain department and besides, with a first former in the job, Darby could look forward to five years of continuity, with all the advantages of long-term planning.

Hymie’s arguments were persuasive. The most telling of them being that we couldn’t do any worse than we were doing, so Darby might as well give him a go. Darby White only jingled his balls in his white duck trousers furiously for about two minutes before agreeing. Darby was quite unable to make a decision of any sort without putting both hands into his trouser pockets and giving his balls a tumble, the longer the process the more complicated the decision.

My first fight was as a flyweight, although at one hundred and two pounds I was a very light one and would be fighting a kid who weighed nearly ten pounds more than me. It took place in the school gymnasium a month after the term had begun. Home matches drew little attention from anyone at the school. School spirit did not extend to boxing, it was a recognised fact that we always lost and only the boxing squad and first form boarders, conscripted to watch, would be present to see the tripe walloped out of the Prince of Wales team. These one-sided bouts were privately referred to as ‘two-fisted attacks from the hairy backs’. As in: ‘Another seven to zero two- fisted attack from the hairy backs.’ The malevolence between Afrikaans and English-speaking South Africans continued unabated, with the English still feeling mightily superior. The fact that only Afrikaans schools boxed was further reason to dismiss the boxing team as being somewhat declasse and not worthy of the finer traditions of the school. Darby White in his white ducks and singlet, with his belly spilling over the old tie which held his trousers up, and Sarge in his jazzy hotel doorman’s uniform and silly pace stick, were looked upon as a comic opera team by the remainder of the mortar and gowned teaching staff. Nothing was ever said, but you simply knew that those who laboured in the field were not equal to those who laboured in the mind.

While only the handful of Prince of Wales kids attended that first fight, the gym was packed with kids from