The Power of One

head but also behind a closed toilet door where I actively fantasised doing it to Sophie Smit.

The fact that I wasn’t a proper born again Christian somehow made it more important that I practise restraint. It became a test of character which I was failing on a daily, sometimes twice daily, not to mention nightly basis. I tried to keep it down to a minimum, promising myself after each time it happened that I was definitely cured, and this had been the last time my fingers would play a tune on the pork flute. Ha, ha… some last time! No matter how hard I tried to reform my wicked ways and to concentrate on other things my tent pole would erect at the most awkward times and I would need to sneak off to seek relief.

The trouble was that Hymie seemed not to have been struck by sex lightning at all. He talked dirty in the usual schoolboy way, though never in the same explicit terms as the constantly randy group around him. Not that I was among these big mouth fantasisers, my sex life was clandestine, a furtive business. But what the others claimed out loud they’d like to do with the Vargas girls in Esquire magazine was simply a paraphrase of what I felt myself. Cunning-Spider, Paul Atherton and Pissy Johnson were also sex struck though, I felt certain, not as badly as me. Hymie on the other hand seemed to sail through puberty like a bloody eunuch.

I don’t want to go on about it; but it was an awkward enough time and, because it disrupted the carefully constructed pattern of my existence, it forced me to think about other aspects of my life.

Hitherto I had never questioned the motives of the adults around me, nor had I felt any reason to question the conventional wisdom they assumed was correct for me. Now I was beginning to see that the plans for my future were being largely made by other people. That in return for being allowed to dream my boxing dream, I was allowing others to map the road ahead for me. I was perceived as a winner and everyone likes to help a winner. I could sense that I was clever enough to win most of the glittering prizes yet to come and this would inevitably lead to a life of privilege, to doors being opened, barriers lowered, places made for me as I was passed from hand to hand among the rich and the privileged until I melded perfectly, indistinguishable from those few who, in the white man’s Africa, have so much power over the many who have none.

Doc had taught me the value of being the odd man out. The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, to think through to the truth and not to be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost.

At fourteen I had no hope of seeing things quite as clearly as this, but I instinctively understood that power is beguiling and man does not lightly give it up. To maintain it he will bend the truth and warp his values. I was a child of Africa, a white child to be sure, but nevertheless Africa’s child. The black breasts which had suckled me, and the dark hands which had bathed and rocked me, left me with a burden of obligation to resist the white power which would be the ultimate gift from those who now trained me.

I saw this same sense of aloneness in Hymie. I sensed his Jewish alienation and I understood the intelligent, clear-eyed pessimism that seemed a part of everything he did. He had inherited loneliness. Despite his need for me, he knew himself ultimately to be on his own. Though we never spoke of it, our friendship was forged on this common knowledge. We had instinctively come together to learn, each from the other, those lessons we needed to use the power within us effectively, to think and act differently from those around us.

To win took on a new meaning. It was still part of my fierce-eyed determination to become the welterweight champion of the world, but in the years to follow winning would become the ultimate camouflage as I trained to be a spiritual terrorist. To achieve this new and barely understood aim, I had to appear to be damn near perfect in everything I did even at the risk of appearing to be a bit of a pain.

Each week I received a letter from Doc, Mrs Boxall and Miss Bornstein. While I wrote home fairly regularly, I think my mother must have been too busy sewing to write very often. Sometimes on the bottom of Doc’s letters would appear two inky thumb prints under which Doc would write in his small neat hand, From Dee and Dum who ask who is washing your clothes and baking rusks for your coffee in the morning? Dee and Dum continued to make the sojourn to Doc’s cottage for the weekly clean-up and he had grown very fond of them. Doc’s letters were about the hills and his beloved cacti, and while I had continued my piano under the instruction of the school music master, he never mentioned music in his letters. I think Doc knew I was destined for other things. Mrs Boxall would write all the town gossip, and she said that the Assemblies of God had supplied two young missionaries who could speak four African languages between them to take on the prison letters. She was still in charge, determined that God would not be allowed to interfere with the perfectly lovely business of writing a letter to your loved ones. In one of her letters she had added that the people sadly missed King Georgie and that letter writing had fallen off a fair bit after I had left.

The Earl of Sandwich Fund had started to spread and Mrs Boxall was elected chairwoman of seven different groups which had started prison rehabilitation work among black prisoners in South Africa. Many of these early members of the Sandwich Fund were to become the leaders of the Black Sash movement, a movement among South African women which started in the mid fifties to protest against apartheid and injustice against the black people. It continues as one of the few voices of freedom coming out of this sad land; a voice muted from protest against a regime afraid to hear the just and anguished cries of the people.

Miss Bornstein was determined to develop my intellect and insisted on knowing in some detail exactly which books we were reading, maths we were doing and, in fact, everything. I had written to her about Hymie and she included him in her letters which would consist mostly of pages and pages of questions and discussion points. Finally she would always include in her weekly letter a chess move for each of us from old Mr Bornstein who in the six years we were at school we never managed to beat.

Hymie would groan loudly when the weekly letter arrived plump with questions. He’d hold his hands to the side of his face and rock in an exaggerated manner. ‘Oy veh!’ he’d say, imitating his granma, ‘the only reason I elected to come to this institution for Christian gentlemen was to get away from Jewish women, now I’m at fucking correspondence school with one!’ But Miss Bornstein had a way, even at long distance, of involving one’s pride and the interest she stimulated in her letters put Hymie and myself far ahead of anyone else in the A class at school.

Hymie was the first to use what became a famous expression throughout the school. We were in ‘Mango’ Cobett’s history class and Mango, an asinine man who taught with a very highbrow bias and was a dreadful snob, was talking about the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Mango carried the nickname because he had an oval-shaped head with fine blond hair which clung to his skull and a sharp blond goatee, the whole assemblage resembled a well-sucked mango pip. Though South African born, he was an avowed anglophile and spoke in a dewy-eyed manner about the bravery of Lord Cardigan in the Charge of the Light Brigade.

From the back of the class where we both sat Hymie interjected, ‘According to Miss Bornstein, he demonstrated a lamentable lack of control over the French, he also lacked common sense and a sense of responsibility to his men, sir.’

There was a stunned silence, Mango’s mouth was half open and he could hardly believe his ears.

‘According to Miss Bornstein, Lord Raglan was also completely out of his depth, in fact, a bumbling old fool,’ Hymie added.

Mango Cobett finally regained his voice. ‘According to whom, Levy?’

‘According to Miss Bornstein of the famous Jewish correspondence school, sir,’ I interjected. The classroom broke into an uproar.

‘Shut up! Everyone shut up at once!’ Mango Cobett yelled. The classroom quickly murmured down into silence. Both Hymie and myself were known as brains and Mango wasn’t game enough simply to punish us with a couple of hours’ detention without first asserting his superior historical perspective.

‘I was unaware that the Jews played a part in the Crimean War. I take it your Miss Bornstein is a history scholar of some distinction, perhaps a better source than The Invasion of the Crimea by A. W. Kinglake.’ He picked up one of the books which lay on the desk in front of him and held it high, squinting slightly as he read the spine. ‘William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1864. I’d say that was from the horse’s mouth, wouldn’t you?’

‘More like the horse’s arse, sir,’ Hymie quipped, and the classroom broke up again.

Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea was one of the volumes my granpa had at home along with the complete works of Charles Dickens and I’d read both volumes of Kinglake’s account when I was eight. According to Miss Bornstein, Kinglake’s account was remarkable but she had also read the Russian and French accounts and now felt the official British version was heavily jingoistic and apt to blame the French and the