The Power of One (52 page)

I stood looking at the cream bun with its shiny brown top and cream-filled center. This was my first major crisis. “I—I don't have any money, sir.”

Cooper turned back to his book. “Use those slippery fingers of yours to find some,” he said, dismissing me.

I left his study holding the offending cream bun gingerly in my hand. Pocket money was drawn every Wednesday after lunch and every Saturday morning, but as I hadn't been given any for the term, the fact that it was Tuesday meant two things: none of the other fags would have any money this late in the week and even if I could borrow some I had no possibility of paying it back.

My arse stung like hell, but I hardly noticed it in my anxiety.

Morrie Levy was waiting at the end of the corridor that led to the sixth form studies.

“Christ, Peekay, I could hear it from here. That bastard sure blasted arse!”

“I'm in deep shit,” I told him. “Fve got to buy Cooper another cream bun, and I haven't got any money.”

Morrie shrugged, “Easy, man, I'll give it to you.” Then he pointed to the bun in my hand. “What's that? That's a cream bun!”

I explained to him what had happened. “Sorry, but I can only accept a loan if you'll let me do something to pay it off,” I added.

“Don't be stupid, Peekay. Pay me tomorrow after pocket money.”

It was the first time I had had to admit that I had no money whatsoever.

“You mean nothing? No money at all?” Morrie was clearly astonished. He dug into the change pocket of his gray flannels and produced a two-shilling piece. “Here, take it. You can pay me back when you leave school.”

“Bullshit, Morrie, that's in five years.”

Morrie grinned. “I'm a Jew, remember. We're supposed never to forget.”

“You're also a pain in the bum, Levy. Keep your two bob, I only need threepence anyway. Bugger it! I'll go and 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 center 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 on 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 could wish. He handed the restored cream bun back to me, a satisfied grin on his mug.

“Gee, thanks, Morrie. 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 Morrie who had really done so, although I guess that's what being partners is all about.

After I had given Cooper his “new” cream bun, Morrie and I retired behind the bogs and laughed our heads off. Then Morrie 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 memorizing all Doc's games plus 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 exactly earth-shattering news as 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 was not compulsory. Only about twenty boys out of the six hundred in the school took part. Darby White, the gym master and ex-cruiserweight champion of the British Army, had turned six of these twenty into a fairly good boxing team, although I soon learned that we boxed only 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. A ribbon in the school colors, red, white, and green, which had been tied around the handle of a massive wooden spoon, the traditional prize for last place, and which hung from one of the beams in the gym, was beginning to fade, the spoon having been in 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 Morrie about this and he immediately became interested. Morrie'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 a bit of his enthusiasm, but he seems to know his onions,” I replied.

“You need a manager, and I know just the chap,” Morrie said. That was the nice part about Morrie; he never bragged, but he was absolutely certain of his superiority. It crapped a lot of people off, but Morrie had prepared himself for a life where 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 your lot,” he'd say.

I asked Morrie 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.

“A certainty! There's nothing my sort of gambler likes better. You'll do nicely.”

“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.”

“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,” Morrie 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 acute embarrassment, it became his favorite 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 the south of London. Dutch Holland was the best cut man in England, and Sarge claimed to have learned the art of stemming an eyebleed 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 swabs, adrenaline, and Vaseline. In fact, his special skill as a cut man was one of the weapons Morrie was to use in his campaign to lift the boxing squad out of last place in the schools competition.

Morrie had himself elected 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 honored 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 their not being known brains and therefore simple opportunists. In putting his case for the swot spot in boxing, Morrie pointed out to Darby White that as he was in the school senior chess team he qualified in the brains 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.

Morrie'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 jiggled 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 more complicated the decision, the longer the process.

My first fight was as a flyweight, although at 102 pounds I was a very light one and would be fighting a kid who weighed nearly ten pounds more than I. 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 recognized fact that we always lost, and only the boxing squad and first form boarders, who were 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 an old tie that 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 labored in the field were not equal to those who labored in the mind.

While only a handful of Prince of Wales kids attended that first fight, the gym was packed with kids from the opposition school, an Afrikaans high school named Helpmekaar, which translated into English means “Help each other.” Helpmekaar enjoyed a huge reputation in all sports except cricket. Its boxing team was said to be the best in South Africa and had won the South African Schools Boxing Championships the year before.

At 111 pounds, the kid I was fighting was just one pound short of being a bantamweight. I didn't mind, as I was used to fighting guys heavier and bigger than me and had fought tougher-looking kids than him before. But Morrie was concerned. This was the first time we were going into business together, and at the weigh-in he looked worried.

“Ten pounds is a lot to give away. This Geldenhuis guy is supposed to be shit-hot.”

“C'mon, Morrie, he's a new boy just like us, how would they know? How's the book going?”

“Great, that's the problem. I've been taking bets in the toilet from the Helpmekaar chaps all night and I've got you at ten to one against four to one on Geldenhuis. They're falling over themselves to bet on their man.”

“That's great. Did you tell the first form boarders to bet on me?”

“
Ja
, they're all pretty excited, but their bets aren't anywhere near enough to cover us if Geldenhuis wins. Christ, Peekay, I must be mad. It's not having all the facts that's pissing me off. We have no form on Geldenhuis, none on you, for that matter. We're making book in the dark, that's just plain dumb.”

“We've got to start somewhere. Let's start by trusting each other.”

“No offense, Peekay, but next time first the facts and then the trust.” It was perhaps the most important thing Morrie ever said to me. Morrie was the supreme example of Hoppie's dictum, first with the head and then with the heart. It was to be the basis of our business operations from that time on.

Geldenhuis was solidly built around the shoulders and I knew I'd have to stay away from his right, which he kept throwing straight from the shoulder as he shadowboxed while waiting for the fight to begin.

Geel Piet had warned me that some boxers throw shadow punches before a fight to deceive their opponent into thinking they lead with a left or a right when in actual fact it's the other way around. The idea is to surprise your opponent in the first few seconds and so unsettle him. I studied the big kid and decided there wasn't any subterfuge in his shadowboxing, he was much too confident to bother with any tricks. His leading hand was the left, and I noticed he held his right too low, leaving his jaw unprotected. His slightly open stance suggested that he saw himself as a fighter, in which case he would come out hard and fast hoping to nail me early with a good punch.