Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched on a whole heap of other responses a fourteen-year-old can’t really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn’t think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark.

Doc and Mrs Boxall had taught me to think. Mrs Boxall in the general sense and Doc in the particular. Doc’s life was a constant pre-occupation with minutiae, his eye sought always what lay hidden yet was important, he knew that nature guards her secrets jealously, that acute observation begins with a questioning mind. ‘Always to ask questions, ja this is so, maybe the answers come slow, but always they are coming if you wait with your head and your eyes.’

Geel Piet taught me to anticipate the problems likely to occur in any situation and to review the answers to them long before disaster struck. His mind was a network of emergency plans. While small boys are not natural pessimists, he nevertheless taught me the value of a routine which, when practised a thousand times, becomes an automatic reaction to a crisis.

Over all this lay Hoppie’s dictum: First with the head and then with the heart . Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often left me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me. Only Doc was allowed to know all of me with nothing held back.

But even Doc was lost to me when sex lightning struck and puberty arrived in a surge of lust. The superior equipment my mentors had given me and which I had unknowingly used so effectively to perfect my camouflage was suddenly useless. Nothing I had been taught prepared me for the onset of my sexual drive. I found myself more completely a loner than ever, but this time I was trying to keep the lid on an emotional cauldron that threatened to boil over and drown me.

I woke each morning with a rigid tent pole which, in the school tradition, I took to the showers, using my erection as a hook over which to drape my towel. While I joined in with the general hilarity at those of us who had been struck by sex lightning, I knew I was faking it. Buried deep where I hoped he would never surface lay Pisskop and his hatless snake and, while circumcision was too common among the guys at the Prince of Wales to cause embarrassment, my dick was the part of my anatomy that had started all my problems and now it was behaving in a manner over which I had absolutely no control.

Sex had never been discussed at home but among the guys in the boxing squad it was referred to as ‘doing it’. Snotnose was said to be almost doing it to Sophie Smit, Captain Smit’s daughter, having given her tits a feel-up in the dark at a Saturday matinee and, it was hinted, a feel down there , as well.

I knew enough about the ways of the Lord to know that if I should find myself in the fortunate position of being able to do it to Sophie, I would be committing a mortal sin. Though I freely admit, even in my pubescent state with my brains turned to meat loaf, I was aware that the chances of my achieving a supine Sophie were just about non-existent, I knew that the Lord, heavily backed by my mother, wasn’t the sort of person who settled for innocence by omission. My case was hopeless. Even for a sinner I was sinning at an alarming rate. Not only in my 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.