Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

Regular boxing against the Afrikaans schools during term had made me a much better boxer, although I personally longed for the magic of Geel Piet, who knew how to make me think better in the ring. Whereas Darby White and Sarge, like Captain Smit, were honest carpenters, Geel Piet had been an artist and I missed his uncanny understanding of how to exploit my personality in the ring.

I felt I wasn’t growing as a boxer. Yehudi Menuhin once said that playing the violin is like singing through your limbs; Geel Piet had had the ability to make boxing seem the same, each punch the result of perfect timing, continuity, controlled emotion and intelligence. If I was to become the welterweight champion of the world, I knew I’d soon have to find a coach who thought beyond schoolboy boxing.

The holidays were packed. I’d be at the prison at five-thirty a.m. for boxing, and Captain Smit would make me go three rounds with two of the other kids. Mostly with Snotnose and Jaapie, both heavier than me but really the only two boxers who could box well enough to push me. Both would itch to have a go, both were fighters in the Smit tradition, and both were very tough. It called for all my ringcraft to stay out of trouble. Halfway through the second round, Captain Smit would blow his whistle and one of them would step down and the other come in. This meant each of them only boxed one and a half rounds and so they’d go flat out, prepared to take a few punches to get a good one in. Captain Smit was convinced that it was the only way to increase my speed and keep me sharp.

After an hour and a half in the prison gym I’d head for Doc’s cottage, where either Dee or Dum, who took it turn about, would have delivered breakfast. By the time I arrived at eight, the coffee would be made and a loaf of fresh bread would be on the table, together with eggs and bacon, plopping away on the back of the stove waiting for me to arrive. Doc was, after all, still a German and he expected me to be exactly on egg and bacon time. The girls loved the holidays and they’d spoil me rotten, with baking and fussing and generally cooking up a storm. Doc always claimed he put on several pounds when I was around.

Doc and I would sit outside on his stoep for breakfast and we’d plan the weekend hike. This usually meant repeating an old trail. Doc would bring out his notepad and we’d discuss the last time we’d done the planned walk, which might have been five years before. We’d discuss every specimen we’d found then and sometimes even leave the table to check the progress of some long forgotten succulent we had collected. Doc was still tied to the Steinway and his little girl students during the week, so our long walks had to take place over the weekend. Though I’m sure, after a while, he’d have had it no other way, the planning and the discussion over his notes became just as important to him as the excursions themselves. At nine he’d give me a piano lesson, shaking his head at the bad habits I’d acquired under the direction of Mr Mollip, the Prince of Wales School music master. ‘This Mr Muddleup, you are sure he teaches pianoforte?’ he would say, shaking his head. ‘I think maybe the banjo yes? He would spend the rest of the holidays getting me back into some sort of musical shape.

The first time I played St Louis blues for Doc I had expected to shock him out of his pants. In fact it was meant as a joke. Instead he nodded quietly. ‘Ja, that is goot.’ I turned to look at him in surprise. ‘But to play black, the music must come from your soul not out from your head, Peekay.’ He indicated that I should rise from the piano stool, and seated in my place he played the piece in the same haunting way as Hymie’s seventy-eight of Errol Garner.

‘Bloody hell, Doc, where’d you learn to do that!’ It was the first time I’d sworn in Doc’s presence but he seemed not to notice. ‘Okey-dokey, Mr Schmarty-Pantz, who is a person called W. C. Handy?’

‘He sounds like a lavatory brush,’ I said flippantly.

‘Mr W. C. Handy wrote this music, and now you want to play it without heart and even without knowing who is the composer! Would you do this to Beethoven or Bach? No, I think not. But now Mr Schmarty-Pantz thinks to play the black man’s music is easy.’

‘Sorry, Doc, it was only a joke. I only wanted to shock you.’

‘Then to shock me you must play me bad music, not play me good music badly,’ he said softly.

I was the one who had been shocked and Doc had in the process taught me once again to do my research and my thinking before I did my judging. ‘Where’d you learn to play like that, Doc?’

Doc laughed. ‘So long ago, ja, when I write my first book on cactus in North America, I was in New Orleans. I had no money so I played fifteen minutes classical every night in a fancy cathouse, the Golden Slipper. Ja, this is the name of that place. After I play comes every night a jazz band and soon we talk and so on and so forth and they think the German professor is very funny, but not my music, the rich people who come to this cathouse, they don’t understand Mr Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms. But the black men, they understood. I teach them a little of this and a little of that and they teach me a little of that and a little of this,’ he touched the keys and played a couple of bars of blues music. ‘It was here I meet Mr W. C. Handy and later also Mr Willie Smith.’

‘You met Willie Smith!’ I yelled at him. ‘The Willie Smith?’

‘Ja, I think there is only one.’

‘Doc, please, please teach me how to play jazz piano.’

Doc laughed, and affecting his version of an American accent replied, ‘Not on your sweet-tootin’ nelly, Peekay.’

‘Please, Doc!’

He shook his head. ‘I cannot teach you what I cannot feel. Peekay, you must understand this. It is not possible for a man to touch the heart of the negro man’s music when he cannot feel it through his fingers.’

Doc had just explained to me why I would never amount to much musically. What Geel Piet knew I had as a boxer, Doc knew I lacked as a musician.

I would leave Doc at eleven o’clock and by a quarter past I had arrived at Miss Bornstein’s house. Mr Bornstein who, as I mentioned before, was a lawyer in partnership with Mr Andrews, had a big white double-storey house designed in the Cape Dutch style. A huge bougainvillea creeper cascaded purple bloom over one side of the house, its mass of purple blossom stark and beautiful against the wall so gleaming white that it hurt to look at it in the near noon sun. The next impression the eye met was of the sweeping lawns which smelt of cut grass and never seemed to lose their wet green look even in the late summer when every other lawn seemed strawed and faded from the heat. There were other things in the garden, trees and tropical shrubs and a bed of deep red canna. And of course all the usual junk like roses and things. But all I seem to remember is the dramatic splash of the deep purple bougainvillea against the blinding white of the house, the green, perfectly manicured lawns and the chit-chit-chit of the hose spitting stingy jets of water somewhere in the garden.

I’d spend the first half-hour or less, depending only on whether I could hold out that long, playing a game of chess with old Mr Bornstein. He would always checkmate me with the same words: ‘Not so shameful. Tomorrow maybe, if God spares us, you will win.’ God spared us but I never won.

A houseboy in a white starched coat would then bring me a glass of milk and two chocolate biscuits, my favourite. Then the lesson would begin. We’d work until two o’clock when the same boy brought in a jug of orange juice and a plate of polony and tomato sandwiches, also my favourite.

Miss Bornstein was determined that I should win a Rhodes scholarship and go to Oxford, and the work we did was far in excess of anything I needed to know to pass my matriculation. With her pushing me, particularly in Latin and Greek, by weekly letter and during the school holidays and with the tuition reserved for Sinjun’s People I was probably getting as fine an education as it was possible for anyone of my age to absorb.