Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

‘People feel they ought to know, so they don’t dare ask,’ she would say. She once told me that the sandwich was named after the Earl of Sandwich, who was a terrible gambler and because he was always so busy gambling he had no time to take meals. To overcome the problem his butler had made him two hunks of bread with something in between them. These were the first sandwiches. ‘If anyone ever asks we’ll say it’s the famous Earl of Sandwich Fund for the poor. That ought to shut them up, don’t you think, Peekay?’

Eventually someone must have asked, because the Earl of Sandwich Fund became the most social of all the war effort funds in Barberton. Even more important than knitting socks for prisoners of war. At the Easter and Christmas fête held in Coronation Park, Mrs Boxall and I ran a sandwich stand where cakes and other delicacies donated by the town’s leading families were sold. My mother sent pumpkin scones baked by Dee and Dum who were also allowed to work on the stand. Mother made two identical pinnies and caps for them and they worked from dawn until dusk laying out cakes on the trestle tables and cutting and buttering bread and making sandwiches.

Because I was on the boxing squad and regarded as one of the prison kids, the wives of the warders baked for days for the sandwich stand and gloated when their cakes and cookies were the first to go. Boer baking was generally superior to that of the town’s leading socialites. The rather snobbish Earl of Sandwich Fund sandwich stand earned enough to pay for the entire mailing system and to send money and clothing to a great many destitute families.

When the tobacco crisis came we solved it through the Earl of Sandwich Fund. Mrs Boxall sent a note to the headmaster of our school requesting that children bring in cigarette butts from home. She even managed to get the butts from the sergeants’ mess at the army camp. Everyone assumed the recycled tobacco was going to the prisoners of war as Mrs Boxall simply referred to them as prisoners. Some kids brought half-packets of unsmoked cigarettes from a parent’s precious ration, a sacrifice to the war effort. I took half a packet of smokes to Geel Piet, who thought all his Christmases had come at once. The bags of butts were taken to Doc’s cottage where Dee and Dum, their noses masked by a dish towel, spent Sunday afternoon shredding the week’s tobacco supply. Geel Piet never had it so good. When the new crop came from Marie’s farm, it was with some dismay that he was forced to switch back to straight tobacco leaf.

What I didn’t know was that little by little the prisoners had pieced it all together and I had been given the credit for everything. I was enormously surprised when one day I passed a gang of prisoners who were digging a large flower bed in the town hall gardens to hear the chanter, who was calling the rhythm so the picks all rose in unison and fell together, change his song at my approach.

‘See who comes towards us now,’ he sang. ‘Tell us, tell us,’ the rest of the work gang chanted back. ‘It is he who is called the Tadpole Angel,’ the leader sang. ‘We salute him, we salute him,’ they chorused.

I glanced around me to see whom they were singing about, but there was no one to be seen. The warder, who recognised me, obviously didn’t know Zulu. He called out to me, ‘How things going, man?’ and I replied, ‘Very good, thanks.’ The warder, who was bored, obviously wanted me to stop for a chat.

‘He who is a mighty fighter and friend of the yellow man,’ the leader continued. ‘The Tadpole Angel, the Tadpole Angel,’ the chorus replied, their picks lifting on the first Tadpole Angel and coming down on the second. I realised with a shock that they were talking about me.

‘I hear the lieutenant is going to let you fight in the under twelve division in the Lowveld Championships in Nelspruit this weekend.’

‘Ja, I’ll be the smallest, but he thinks I’ll be okay.’

‘We thank him for the tobacco, the sugar and the salt and for the letters and the things he sends to our people far away.’ ‘From our hearts, from our hearts,’ came the chorus.

‘Nine is not very old, man, eleven can be blêrrie big with a Boer kid.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I am ten in two weeks.’ I was trying to hide my embarrassment at the salutation going on around us.

‘Ja, man, and the kid you fight will be most likely twelve in two weeks,’ he said gloomily.

‘I have to go, I’m late for the library.’ I wanted only to get away from the chanting of the prison gang.

‘You’ll be okay, man, I seen you sparring, you fast as buggery.’ He looked at me closely and grinned, ‘You is a funny bloke, Peekay. Now why you blushing like mad suddenly, hey?’

‘He is the sweet water we drink and the dark clouds that come at last to break the drought,’ the leader sang. Up came the picks, ‘Tadpole Angel.’ Down they went in perfect unison, ‘Tadpole Angel. We salute him, we salute him.’ I started to run towards the library and broke out in a sweat, my embarrassment consuming me.

I tackled Geel Piet about the matter the next morning and he admitted that this was my name. ‘It is a great compliment, small baas. For them you are a true angel.’

Doc was listening, as Geel Piet and I now spoke in English when we were with him. ‘Ja, and for you we are all angels, Geel Piet.’ He chuckled. ‘You are a rich man I think, ja?’

Geel Piet made no attempt to deny it. ‘Big baas, it is always like so in a prison. If I am discovered I will be killed, so I must have something for risking my life. Thirty per cent is not so much, in Pretoria and Johannesburg it is fifty per cent, in Robben Island and Pollsmoor it is sixty per cent.’

‘I think you are a skelm, Geel Piet, but we will say no more.’ Doc, like Mrs Boxall, had come to realise how important the letters were and how the small amount of contraband made life bearable for men who were shown no compassion and whose diet of mealie meal and a watery stew of mostly cabbage and carrots with an occasional bit of gristle floating on the surface was only just sufficient to sustain them though not sufficient for the brutally hard work on the farms or the saw mills or the granite quarries. He had also come to accept the role Geel Piet played in the distribution system, knowing that without it chaos would ensue. ‘Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion.’ Doc sighed and took out his bandanna and wiped his face as though trying to wipe the prison atmosphere from his skin. ‘When man is brutalised in such a place like this always he is looking for small signs. The smallest sign that someone is worried for him is like a fire on the dark mountain. When a man knows somebody cares he keeps some small place, a corner maybe of his soul, clean and lit.’

While the food allocated for each prisoner was insufficient to keep a man doing hard physical labour, whoever hired a gang was expected to supply a meal at noon. It was this meal which kept the prisoners alive, for the regulations required it to be a vegetable and meat stew consisting of eight ounces of meat per prisoner and a pound of cooked mealie pap. I sometimes heard the warders discuss a scam whereby they tried to get a contractor to cut the rations in half, pay the warder ten shillings and save himself ten shillings. This only worked when gangs were hired for short periods, otherwise the men soon grew too weak to work. It was a big risk. Lieutenant Smit rotated warders so they had a different gang each week and couldn’t set up a scam. The prison authorities depended on this one good meal a day from outside so they could cut rations on the inside. Although, I must say Geel Piet told me this story and so it is not necessarily the entire truth. If a warder was caught in a scam he was not only dismissed but drafted into the army. Nobody in the boxing squad ever tried a scam, they were all Lieutenant Smit’s men and, even more than the good musicians, were considered special, seldom having to go out with gangs and mostly getting guard duty on the day shift.