Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

Fagging was hard work and we were on standby for the school and house prefects from first bell at six a.m. until lights out at nine-thirty. No chore was thought too menial and a prefect had only to yell from his study and all the fags within hearing distance would have to come running. Last new boy to arrive did the chore. In addition to this, each fag had a list of duties he was obliged to perform for his personal prefect. He made his bed, shone his shoes, cadet and rugby boots, washed his rugby togs or during the summer blancoed his cricket boots, and if he was an officer in the cadet corps polished his Sam Browne and brasses, laid out his clothes, tidied his study, ran his messages and made trips to the tuck shop on his behalf.

The first tanning I received was for scooping the tiniest dab of cream off the top of a cream bun I was delivering to Fred Cooper. At least it started with the tiniest scoop and then, in an attempt to smooth the scooped part, I took one or two more small scoops on the end of my finger. By the time I arrived at Fred Cooper’s study, the bun looked somewhat re-arranged.

‘You rotten little bugger! You’ve been norking my cream bun,’ Cooper yelled at me.

‘My hand slipped over it and I had to lick it off sort of, sir,’ I explained, not quite willing to tell an outright lie.

‘Shit! Did you lick my bloody bun, Peekay?’

‘No, sir, just my hand.’

‘Close the door, boy. We have an excellent way to train slippery hands.’ Cooper reached for the cane which hung behind the door. ‘How many times do you reckon it slipped?’ he asked.’

‘Not many, sir,’ I said fearfully.

‘Not many is once or twice or three times, tell me, man?’

‘Once?’ I said hopefully.

‘Right, bend down.’ I bent down holding my knees and proffering my arse. Whack! ‘That’s one for your slippery hand.’ Whack! ‘That’s one for your slippery tongue.’ Whack! ‘And that’s one for your poor memory.’ Cooper returned the cane to the back of the door and pointed to the cream bun on his desk. ‘Eat it! And go and get me another one with your own money.’

I stood looking at the cream bun with its shiny brown top and cream-filled centre. 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. Hymie Levy was waiting at the end of the corridor which 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. ‘I’ve got to buy Cooper another cream bun and I haven’t got any money.’

Hymie 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?’ Hymie was clearly astonished. He dug into the change pocket of his grey flannels and produced a two-shilling piece. ‘Here, take it, you can pay me back when you leave school.’

‘Bullshit, Hymie, that’s in five years.’

Hymie grinned, ‘I’m a Jew, remember, we’re supposed never to forget.’

‘You’re also a pain in the arse, 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 centre 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 onto 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 please. He handed the fully restored cream bun back to me, a satisfied grin on his mug.

‘Gee thanks, Hymie. 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 Hymie who had really done so. After I’d given Cooper his ‘new’ bun, we retired behind the bogs and laughed our heads off. Then Hymie 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 memorising all Doc’s games plus my 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 earth shattering news, 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 not compulsory. Only about twenty boys out of the six hundred in the school took part. Darby White, the gym master and ex light-heavyweight champion of the British army, had turned six of these twenty into a fairly good boxing team, although I soon learned that we only boxed 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. The red, white and green ribbon, which was the school colours and which had been tied around the handle of a massive wooden spoon and hung from one of the beams in the gym, was beginning to fade, the spoon having been in permanent 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 Hymie about this and he immediately became interested. Hymie’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 his enthusiasm, but he seems to know his onions,’ I replied.

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