The Power of One (57 page)

“It was what?” Morrie said, not sure he'd heard me correctly.

“It was one of England's finest hours. What's important is, it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.”

“Bullshit!” Morrie said. “If the Jews had played that game, we'd have been extinct fifteen hundred years ago.”

“You have to be a Christian gentleman to understand,” I kidded him.

“Do me a favor, Peekay, don't just read history, feel it. Try to imagine being an ordinary guy on a half-starved horse, your regiment decimated by cholera. You've got a lance in your hand and are looking into the barrels of the Russian artillery holding the Vorontsov Ridge at Balaclava. Do you know why the English managed to conquer half the globe? Because they were so bloody stupid! Some half-witted lord jumped up in a general's uniform would simply advance on a position and expend men. He didn't care, they were only yeomen and slum slush, cannon fodder. He just kept sending them in, and so help me they kept on going, until eventually he won. You call that bravery? I call that two things, murder and stupidity. The generals murdered their men, and the men were too stupid to resist.”

“And too brave. It wasn't just stupidity.”

Morrie ignored my interjection. “History makes it all okay. History forgets the vomit and the shit, the blood and the horses with their guts blown away, the cries of men as they shat their pants and drowned in their own blood. The Charge of the Light Brigade is celebrated because it was the most obviously stupid, most spectacularly stupid, most stupendously stupid sacrifice of men until the brilliant British generals finally topped it for sheer cold-blooded slaughter in the trenches in Flanders and on the cliffs above Gallipoli.”

He changed course suddenly. “Hitler murdered six million Jews. He had to round them up and rail them to the death camps, and the world wept for man's inhumanity to man. But underneath it all is the feeling that the Jews should have fought, should have resisted, should have died defending their kith and kin, should have died like men. All the women and children and the cobblers and tailors and small shopkeepers who believed that they were Germans and Poles and Hungarians, who believed passionately in logic and order, in Kant and Spinoza, in minding their own business and never getting involved, and most of all, in never volunteering to be stupid, should have turned into a fighting machine that takes pride in dying. Because they didn't go chasing a piece of colored bunting around the place, history may yet judge them cowards.” Morrie sniffed and wiped his nose across the back of his hand. I had never seen him quite as upset and angry before.

“When a British general looking for a new swatch of ribbon for his chest sent men into battle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then again in the Great War, Englishmen volunteered to go. They actually handed themselves over into his care, and in return for their trust he was just as careless with their lives as the Jew killers of Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, Belsen, and the other death camps were with the lives of my kind. But when it was all over, the world, or the English-speaking world anyway, cheered their Christian gentlemen heads off. More tradition had been made, more regimental bunting to hang in St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey. More bullshit.” He sniffed again and grabbed me by the shoulder.

“You know something, Peekay? History stinks, and it's bastards like Mango Cobett who add to the putrefaction by believing the crap that's written. Take my word for it, in another thirty years the Germans will claim that only a handful of SS persecuted the Jews, unbeknownst to the good burghers, who stayed at home and knitted socks for Jewish prisoners of war.”

To Mango Cobett's credit, the detention essays Morrie and I wrote on the Crimean War shared the history prize that year. Miss Bornstein's evidence was too conclusive.

With her weekly letters, some of them up to twenty pages long, Miss Bornstein had the happy knack of instigating a line of reasoning that would stimulate us both. We'd rush to the school library to follow its course. By the time we were in form three, we were fairly skilled researchers and were given permission to spend Wednesday afternoons at the Johannesburg Public Library.

Form three was a big year for us. It was the year the boxing team lost the wooden spoon and also the year we published, with the help of a typist and the Gestetner machine in Morrie's father's carpet emporium, “The Miss Bornstein School of Correspondence Notes. Results fully guaranteed or your money back. Peekay & M. Levy. 5/-.” There were two books, one for form one and the other for form two.

Morrie and I had argued furiously about the price. Five shillings was outrageous when a science textbook cost only two shillings.

“If we charge what it appears to be worth, we'd be lucky to get sixpence,” he admitted. “Good business is when people perceive something to be valuable, and the best way to encourage this perception is by guiding their thinking.”

“You mean by charging outrageously?”

“Now wait a mo, Peekay, that's not quite fair. Value for money is when the customer is satisfied that he has made the right purchase decision. Or do you disagree?”

I was forced to agree. “Well then,” he continued, “what are we promising them with “The Miss Bornstein School of Correspondence Notes” for forms one and two?”

“The promise is on the cover, but the bloody promise holds good whether we charge them sixpence or ten bob?”

“Not so. A five-bob price tag means at least two things: it means that the information in the notes is important and rare and that by following it, success is guaranteed. The second promise is convenience: all the information they need is between two covers, they don't have to schlepp through a dozen textbooks, the authors have done all the mental legwork for them. If we charged them sixpence they wouldn't value the book, and so it wouldn't work for them.”

“Shouldn't we dress it up a bit? For two bob a copy we could probably afford to have them printed with a hard cover. At least that way the value would be perceived to be better?”

Morrie looked at me in astonishment. “Peekay, are you mad? Do you want to kill the business in a year?”

“What do you mean?”

Morrie picked up a copy of our textbook and, holding it by one corner, he shook it violently. The staples in the center margin gave way, and the pages flew apart.

“There you are, look at that! They're rubbish, we'll never get away with this,” I protested.

“Bullshit, they're perfect, they'll only just hang together for one year. If we did it your way and we had them properly printed and bound, the guys would sell them at the end of the year to the incoming form. Where would our business be then?”

Morrie was right. Despite the price, there wasn't a kid in either form who didn't purchase a copy, and no one asked to have his money refunded. We were a good business combination. By the third year in school we were widely known to be brains. In addition, my ability in the boxing ring and on the rugby field had created quite a large following of my peers. Doing business with The Bank when you were broke became the norm for both day boys and boarders, so that every time we went out into another business venture the reception we got was usually pretty good. We referred to this accumulation of goodwill as our “image,” a word I discovered in an American book on business practice and which had not then gained the currency it enjoys today.

I must say, while Mango Cobett was a bit of a buffoon and a terrible snob, Singe ‘n' Burn, the head, had taken care to staff the school with liberal thinkers. He was less interested in turning out what he referred to as “the private school product” than he was in encouraging individuals to emerge. He would refer to his ideal person as a Renaissance man. A boy who delighted in learning for its own sake, the inspired amateur in the gifts of the body and the spirit. The complete man, superior by virtue of his curiosity and the careful nurturing and harvesting of his gifts. A man who was modest and unassuming because he had no need to hide his thoughts or his deeds from others, nor had he the need to seek their approval.

Singe ‘n' Burn was an Englishman coming to the end of what is usually referred to as a distinguished career. To parents he represented all the values of the English public school system, coming as he did from Winchester, where he had been a senior housemaster. For the board of governors he epitomized a system of privilege which they held in great esteem and desired him to emulate as faithfully as possible.

In his twenty years as headmaster of the Prince of Wales School, Singe ‘n' Burn never quite came to terms with the wealthy South African schoolboy.

In a curious way, the boys shared the belief in their social superiority with their English public school counterparts, though perhaps the basis for this superiority was different.

In the first instance, like all white South Africans, English and Afrikaans, they believed that God had ordained their superiority as white men. To this was added their proxy Englishness and their absolute belief in the right of wealth and privilege. Perhaps, after all, not so different from their English cousins.

Singe ‘n' Burn's pupils came to him with minds already narrowed, bigots with their dislike and distrust of the Afrikaner intact. Among them was the unspoken belief that they were the intellectually and culturally superior of South Africa's two white tribes. To this was added their spoken belief that they were of a higher species than the blacks. This corruption of the spirit had taken place in the cradle, and the task of driving the racist out of the boy was fruitless. St. John Burnham was forced to take in largely shallow minds to be fattened with sufficient information to pass the matriculation exams. Alas, the potential for a Renaissance man to emerge from this intellectual scrubland was severely limited.

Yet for twenty years Singe ‘n' Burn had kept his dream alive. While most of the boys from the Prince of Wales School were interchangeable with the product of any of the private schools in South Africa, that is, equipped for a society where money and social position were important, he kept for himself six boys each year. They were the raw material for his Renaissance men.

This handful of brilliant boys was known as St. John's People, pronounced “Sinjun's People.” They were selected in form three for special tuition under the direction of Singe ‘n' Burn, who elected to neglect the many for the precious few. Sinjun's People were the roses among the tangleweed, and the school's considerable reputation as a nursery for the country's future leaders had been built on these half dozen carefully nurtured young minds brought to flower in Sinjun's intellectual garden. Brains alone did not qualify a boy to be one of Sinjun's People, though intellect played a significant part in the training to come. “It is the spirit of the boy, an unselfconscious ability to maintain his status among his peers while remaining true to himself in his beliefs, opinions, and actions,” is how Singe ‘n' Burn would explain it at the first headmaster's assembly at the beginning of each year.

There was always a great deal of speculation in form three and, indeed, among the rest of the school, when the election of Sinjun's People took place just prior to the Easter break. I had prepared myself in my old way for a disappointment, and had I not been among the chosen six it would have hurt my pride enormously, but I knew it wasn't the end of the world. The betting on my being included was pretty high, though I didn't share this general confidence. Not, I should add, for reasons of false modesty, but because of my boxing. While the boxing team had given the school a new status, compared to cricket and rugby it was a sport of small importance. Several of the masters considered it unsuitable for a school of our reputation, and but for Darby and Sarge it would probably have been phased out. I had maintained my position as one of the brains of the school but had never left any doubt that boxing came first in my immediate ambitions. I was certain this would count against me. In my final interview with Singe ‘n' Burn, he had noted that my boxing appeared to come first, ahead of my competence as a musician and as a promising young scholar. “Your boxing? Is this an obsession with you, Peekay? Where do you propose to take your skill? I must say, it seems an unlikely future pastime for a gentleman, even though Lord Byron was said to have been a talented boxer.” When I had replied that I intended to be the welterweight champion of the world, his eyebrows had shot up and he had looked at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles. “Hmm,” was all he said by way of reply.

Morrie was also among the fifteen candidates to be interviewed by the head. While he was regarded as a powerful intellect, Morrie was generally thought to be too brash and was therefore regarded by most of the schoolboy punters as being a long shot. When I queried him on his interview with Singe ‘n' Burn, he seemed reluctant to talk about it, and so I didn't question him any further.

Sinjun's People were traditionally selected in order of merit, and this provided Morrie with a business opportunity that was to be one of our greatest successes. Apart from doing some of the legwork and sharing in the considerable profit, I played no part in its formation. We called it “Levy's Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred.” As a punter you could bet two ways: by paying a shilling you could nominate any three successful candidates from the list of fifteen finalists, regardless of order, the winners, for there was certain to be more than one, to share a pot of thirty pounds. Or, if you took two bets or more, you qualified to enter Levy's Remarkable Multiple of One Hundred, which carried a prize of one hundred pounds and required only two successes, the names of the boys in first and second place on the Sinjun's People list.