duller and duller until there is nothing left but a compendium of forensic triumphs and failures, stale anecdotes about cases, judges and witnesses, and a sense of failure.’29 His son Jerome recalls that indeed Arthur didn’t have a lot of interests other than the law, though he read a lot, he and Lorraine went to movies, and there was a little music in their house (in the early 1960s, Lorraine and Arthur were going to Johannesburg jazz clubs)30 – and of course there were sports.31 That’s not a description of a parched life, but my sense that Arthur feared he was a bore underpinned a more profound fear that Arthur had, not only of dullness but of meaninglessness – from which Lorraine preserved him.
*
As superbly competent as Arthur was professionally, he seems to have been much less assured in private life. The Chaskalsons frequently borrowed the home of two Cape Town friends, Richard and Hilary Rosenthal, for vacations (the Rosenthals would be on their own travels elsewhere). Richard recalls learning at the end of one such vacation that when Arthur and Lorraine arrived at their Cape Town house, Arthur walked around the household and managed to fall in the pool while wearing his suit. Lorraine didn’t remember this, but she agreed that Arthur certainly didn’t notice all sorts of things; he had undivided attention for what he paid attention to.32 On another vacation at the Rosenthals’ home, Arthur pulled on an unmarked string, turning on two heat lamps, which cracked a mirror and almost burned the house down. On yet another occasion, Arthur went to a grocer to buy a head of lettuce, and managed to get a slipped disc in the process, requiring days of lying in bed.33 And on still another, a burglary took place; Arthur tried to close up a building that had been invaded, and in the process locked it up so that no one could get in; ‘the worst possible thing to do’, Arthur wrote in a long, handwritten letter to the Rosenthals, because ‘I had managed to exclude myself (but possibly not the burglars) from the cottage’. He also reported in this same letter that although he had successfully connected up their garden irrigation system, he hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it again when he tried to shift the irrigation to another part of the garden. ‘This notwithstanding the roses have been watered fairly regularly.’34
I remember discussing with him the question of whether dishes should be washed before they went into the dishwasher (we both thought ‘yes’). Sheila van der Plank recalls hearing that he had trouble using the stapler at the Legal Resources Centre.35 His friend Benjamin Pogrund reports, from a trip on which Pogrund took the Chaskalsons in Israel, that after using a public restroom to urinate, Arthur asked whether it was necessary to wash one’s hands afterwards.36 And he was, by almost all accounts, a poor driver whose mind was usually on other things than the road; his colleagues in at least one case told him that they would take over the driving so that he could prepare in the car. (Though when his friend Geoff Budlender revealed this to him, after Arthur’s retirement from the Constitutional Court, he responded that his driving record was clean.37) Clinton Bamberger, visiting from the United States and driving with Arthur to an LRC annual general meeting, emerged from the ride with the memory that Arthur did not know how to change a flat tyre.38
Richard Rosenthal thought of Arthur in private life as a vulnerable innocent – despite his masterful approach to legal matters – and suspected that Lorraine kept Arthur upright in the face of such difficulties. Aninka Claassens recalled a time when Arthur began ‘deadheading the roses’ (that is, cutting them off once they’re dead) at the Claassens–Budlender home. Arthur, who apparently was doing this without having first asked his hosts, said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I hope this is okay?’ and Claassens responded, ‘No, it’s perfectly okay, it’s what’s got to be done,’ and Arthur agreed: ‘Yes, Lorraine told me.’ Claassens concluded that Lorraine ‘told him all these things like … you deadhead the roses and he would just automatically deadhead the roses.’39 Lorraine, however, felt the two of them were practical about different things.40 It seems that a good deal of his attention must have been on some higher plane.
Another letter Arthur sent, this one to their son Jerome in September 1987 as Arthur and Lorraine were settling into a sabbatical semester at Columbia Law School, gives a similar sense of the lives they led. It is a nine-page, handwritten account of a saga of mistreatment at the hands of the university bureaucracy (and I feel some personal guilt about these series of events, since he was about to teach with me). Things get off to a bad start as Arthur and Lorraine find themselves lost in the Johannesburg airport, and matters do not improve when Arthur leaves ‘our bank draft [their only immediate source of substantial funds] and return tickets on a trolley’ at JFK Airport in New York. Many complications ensue. Midway in the course of these events Arthur finds himself in the ID-card office at Columbia Law School, not for the first time. The formidable staff member there, he writes, had to take his photograph. ‘The camera did not work. She tried again. The camera did not work again. She shouted into the void: “The camera is not working. Get me another camera.” She then turned to me and said accusingly, “That has never happened before.” I said I have been photographed on many occasions and this was the first time I had broken a camera.’ That shows spirit, even in the midst of this series of disasters.
There follow further difficulties, including an effort to register to use the campus gym, subway and bus adventures, and a trip to Macy’s where they have to pay with their limited supply of cash, and the eventual receipt of cash cards whose only defect is that they are unusable because of the supposed overdraft resulting from Arthur’s leaving their bank draft on a trolley. Amazingly, Arthur ends this tale by saying to Jerome, ‘We are having a very nice time in New York. I hope you are having a nice time in South Africa,’ and wishing his son love.
*
It seems fair to say that Lorraine was the more present of the two parents. In his eulogy for his mother, who died on 7 November 2017, Matthew Chaskalson said:
Most of all, she gave us a lot of uncomplicated love. I think that the highest compliment that Jerome and I can pay to Lorraine as a mother is that we both had an incredibly happy childhood. Our home was a place full of love. And it was a place that all of our friends were happy to be in. Childhood friends who I haven’t spoken to in more than 20 years have written in the last few days to say how fondly they remembered Lorraine and what a wonderful time they had in our home. And it reminds me of what a wonderful childhood she made for Jerome and me.41
There is no doubt that Arthur’s law practice meant he was very busy. Although he was unusually good at estimating realistically how much time a case would take,42 he had many cases. The boys ate before their parents while they were small; the Chaskalsons did not have a family dinner routine until the mid-1970s. Matthew remembers waiting for Arthur to come home as his bedtime approached.43 Quite often Arthur worked at home in the evenings, and in the office or at home on the weekends.44 He had learned to cook a leg of lamb, as we’ve already seen, and one friend, Janet Kentridge, recalls him preparing the Sunday lunch, often for not only the family but many guests – still an unusual contribution from a husband in those days.45 Overall, Arthur was very much a part of the children’s lives. Jerome would unhesitatingly declare, years later, that he and his brother had grown up in a two-parent, loving home.46 How did Arthur do this?
As the boys grew older and went to school, Arthur was able to structure his work week so that he was free on Wednesday afternoons. He used those afternoons to watch his sons’ sports teams play: both boys inherited their father’s athletic ability and enthusiasm. (In addition, Arthur was active in the primary school parent–teacher association; this too may have been possible to schedule so that it fitted with Arthur’s practice commitments.47) Jerome says that Lorraine, always sympathetic to the underdog, would sometimes decide to root for the opposing team because Jerome’s team was so strong; needless to say, this made Arthur a favoured parent as a fan.48
Arthur also took them to see matches; he himself loved watching cricket, but he also took the boys to football (soccer) games and no doubt others.
