Matthew recalls that he and Arthur at one point followed a particular football team and watched its matches every week. Once they travelled fifty miles to a cold, desolate town where the local team soundly defeated theirs; Matthew was in tears and even the other team’s fans became sympathetic. Arthur and Matthew also listened to sports broadcasts on a shortwave radio that Arthur bought in 1971.50 Lorraine at one point worried that Matthew was interested in football and nothing else, but Arthur and Matthew long afterwards would still discuss the details of football developments around the world.51
When he was home, moreover, Arthur was always very available to the kids. Jerome remembers his father being with them a lot, for example spending time with them in the evenings before working later at night.52 He was part of the life of the house: Ilse Wilson remembers a moment when Matthew wanted to ask Lorraine something, and she replied, perhaps not quite in these words: ‘Go talk to your father; he’s on the loo taking a crap.’ At the same time Lorraine, Ilse remembered, had endless patience for the boys.53 Jerome also recalls that his parents raised them consistently – rather than with one parent on one page, the other on another.54 That surely required either intuitive harmony or a good deal of conscious coordination.
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But time was constrained at home, especially for Arthur, and Matthew says that many of his interactions with his father came on vacations.55 The family usually vacationed twice a year – evidently standard for upper-middle-class white South Africans of that period – and these were very special times.56 The family went to England in 1970 and 1973. In the northern hemisphere winter of 1976/7, while Lorraine was working to finish her dissertation, Matthew went with his friend Philip Amoils’s family to Switzerland to ski, while Arthur took Jerome to England. After Matthew and Philip joined the others in England, it turned out that the hotel in which they were staying had a discount price for longish stays, but they had not received it because the hotel insisted they only gave the discount to those who asked for it in advance. Arthur was outraged, they packed up and left the hotel to stay elsewhere, and from then on that hotel chain was off limits.57 Arthur did not like unfair dealing, and he did not forget it either.
Usually they vacationed in South Africa, and without such crises. Jerome remembers Arthur and the boys going golfing, with Jerome at first so young that he just walked along with his father and brother. Some of their vacations were in the Drakensberg mountains, while many times they went to Cape Town for the long, end-of-year midsummer holiday that South Africans celebrate. (Even the revolution, it used to be said, paused for this holiday.) Jerome remembered simple pleasures from those trips: his father pushing him on some sort of flotation cushion so that he could ride the waves in towards shore, and also pushing him against the waves so that he could breach them and feel he was flying.58 Friends joined them on these vacations, and they enjoyed the kinds of routines vacationers develop. For some years, Arthur and Benjamin Pogrund, a leading liberal journalist, would jointly put on a braai (a barbecue) while their families vacationed in Cape Town.59 One year, in 1965, the Chaskalsons, Kunys, Soggots and another friend, Luli Callinicos, went on a picnic; Sheila van der Plank, then married to David Soggot, brought a pecan pie because she knew Arthur loved them – but baboons arrived and began menacing the humans, who fled without their pie.60
We can catch other glimpses of Arthur on these vacations. On one trip to Cape Town the Chaskalsons were accompanied by Matthew’s close friend Philip Amoils. (This itself was characteristic: other children would join them on vacations, while the Chaskalson boys would join other families’ trips in turn.61) On this particular vacation, Philip and Matthew went to a nearby store to buy magazines. The shop-owner insisted that because Philip had opened the plastic cover of a magazine to see the football foldout, he was now obliged to buy it – a purchase that consumed most of his money for the vacation. He and Matthew returned to the Chaskalsons’ home, and told Arthur about this. Arthur at once returned to the store, insisted on seeing the manager, and demanded – emphatically and successfully – that the shop-owner fully refund Philip’s money. This was one of the few occasions when Philip ever saw Arthur angry.62 He hated injustice and bullying, at work or at home.
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On another occasion, years later, Matthew and Philip were staying at a youth hostel, while the Chaskalsons were elsewhere in Cape Town. The boys conceived the idea of picking up Minis and moving them from place to place; their crowning achievement was to deposit one in an apartment elevator. Excited by their success the first night, they started again the next night – but this time they were seen. Most of the boys fled; one, however, had the bad idea of staying and pretending to be an innocent bystander, and Matthew then felt he should return and stay with this boy. They were both taken into custody by the police, and then spent some harrowing hours in a police cell at the Sea Point police station while the police officer there scared them, by threatening to put them into another cell with hardened criminals.
Finally Matthew, remembering the detective movies he’d seen, asked to make a phone call, and called Arthur. Lorraine remembers that they were sure Matthew could not be guilty of car theft, and Arthur put his clothes on over his pyjamas to venture out to the police station; he was the one to go because he could look severe.63 For a while, Matt recalls, nothing happened – and then things began to happen very fast. The station cop took them out of their cell and assured them they had not been arrested. When they came to the front of the station, Arthur was there, insisting that they could not be guilty of the offence they were supposed to have committed and demanding that the records of their being taken into custody be burned before his eyes, as they were. But after Arthur and the two boys had emerged into the station parking lot, Matt told his father that they had also been fingerprinted – and Arthur turned around and went back to the station and successfully demanded that the fingerprints be destroyed too.64
Again, Arthur’s hatred of bullying is vivid. But so is his ability to take control of a situation and shape it as he wished; when he wanted to be, he was a force, almost an irresistible one. In this he resembled his mother, Mary, who, as we have seen, was known for her ability to get what she wanted. As Matthew told me the story of Arthur’s rescuing him and his friend from the Sea Point police, he pointed out the similarity of Arthur’s actions and those of Arthur’s mother. The difference was that Arthur employed this ability for the sake of justice, while the family felt that his mother equated what she needed with what was right.65
But Arthur had only assumed that his son’s cause was just. It was not until they were driving away from the police station that Arthur asked the boys what they had been up to. They told him the story. Whether he was surprised or amused, what he said was only ‘Hmm’. Matthew’s friend then asked if this event could remain a secret among the three of them, since he did not expect his own father to take such a tolerant view – and a secret it became.
Arthur’s decision not to respond to this scrape with stern discipline, or even wise moral injunctions, was characteristic of the Chaskalsons’ child-rearing. Here is another example of their response to what Lorraine would later call ‘devilry’,66 again reflecting the Chaskalsons’ disposition not to punish. Matt and his friend Philip Amoils broke all the windows in a house owned by relatives of the Chaskalsons. But one of the owners saw them, tried to catch them as they ran away, and even though he failed, he recognised them, and called the Chaskalsons, so they had to confess. Matthew remembers that Arthur communicated a sense of real disappointment, but without saying anything.67 Philip remembers the story slightly differently; as he tells it, Matthew went to his mother and said, ‘I did a bad thing.’ ‘What bad thing did you do?’ Lorraine asks, and Matthew tells her. ‘And what will you do about this?’ Lorraine asks. ‘I’ll take responsibility and repair all the windows.’ Of course Matthew had no money, but ultimately the matter was settled on this basis. Lorraine’s concern was for them to recognise their responsibility, even if (apparently) there were few actual consequences flowing from that acknowledgement.68
When
