recalls Arthur, while driving the family to Cape Town, reaching back to swat Matthew on the leg, hard enough to leave a handprint for a while, because Matt was teasing his younger brother so relentlessly. Matthew picked on Jerome a lot when they were small, though he would not permit anyone else to bother his little brother.69 Matthew recalls, though Jerome does not, that when they were very small they were occasionally smacked by Lorraine with a hairbrush; very rarely Arthur used some form of corporal punishment too.70 But Lorraine told us (as my wife recalls) that she once chased Jerome into the street and smacked him after he played some military game; evidently, at least at that particular moment, this game was a breach of the rules. Jerome does recall one moment when he got in trouble – when he locked a door and his mother had to put her hand through a glass window to get the door open, and in the process cut her hand. But this incident upset Jerome himself more than anyone and so he didn’t get in much trouble.71
After the boys had reached something resembling the age of reason, Arthur and Lorraine still taught moral lessons, but rarely with discipline. At least in Arthur’s case, moreover, the lessons were rarely imparted by explicit instruction – unless the boys crossed a line with Lorraine. My impression is that Arthur rarely gave advice to anyone unasked; Lorraine recalls him listening receptively to her accounts of difficulties she was encountering, but not giving advice, just wanting to support her.72 Most of the explicit instruction, Matthew recalls, came from Lorraine, though Lorraine would invoke Arthur by asking her children, ‘What would Arthur think of that?’ Matthew in particular felt he knew what Arthur would think, or at any rate was very concerned about it. Even this may have been rare. Jerome, who may have misbehaved less dramatically than his older brother, does not recall ever even being given an ‘I’m disappointed in you’ speech.73
Why did the Chaskalsons approach child-rearing in so dramatically permissive a way? Lorraine felt she had grown up with a very protective Jewish mother, and she was determined to give her kids the space and freedom that she never had.74 Arthur too may have felt unfree as a child, under the dominion of his formidable mother. It may also be, as their friend Aninka Claassens believed, that Lorraine taught Arthur how to be a parent, much as she deeply influenced his views on issues of justice. Arthur himself, Aninka points out, had not had a role model of fathering, because of his own father’s untimely death. Lorraine, for her part, would have brought her passionate commitments to their life at home: she told Aninka once ‘that she was so young when she got married and she didn’t know if she could do this and she didn’t know if she could do that, she didn’t know if she could be a hostess … but she knew she would be a brilliant wife and mother.’75
But I think that their approach also reflected broader convictions that both of them had. It was not just an assertion of their children’s freedom; it was also, I suspect, rooted in their belief in their children’s entitlement to be treated as rational beings. This belief was reflected in the fact that Arthur and Lorraine did not pull rank; the boys always addressed their parents by their first names and nicknames; Arthur would be ‘Arth’, and Lorraine ‘Emma’ or ‘Em’ or even ‘Emily’. Exactly how Lorraine acquired her nicknames, incidentally, is mysterious. Matthew recalls that neither Arthur nor Lorraine could explain it. One possibility is that ‘Emma’ is a variation of the Hebrew ‘Imah’, or mother, but Lorraine was hardly a Hebrew user. Another is that ‘Emma’ comes from Jane Austen, but while Lorraine was very fond of Austen, Austen’s Emma is in some ways an over-reaching young woman and the family did not see her as a stand-in for Lorraine. Still another possibility is that acquiring a nickname with no relation to one’s life was a tradition of Lorraine’s side of the family; her father Samuel was called Eddy, her mother Frieda became Judy – though Frieda didn’t like her given name, Lorraine had no objections to hers. Perhaps the choice of a nickname was a form of asserting independence that united even Lorraine and her mother across the tensions between them.76
Their commitment to respecting all those around them was a fundamental part of their lives, the touchstone especially of the way Arthur engaged with everyone he met. Clearly Arthur and Lorraine were as committed to treating their own children with respect as they were to treating everyone else this way as well. Terry Shakinovsky recalls that when she was at Wits, and a classmate of Matthew’s, the Chaskalson parents were seen as people who gave their children freedom and respected their right to autonomy.77 This freedom, moreover, went beyond matters of discipline as such. Jerome thinks that he consciously decided that it was pointless to compete with his brother Matthew for grades, and so he would get 70s and meanwhile enjoy himself, and his parents never tried to steer him into working harder.78 Lorraine liked the fact that their sons went their own ways. Jerome, in fact, didn’t recall ever being forced to do anything. He remembers that the boys’ areas of freedom were large – they could and did, for example, spend entire weekends at others’ houses, without objection from their parents. He also says, though, that with freedom came responsibility; they were expected to do household chores, for example, and they did, without direct demands from their parents.79
At the same time, Arthur and Lorraine did want their children to be decent people.80 Surely Arthur and Lorraine both held firm views about what it meant to be a decent person. Lorraine, in particular, seems in some ways to have asked too much of her children, imputing to them a rationality that they could not yet attain. Matthew said in his eulogy of his mother:
She took it upon herself to teach us to read and write. But it wasn’t good enough to be able to read and write. We had to read like we were BBC radio announcers and we had to write in Italic script with a fountain pen.
When we did Grade 1 school projects we had to include a full bibliography with date and place of publication. Because plagiarism was bad, and that was something that was very important for six years olds to know.81
At some point, her sons’ resistance to these demands must have come through to Lorraine, because she told me, looking back, that she feared she was young and too rigid as a parent, and mentioned having had a very clear sense of certain things being appropriate and others not.82
Arthur too could make his views clear to his sons. In fact he could convey his disappointment with a look. Philip Amoils said he would ‘brow you’, and that with his deep-set eyes and big eyebrows he looked very intimidating without actually saying much.83 Those brows would remain; Pat Gruber, who with her husband created the Gruber Justice Prize and knew Arthur both as a winner of the prize and then from 2007 to 2011 as the chair of the advisory board that selected winners, remembered that when he was concerned, his eyebrows would move, and that he had really great eyebrows.84 Another friend who knew Arthur well in the 2000s, Terry Shakinovsky, said that you could tell when Arthur was angry from the set of his jaw, and his absolute silence – and it was dreadful.85 Matthew remembers being extremely attentive to what Arthur valued (Jerome may have been somewhat less so), and his friend Janet Kentridge recalls that the first night they met, Matthew spoke of his tremendous love and admiration for his father.86 And of course much of what Arthur and Lorraine taught, they showed by the example of their own lives.
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