coming to dinner. He responded saying, “that was very rude of him”. I was mortified. I did not like him and was very glad that not long after he ceased to visit.’ He was pleased at first with his mother’s subsequent choice of Joe Adler, ‘a dentist, who was then in the army medical corps … He was in uniform, had been a fine sportsman in his youth (a double blue at Wits) and I think my mother thought [the new husband, Joe Adler] would be a good substitute father for her two children; as matters turned out she was wrong.’ He recalled that ‘it soon became clear that the marriage was not going to be a happy one. My mother had a much stronger personality than he did, and there were frequent quarrels; despite this, they remained together for over forty years until Joe, then 87, died of cancer. They seemed to have made their peace with one another as they grew older, and their latter years together were better than the earlier years.’ Sydney seems to have felt closer to Joe Adler than Arthur did, and Joe himself, Sydney learned from others, regarded the two boys as his own children, but in some fundamental way the relationship between him and Arthur did not gel. Arthur also recalled that he was not close to any of his maternal aunts and uncles, and did not have much contact with his father’s siblings, though in later life he was close to his mother’s youngest brother, Alec, and hosted the 90th birthday party for Alec’s wife Helen.28
If Joe was too retiring to be a good match for Arthur’s mother, it’s also clear that Arthur was the son of a very strong mother – but with her too Arthur may have experienced distance rather than closeness. The family recalls that when faced with the need to obtain essentially unobtainable permits for her black servants – including Malawians, to whom the state was especially intent on not giving permits – she descended on the government office with such force that she could not be denied. On another occasion, she managed to get the Pick n Pay grocery store near her to take her phone order for groceries and deliver them to her home – precisely what Pick n Pay ordinarily did not do – in part by invoking the name of Raymond Ackerman, a family friend who was the founder of the Pick n Pay chain.29
But while Arthur’s mother Mary was a force of nature, she may not have been a very available mother. The boys had a Scottish nurse, Janet Thorogood. Sydney recalls that ‘Mrs Thorogood had a love of English Literature, had a book collection, of Walter Scott, Dickens, and English Poetry which she shared with Arthur and me’. During the war, ‘there was a world map in her bedroom where the positions of the Allied and Axis armies were marked by coloured pins, which we moved after each news broadcast’. It was Janet who told the boys of their father’s death, and Sydney felt that she actually did much of the rearing of the two boys. Sydney later wrote that ‘After our father died [our mother] went back to study at University, joined the Union of Jewish Women, became national chairlady, worked endlessly during the war years for the executive committee of the Governor General’s War Fund, worked for the Red Cross, and was awarded a medal by them, joined WIZO [the Women’s International Zionist Organisation], became National President, and subsequently honorary Life Vice President of World WIZO. All this time Janet Thorogood was there to care for Arthur and me whilst Mary was busy with the war and communal work.’30
Sydney remembers a time when their mother was going to take them to a movie, and the two boys waited on the street for her but she arrived very late – and this was one of the rare occasions, he said, when she did something with them at all. She would also take them to fancy restaurants a few times a year when they were home from boarding school, and teach them about wine. Years later Arthur would be slow to leave the comforts of home and the domain of his mother as he entered the world of law practice. Arthur’s cousin Aubrey Lunz, who lived with the Chaskalsons as a young man after the death of his parents, recalls Arthur’s mother thinking of Arthur as ‘her blue-eyed boy’ and the ‘cherry on the cake’. But he also says that she would ‘eulogise’ Arthur over the dinner table – to Arthur’s discomfort, for he was never one to sing his own praises.31 Arthur would eventually leave his mother’s home, and would grow to be a man who would say of his mother that she ‘was inclined to exaggerate and was not always a reliable witness of events’.32
After his father’s death, the family moved from their ‘large house’ (as Arthur recalled) at 47 Eighth Street in what is now Melrose Estate in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg to a smaller house ‘around the corner’ at 22 Glenhove Road. The house no doubt was smaller, and Arthur recalled it as being ‘in a different and then less affluent suburb’. The reason seems to be that Arthur’s father had not left all of his estate to his widow: ‘My father had left the house and its contents to my mother and divided the balance of his estate into three parts. One part to my brother, one part to me, (the income from which could be used for our education and other needs) and the third part to my brother and me subject to a usufruct [a right to use and benefit from the brothers’ property] in favour of my mother. My mother was wrongly thought to be a wealthy widow. In fact she had only a comparatively small income and tended to live beyond her means.’ Sydney recalls that he had to stop his horse-riding lessons. Even so, the house had a back garden which would, by the time Arthur was a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, be turned into a tennis court, and was also big enough for cricket games. Arthur’s mother was also able to send both Sydney and then Arthur to a leading private boarding school (then for white children only), Hilton College in Natal. She told her sons that ‘my father had always wanted us to have the best education possible – something that had been denied him’. Their father, an anglophile, would have had them educated in England if he had lived – and this alone would have put Arthur on a different life course. As it was, he and Sydney remained in South Africa but their mother Mary insisted on sending them to Hilton despite the objections of Harry’s brother Jack, who considered it absurd.33
The family were also well enough off to have three black servants. Sydney recalls being asked by one of their servants, while he was still learning to write, to write a pass so he could travel elsewhere in town. The servant, a grown man, addressed him as ‘Master Sydney’. Sydney recalls being struck, even at the time, by the wrongness of this. He also remembers, at the age of two or two and a half, going to the door around Christmas-time and hearing a black man say, ‘I’m the pepper boy’ – which Sydney, after many repetitions, realised meant that this was the man who delivered the newspapers, and who had come to the door to receive his customary Christmas present.34 Other South Africans who were children in this era also remember the extraordinary power they wielded. Arthur’s friend Denis Kuny said that you could buy a pre-printed book of these passes or permits in a stationery shop. (He also recalled that his family had both a ‘boy’ and a ‘girl’ as servants, and that an aunt of his employed only black men as servants, required them to dress in short white pants, and addressed them all as ‘Jim’.35) Jules Browde, like Denis Kuny a longtime friend and anti-apartheid lawyer colleague of Arthur’s, similarly speaks of being asked by his father to write a pass for their servant Solomon: ‘I would write, “Please pass boy Solomon,” and not think much about it, and Solomon would thank me for writing it … and the police would let him go because he was in possession of a note written by a twelve-year-old boy.’36 Arthur no doubt shared his older brother’s reactions. At the same time, the Chaskalson boys seem to have lived in a world that except for servants was almost all-white. Arthur apparently did not have the experience of his mentor Bram Fischer, of being friends with black children and then seeing in himself as an adult the taint of irrational prejudice.37 His own recollection in a 2007 interview was that ‘I grew up as a little white boy in a middle class home in an area where I met other little white boys and girls, and that’s how I grew up’.38
But what sort of child was Arthur himself? By his own account, he was shy – and his shyness remained with him all his life. ‘I was a shy child,’ he wrote, and in the years ‘after the death of my father I tended to tag on to my brother and his friends.’ A memory that he had from kindergarten, he wrote, ‘is of being too shy to put up my hand in “class”, which was required if you needed to go to the lavatory. That led to various accidents, but did not cure my shyness.’ If he was frightened, he was also vigilant: on the bus home from kindergarten, ‘I was always anxious that I might lose my ticket and be caught without one. I would
