he was not irredeemably so. He always sat upstairs on that bus because ‘that was more exciting and you could look out from there’. On visits to his grandmother’s flat, he remembered, ‘my brother and I would go on to the balcony to play. We would take grapes from a bowl of fruit or whatever else was suitable and drop it on the passers-by, ducking down immediately we had dropped the grape to hide.’ At home, the boys played by a river or stream at the bottom of the hill on their street.40
Similarly, the boys would spend holidays at the farm home of their cousins the Lunzes, in the area of Leslie, east of Johannesburg, which was then the site of a Jewish farming community. (The two Lunz boys, like the Chaskalsons, may have been at the farm only for vacations, because they had moved to Johannesburg to live with their grandparents.) Sydney recalls that ‘It was a great place for young boys to holiday, we each had a horse to ride, there were acres and acres of farmland, fruit orchards, and an irrigation dam – there were pellet guns as well and we, I am afraid, shot lots of birds which we passed on to the farm labourers for food. I remember one day, climbing through a barbed wire fence, nearly stepping on a snake – which the four of us (the two Lunzes and the two Chaskalsons) dispatched with stones.’41 As Sydney’s reference to ‘the farm labourers’ reflects, there were black families living on the Lunzes’ farm. Aubrey Lunz, Arthur’s first cousin, remembers that they became friends with some of the black children on the farm and with some of their families; he also remembers that, although the Lunzes treated their farm labourers more humanely than some farmers did, there was a lot that people overlooked in those days.42 But it seems that these contacts with black children were only fleeting moments in Arthur’s young life.
At the age of nine or ten, Arthur was once riding his bicycle home from school, ‘racing ahead of my brother. I rode into an uncontrolled intersection and collided with a car that was driving in the cross road and also had not stopped. I was thrown up into the air and landed on the ground near to a post box. I got up and dusted myself down … I picked up my bicycle which, like me, had miraculously survived the collision, and continued home on foot with my brother in close attendance. When I got home and reported what had happened, I said that my brakes had failed which was the best excuse I could think of.’ Though a local bicycle shop found nothing wrong with the brakes, Arthur thought that his mother ‘was so pleased that I had survived the accident unscathed that she was probably willing to let things be with no more than a rebuke and a warning to be careful in the future’.43 So we know that Arthur was capable of mischief and high-spirited play and even recklessness, and that he might concoct an excuse when he was caught – and that his mother, distant or not, loved him.
He did not lose his capacity for mischief as he grew older. At the age of 14 or 15, he and a friend were on the train that took students to several schools in Natal. This train had separate sections for boys and girls. Arthur’s friend asked him to go with him as they sneaked into the girls’ section to visit a girl he knew. ‘We got off the train at one of the stations at which the train had stopped and ran round to the girls’ side, found our way to the correct compartment and stayed together for some time. While we were still there we heard the noise of the conductor approaching. Fortunately the train stopped and we were able to get out of the girls’ compartment and run round to [the] other side of the train and our compartment without being caught by the conductor. But we had been spotted and the conductor had seen the compartment from which we had run.’ An investigation led to Arthur’s being told to call on his headmaster. ‘I did that with some trepidation. The headmaster wanted to know what we had done. I told him that we had talked. Had we kissed or touched the girls? I said no – truthfully, in fact. He seemed uncertain, and said that he would think about the matter and may have to ask us to leave the school. Despite that dire threat, nothing happened.’44 We might infer from this episode that while Arthur was capable of mischief, he was shy with girls.
He was athletic too. In fact, he was an outstanding athlete, even though he ‘was not a very big guy’ until a growth spurt in his last year of secondary school and first year of university. (He would become a tall man, 6 feet 2 inches.) On one occasion when he and his brother were at the same school, they played on the same side in football; his brother recalls, ‘Arthur dribbled the ball down the field, passing to me at the goal mouth, and I then scored. This happened nine times, and after the game the games master said, “That’s the last time I let you two play together.”’ Later Arthur would be chosen for the combined South African Universities team, as a goalkeeper. He was equally good at cricket, and the backyard cricket players at their house every day included a set of boys who would grow up to play for provinces or for the country. His brother remembers ‘Alan Melville, the [South African] cricket captain, visiting our house and telling my mother if she let him coach Arthur he would play for South Africa. For some reason she would not agree.’ Nevertheless she repeated the story ‘ad nauseam’.45 And Arthur became an excellent tennis player. His only weakness seems to have been his eyesight, which was poor enough to affect his performance. In secondary school, it seems, he never wore glasses while playing. At university, Arthur wore them for cricket but not for football, or so he maintained; according to Adrian Friedman, George Bizos remembers Arthur wearing glasses to play football, but Arthur ‘emphatically denies it’.46
When I asked Arthur’s brother if Arthur was happy as a child, he answered that he was ‘very serious’. Arthur’s memoir does not speak to whether he was happy, but his recollections – with the stunning exception of his father’s death – do not seem sad. He rarely lost his temper, and in adult life too he would be known as someone who almost never became irritated. Sydney recalled only two occasions when Arthur lost his temper as a child. One took place when Arthur was playing cricket in their yard, and was called out; he responded by throwing the wickets about, because he felt he’d been wrongly dismissed. Perhaps this was the first dramatic demonstration of Arthur’s passion for justice.
The other incident which Arthur also recalled and wrote about was his initial entry into preparatory school. The school, a ‘small private school’ called Pridwin, was ‘not too far from our house’, as Arthur wrote. But on the first day, ‘I refused to get out of the car, and could not be persuaded to do so … One of the teachers … came to the car, picked me up, and took me kicking and screaming into the school grounds … The rest of the school children were already lining up to go into the school for classes, and I was taken … to a porch in front of the headmaster’s house which was adjacent to the school building, and kept there until I had calmed down and could be taken to the classroom where I was to begin my school career.’47 Was this distressing moment another sign of his uncertainty about the security of his home, from which his father had been taken? What we do know is that this moment did not haunt Arthur at the school. Instead things seem to have gone quite smoothly.
At Pridwin, Arthur recalls, ‘the pupils were assigned to four houses named after the Knights of the Round Table – Bedevere, Galahad, Lancelot and Tristram. I was assigned to Bedevere, which was the house to which my brother belonged. I was proud of the fact that Bedevere had been chosen as the knight to take custody of the great sword when King Arthur was dying, but concerned that he did not initially carry out the instructions to throw the sword back into the lake. That troubled me and I saw it as a blemish on our house.’ Was this an early moment of attachment to a grand ideal? In any case, Arthur writes, this blemish ‘was more than made up for by the fact that my name was Arthur, which to my mind gave me an undoubted status’. He left Pridwin, as he writes, ‘as head boy of Bedevere, with colours in cricket and soccer, and poor eyesight’. His eye troubles – diagnosed as shortsightedness and astigmatism – were discovered when he was about ten, and required him to wear glasses in class, despite the fact that he ‘associated glasses with weakness and was ashamed to wear them’.48
From Pridwin he went at the age of 14 to Hilton College, an elite boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal. His brother had also gone there, but they did not overlap; his mother postponed his departure to boarding school for a year because she felt that Sydney had gone too young. (Sydney, as I’ve mentioned, faced bullying from an anti-Semitic clique
