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 while he was a student there, and his fondest memories were not of being at school but of being required, every Sunday, to spend the day outdoors in the school grounds.) Because his mother broke the pattern of their schooling, Sydney recalls, ‘Arthur and I, after being close at Pridwin, never saw each other at school again.’ By the time Arthur got to Hilton College, Sydney was enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, and their time together was further limited because their school vacations were on different schedules. So it seems that Arthur, a boy without a father and with a rather unavailable mother, now also lost much of his interaction with his only sibling.
Nevertheless, Arthur recalled that when he went, ‘I was going to a strange school as a boarder without any friends. I was still a shy child, and the prospect did not appeal to me. But unlike my introduction to primary school, I did not protest and accepted that I had to go.’ He had become quite pragmatic, by the age of 14. He told Adrian Friedman that he ‘didn’t really enjoy [Hilton] but didn’t really suffer; just kept out of trouble and saw it as something to get through. No real pleasure from school and no real pain.’49 According to his brother, he graduated in the top three of his class, but Arthur’s own recollection was that he was ‘reasonably good academically’.50 His matric certificate (giving the results from his final high-school exams at the end of 1948) indicates that at least on these exams he did not distinguish himself: he gained four Bs, two Cs and a D, though that added up to a ‘first class’ pass. Many years later, when he was the head of South Africa’s Constitutional Court, Hilton College wanted to celebrate his appointment – but Arthur declined.
He finished Hilton College and matriculated in 1948, and the following year he entered the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Even before he left Hilton he knew that he wanted to be a lawyer. He told an interviewer in 2007:
I always knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. When I say ‘I always knew’, when I was at school I had decided that I wanted to be a lawyer. I’m not sure why I decided that, it wasn’t as if there was any individual in my family who had influenced me in any way, my father died when I was young, I had a couple of uncles who were in the law [Willie Oshry, an advocate at the Johannesburg Bar, and Alec Oshry, an attorney in Johannesburg] but I wasn’t close to them and I certainly had no discussions with them about my future. I think I must have decided to become a lawyer from reading and I probably had a romantic idea about what lawyers could or couldn’t do and it was something I wanted to do. And it was strange that I knew very clearly already when I was in