And Justice For All. Stephen Ellmann
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 sit with the ticket clutched tightly in my hand throughout the ride.’ His brother says that Arthur was always very dutiful.39
But 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