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CHAPTER TEN

At Home

While Arthur practised law, and his wife Lorraine taught at Wits, they were raising their two sons, Matthew and Jerome, at home. They made a home, balanced work and family as well as they could, helped their sons to grow up, entertained, took vacations and built friendships. The life they had was a life of privilege, but it was also a meaningful life, marked by warmth and love. As we look at the life they led – an inquiry that will start with the years between Rivonia in 1963–4 and the founding of the Legal Resources Centre in 1979, but will inevitably extend further forward in time as well – we will encounter aspects of Arthur that were often invisible in his professional work.

*

Both Arthur and Lorraine were working full-time. By the end of her third year at university, Lorraine was pregnant, and she soon became the mother of a son, Matthew, who was born on 12 August 1963. In 1966 she began teaching at Wits, well before she had her PhD. Meanwhile, she and Arthur planned for the time when they would have another baby – Lorraine told Ilse Wilson that she waited till she was ready before having their next child – and Jerome was born on 1 August 1967.¹ That she began teaching so quickly was a recognition of her talent, but it also meant she still had her dissertation to write, as well as two boys to care for.

She laboured over her thesis, perhaps somewhat daunted by how outstanding her undergraduate honours thesis had been.² At one point her progress was interrupted when she entrusted the sole copy of the manuscript to Arthur’s typist, who was typing for Lorraine too and left the manuscript on a bus. That copy was never recovered, but fortunately Arthur had insisted that Lorraine keep the previous draft, so only the current draft’s changes were lost.³ Vanetta Joffe recalled that Lorraine also found herself in the familiar academic position of feeling that her knowledge of her subject – Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – was steadily increasing, and so what she’d already written needed revision.⁴ She did finish, however, with the aid of a two-month stint in America in 1973 or 1974, and another stretch from December 1976 to January 1977, when she worked on the manuscript in Johannesburg while Arthur (and family friends) took care of the boys by taking them on vacation to Europe.⁵ She earned her PhD in 1979; her dissertation, ‘Or Telle His Tale Untrewe: An Enquiry into a Narrative Strategy in the Canterbury Tales’, is available today online.

Lorraine’s teaching was, by all accounts, outstanding. She was a magnetic professor, warm and accessible to her students, catching their interest with her incisive analyses of works of literature and her sometimes profane classroom discussions, such as her analysis of the name of Jane Austen’s character ‘Fanny Price,’ which Janet Kentridge recalled – that she had a fanny, and it had a price.⁶ Her students remember her love for them. Lynn Shakinovsky, a longtime friend, first got to know Lorraine as her student, and later joined her at Wits as a colleague; she remembers the two of them marking papers together in the Chaskalsons’ garden, and also that Lorraine was her first mentor as a cook.⁷ Lynn’s sister Terry recalls that at Wits they were all in awe of the renowned scholar Lorraine (and of Arthur); she also describes Lorraine as one of the kindest people she’s known, immensely generous, and very, very smart.⁸ Another friend, Orenna Krut, remembers that when she wrote her thesis for her MA at Wits, she did not have the money for a computer, and Arthur and Lorraine offered her the use of their study and their computers.⁹ Lorraine rose in her profession, being appointed as a full-time lecturer in English in 1974 and promoted to senior lecturer in 1980; she also was elected to the university Senate and the university Council, and sat on the Academic Staff Association Executive.¹⁰ But she found many of her colleagues at Wits difficult and inflexible.

She found more sustenance in working with African students to open up learning opportunities for them. She reached out to black students not only pedagogically but more politically as well; her decidedly personal CV says: ‘During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there were police on campus (unthinkable before then), firing tear gas and rubber bullets at students protesting against apartheid, I was one of three Academic Staff Executive members who met regularly with the various black student organization leaders on campus.’ But her most sustained efforts were as a teacher. Early on she taught honours students from Soweto at the Chaskalson home in the afternoons and evenings.¹¹ From 1963 to 1989 she taught black students seeking degrees from the University of London (later from the University of South Africa) under the auspices of the South African Council on Higher Education (SACHED); one of her first students was Njabulo Ndebele, who would go on to prominence as a novelist and educator. For some years she chaired SACHED’s Tertiary Education Committee. Her involvement with SACHED had its grimly educational side for her too: Lorraine remembered that at some point there was a celebration of SACHED’s progress, and three Africans from the townships came to it; at the end, she said, she naively didn’t invite them to stay the night – and they went back to the townships where one of them was murdered that night. She also taught learning skills to black students joining the Johannesburg Bar.¹² Over the years, she increasingly focused on academic support teaching at Wits itself. As we will see, even these moves would not shield her from conflict and disappointment, which grew over the years, and she would retire from Wits in 1996.

Lorraine seems to have managed much of the day-to-day life of the household. She certainly did most of the cooking – and made the kitchen her preserve in part to have one area of their lives where she rather than Arthur was certainly the expert.¹³ She was a talented cook, who made meals that were (as I had the pleasure of experiencing) both tasty and beautiful to look at, and did so with kitchen equipment, including knives and cookware and crockery, that she had carefully selected. In 1990, Julia Child praised Lorraine’s recipe for lamb pilaf in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin.¹⁴ It may be that Arthur and Lorraine arranged a division of labour, and that Arthur handled other household matters, but if that was so, it was not completely so, because in their earlier years together Lorraine looked after the household’s domestic finances too, perhaps even including dealing with the Receiver of Revenue on Arthur’s behalf.¹⁵ Matthew recalls the ‘very conventional gender division of labour in the house when we were growing up. Until the mid-’70s, Arthur did almost no cooking or cleaning up’, but he took on more of these duties in the 1980s, and became ‘particularly proud of being able to cook a good leg of lamb’.¹⁶ In later years Arthur took over a much wider range of tasks, but that was the result of the growing physical and emotional difficulties that Lorraine encountered.

It is impossible to discuss Arthur and Lorraine without emphasising the bond between the two of them. Many people commented to me on how strong their love was, and that in itself is important, but it is also important to understand what their love entailed. Their friend Richard Rosenthal felt that Lorraine kept Arthur balanced in dealing with the workaday world, though she herself felt that each helped the other with different aspects of this balance.¹⁷ She also filled their house with beauty. They raised their two sons together, with a commitment to the boys’ freedom.

But there was much more even than this to their partnership. Joel Joffe felt that Lorraine helped Arthur to open up emotionally, and that this was crucial to his later achievements as a leader of the Legal Resources Centre and the Constitutional Court.¹⁸ Arthur had begun his career as a barrister. Lorraine recalled that Arthur didn’t talk much about his feelings; she talked about hers.¹⁹ Yet Arthur would wind up focusing on the building of institutions, such as the Legal Resources Centre and the Constitutional Court, which relied on the cooperation and fellowship of many individuals to become successful. Lorraine also contributed to Arthur’s moral thinking. As we have seen, Ilse Wilson, one of Bram Fischer’s daughters, saw Lorraine as Arthur’s moral compass, even though he himself was a very moral person.²⁰ Arthur himself told Lorraine that she had taught him what justice is. Lorraine felt that she was more emotional about justice and injustice than Arthur was.²¹

It may be that Lorraine’s outspokenness on matters of justice and injustice was the precise counterpart that Arthur needed to his own circumspection. He was well known for his reluctance to speak ill of anyone; Lorraine, while outstandingly kind to those for whom she cared and to those she saw as victims of the unjust society around them, could be very blunt with others. As a political statement, this may have been an expression of candour and commitment, though it hardly built bridges; at a lunch in the early 2000s she abruptly told Tony Leon, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, that ‘I agree that we need an opposition but I certainly do not approve of the kind you run’.²² But she could also be hard on others, such as Arthur’s mother Mary, who were not necessarily subject to any real political critique. One can imagine Arthur finding much to admire in Lorraine’s candour, while also working to maintain the connections with others to whom she gave short shrift. Their son Jerome, for his part, does not recall Arthur ever telling Lorraine that something she had said went too far.²³

At the same time, they did not always agree. Lorraine, for example, was extremely generous to the street people and the marginally employed so visible in South Africa, while Arthur maintained that giving money individual by individual was pointless.²⁴ Jerome recalls that Lorraine used to drive around with a small bag containing R200 in coins to be used in giving money away in this manner.²⁵ I remember that sometime after Arthur’s death, when my wife and I were in the car driving home one night from a restaurant with Lorraine, we passed someone she felt was in need, and at her request I walked back up the street to give this person some money. She told us, too, that she had provided a steady if modest income to a parking lot attendant she had got to know.

Lorraine’s efforts, however, were not just monetary. Years later, when she would pick her granddaughter Julia up after school, ‘she would speak to any old person with kindness and genuine interest: the ice cream man, a waiter, the garage petrol attendant’. And Julia herself ‘was always assured of her absolute undivided attention’.²⁶ Lorraine also tried ‘to solve the shortcomings of the apartheid urban transport system on her own. Often when she fetched us from school,’ her son Matthew said in his eulogy of her, ‘our drive would be diverted because she saw a domestic worker walking and needing a lift to the nearest bus stop’ or even further if it was raining.²⁷ She and Arthur each took their own course on such matters; they were not identical people by any means, and they were not controlling. (Zak Yacoob, however, tells a story of Arthur insisting, very early on in his relationship with Lorraine, that ‘unless she stops smoking, he is never going to see her,’ and recalls that Lorraine confirmed that he did ‘put his foot down on this issue’.²⁸ This moment seems quite out of character for both Arthur and Lorraine and for their marriage, but perhaps at this very early point some fundamental issues had not yet been worked out between them.) In any event, they agreed, always, on the fundamental point that apartheid had to end and its after-effects had to be combated.

Perhaps the most telling account of Lorraine’s impact came from Arthur himself, in a letter he wrote to her while she was away in Israel visiting her sick father. Adrian Friedman, in his biographical notes on Arthur, emphasised this letter, in which Arthur says that when he and the boys are back in Johannesburg, he will probably ‘stay home, ignore the people and do the work’ and then, in Friedman’s words, ‘implores Lorraine to save him from that when she returns’. Arthur then writes: ‘If you don’t, I will grow duller and duller until there is nothing left but a compendium of forensic triumphs and failures, stale anecdotes about cases, judges and witnesses, and a sense of failure.’²⁹ His son Jerome recalls that indeed Arthur didn’t have a lot of interests other than the law, though he read a lot, he and Lorraine went to movies, and there was a little music in their house (in the early 1960s, Lorraine and Arthur were going to Johannesburg jazz clubs)³⁰ – and of course there were sports.³¹ That’s not a description of a parched life, but my sense that Arthur feared he was a bore underpinned a more profound fear that Arthur had, not only of dullness but of meaninglessness – from which Lorraine preserved him.

*

As superbly competent as Arthur was professionally, he seems to have been much less assured in private life. The Chaskalsons frequently borrowed the home of two Cape Town friends, Richard and Hilary Rosenthal, for vacations (the Rosenthals would be on their own travels elsewhere). Richard recalls learning at the end of one such vacation that when Arthur and Lorraine arrived at their Cape Town house, Arthur walked around the household and managed to fall in the pool while wearing his suit. Lorraine didn’t remember this, but she agreed that Arthur certainly didn’t notice all sorts of things; he had undivided attention for what he paid attention to.³² On another vacation at the Rosenthals’ home, Arthur pulled on an unmarked string, turning on two heat lamps, which cracked a mirror and almost burned the house down. On yet another occasion, Arthur went to a grocer to buy a head of lettuce, and managed to get a slipped disc in the process, requiring days of lying in bed.³³ And on still another, a burglary took place; Arthur tried to close up a building that had been invaded, and in the process locked it up so that no one could get in; ‘the worst possible thing to do’, Arthur wrote in a long, handwritten letter to the Rosenthals, because ‘I had managed to exclude myself (but possibly not the burglars) from the cottage’. He also reported in this same letter that although he had successfully connected up their garden irrigation system, he hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it again when he tried to shift the irrigation to another part of the garden. ‘This notwithstanding the roses have been watered fairly regularly.’³⁴

I remember discussing with him the question of whether dishes should be washed before they went into the dishwasher (we both thought ‘yes’). Sheila van der Plank recalls hearing that he had trouble using the stapler at the Legal Resources Centre.³⁵ His friend Benjamin Pogrund reports, from a trip on which Pogrund took the Chaskalsons in Israel, that after using a public restroom to urinate, Arthur asked whether it was necessary to wash one’s hands afterwards.³⁶ And he was, by almost all accounts, a poor driver whose mind was usually on other things than the road; his colleagues in at least one case told him that they would take over the driving so that he could prepare in the car. (Though when his friend Geoff Budlender revealed this to him, after Arthur’s retirement from the Constitutional Court, he responded that his driving record was clean.³⁷) Clinton Bamberger, visiting from the United States and driving with Arthur to an LRC annual general meeting, emerged from the ride with the memory that Arthur did not know how to change a flat tyre.³⁸

Richard Rosenthal thought of Arthur in private life as a vulnerable innocent – despite his masterful approach to legal matters – and suspected that Lorraine kept Arthur upright in the face of such difficulties. Aninka Claassens recalled a time when Arthur began ‘deadheading the roses’ (that is, cutting them off once they’re dead) at the Claassens–Budlender home. Arthur, who apparently was doing this without having first asked his hosts, said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I hope this is okay?’ and Claassens responded, ‘No, it’s perfectly okay, it’s what’s got to be done,’ and Arthur agreed: ‘Yes, Lorraine told me.’ Claassens concluded that Lorraine ‘told him all these things like … you deadhead the roses and he would just automatically deadhead the roses.’³⁹ Lorraine, however, felt the two of them were practical about different things.⁴⁰ It seems that a good deal of his attention must have been on some higher plane.

Another letter Arthur sent, this one to their son Jerome in September 1987 as Arthur and Lorraine were settling into a sabbatical semester at Columbia Law School, gives a similar sense of the lives they led. It is a nine-page, handwritten account of a saga of mistreatment at the hands of the university bureaucracy (and I feel some personal guilt about these series of events, since he was about to teach with me). Things get off to a bad start as Arthur and Lorraine find themselves lost in the Johannesburg airport, and matters do not improve when Arthur leaves ‘our bank draft [their only immediate source of substantial funds] and return tickets on a trolley’ at JFK Airport in New York. Many complications ensue. Midway in the course of these events Arthur finds himself in the ID-card office at Columbia Law School, not for the first time. The formidable staff member there, he writes, had to take his photograph. ‘The camera did not work. She tried again. The camera did not work again. She shouted into the void: “The camera is not working. Get me another camera.” She then turned to me and said accusingly, “That has never happened before.” I said I have been photographed on many occasions and this was the first time I had broken a camera.’ That shows spirit, even in the midst of this series of disasters.

There follow further difficulties, including an effort to register to use the campus gym, subway and bus adventures, and a trip to Macy’s where they have to pay with their limited supply of cash, and the eventual receipt of cash cards whose only defect is that they are unusable because of the supposed overdraft resulting from Arthur’s leaving their bank draft on a trolley. Amazingly, Arthur ends this tale by saying to Jerome, ‘We are having a very nice time in New York. I hope you are having a nice time in South Africa,’ and wishing his son love.

*

It seems fair to say that Lorraine was the more present of the two parents. In his eulogy for his mother, who died on 7 November 2017, Matthew Chaskalson said:

Most of all, she gave us a lot of uncomplicated love. I think that the highest compliment that Jerome and I can pay to Lorraine as a mother is that we both had an incredibly happy childhood. Our home was a place full of love. And it was a place that all of our friends were happy to be in. Childhood friends who I haven’t spoken to in more than 20 years have written in the last few days to say how fondly they remembered Lorraine and what a wonderful time they had in our home. And it reminds me of what a wonderful childhood she made for Jerome and me.⁴¹

There is no doubt that Arthur’s law practice meant he was very busy. Although he was unusually good at estimating realistically how much time a case would take,⁴² he had many cases. The boys ate before their parents while they were small; the Chaskalsons did not have a family dinner routine until the mid-1970s. Matthew remembers waiting for Arthur to come home as his bedtime approached.⁴³ Quite often Arthur worked at home in the evenings, and in the office or at home on the weekends.⁴⁴ He had learned to cook a leg of lamb, as we’ve already seen, and one friend, Janet Kentridge, recalls him preparing the Sunday lunch, often for not only the family but many guests – still an unusual contribution from a husband in those days.⁴⁵ Overall, Arthur was very much a part of the children’s lives. Jerome would unhesitatingly declare, years later, that he and his brother had grown up in a two-parent, loving home.⁴⁶ How did Arthur do this?

As the boys grew older and went to school, Arthur was able to structure his work week so that he was free on Wednesday afternoons. He used those afternoons to watch his sons’ sports teams play: both boys inherited their father’s athletic ability and enthusiasm. (In addition, Arthur was active in the primary school parent–teacher association; this too may have been possible to schedule so that it fitted with Arthur’s practice commitments.⁴⁷) Jerome says that Lorraine, always sympathetic to the underdog, would sometimes decide to root for the opposing team because Jerome’s team was so strong; needless to say, this made Arthur a favoured parent as a fan.⁴⁸

Arthur also took them to see matches; he himself loved watching cricket, but he also took the boys to football (soccer) games and no doubt others. (Arthur also continued to play tennis regularly with a group of friends until his forties.⁴⁹) Matthew recalls that he and Arthur at one point followed a particular football team and watched its matches every week. Once they travelled fifty miles to a cold, desolate town where the local team soundly defeated theirs; Matthew was in tears and even the other team’s fans became sympathetic. Arthur and Matthew also listened to sports broadcasts on a shortwave radio that Arthur bought in 1971.⁵⁰ Lorraine at one point worried that Matthew was interested in football and nothing else, but Arthur and Matthew long afterwards would still discuss the details of football developments around the world.⁵¹

When he was home, moreover, Arthur was always very available to the kids. Jerome remembers his father being with them a lot, for example spending time with them in the evenings before working later at night.⁵² He was part of the life of the house: Ilse Wilson remembers a moment when Matthew wanted to ask Lorraine something, and she replied, perhaps not quite in these words: ‘Go talk to your father; he’s on the loo taking a crap.’ At the same time Lorraine, Ilse remembered, had endless patience for the boys.⁵³ Jerome also recalls that his parents raised them consistently – rather than with one parent on one page, the other on another.⁵⁴ That surely required either intuitive harmony or a good deal of conscious coordination.

*

But time was constrained at home, especially for Arthur, and Matthew says that many of his interactions with his father came on vacations.⁵⁵ The family usually vacationed twice a year – evidently standard for upper-middle-class white South Africans of that period – and these were very special times.⁵⁶ The family went to England in 1970 and 1973. In the northern hemisphere winter of 1976/7, while Lorraine was working to finish her dissertation, Matthew went with his friend Philip Amoils’s family to Switzerland to ski, while Arthur took Jerome to England. After Matthew and Philip joined the others in England, it turned out that the hotel in which they were staying had a discount price for longish stays, but they had not received it because the hotel insisted they only gave the discount to those who asked for it in advance. Arthur was outraged, they packed up and left the hotel to stay elsewhere, and from then on that hotel chain was off limits.⁵⁷ Arthur did not like unfair dealing, and he did not forget it either.

Usually they vacationed in South Africa, and without such crises. Jerome remembers Arthur and the boys going golfing, with Jerome at first so young that he just walked along with his father and brother. Some of their vacations were in the Drakensberg mountains, while many times they went to Cape Town for the long, end-of-year midsummer holiday that South Africans celebrate. (Even the revolution, it used to be said, paused for this holiday.) Jerome remembered simple pleasures from those trips: his father pushing him on some sort of flotation cushion so that he could ride the waves in towards shore, and also pushing him against the waves so that he could breach them and feel he was flying.⁵⁸ Friends joined them on these vacations, and they enjoyed the kinds of routines vacationers develop. For some years, Arthur and Benjamin Pogrund, a leading liberal journalist, would jointly put on a braai (a barbecue) while their families vacationed in Cape Town.⁵⁹ One year, in 1965, the Chaskalsons, Kunys, Soggots and another friend, Luli Callinicos, went on a picnic; Sheila van der Plank, then married to David Soggot, brought a pecan pie because she knew Arthur loved them – but baboons arrived and began menacing the humans, who fled without their pie.⁶⁰

We can catch other glimpses of Arthur on these vacations. On one trip to Cape Town the Chaskalsons were accompanied by Matthew’s close friend Philip Amoils. (This itself was characteristic: other children would join them on vacations, while the Chaskalson boys would join other families’ trips in turn.⁶¹) On this particular vacation, Philip and Matthew went to a nearby store to buy magazines. The shop-owner insisted that because Philip had opened the plastic cover of a magazine to see the football foldout, he was now obliged to buy it – a purchase that consumed most of his money for the vacation. He and Matthew returned to the Chaskalsons’ home, and told Arthur about this. Arthur at once returned to the store, insisted on seeing the manager, and demanded – emphatically and successfully – that the shop-owner fully refund Philip’s money. This was one of the few occasions when Philip ever saw Arthur angry.⁶² He hated injustice and bullying, at work or at home.

*

On another occasion, years later, Matthew and Philip were staying at a youth hostel, while the Chaskalsons were elsewhere in Cape Town. The boys conceived the idea of picking up Minis and moving them from place to place; their crowning achievement was to deposit one in an apartment elevator. Excited by their success the first night, they started again the next night – but this time they were seen. Most of the boys fled; one, however, had the bad idea of staying and pretending to be an innocent bystander, and Matthew then felt he should return and stay with this boy. They were both taken into custody by the police, and then spent some harrowing hours in a police cell at the Sea Point police station while the police officer there scared them, by threatening to put them into another cell with hardened criminals.

Finally Matthew, remembering the detective movies he’d seen, asked to make a phone call, and called Arthur. Lorraine remembers that they were sure Matthew could not be guilty of car theft, and Arthur put his clothes on over his pyjamas to venture out to the police station; he was the one to go because he could look severe.⁶³ For a while, Matt recalls, nothing happened – and then things began to happen very fast. The station cop took them out of their cell and assured them they had not been arrested. When they came to the front of the station, Arthur was there, insisting that they could not be guilty of the offence they were supposed to have committed and demanding that the records of their being taken into custody be burned before his eyes, as they were. But after Arthur and the two boys had emerged into the station parking lot, Matt told his father that they had also been fingerprinted – and Arthur turned around and went back to the station and successfully demanded that the fingerprints be destroyed too.⁶⁴

Again, Arthur’s hatred of bullying is vivid. But so is his ability to take control of a situation and shape it as he wished; when he wanted to be, he was a force, almost an irresistible one. In this he resembled his mother, Mary, who, as we have seen, was known for her ability to get what she wanted. As Matthew told me the story of Arthur’s rescuing him and his friend from the Sea Point police, he pointed out the similarity of Arthur’s actions and those of Arthur’s mother. The difference was that Arthur employed this ability for the sake of justice, while the family felt that his mother equated what she needed with what was right.⁶⁵

But Arthur had only assumed that his son’s cause was just. It was not until they were driving away from the police station that Arthur asked the boys what they had been up to. They told him the story. Whether he was surprised or amused, what he said was only ‘Hmm’. Matthew’s friend then asked if this event could remain a secret among the three of them, since he did not expect his own father to take such a tolerant view – and a secret it became.

Arthur’s decision not to respond to this scrape with stern discipline, or even wise moral injunctions, was characteristic of the Chaskalsons’ child-rearing. Here is another example of their response to what Lorraine would later call ‘devilry’,⁶⁶ again reflecting the Chaskalsons’ disposition not to punish. Matt and his friend Philip Amoils broke all the windows in a house owned by relatives of the Chaskalsons. But one of the owners saw them, tried to catch them as they ran away, and even though he failed, he recognised them, and called the Chaskalsons, so they had to confess. Matthew remembers that Arthur communicated a sense of real disappointment, but without saying anything.⁶⁷ Philip remembers the story slightly differently; as he tells it, Matthew went to his mother and said, ‘I did a bad thing.’ ‘What bad thing did you do?’ Lorraine asks, and Matthew tells her. ‘And what will you do about this?’ Lorraine asks. ‘I’ll take responsibility and repair all the windows.’ Of course Matthew had no money, but ultimately the matter was settled on this basis. Lorraine’s concern was for them to recognise their responsibility, even if (apparently) there were few actual consequences flowing from that acknowledgement.⁶⁸

When the children were small, their parents could be more abrupt and even physical: Philip 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.