Tos du Toit lavished his generous, effervescent humanity on generations of schoolboys, students, film buffs, business associates, readers, family and friends. Rich in learning, always carried lightly, precise in vocabulary, unerring in insight, his inexhaustible friendship was a vivid presence in each of our lives. His life, like Tos himself, was beautiful – but it was also fun, filled with his infectious laughter and bubbling over with his joy in living. In all this, Tos offers us an instructive and comforting example.
We all, I think, have felt tremendous shock at Tos’s death. He was so vital, so energetic, so full of life, so in love with life, that we thought he would keep on going indefinitely.
But his body proved mortally frail, after all, and now we are left to mourn his absence – but also to rejoice in the rich gifts he gave us each – as schoolmaster, lecturer, business associate, writer, producer, editor, family member and friend.
I had the privilege of knowing Tos for nearly fifty years. He was my schoolmaster at Pretoria Boy’s High in 1967, when I was in Form 2.
He taught us both English and Afrikaans, two periods a day, five days a week.
You would have thought this length of exposure in a class of fidgety adolescents was a recipe for boredom and distraction. But no!
Tos enraptured us. He was endearing, funny, intriguing, knowledgeable, and extremely entertaining.
He called us “troglodytes” – and forced us to find out that the word meant “cave-dwellers”.
When he invited us to respond to a question, he would say “Now, boys, raise your reptilian little hand if you know the answer”.
Tos loved words, both English and Afrikaans. But he loved especially English words. His eyes would sparkle, a smile would light up his face and he would share with us the delight of a word whose meaning he thought we should know.
He gave us advice – some of which, till today, I still remember and use. He said – “There is no excuse for being bored. Remember, only boring people are bored.”
So today, I remind myself not to be boring, and I advise others, from time to time, that only boring people are bored.
We were all in love with Tos. And I mean all of us – not only those of us who passed through the fusty furnace of adolescence to find that we were same-sex orientated. Every one of the 26 or 27 schoolboys in 2A adored Tos, looked forward to his classes and laughed excitedly through a large part of all of them.
He was undoubtedly the most glamorous, handsome and socially delectable teacher on the staff at PBHS.
After all, Tos was a famous model. It was his beautiful nut-brown hand with its perfectly manicured fingernails that appeared on the back cover of every issue of Huisgenoot and Personality, clutching an enticing-looking pack of Rothmans cigarettes in the emblazoned uniform of a senior pilot. Not just Rothmans – but Rothmans of Pall Mall.
Tos brought the sophistication and polish of the age of international jet-travel and marketing right into our classroom, twice a day.
And he revealed fascinating details about his modelling. We thought, of course, that, to make the Rothmans advert he had to dress in a full pilot’s uniform. No, he told us. The producers of the ad had a tailor make up only an elbow-length sleeve.
We were crestfallen. Not an entire uniform? No peaked cap? Thus did Tos initiate us into the complex realities of form, appearance, substance and gloss.
We thought then that there was no end to Tos’s talents. He had a way with words. He had a way with women. He was a film star and a model. He wrote film scripts.
And, indeed, the world of Pretoria Boys’ High was too small for Tos. He went on to teach English at the University of Pretoria. There he became legendary for the hordes or first-year women students who would crowd into his classrooms just to breathe the same air as this beautiful man.
Tos went on to a successful career as a glamorous film actor, then as a director, and then a producer of films.
For we were right in thinking that there was no end of his talents. For Tos was a superbly accomplished, witty, polished, urbane man of innumerable parts.
Just two years ago, after celebrating his 80th birthday, he published his novel – a touching, poignant, vivid and funny, patchwork of incidents from tender adolescence, integrated a selection with Tos’s most beloved and informative quotations.
The riches of Tos’s own life were packed into this book. They included the exquisitely witty and tender drawings that Walter Battiss prepared for him. Art and text, words and language, were deftly interwoven to produce a literary and visual feast.
But through it all the real theme was the transcendent importance of the pedagogue – the benign, learned, richly knowledgeable teacher who is dedicated to the well-being and the moral and intellectual development of his charges.
In this, Tos was speaking about himself. And in his fictional character, we saw the life and work of Tos himself.
Even though he was a teacher and then a lecturer only for a relatively few years, his didactic genius pervaded his life and his friendships.
Its greatest richness again revealed Tos’s own fascination with words. Words are the indispensable components of our communication as humans. Their beauty and complexity and creative power are endless.
It was this fascination and joy that Tos conveyed to us grubby 14 year-olds in Form 2A in 1967. My own love of words, as entities that signify meaning suggestively, without ever fully exhausting it, comes directly from Tos.
It was an enduring gift to each of us and one for which I have been particularly grateful in my life as a lawyer.
His life was one life of constant enterprise, creation, innovation and creativity – all woven through intense and joyful friendships.
To them, he brought the infectious delight that he brought to everything he did. For that was his principal and most surpassing characteristic – his delighted enjoyment of human company, human engagement and human warmth.
No dinner party, no bridge table, no meeting and no social engagement where Tos was present could fail to fizz with the fun that he brought to everything he did.
Tos taught me nearly fifty years ago. But I felt privileged to nurture a friendship with him throughout every year since then. He was a role-model, hero, friend and support.
But above all, he was wittily, infectiously, subversively funny.
It was a delight to know him. May his joyful life energies continue to effervesce around us for many years to come – a human life so extraordinarily rich in fun, in laughter, in delight.
- Edwin Cameron