by Jenny Hobbs
· 2 ·
IN THE EVENING OF THE LONG DAY AFTER J J DIED, they sit stunned in the lounge when the last sympathisers have left, taking with them the kids who hav mooching about the garden doing their best to look sorrowful. Wild bananas jostle at the picture window. Out at sea, a rising wind ruffles the moonpath that narrows towards the horizon.
‘Good news.’ His sister Barbara sweeps in from answering the phone in the hall. ‘Bishop Chauncey will hold the funeral service in St Ethelbert’s.’
‘St Eth’s is huge,’ Hugh objects. ‘And you know how Dad felt about churches. We should just hold a wake.’
‘He deserves a proper ceremony. Madiba said he was an outstanding man of his generation after those rugby matches he organised for the Children’s Fund.’ Barbara has basked in her brother’s fame most of her life.
‘Who was that on the phone, anyway?’
‘A journalist.’ Barbara hasn’t let on that she has been feeding daily bulletins to the papers about J J’s weakening condition.
Shirley raises her blotched face. ‘I couldn’t bear a big funeral. I just want a small family service.’
After a considerate pause Hugh says, ‘I suppose we should talk to SARU about the bishop’s offer.’
Her head snaps up. ‘He hasn’t been to a rugby union meeting for years.’
‘Maybe not. But they owe him for the fund-raisers. They were fantastic publicity.’
‘And he was a war hero.’
‘That was long ago, Mum. War isn’t kosher any more.’
‘How can you say that?’ she flares. ‘He fought and suffered and almost died for his country. You chickened out of army service.’
It’s an old refrain.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘You’re so like Barbara. Always disparaging.’
‘Thanks very much.’ Barbara glowers at Hugh, whose rebellion against his father has included a skirmish with Marxism, avoidance of army duty and scorn for rugger buggers.
Lin sits looking out the window trying to ignore them. The big milkwood at the edge of the lawn is a restless silhouette against the moonlit sea, heaving with each gust of wind. She learnt to climb and balance in that tree, running along its sprawling branches with her arms extended and Mum calling out, ‘Careful, dear,’ and Dad yelling, ‘Go for it, Lin! Faster! Right to the end, then jump. I’ll catch you.’
She says, ‘Dad didn’t deserve to end that way. Petering out.’
‘Most of his friends have gone too. No one would come to a big funeral. We’ll hold a small private service with tea here afterwards,’ Shirley says, hopeful that now John’s gone she can have her way for a change.
No such luck. Lin says, ‘I don’t agree, Mum. It’s not just you involved. We all need to make the decision. I vote for St Eth’s. Dad loved pomp and ceremony.’
‘He never missed the Moth service on Remembrance Day,’ Barbara chimes in.
‘Played the gallant ex-serviceman to the hilt.’
‘Stop it, Hugh.’ Anger has perked Shirley up. ‘You’re all bullying me.’
Lin insists, ‘We just need to make a decision.’
‘I’ll go with the majority vote.’ Hugh escapes down the passage and up the stairs to knock on the bathroom door. ‘Sam-Sam? Have you showered?’
‘No, I’m on the bog. And don’t call me that. It’s childish.’
‘Sam, then. Hurry up. Charlie will be serving dinner soon and Gran doesn’t like anyone to be late.’
‘Old bag.’
‘It’s been an awful day, son. Don’t make it any harder.’
‘I’ll be out in five, promise. Greased lightning.’ It’s a family phrase from old press reports describing J J Kitching’s legendary dashes for the try line.
‘Don’t forget to use soap in your mad haste.’
‘I’m not stupid. You’re as bad as Ma,’ he grumbles.
Hugh goes back to the lounge, wondering if his first wife Bridget will come, and whether Nelisiwe will be in time for dinner. Nelisiwe is a chic town planner from Gingindlovu whom his father treated with the exaggerated courtesy of a plantation owner. His mother still struggles to talk to her, even in strained platitudes.
Lin has gone to sit near a light, where she pages through her father’s desk diary. None of them would have dared enter his study before he became too weak to go downstairs, and when they did, it was only to dust. So it feels like sacrilege to be looking at his jotted notes of doctors’ and clinic appointments and phone calls. Finding a full page of writing, she scans it and calls out, ‘Hey, listen to this.’
‘What?’ Hugh comes to read over her shoulder.
‘Dad’s last entry. It’s so unlike him. Last words for us, with a warning.’
‘That’s not unlike him. Always wanting control.’
She turns, keeping her place in the diary with her finger. ‘Thought you’d cleared things with him, bro?’
‘I did. Including the fact that you and I knew his deadly secret.’
‘Never mattered. He’s always been a hero to me.’
‘It wasn’t easy living up to his expectations.’
‘I didn’t feel that.’
‘Oh, but you did. Be honest. We had to study harder, jump higher, go further, reach for the stars he decided were best for us.’ Every confrontation had been a challenge until the day J J’s demanding glare began to fade.
‘Aren’t all parents like that?’
‘Not me,’ Hugh says with a determined scowl that makes him look just like his father. ‘But Dad and I made our peace. Okay, read what he’s written.’
‘Here it is: “As I prepare to leave the final changing room, these are my last words to my family. A wise man living in a culvert has explained ubuntu: it’s shorthand for humanity. War taught me something else: that life is a game of chance with many losers. So keep your eyes open, look after each other, and guard your birthright. You can never be sure who’s shuffling the cards.”’
For once, Hugh is speechless.
Shirley moans from the sofa, ‘John didn’t tell me anything about a man in a culvert.’
‘That’s Stanley Magwaza, Grampa’s friend.’ Sam comes into the room towelling his hair. ‘He took me to see him once. Looks like an old tramp, but he’s famous too. Played for Orlando Pirates in the fifties. The Bucs.’
‘Bucks?’
‘B-u-c-s, short for buccaneers. Another word for pirates. Neli told me. She’s cool. She’s got a 60-gig iPod and drives a Volvo as well.’
‘As well,’ Hugh corrects, an automatic reflex.
‘Don’t be pedantic.’ Barbara is trying to hide her own surprise. Her larger-than-life brother scorned pessimism. Or said he did.
Lin looks up from the bold handwriting on the diary page. J J still used a fountain pen and blue-black ink; they’ll find a crusted Parker Quink bottle in his desk drawer. ‘What does he mean by “guard your birthright”?’
Barbara says, ‘It’s Johnny being pompous. He liked laying down the law.’
‘Is he saying that we may need to defend our entitlement to belong in Africa? Was it an issue for him? I don’t remember him talking about it.’
Nobody answers.
Hugh sits puzzling over the coda: ‘You can never be sure who’s shuffling the cards’. His father had been an action man, not given to mystical thinking. What else had been hidden behind his austere face?
Shirley fumes, John didn’t tell me about this. Now they’re all forcing me into a church funeral. Everything’s changed and I’m left to deal with it. Typical.
Barbara is tapping the ash off her third cigarette of the evening, when Charlie appears in a white cotton uniform to announce, ‘Dinner is ready.’
I miss the camaraderie, the action, the flying, the purposeness of missions and the sudden ability to get things done … We were all friends with everybody in the squadron and we had a feeling almost of brotherhood because we were involved in exactly the same business. The only thing that separated one
from the other was the length of time – how long were you able to stay alive?
– PILOT ARTHUR DAVIS in Thunderbolts: the conquest of the Reich, on the History Channel
For the rest of his life, J J had to endure the contradiction of being hailed as a hero for saving an air gunner he hardly knew, though he had failed a friend in prison camp.
After liberation, the South African Defence Force doctors’ diagnosis of shell-shock and malnutrition kept him for several months in the Brighton repatriation camp, running a gauntlet of bossy army nurses and psychologists when all he longed for was to be sent home to forget. Sudden rages against them alternated with days of being down in the dumps. Often he stammered and couldn’t make himself understood. Sometimes he couldn’t speak at all, recalling how he had kept quiet instead of owning up. The memory of his cowardice festered on after he was released. He kept a coin hidden in his deepest pockets to remind him.
Home at last, he started rugby as soon as he was fit enough. It felt good to be back on a green field playing games where rules prevailed, and the Survivors B Team offered a way to sweat out the shame. Few could afford a car after the war, and if they arrived early at the grounds after cadging lifts or taking buses, they’d play cards in the changing room.
Udwayi Dent, the fullback, liked to deal. His Zulu nickname meant ‘the strider’ – he had long legs like a secretary bird, and could be as slow. The only time he really came alive was with playing cards in his hands. He’d shuffle them two ways: back and forth in a cupped hand and then face-down in two parts, allowing the lifted corners to knit together as they riffled down. Then he’d thump the pack on the bench to square it off and say, ‘So, what’s it today?’
Poker usually, though Herman sometimes voted for Snap in honour of his tank crew who had been blown up by a Teller mine near Monte Cassino on a day when he’d stayed behind in camp, flattened by dysentery. Lethargic games of Snap had helped to take their minds off the hell-oven claustrophobia before battles.
If a match was late, the team often smoked through a box of fifty Springbok, fogging up the changing room before they had to run on. Udwayi liked to win at cards and they learnt to let him triumph before hard games. When he lost, he could go into a dwaal that had to do with the slanting scar across his forehead, souvenir of an Italian bayonet.
They all had souvenirs. There were times when J J began to shiver and couldn’t stop. If it happened on the field, one of the team would sham an injury and lie writhing on the grass to bring the St Johns man running on with his first aid bag, while the others huddled round J J and held his arms close to his body until he quietened down.
As Udwayi said, ‘It could be any one of us, boet.’
That was the hard thing – you had to get your mind around the arbitrary luck of being alive and able to play games, with so many mates dead and gone. The army psychologists had a name for it: survivor’s guilt. That’s why they called themselves the Survivors B Team.
There was no A Team.
J J is hounded all his life by two questions: Why all of them and not me? and, What made me chicken out that day at Moosburg? He dies hoping he’s been forgiven. He’d spent a lifetime trying to make up for it.
· 3 ·
GREAT STUDDED DOORS STAND OPEN TO CRAWLING Friday afternoon traffic, irritable honking and a din of mynahs in the palm trees. St Ethelbert’s stone floor gives it a dank chill after the muggy Durban heat. The men who sweated up the steps in formal suits and ties are more at ease now, cooling down and looking round to see who else has taken the afternoon off to honour J J Kitching.
Outside on the stone platform at the top of the steps, the pall-bearers stand with Bishop Chauncey and Reverend George, the township priest, waiting for the hearse. When it glides into the loading zone not quite five minutes late, Purkey the driver says something to Clyde who opens the passenger door before it stops, his pointy black shoe sliding along the tarmac. They get out and hurry towards the back, the khaki lab coats replaced by black tails, wing collars, bow ties and striped waistcoats. Cameras whirr and flicker as they slide the mahogany coffin onto a steel trolley on scissor legs. Purkey leans inside the hearse for a folded South African flag, which he shakes out with a flourish and drapes over the coffin, placing J J’s battery of medals at its head and a bunch of flowers in the centre.
Because some of the pall-bearers are too old to carry teacups, let alone push a coffin, Purkey beckons only Hugh and Mtshali – the cook J J always called Charlie. The two men help guide the trolley up the ramp to one side of the steps while Clyde propels it from the back. When they reach the stone platform, Reverend George fusses everyone into position, then takes his place behind the bishop waiting at the head. As the procession begins, Purkey and Clyde fade through a side door.
So J J moves, feet first, into the church he’d rejected after the war destroyed his boy’s faith in God, making rare exceptions only for Remembrance Day services and friends’ funerals. The bishop has ignored his apostasy because a hero’s funeral is useful publicity. It’s a struggle to fill more than a few pews at St Ethelbert’s on Sundays, when litter in the empty streets outside is the sole evidence of busy city weeks.
The usher closes the doors as the procession moves towards the altar with the organ burbling the Death March. Shirley, her eyes still puffy but resolutely dry, sits in the left front pew with Barbara, Bridget and Nelisiwe, leaving room for the family pall-bearers to join them when the service begins. The right front pews have been reserved for the Memorable Order of Tin Hats: two rows of grave old men (and a few women) with white hair and shaky jowls, in black blazers with badges of crossed rifles ringed by stars. Ranks of medals hang from faded ribbons above their hearts. They sit with clasped hands and distant eyes, gone back to war.
All the pews are full, some more packed than others. The Springbok and Sharks team representatives sit shoulder to mighty shoulder, looking straight ahead with solemn faces. It wouldn’t do for the press photographers lurking in the side aisles to catch a wrong expression on this day of young rugby heroes paying tribute to a legend. J J’s obituaries have mentioned other dashing South Africans of his time – Sailor Malan and Bill Payn, their official war photos reviving memories of the level manly gaze and ruler-straight hair parting.
A wheel squeaks as the coffin is escorted up the red-carpeted aisle by J J’s children, friends, grandson and cook. The altar dais is banked with flowers and propped-up wreaths; one reads KITCHEN BOY in pearly everlastings. Lin has helped Shirley pick red clivia and maidenhair fern in the shade garden for the bunch that lies on the flag with a card reading: With All My Love, Forever Your Shirl. The writing in blue-black ink is shaky and blotched.
THE PALL-BEARERS
Morné du Plessis has said of Springbok captains: ‘Personally, I don’t have much belief in the born-leader syndrome. I am absolutely certain that good leaders are made.’
Retief Alberts was a case in point: a captain tempered in a steel mill. His father, born in a Boer concentration camp, had forbidden him to go and fight for the British swine when he left school in 1940. But he wanted to prove himself, so his next option was an essential occupation. Iscor in Pretoria was churning out steel for the armoured cars and tanks and munitions being manufactured for the Allies by South African Railways and in the mine workshops, so he applied to become an apprentice fitter and turner.
Retief pushed his body to extremes, working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week. He was a quick learner, and fast-tracked through welding school and the operation of metal lathes spinning off spirals that clung to his brown overalls like steel tresses. He volunteered for extra duties on repair teams, fixing blast furnaces and grab buckets, toiling up and down ladders with bags of tools and replacements for faulty overhead cranes. To feel and hear what war was like, he would stand by at the end of a blow when the Bessemer converter was tapped, his body streaming sweat as molten steel arced into ladles for teeming into ingot moulds. He watched as slag cracked into black islands on the intense r
edness of the melt and tried not to think of his friends trapped in burning tanks in the desert Up North. When shifts allowed, he went to the rugby club and trained: running laps, exercising with dumbbells, doing press-ups, scrumming against other straining men on the crisp grass of winter afternoons as shadows crawled across the field. He was always the last to leave the changing room.
Within four years, he had risen to be the youngest-ever foreman of the sheet steel rolling mill. By the time the war ended and men could think of playing serious rugby again, he was captain of the Iscor team and later chosen to play No 8 for Transvaal in the Currie Cup. When J J Kitching was selected as a wing three-quarter in the first post-war Springbok team in 1949, Retief was his captain.
It is a coup to have a man as revered as Retief Alberts at the funeral; he is not far off ninety and doesn’t like to leave his cattle farm near iNgogo in the shadow of Majuba. He leads the pall-bearers on the right, his quavering hand resting on the flag draped on the coffin. This bright new flag – so different to the old flag – makes him feel just as proud. When he makes his rare speeches now, he says that we are indeed a great nation to have come to an agreement rather than fighting to the death. He ends by saying that war is a curse, never adding that there was a time when he would have rushed off to fight if he hadn’t been a dutiful boereseun. Yet that is what he thinks now, walking beside his dead teammate into St Ethelbert’s.
Sam is eleven when he becomes his grandfather’s solace – old enough to listen and be impressed, too young to have heard repeats of the stories that give the rest of the family glazed eyes. He’s an only child who is too often alone and gets lost in dreams. Other boys avoid him because of his asthma; blue veins show through his skin and he looks like he’d bruise if you touched him. His teachers complain that he doesn’t pay attention in class.
Sam’s passion is war history. He reads a lot about knights and bowmen, swords, sieges, Mongol and Zulu warriors, Roman legions, cannons and battles, but feels funny at the sight of blood – even the watery stuff that comes out of raw chicken. He keeps a travelling war library in his mother’s old brown school case covered with stick-on labels; it goes with him everywhere except school. When she fished it out of a garage cupboard for him and said with a smile that it was made of extra-tough Samsonite, he thought of Superman with his kryptonite and felt chuffed. Most of the boys he knows play computer games when they’re not kicking or hitting balls, and they think that reading is a drag. He says he doesn’t care that they call him a sissy, because his grampa is a Springbok and a war hero, and nobody can beat that.