Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  But he does care. How do you know whether you’re a sissy or not unless you’re tested? In combat, say, or in a situation where you can save the day with a valiant act of courage. He knows about olden-day heroes, like Jason and Shaka, and the war heroes Grampa talks about, like Guy Gibson and Edwin Swales VC. When other boys talk the same way about computer avatars and sportsmen and rock stars, he’s puzzled.

  Grampa is scathing about chaps with girls’ hair who wear earrings. He calls them nancy boys and says, ‘We were flying war planes and fighting the Hun before we were twenty.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ is the key Sam uses to unlock catacombs of memory. ‘Tell me about flying from Italy to Poland in a bomber when you saved the tail gunner and baled out just before it crashed.’

  ‘You’ve heard that one.’ J J shifts in his chair, easing his bladder.

  ‘But I want to know more. Where did you drop the bombs?’

  ‘Not bombs. We were parachuting supplies to Polish partisans: hand grenades, radio equipment, Sten submachine guns, automatic pistols, two-inch trench mortars, shoulder-fired PIAT anti-tank weapons –’

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘A smaller British version of a bazooka,’ he explains. ‘Plus warm clothes and food and medical supplies. It was August 1944. Rain and mud everywhere. The partisans had been training in secret for months. When our so-called Allies, the Russians, got close enough, the partisans rose up against the occupying Germans. But those fucking Reds stopped outside Warsaw and sat there watching the Nazis hammer the Polish Underground Army. They were fighting from street to street, hiding in cellars like rats, starving. Backs to the wall, poor sods. The Polish government in exile in London asked the RAF for help and they roped us in.’

  ‘You flew Liberators,’ Sam prompts.

  The old man nods. ‘Built by the Yanks: big ugly brutes with glass turrets in the nose and tail for the gunners. Wings with four prop engines and a pair of bloody great ovals for tail fins, all mounted above the fuselage. This meant a very high lift-to-weight ratio, so Libs could take off from short runways and carry heavy loads over long distances. They could do the two thousand miles from Foggia to Warsaw and back in ten or eleven hours on a good night, up to thirteen in foul weather.’

  ‘What’s Foggia?’

  ‘Where, you mean. North-east of Naples, near the Adriatic Coast. SAAF 31 and 32 Squadrons flew from there over occupied Europe: first the Adriatic, then Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland. Those Libs were rugged as hell, took a lot of punishment from flak and awkward landings.’

  ‘Did the enemy keep trying to shoot you down?’

  ‘Not all the time. Over the cities. Airfields. Railway yards. Refineries. Factories –’ He trails off, not wanting to add ‘labour camps’. He remembers cowering into filthy sacking night after night in a transit camp near Krakow, terrified that his own side’s bombs would kill him before the Nazis did.

  The old man’s eyes droop and Sam fires another question. ‘Tell me again what you did in the Liberator, Grampa?’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ He picks up the thread. ‘Mostly I sat at the navigation table in the cockpit, plotting a course over the Carpathians for the Vistula River to lead us to Warsaw. But when we started the run for a drop, I had to crawl down to a bench halfway towards the front turret, just above a perspex window where the bombsight was mounted. You lay flat on your tummy to operate it.’ He has explained to Sam that navigators were called observers in the South African Air Force and trained as bomb aimers too.

  ‘Who sat in the front turret?’

  ‘Nobody, on those runs. Because we flew at night when attacking fighters could only see our exhaust flames from behind, the front turret guns were dumped so we could carry heavier loads. I lay there alone above that window, looking down on hell. Burning buildings. Tongues of fire licking up. Bomb explosions. Thick black smoke. Screaming ack-ack. Shrapnel rattling all around us.’

  Sam whispers, ‘You must have been so scared.’

  ‘Shitless. Every time I climbed up those metal steps I’d think: I could die tonight. These may be my last moments on Earth. And I was hardly out of school. Short on ball hairs. Cut the tops off my pimples when I was shaving.’

  J J hesitates. His stories have always been edited – even to Shirley, who thinks she knows the worst – but the disease that has begun to ravage his body urges him to spell it all out. He wants this boy he loves to know what men are capable of when pushed to extremes.

  Sam’s questions have dried up. He only has six years of school left. He knows that if war happened again, he could die too.

  Hugh comes into the room from the doorway where he’s been waiting to intervene. ‘That’s enough for tonight. Off to bed. I’ll come and tuck you up after I’ve had a word with Grampa.’

  ‘Don’t tell him to stop, Dad. I like hearing about war and heroes.’ But it’s a half-hearted plea. War is better in books than on an old man’s face at night.

  ‘And I like telling you, old chap.’ J J manages a smile. ‘We’ll continue in the morning. Eight-thirty sharp after breakfast.’

  Ten months later Sam walks next to the coffin, right behind Retief Alberts. He thinks hard about his grandfather flying through the dark, lying on his tummy and looking down on war, not even twenty and shitscared. He doesn’t want to leave even a chink of time to imagine Grampa’s body inside the coffin.

  Hugh says in what he hopes is a reasonable voice, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’ He’d hated hearing about the war when he was Sam’s age and the world was boogying into its brief Make Love, Not War interlude. He had believed in it all, to his father’s disgust. Winning a succession of bursaries at university had allowed him to avoid army service until it was no longer compulsory.

  He goes on, ‘You should tell him about growing up in Zululand. Lin and I loved those stories.’

  ‘He’s heard all that stuff already.’

  ‘Then talk about rugby. Your dazzling triumphs on the Springbok wing.’

  ‘Do I detect sarcasm?’

  ‘No. I’m just concerned about your graphic bedtime stories.’

  J J says to his grandson, ‘Don’t worry. I’m the boss in this house. He can’t tell me what to say.’

  ‘Sure. Though I can ask you to tone it down, Dad.’ Hugh has been trying to mend his relationship with his father. Your old man won’t last the year, the doctors have told him. Hugh is glad that J J and Sam connect so well and lets the boy spend weekends at this house on the hilltop overlooking the sea. But there are limits. ‘Hop it, son,’ he insists, and Sam goes towards the stairs, his slipper heels dragging on the floor.

  ‘You’re bullying him. You know I enjoy his company. It’s about all I’ve got left.’ This sounds pathetic, but he wants to leave his grandson the legacy of valiant men and war memories that his son rejected.

  Hugh says, ‘And he loves being here. He’s a much better listener than I was. But I won’t have his head filled with obsolete patriotism.’ He moderates the reproach by adding, ‘Life is much more complex now.’

  ‘You were a hippy prick. Still are.’

  ‘Come on, Dad. I keep hoping we’ve moved beyond that.’ Hugh is tired after a day of lecturing and his patience is wearing thin.

  But J J continues to bristle. ‘You’ve always opted out and Sam’s been mollycoddled, like they all are today. Someone has to make this next generation realise that the world isn’t all sweetness and light.’

  ‘Not when they’re only twelve.’

  ‘When I was that age, I had to serve behind the counter of your grandfather’s trading store.’

  ‘In the school holidays.’

  ‘Every day except Sundays. We all mucked in during the Depression. Doctors and lawyers shovelled coal on Durban docks.’

  ‘So you’ve always said.’

  ‘Clearly boring you.’ J J’s chin still shoots forward when he’s furious, only now the flesh is falling away so his jawbone stands prominent.

  ‘Please, Dad. I’m just asking y
ou to give Sam a break from war. He’s an imaginative kid. We try not to over-stimulate him before he goes to bed because he has nightmares.’

  ‘So do I.’ The confidence spurts out before he can stop it. ‘Ever since –’

  ‘I know,’ Hugh cuts in. ‘Barbs and I used to lie there listening.’

  ‘You did? I tried to keep those – horrors –’ He’d always believed that the nightmares were a weakness only he and Shirley knew about.

  ‘Behind closed doors? They aren’t thick enough. We heard you scream and howl. It was terrible. I wanted to grow up so I could kill the Germans who had hurt you.’

  ‘You did?’ his father repeats, a sick old man with his lifetime certainties crumbling. ‘But you’ve always said you despise war and the stupid bastards who make it.’

  Hugh manages to say what he’s been trying to voice for months. ‘I do. But I love you, Dad. You didn’t make that war. You did the honourable thing, joining up so young.’ He hopes it sounds convincing and adds, ‘I don’t think I could ever be so brave.’

  ‘You try to do your duty.’

  Hugh bends towards him and grips the skeleton hands. ‘You did much more.’

  ‘I just wanted to help make the world safe. But I lost so many friends. Boys, most of them. One moment they were there, the next – pff! Gone.’ A tremor deepens the crevices in his face.

  ‘Try not to dwell on it.’

  ‘Well,’ is all J J can say, shaking his head, ‘well.’

  Leaning over the stair rail, Sam sees his father help Grampa out of the chair and, putting his arm round the wasted shoulders, lead him towards the veranda. Shirley keeps up the tradition of the evening spot, though now it’s weak whisky.

  Less than a year has gone by, and Hugh is, of course, the other leading pall-bearer.

  J J and Bobby Brewitt go back a long way, to the time when they were boys in Umfolozi. Bobby’s father Reg worked for the railways, in sole charge of the small red brick station and its corrugated iron shed at the end of the branch line. Every day at noon, a train came puffing in with supplies and left with loaded trucks of sugar cane. J J’s father Victor ran the trading store, now that he’d come down in the world. His mother Dot kept up their standing in the community by hosting tea parties, baking for hours in the hot kitchen to load the tiered cake stand with jam tarts and shortbread and squares of exquisite lemon cake. Afterwards, the two boys were given the leftovers to scoff, quick sticks, with the ragged kids who hung around the store’s back steps. If Victor came home early and saw there’d been a tea party, he’d thump the table, shouting, ‘Bugger the sweet stuff. Waste of bloody money. I want red meat, not bally confectionery.’

  Bobby shuffles next to his oldest friend now, remembering far back to an afternoon when Mrs Kitching squelched half-oranges on a glass squeezer and gave them mugs of juice to carry out to a rug spread in the fig tree’s shade. He sees J J’s baby sister Barbara sleeping in a Moses basket next to them, and the cobra that rises above the plaited cane weaving a figure of eight over her, as he freezes in fear. And J J jumping up and yelling, ‘Mfezi!’ – his mug tumbling away as the snake whips into the grass and is gone.

  Bobby walks behind Hugh thinking, Even then J J was a hero. What made him so different?

  On the evening of the death, eight places are laid at the rosewood table in the dining room. The cook known as Charlie has spent the afternoon polishing the silver. Gleaming cutlery lies next to bone china and the beaded place mats that affirm Shirley’s recent pledge to be Proudly South African. Charlie has arranged a mass of dusky pink bougainvillea in the rose bowl presented to J J Kitching when he retired from South African Breweries. A dinner with all the trappings is his salute to the man he has called Master for forty years.

  At the beginning of the nineties and new political realities, J J asked Charlie to call him Mr Kitching and said that he and the Madam would use his correct name, Mtshali. But it was too late for Shirley, who kept slipping back into ‘Charlie’, and also for the cook whose respect code had been drummed in by a stern mother. Although J J had spoken fluent Zulu from childhood and could greet and enquire about family and the state of the cattle and crops back home, he remained ‘Master’. Affable and generous though he was, J J was always the authority in the big house with the sea view – just as Gilingwe Mtshali is at his village near uMzimkhulu.

  Satisfied with the table setting, Mtshali stalks back into the kitchen. His white jacket and trousers crackle with starch above tennis shoes crisp with freshly applied whitener.

  He thinks: when we were young, people used to call us both kitchen boy, yet we grew into men of dignity. A warrior’s cow-hide shield used at the right angle can deflect words as well as spears.

  Mtshali is the pall-bearer who walks behind Hugh and Bobby.

  Herbie Fredman was the tail gunner in the Liberator crippled by antiaircraft fire on the outskirts of Warsaw, then shot down by a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt near Krakow on 17 August 1944.

  With J J gone, he is the sole survivor of the air crew photographed in front of the open bomb bay at Celone airfield near Foggia on the afternoon before they left. They sit there still in the framed Box Brownie photo on Herbie’s desk. Seven young men in two rows, with combed hair and folded arms, wearing desert khakis: shorts and military shirts with rolled-up sleeves, long socks to below the knees, lace-up leather shoes. All except one are looking at the camera with the nervy determination of men intent on doing a decent job of work in difficult conditions. The exception is Sergeant (Air Gunner) Herbert Fredman standing on the right in the back row, ears sticking out and a boy’s grin under a thicket of dark hair. The three in front are sitting on a bench, one leg cocked over the other knee. The pilot in the centre with the Clark Gable moustache is a year older than the others, flanked on one side by the co-pilot and on the other by the navigator who also aimed the supply drops, Lieutenant J J Kitching.

  Herbie has kept up with him through the years, even though their lives diverged. After his war service, Herbie studied engineering and went into his father’s die-casting business in Pinetown, expanding it into a major supplier of fittings for the building and motor trades. The Fredman mansion juts out of a Kloof hillside and features in books of modern South African architecture. The Fredman sons and daughters are doctors, lawyers – and a poet who trawls the oceans alone in an old yacht, navigating by the sun and the stars. Herbie calls him the Happy Wanderer and has cut him off without a penny to encourage him to come home and join the real world. His mother sends him a discreet monthly allowance.

  Herbie owes his life to J J, who struggled through the hatch of the rear gun turret after a series of violent bangs on a supply run, yelling, ‘We’ve been hit. Pilot’s copped it. Half the crew’s gone. Bale out!’

  ‘Can’t. I’m stuck.’ Herbie was trapped by the jammed buckle of his harness webbing, bug-eyed with terror at the tongues of fire licking from the tail fins.

  ‘Cut yourself out, man. We’ve got to go now.’

  There was a frightening sideways lurch as the plane corkscrewed before righting again. ‘You go,’ Herbie sobbed.

  J J screamed, ‘No!’ and grabbed the harness and wrenched it apart, then heaved him up and rammed him through the hatch, scrabbling after him. There was a howling black void where the wireless operator had sat. Herbie teetered on the edge, too shocked to resist when J J shoved him through, shouting ‘Yee-ha!’ as they plummeted into the Polish night.

  He doesn’t remember pulling the cord, just the heart-stopping jerk when his parachute snapped open. In a book called Captives Courageous he has read and shuddered over Lieutenant John Colman’s account of his escape from a burning plane over Hungary:

  I knew I was going to die. It would be quick, anyway. God, it was hot! … My parachute swung above, big and white and ghostly … I was feeling almost happy. Then I looked up. I hope I shall never again feel such raw fear. Bits of fire leapt about the parachute. The sky was full of flame and spark, darting here, hovering there. It see
med I must soon plunge to earth in a trail of silk ash. God help me. I hung in abject terror.

  That was it. Raw fear. Abject terror. The smells of near-death: searing metal and blood and burning. Then an eerie stillness swaying in sickening arcs through alien dark. They fell into an oblivion of mud, sugar beets and the thud-flash-boommm of their plane exploding nearby. Day broke with a German army patrol aiming rifles at their groggy heads.

  They were jailed, interrogated and separated a week after their arrival at Stalag Luft VII, Bankau bei Kreuzburg. Herbie was bundled into a lorry and taken away to a labour camp. But in the random way of war, he was home months before J J stumbled down the gangplank of the Arundel Castle in Durban harbour. It was only after the psychologists at the Union Defence Force camp in Brighton had judged him able to cope with civilian life that he’d been demobbed. Herbie was there, standing on a quayside bollard next to his father’s black Buick, waving and shouting, ‘Yee-ha!’

  Now he walks beside his comrade in an unfamiliar stone church, remembering the stench of fire and scalding metal and fear. Every morning without fail, after he has mourned his aunts and uncles who’d gone into Auschwitz, he gives silent thanks to J J. Herbie is the third pall-bearer on the right, behind Retief and Sam.

  In the last months of his life, J J Kitching became friends with a philosopher who lived in a concrete culvert. Shoes and war were the catalysts.

  J J could no longer manage the long flight of steps up from the beach. Instead, he took a slow afternoon stroll with his carved tambuti induku along the hilltop road with its views over the Indian Ocean on one side and the Valley of a Thousand Hills on the other. Being able to see so far revived his spirits after the stench of chemotherapy and the busybody clatter of nurses.