Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  After he was chosen for the 1949 Springboks, South African Breweries in Durban offered him a job as a salesman which would give him all the latitude he needed to go on playing for his country. He left university the next day, saying, ‘Thank God for that. I was bloody bored stiff.’

  His boss was a sapper who had joined up at thirty, been taken prisoner at Halfaya Pass, and then spent three-and-a-half years in POW camps in Italy and Germany. He had a nervous tic in his right eye and no time for fools. They stuck together, the war-damaged.

  The cheery hit song that year was ‘I’m looking over a four-leafed clover’. As if everything was all right with the world again. As if.

  The gravel road opened onto a clearing and they faltered to a stop, a line of scarecrows in worn-out uniforms, gaping at the great log chalet. ‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.

  · 5 ·

  BISHOP CHAUNCEY ASCENDS THE STEPS IN FRONT of the high altar, resplendent in a cope of purple brocade set off by billowing sleeves of snowy lawn. He inclines his mitre towards the crucifix and veers to face the congregation, changing course like a galleon in full sail, his jewelled pectoral cross heavy as an anchor on its gold chain.

  By his side, Reverend George does an abrupt rotation, playing up the contrast in his role as the people’s priest. His black cassock is overlaid with a k-sheeting tunic embroidered with Zulu motifs by women parishioners in KwaMashu.

  Two microphones on long stalks dangle above the two priests.

  ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,’ the bishop intones, ‘and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

  Shirley thinks: John stopped believing in God after the war, so where does that leave him? Just plain dead. It’s not fair. This is all wrong. Good people should go to heaven, whatever they believe.

  Hugh is still standing next to the coffin with the other pall-bearers, all of them uncertain what to do next. He wonders if the King James Bible translators had written these Church of England services. While researching Jacobean plays, he’d paged through the Book of Common Prayer and discovered some gems: ‘A Commination or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgments Against Sinners’; ‘Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts’; ‘The Ministration of Baptism to Such as are of Riper Years and Able to Answer for Themselves’. Even a ‘Table to Find Easter-Day from the Present Time Till the Year 2199 Inclusive’. That was looking ahead, for sure.

  Purkey and Clyde have moved up the side aisle on the left like two giant cockroaches – one portly short, one gangly – and are now standing in the shadows, their hands cupped over their flies. Clyde finds it hard to keep still. He clatters his tongue stud against his teeth and his little finger plays with the metal tag of his trouser zip. Purkey wishes he could send him outside, but respectful attendance is crucial to the Digby & Smith superior interment service. The pall-bearers need to sit down now. He catches the eye of the Reverend, who flaps a hand to indicate that they should take their seats. Retief Alberts shuffles to the wheelchair waiting for him at the far end of the Moth pews.

  The bishop frowns at the disturbance, but carries on in his fruity voice, ‘And though after my skin worms destroy this body –’

  Sam tries not to think of the worms lying in wait to feast on his Grampa. They’d gone fishing in a small boat on Durban Bay once with a squirming mass of earthworms in a billycan. Grampa had shown him how to find them in the garden by digging in the damp earth where Charlie watered his mealies behind the khaya. You’d see a bit of pinkish worm trying to wriggle out of sight, then you’d hook your finger under it and pull, like stretching elastic, until it snapped into your hand: clammy-cold and squirting poo as it writhed.

  It was even worse baiting hooks with the boat rocking near the slimy pilings under Maydon Wharf where things lurked in the water. The first time, when he couldn’t keep the worm still, Grampa said, ‘Come on now, boy. Grasp the bloody thing and push the point through one end. Then thread it on from side to side.’ He felt sick when the hook went in and the worm jerked. He looked up and said, ‘I can’t,’ but Grampa barked, ‘Don’t be so wet. It’s just a stupid worm,’ his face all cross.

  Later, when Sam could crucify worms without his fingers trembling, Grampa caught a spotted grunter and showed him how to kill it by slicing crossways with his fishing knife through the spine at the back of its head. ‘Most humane way,’ he said as the fish shivered and died. He then turned it over and cut a long slit up its belly to show Sam how to clean it. ‘Pull out the guts with your fingers, like this. Careful of the gills. They’ve got sharp edges. Look.’ He scrabbled in the slithering mass with a knobbly forefinger. ‘These red arcs are the gills. That pale chunk is the heart, still beating. Do you want it?’

  Sam steeled himself and said yes, then held the small pulsing lump of flesh in his palm, watching until the pulses slowed and stopped. ‘Do hearts live longer than bodies?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Usually they give up first and then you die.’ Grampa was busy packing his fishing bag.

  ‘What is dying, actually?’ Sam wanted to know because a dog he’d loved had died of biliary only a month before.

  The old man gave him a sharp look. ‘Just like going to sleep.’

  ‘But you said some of your friends had a horrible death.’

  ‘That was different. They were fighting a war. If you’re very sick or your body stops working, dying is like –’ He thought for a bit, then said, ‘Like getting out of a bad place. Getting free.’

  Sam looks at his grandfather’s flag-draped coffin in front of the altar, and thinks, Is Grampa free now? Are cemetery worms the same as the ones I used to dig out? How do worms get into coffins and bodies if they don’t have teeth?

  Lin feels him shudder and puts her arm round his shoulders.

  ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.’ The bishop’s hooded eyes trawl the congregation to see who is present. The mayor in one of the raised VIP pews at the back, wearing an orange headwrap that matches the intricate embroidery on her brown shweshwe robe under the mayoral chain. A number of councillors. Rugby representatives. Prominent Durban businessmen. The editors of the Mercury, the Daily News, the Natal Witness and the Sunday Tribune. Knots of journalists and photographers. TV news teams. Two pews of Moths. Quite a turn-out for an old man.

  Reverend George, poised to take over with Psalm 39, worries about the eulogies. At the planning meeting he’d suggested inviting just the mayor, a representative each from SARU and Breweries, and J J’s friend, Mr Pillay.

  ‘We must have one of the Moths too,’ Hugh objected.

  ‘Old men go on too long.’

  ‘They were his comrades in arms.’

  ‘A dying generation. Sadly,’ the Reverend added to appease him.

  ‘A generation that made sacrifices from which we’ve all benefited.’

  ‘Maybe. But –’

  ‘Those men went through hell with Dad. People should hear what they have to say.’

  ‘We don’t have enough time for reminiscences.’

  ‘I’ll make sure the speaker keeps it short.’

  ‘It may mean cutting out someone important.’

  ‘So be it. Being a Moth was important to my father.’

  ‘Very well, then.’ It was a grudging concession.

  Having won the argument, Hugh had to warn Lofty Munn not to talk for longer than three minutes.

  ‘It’s not enough.’

  ‘It’s all you’re allowed. There are other speakers. Please understand.’

  Lofty grumbled, ‘Nobody wants to listen these days. War’s two a penny. But I’ll pin their ears back. Owe it to J J.’

  ‘Three minutes at the most?’

  A bitter smile bared yellowed teeth. ‘Understood.’

  Pint-sized Lofty had lost a leg to gangrene at Campo 47 near Modena. He’ll tell them how it was, for effing sure. He sits at
the aisle end of the second Moth pew, his notes shaking in the hand gripping his crutches as he awaits his cue.

  ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord hath taken away.’ With a flourish, the bishop raises both hands. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’

  Bobby Brewitt sits next to his wife Petronella in the third pew, thinking, The Lord hath taken away, for sure. Can’t believe J J has gone. It seems just like yesterday that we were kids, and here I am, eighty-two in the shade, still alive and kicking.

  He nudges Petronella and whispers, ‘Thanks to you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she mouths back.

  ‘You’ve looked after me. I’m grateful to still be here, girl.’

  ‘Girl!’ she snorts, a cheerful hippo in a floral dress with matching picture hat bought at Milady’s for the important funeral, not wanting to let Bobby down by looking like a boerevrou from the sticks. He’d married her when he started as a porter on the railways. It took them thirty years to work up from a plot to a small banana farm near Port Shepstone, but they got there. Now they have grandchildren going to school with Zulu kids like the ones who used to hang around the back steps of the trading store with nothing to do.

  Bobby couldn’t go to war because of bad eyesight; it seemed terrible at the time, but he was grateful when he saw the problems war sicked up afterwards. J J wasn’t the same when he came home. But he never forgot his old friend, making sure that Bobby got a complimentary ticket for every match he played in Durban, and in later years sending him invitations to the Breweries hospitality suite. Bobby only went once, because he felt out of place in velskoens and a sports coat that had seen better days. It was also hard to get used to J J being so famous.

  He prefers to remember way back to Umfolozi. How his father Reg walked out onto the platform just before noon every day in his stationmaster’s black suit with waistcoat – his Zobo watch on its looped chain – wearing a peaked cap and carrying red and green flags. Soon there’d be a toot-toot among the thorn trees and a steam locomotive came chuffing in, pulling trucks and a guard’s van. The brass pipes were shining, and the engine driver hung his elbow out the window.

  Half the village turned out when the train came, to unload or just stand and watch. The hatches and doors on the trucks clanged open. Boxes and cartons and sacks and farming implements were hustled out. Canvas postbags were dumped from the guard’s van onto the platform. Drums rumbled down gangplanks. People shouted. Dogs barked. On the siding, the last bundles of sugar cane were stamped down into place. A ganger uncoupled empty cane trucks, signalled the driver to shunt forward, then back into the siding, and hitched on the loaded ones. At last Reg Brewitt’s whistle blew and his green flag dropped. There was a jerk and the clamour of couplings as pistons began to move again and the wheels turned and the train chuffed away through the thorn trees back to the main line.

  Men loaded bundles of sugar cane all day during the season, their shoulders padded with sacks as they ran stooping up wooden gangplanks to heave in the bundles. On the far side of the trucks, Bobby and J J and their cohort of Zulu boys swarmed up the iron ladders to steal sticks of cane, then slid down to find a shady place to sit and shave off the thick maroon skin with a shared knife, and bite off chunks to chew and suck. The gravel round the station was littered with chewed sugar-cane fibre.

  They had to watch out for Reg, who knew what boys got up to on trains. He patrolled the trucks, his signal flags rolled round their sticks, and if he caught any of the boys, he’d whack their legs and shout at them to bugger off. Though not if Mrs Kitching was looking. You didn’t swear in front of ladies – a rule that Bobby still obeys.

  But Mr Kitching swore, all right. He was a mean bastard who flicked his riding crop at the men unloading goods from the trucks, shouting, ‘Shesha, man! Get a fucking move on. I haven’t got all bloody day.’ He’d already have had a few beers by then.

  Into the trading store went sacks of mealie meal, stampmielies, peanuts, rice, and government sugar carried on bent backs; cartons of cigarettes, sweets, groceries, and bales of cotton goods piled on wheelbarrows; barrels of diesoline, oil, paraffin and petrol rolled along, hand-overhand, in the hot dust.

  The petrol was for the tall red Pegasus pump that stood in front of the store, its metal jacket padlocked. Sometimes, as a special treat, Bobby and J J were allowed to unlock it and work the handle back and forth, pumping petrol that bubbled up into one of the glass cylinders until it was level with the gallon mark, then letting it run down the thick hose into a car’s petrol tank or a jerry can. There weren’t many cars in those Depression years, just the odd Ford, dusty farm lorries and, once a year, Mr Herald’s Hudson.

  Dot Kitching had been Dorothy Herald, granddaughter of a sugar baron, before she married Victor and he pissed her money away. Her father said that she’d made her bed and now she must lie on it, but he and Mrs Herald would come on Christmas Day bringing pointless presents. Perfume and silk scarves for Dot. Roller skates and party clothes for Johnny and Barbara. And nothing but contempt for Victor, which meant brawling binges into the new year.

  Landela mostly worked the petrol pump: a man whose sweating muscles gleamed like the malt and cod-liver oil your mother gave you in a big spoon. Bobby remembers the fishy cloying sweetness to this very day.

  Reverend George is not used to microphones. His township-hall voice is a thumped tin guitar to the bishop’s clarinet, and his first words are croaked.

  ‘Psalm 39. I said,’ he gives a strangled cough to clear his throat, ‘I said, I will take heed to my ways that I offend not in my tongue.’

  One of the girls sitting behind Sam giggles and whispers just loud enough for him to hear, ‘I didn’t tell you. Marco offended me with his tongue last night.’

  ‘Sis, man, Sharon. You shouldn’t talk like that at a funeral.’

  ‘So? I can still think what I like. Marco reckons he doesn’t go around French-kissing just any chick.’

  ‘Shoosh. Mom’ll get mad.’

  Sam daren’t look around, but he turns his head sideways to hear better. He wonders what’s different about French kissing.

  The whispering starts again. ‘Why did she make us come, anyway?’

  ‘He was her boss, remember.’

  ‘That was a zillion years ago. Before she got married and had us.’

  ‘Plus, he’s famous. Didn’t you see the cameras? Maybe we’ll be on TV news tonight.’

  ‘So that’s why you wore your new mini. You could’ve told me.’

  ‘How was I supposed to sniff?’

  ‘You knew and didn’t say. Typical. You make me sick. I wish I wasn’t your sister. I wish I was Marco’s, then we could French-kiss all we like.’

  ‘Sharon! That’d be incest.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s disgusting. You can go to jail, even.’

  ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘Be quiet, you two!’

  The command from further along the pew ends any more revelations. Sam isn’t sure what incest means. He’ll have to sneak a look at the whisperers when the congregation stands up again.

  Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d.

  – WILLIAM CONGREVE, The Mourning Bride

  Valerie Palmer, J J’s private secretary during his corporate years as Durban manager for SA Breweries, was known to everyone as Palmer the Charmer. Tall, thin, dressed like a model, auburn and ambitious. Valerie’s glossy lips issued orders disguised in compliments. Her high heels rapped an authoritative Morse code down the corridors. Her matching nails clacked on her typewriter keyboard.

  J J called her a company asset, leaving her to organise everything from board meetings, to the distribution of Christmas booty for other executives, to buying presents for his family on their birthdays. Shirley worried the whole time Valerie worked for him that she’d lure him away with her glamour and power over men who went all silly in her presence, snickering and straightening their ties.

  Val
erie did her best to let J J know she was just the woman for him and available. Though tempted, J J had always been wary of predatory women and avoided the bait. She moved on to greener pastures, but her bosses seemed equally loath to dump their dull wives, despite all her efforts at corporate elegance and making vigorous nookie on business trips. In despair by her late thirties, she married a gambler who wanted sons and dumped her after their second daughter’s birth.

  Charmers who succumb to rage when their hopes are dashed don’t age well. Her crêpe de Chine lips pout, her eyebrows are pencilled on, her hair’s too red, her clothes have been bought in covert sorties to inconspicuous shops that stock rich women’s discards. Her glare at J J’s coffin says: I should be the grieving widow here. Me! Not that mousy nobody.

  ‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.

  ‘Hang on, chaps.’ Major Irving stood his ground, gathering the shreds of dignity left to an officer in battledress fit only for a dog’s basket.

  He turned to the SS Hauptsturmführer who had been sauntering behind them. ‘What’s this place?’ The man made an abrupt gesture with his swagger stick. ‘Für die Jagd. Go!’

  · 6 ·

  MULTI-HUED LOZENGES OF REFRACTED LIGHT crawl up the stone columns as the sun moves towards mid-afternoon. Reverend George brays, ‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle while the ungodly is in my sight.’

  Lin remembers her father and other Moths talking in low voices about the ungodly when they had evening meetings in the dining room. She had a hiding place under the yesterday, today and tomorrow bush outside the window, and the sickly smell of the purple and white blooms still makes her think of ugly dark secrets, a Pandora’s box of men’s terrors. She squatted there listening to things that had happened in their war, transfixed by stories of bombings and bloody deaths and grown-up men crying. These were her father’s friends who stood around at braais drinking beers and joking, yet in that room they spilled over with the horror and rage that crawled under the surface of their lives like reptiles. One of them shot himself when she was ten and she heard her father say to Shirley, ‘He never got free of the nightmares, poor sod.’