Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  ‘We didn’t mean – not you, sir.

  ‘Did you mean the kaffirs? The munts? The coons?’

  ‘No, it’s just – it wasn’t –’

  ‘Were you talking about the lucky Bantu who were allocated their very own Bantustans?’

  The speakers cringe.

  ‘You apartheid remnants make me sick. We’ve let you get away with too much. I will personally make sure that all retrenchment payouts are scrutinised with a magnifying glass.’

  His pew creaks as the CEO leans back in his seat and the woman next to him whispers, ‘Don’t let them get to you, bhuti. They’ve lost, nè?’

  ‘When you rebuke and chasten man for sin, you make his beauty consume away like a moth fretting a garment,’ thunders Reverend George, glaring up at the organ loft.

  Down below in the congregation, a red-faced former major glances sideways at the wife he’d married when she was a pert corporal in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. That’s a fact, he thinks. Her beauty has been consumed. Looks like a blinking tramp. Food dropped down her front. Petticoat hanging out. Hair all over the show. Wouldn’t have brought her today if she hadn’t insisted. Said she wanted to wish J J luck as she waved him goodbye. Said at least there was one decent man left to honour. Getting sarcastic in her old age. Losing her marbles, too. I’ll have to make a plan. Strategise. Manoeuvre her into a home that doesn’t cost too much, and then regroup my forces. Find a reliable batman to do for me. No stickability, women.

  He pats and smoothes his tie, oblivious of its gravy stains.

  Theodora muses, What’s happened to the moths that used to thump against our khaya windows? Those big golden-brown ones with beautiful cream-and-black markings? My embroidery customers often chose moths over butterflies, maybe because they were our companions at night when our time was our own. Us ‘girls’ in the back rooms, sitting on our beds sewing or writing letters on lined pads to our kids back in the reserves (postal orders enclosed). Gazing often at their photos stuck up on our walls, the black-and-white ones with fancy edges sent by our mothers who were looking after our children.

  There seem to be fewer moths these days, though the back rooms are still there, each with a light hanging from the middle of the ceiling and a plug for the kettle to make tea – sometimes even a hot plate to cook on. ‘Staff flats’, the estate agents call them. Have all those servants’ toilets been replaced, the ones with a hole in the floor between two footplates, and a high cistern with a chain and a pull-handle? She can’t conceal a smile at the memory of Madam instructing her on the proper use of a toilet brush and Harpic. Madam had been handier with the toilet brush than she’d expected. She only learnt later that her employer had trained as a nurse in the early days when nursing staff had to scour their patients’ bedpans.

  Looking at her, Theodora thinks, Shame, her hair is thinner on top and her scalp is shining through the stiff curls that never change. She must have been at Salon Jolene this morning for a shampoo and set. Will she go back to her lover now, that Englishman who came every few years, always when Master was out? The one who must have written those airmail letters in the emptied sanitary-pad box under her panties in the chest of drawers.

  Theodora had seen her from the doorway of the bedroom once as she sat with the box on her lap. When she went in saying, ‘Tea’s ready in the lounge, Madam,’ Shirley tried to hide the box behind a cushion. Theodora saw her in a different way after that, as a woman like her with love secrets rather than just an employer.

  In the front pew, Shirley remembers John’s moth-fretted old sweaters which she’d tried to persuade him to put in the charity pile. But he’d clung to them, saying that you must never throw away warm clothing. As well as the burning nightmares, he’d had freezing ones where his feet were in bloody rags, hobbling through snow. Nothing she could say would convince him that it wouldn’t ever happen again.

  He’d lie shivering during hot Durban nights with the curtains barely stirring at the windows, and if she touched him, she’d feel his skin as cold as a dead fish on ice. It wasn’t easy living with a man whose terrors never went away. After Vietnam, they gave it the fancy name Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but she knows it as shell-shock.

  After one of John’s worst attacks when the children were little, his psychiatrist told her what Jean Amery of the French Resistance had written: Those who are tortured remain tortured.

  ‘Yes,’ she’d said, knowing it already.

  ‘The trauma is always there,’ the psychiatrist had gone on. ‘He’ll just have to become more adept at managing it. And time gradually whittles it down.’

  What about her? Would she have to manage it too? For how long? But Shirley hadn’t asked those questions of the doctor-god.

  John had been a good husband to her, and she his loving wife, but there was anger buried in her love. He was always the one everybody noticed and wanted to talk to, the one who made the decisions about what he called ‘the big things’, while she was fobbed off with the trivial ones. He could walk into a party feeling grumpy, having snapped at her in the car for making him get dressed-up and go out, but when people gathered round him he was all smiles. She was used to fading away from knots of admirers to find other ignored women to talk to until he remembered that she was there. At least Durban waiters were efficient at bringing round drinks, so she was spared having to ask for one at the bar to take the edge off her annoyance.

  Now she sits mourning the loss of John, but she also remembers his diminishing of her. Once she’d been somebody, a registered nursing sister, and not a mere handmaiden to a hero.

  Mr Rabindranath Pillay had been one of those Durban waiters, spruce in khaki drill set off by a broad red cummerbund with matching turban, though he wasn’t a Sikh. The beachfront hotel knew the attraction of colonial trappings – lush bamboo palms, slow rotating fans, brass tray tables, staff uniformed like a maharajah’s servants – and handsome, assiduous waiters with ready smiles.

  He wasn’t a waiter for long: he knew the value of savings and had a large family that worked towards a common goal. Twenty years after starting off as a washer of glasses behind the bar, he had succeeded in buying the hotel and now owns a chain of upmarket inns and coastal resorts.

  J J had been one of his earliest suppliers. ‘Best business decision I ever made,’ he often said, ‘backing him when my bosses said they couldn’t by law supply liquor to a non-European hotel owner. “That’s not just any old charra,” I told them, “He’s solid as a rock and more ambitious than Sol Kerzner.” Then I went to Pillay and told him to put in a white manager with a nominal share in the hotel, so they had to go on supplying him. Great guy, Pillay.’

  Their friendship grew over blistering lunchtime curries and tables stained with rings from Rabindranath’s beaded glasses of Coke and J J’s cold Castles. They shared an admiration for Churchill and Gandhi, and talked politics with the enjoyment of men unconstrained by the presence of wives. As Rabindranath prospered and grew more rotund, J J began lecturing him on keeping fit – doing yoga perhaps – and abandoning the Cokes to which he had become addicted.

  J J was waved away by Rabindranath, ‘Suka, John. Yoga is for women and ascetics.’

  Now he sits at J J’s funeral thinking, I’m still here, Kitchen Boy, and I’ll miss you. Where have you gone to, eh? In Nirvana you might be absorbed into Brahman, which could be a terrible shock for a white man.

  Rabindranath ignores the scrawny priest’s voice barking from the altar, and instead considers Shirley, who sits hunched in unbecoming black two pews ahead. White women don’t understand drapery that flatters a woman’s body. The young ones in their short, tight skirts and revealing boob tubes and visible thongs are even worse. No class. No common sense. His granddaughters are schooled in Indian dance, and at Durban Girls’ College and the university, and he encourages their social advancement in the right circles with the help of discreet matchmakers.

  His grandfather may have been an indentured labourer sweating and weeping i
n the cane fields, but after a hundred years of toil, unflinching purpose and careful strategy, the Pillay family bow their heads to no one.

  ‘Every man therefore is but vanity!’

  Reverend George hurtles into the closing verses of Psalm 39 with another accusation, but there are stirrings among the Moths. Several of the old men are wondering if they can last out the service without going for a pee.

  St Ethelbert’s has curious acoustics. From the front-row pew where he sits with the other Moths, Ed Usher has heard the altercation in the organ loft. He remembers how he and J J joined the Torch Commando together, so long ago, and so irrelevant now. He owes his life to J J and Kenneth, who’d kept him going on the Long March from Sagan to Moosburg at the tail end of that last savage German winter, buggered feet and all.

  He also knows J J’s secret, and tries to push the knowledge down into the labyrinth where it belongs. Today his fellow prisoner of war – and victim, he reminds himself – is being honoured as a hero and sportsman. Ed pays his own tribute with the memory of ex-soldiers rallying by torchlight, mobilised by an ideal of brotherhood that didn’t include many of the men who had served beside them.

  He doesn’t know of any black Moths.

  In fighting politicians you think you are winning and

  suddenly you find you have lost.

  – FIELD-MARSHAL LORD MONTGOMERY (‘Monty’)

  In 1952, Ed had stood next to J J in that extraordinary gathering outside the City Hall in Durban. He recalls the swarming beehive excitement of men marching together with a high purpose, pavement crowds of silent watchers, torches with darting tongues of fire, the oily reek of black paraffin smoke.

  The call had gone out to ex-servicemen to fight the Nationalist government’s plan to put coloured people on a separate voters’ roll. In 1948, the Nats had squeaked in with a majority of five because of weighted rural constituencies, ousting General Smuts. Later, when they lost two key seats in the Cape provincial elections to Smuts’s United Party, the Nats blamed the setback on the coloured vote. It made sense to shift the inconvenient Non-Europeans off the common roll. Hardly any of them paid tax, anyway.

  Ex-servicemen like Ed missed their wartime brotherhood in the aftermath of fading public interest. People longed to forget about destruction and death, and wanted to live it up again. The girls he met at parties did the London Jive, but he didn’t know the steps.

  The appeal from the War Veterans’ Torch Commando had come like a trumpet call. Marching men formed rivers of flame through dark streets and gathered in crowds of thousands to listen to speeches by their leaders, men with a mission who felt important and needed again. It was a way to show their patriotism and honour the memory of the general who had brought them through the war, only to be cheated of his parliamentary seat. They had to get rid of the Nats, who’d been pro-Hitler and still seemed so.

  Ed remembers the cheering and whistling when J J was called up to speak from the top of the City Hall steps, under the Torch banners: Natal’s own war hero and rugby Springbok, stern-faced in the spotlights. ‘Kitchen Boy! Kitchen Boy!’

  ‘I’m with you, men!’ he boomed over the loudspeakers. ‘We’ll fight for justice!’ Hearty cheers. ‘We’ll fight for the fellow South Africans who served with us!’ Louder cheers. ‘We’ll fight to win our country back from the Nats!’

  The Torchmen were ecstatic, stamping and yelling their heads off in the muggy Durban night, ignoring the policemen muttering orders in Afrikaans. Already the English-speakers were being weeded out.

  After hours of standing and cheering, Ed went home with battle cries ringing in his ears, the pain in his feet a reminder of the flesh he’d lost under one heel during the Long March. He was a history teacher with some afternoons free, and so he volunteered. Torchmen were told to concentrate their efforts on the 1953 election, working for the United or Labour Party, according to preference. Morale was high. They were at war again. But this time they weren’t on the winning side. The Nationalists got in with a clear majority and began to fine-tune apartheid.

  Ed is an old man now whose hindsight has been perfected. He remembers people saying that the United Party broke the Torch after they lost the election, having no more use for it. But it wasn’t that. They’d lit their firebrands too late. They’d allowed those damned hairybacks to get in when they should have rallied behind the general and supported the black blokes who’d gone Up North with them: the batmen and cooks, the stretcher-bearers and latrine-diggers …

  Ed forgets that he’d hardly noticed the men on the lower decks of the troopships, and those serving in the messes. This new concern of his has been roused by recent newspaper articles exposing the scandalous neglect of black ex-servicemen who’d disappeared into the cities and native reserves when they were demobbed.

  Today in St Ethelbert’s, Stanley Magwaza is their only representative.

  ‘After we’ve loaded it up, then what?’ Nobody wanted to think that far. Chivvied by the guards, they rolled tapestries, swaddled paintings in blankets, bundled small arms and shotguns in layers of embroidered linen.

  · 11 ·

  REVEREND GEORGE HEADS FOR THE PSALM’S FINISHING LINE. ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and hold not your peace at my tears.’

  How long can I hold my peace? Rick is still fuming at being called Kaffir by the oaf sitting next to him. He’s sick and tired of the stupid nickname. Doesn’t the wanker know that journalists are always on the lookout for skinderstories they can blow up into major shit in the newspapers? Coach has drummed into them that Springboks have to be ultra careful. They represent their country at all times, not only when they’re overseas or singing the national anthem on TV before matches with their right fists clenched over their hearts. At all times.

  He personally goes out of his way to toe the line and be friends with the black guys on the team, conscious of his responsibilities as a Springbok. His father Ian was so proud when he made the team. He’d said, ‘Your grandfather would have claimed it’s in the Savidge blood, but I know it’s more than talent. It’s also major effort and training. Well done, man.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad. But it was Grandpa Percy who taught me the secret of success.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘Get the fuckers first, before they get you.’

  ‘I don’t remember him saying that.’

  ‘It was just before he died, when you took me to meet him. He was talking about the Hun and the Jap. I just psych myself up to think of the other team as Huns – specially the All Blacks. Tackled the hell out of them in the Tri-Nations.’

  ‘So you did,’ his father said, adding, ‘It’s all modified warfare.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rick is not given to reflection.

  ‘Sport. Competing to see who’s better. How else would we channel young men’s testosterone? Trouble is, speed and money are becoming addictive and skewing the contests, along with drugs. I hope you aren’t taking any.’

  ‘Me? No chance.’ Rick knows his body is a temple and nourishes it with the high-energy diet prescribed by the Sports Science Institute, filtered tap water, and the occasional Windhoek Light – though never before matches. On top of the training sessions, he goes to gym every day. He’s sorted.

  Ian Savidge thinks: This generation believes so naively in logic. They’ve never had an irrational crisis like war. He remembers his old man’s letters from Up North before he was captured, cheery scribbles decorated in the margins with sketches of camels and pyramids and Egyptian mummies. Grandpa Percy’s sense of humour is one great gift Rick hasn’t inherited. Pity that the boy only knew him as a morose loner who didn’t like anyone touching him.

  Ian has come to St Ethelbert’s to pay tribute to the confident father who marched off to do his duty, rather than the broken man released from a POW camp. He is sitting two pews behind the Moths and studies each of them in turn, wondering how they were damaged by the war. The old guy with crutches is holding papers in a wizened hand like the end of a stick of biltong
. Yet he too must have clumped up a gangplank to board a troopship that steamed out of Durban Harbour, with Perla Siedle Gibson standing on North Pier belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ through her megaphone.

  Percy Savidge had written home that he would never forget the Lady in White singing her boys off to war with the wind whipping her dress and one hand holding onto her hat. ‘She gave us hope all right. What a dame! And here we are sailing up the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal. Look after your dear mother whilst I’m away, Ian boy. Won’t be long. They say it’ll all be over by Christmas. You can bet your boots we’ll have a party then. Love, Dad.’

  There’d been a second letter for his mother that made her cry. But when his father came home after four years, he was someone different: a husk of a man shrunk round a bitter core.

  ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.’ Reverend George gallops up the home straight, reaching the finishing line with a triumphant neigh: ‘Amen!’

  And thank God for that. Bishop Chauncey gives him a nod and waves him back into his place. There will be two eulogies before the lesson, limited to three minutes each. On paper, anyway. In the bishop’s experience, people get carried away, lavishing praise on the dead despite its being too late for them to hear it.

  All glory is fleeting, he reminds himself, smug in the knowledge that he is quoting General George Patton.

  Are you here trying to crawl back into the skin you had before they pushed you through the mincer?

  – J L CARR, A Month in the Country

  Udwayi Dent swore blind that women choose husbands for their ability to father healthy children and provide enough money to support a family in idle comfort. ‘You wouldn’t catch me being the goose expected to lay golden eggs.’