by Jenny Hobbs
‘Well done,’ Kenneth murmurs when they sit down again. ‘People forget the ones who never came back. And the non-heroes like us.’
‘Yesterday’s men,’ Lofty conceded. ‘Though you were a hero, too.’
‘Getting smashed up for something I didn’t do? Come on. I screamed like a baby.’ He looks at the misshapen fingers contracted into his palm. ‘Soon learnt to write using my left hand.’
‘J J always blamed himself for not speaking out.’
‘I know. I blamed him too. Now I think that all those heroics were a cynical boys’ game of win some, lose some. He’d have got a DFC for saving Herbie if there’d been a witness in that burning plane, and a reprimand if the war hadn’t ended when it did. That’s why I’m here, to make it quits. Too late for J J, but not for me.’
He pats the badge pocket of his blazer, which holds a gold coin wrapped in half a sheet of typing paper. It’s been in his safe all these years, a tangible focus for his long-held grudge.
Lofty looks at him sideways, then away again. He doesn’t understand either the words or the gesture, but he can see Naylor is planning something and hopes it’s not revenge.
The congregation is still, the city noise muted by the closed doors of the church. Lofty is reminded of a painting of a royal funeral: shafts of afternoon sunlight from high windows slanting down to a stone floor, the flag-draped coffin, robed priests, banks of flowers, solemn faces, women in hats, old soldiers in tears. Even the candle flames on the altar hold steady, small golden arrows of light pointing upwards.
They’ll remember this for sure, Lofty thinks. Tot siens, J J. Go well.
I went to war for adventure, brass bands and women.
– SAAF navigator in A Country at War,
by JENNIFER CRWYS-WILLIAMS
The roll-call of dead men’s names means little to most of the congregation, though a few are weeping as Lofty sits down.
Maurice’s sister, Audrey Fenton, staunches her tears with a damp hanky. She remembers her brother and Johnny in their last year at school, when she was a fourteen-year-old beginning to look at boys in a new way. Wanting to be grown-up enough to dance with them in a swirling frock to dreamy saxophone music, yet apprehensive of their breaking voices and clumsy maleness and the hot red pimples on their necks. The agile brown-skinned boys she’d envied – running along rooftops, yelling with exultant fear as they plummeted from the struts of the windmill into the reservoir below – had turned into ungainly aliens.
Everyone went to Zululand parties, from grandparents down to the kids who succumbed to sleep, huddled in corners with their nannies. She and Barbara, ignored younger sisters, had hung around sipping orangeade, watching the matric boys glug down beers and boast of games and girls in bursts of raucous hooting. This was better, though, than the sight of parents growing animated over their gins and ginger squares, flirting and gossiping in blue auras of cigarette smoke. Victor would pass out after only a few drinks, when Dot could relax her guard and enjoy herself. And Barbara, as she whispered to Audrey, could stop feeling so ashamed.
It was at one of those parties, towards the end of 1943, that they overheard Johnny say to Maurice at the far end of a veranda, ‘We won’t tell them we’re joining up till we’ve done it, okay? They’ll try to stop us.’
‘No one can stop us. We’ve made it. Watch out, Hitler, here we come!’
Audrey remembers the way the light from a window glistened on the downy hair of Maurice’s cheek as she heard, for the last time, the joyous laugh of a keyed-up boy on his way to adventure.
J J slipped the coin into his trouser pocket and said nothing to anyone, not then or later as they were marched back to the camp. It was a talisman. It could be useful for bartering – maybe save his life. It must stay a secret.
· 14 ·
BEFORE THE SPELL BREAKS AND PEOPLE START LOOKING AROUND, Bishop Chauncey turns his back on the congregation, does a perfunctory bob, and ascends to the altar to mop his forehead, cheeks and neck with the linen cloth. The organ starts burbling ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’, the all purpose musical filler during a hiatus in a service.
Always observant, Purkey nudges Clyde. ‘See that? His Grace is getting hot under the collar. Doesn’t like people stealing his thunder.’
‘In his own church, too.’ Clyde recognises irony even if he can’t name it.
‘Those extra lights for TV generate a lot of heat. Mark my words, this service will be on all the channels tonight. Maybe even the BBC.’
‘You reckon?’
‘It’ll be big news because of what the mayor said. Plus, Mr Kitching was a famous Springbok. He could run like hell on the wing, you know.’
‘It probably wasn’t very fast, compared with today’s Boks.’ Clyde looks across at the pews where the rugby players are sitting. ‘Those guys are fit, man. They train all year round. Gym, weights, sprints, special diets, you name it.’
‘They should be fit. They earn a fortune,’ Purkey grumbles.
‘We should be so lucky, hey, Mr P?’
A woman with wiry grey hair leans out of a pew and whispers, ‘Be quiet.’
Who, me? Clyde mimes, pointing at himself.
‘Both of you. Undertakers should be seen and not heard.’
‘Mortuary executives, lady. Clyde at your service.’ He clicks his heels and sketches a bow.
She peers in distaste at his body piercings and snaps, ‘Just shut up, right?’
As the hymn comes to its poignant coda, the organ wheezes and stops, catching out those who have been humming along. The bishop, his face mopped dry, has moved to the lectern with its large Bible, which he opens at a marked page. ‘Here beginneth the lesson. It’s from the fifteenth chapter of the Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians.’
Purkey mutters, ‘Hell, he’s going to do the whole damn thing.’
‘Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept –’ The bishop lays claim to his church, once more on familiar territory.
How could he become the first-fruits of them that slept? Hugh wonders. It’s a wrong translation from the Greek or Aramaic or whatever the original language was of the epistle. He nudges Neli – her grandfather had known the Bible backwards.
‘Ah, Hugh.’ She leans towards him and whispers, ‘Is this hard for you?’
‘Not really. It’s a relief in a way.’ He whispers close to her ear.
‘For your mother, I’m sure. But you had big issues to sort out.’
‘We were okay at the end. I know you didn’t like him, though.’
‘Not much. Old white men don’t get us, you know?’
‘Us, as in you and me?’
‘Us as in professional black women.’ She covers her mouth with her hand to hide her smile.
‘He was getting used to you,’ Hugh says in automatic defence.
‘Maybe. But your mother isn’t. I think she’s afraid of having coloured grandchildren. Did you tell her we’ve decided against kids?’
‘No. I’m keeping her in suspense.’
He looks sideways down the pew at his mother. Her discomfort with Neli makes him angry, as do all the disapproving expressions on white faces. And black faces too, he has to admit. Eyes follow them in the street. That sister has hooked up with a sugar daddy, they seem to say. As if he’s one of those old white fat cats battening on beautiful young black women who put up with their attentions in return for status and an easy life. But Neli’s the high-flyer, and he’s just a senior lecturer. He wonders why she married a middle-aged academic with a failed marriage and a load of guilt about his years of clashing with his father.
‘Don’t dwell on things, Hugh.’ She digs him with her elbow and turns to face the bishop.
‘But every man in his own order –’
Me and J J had our own order, the Knights of the Sawdust Mountains. Bobby remembers the sawmill at Umfolozi and the great grey heaps of sawdust that grew a new hump every year.
They’d run there along
the dirt road with its grass middelmannetjie oily from the sumps of logging lorries, trailed by the black boys who were foot soldiers to their knights, all of them armed with fighting sticks. You heard the sawmill long before you got there: logs whining against saws in a big open corrugated iron shed where everything was coated in the spraying sawdust – machines, trolleys, overalls, even the eyelashes of the men toiling at the saws and heaving the pine and gum logs around. A warm smell of wood sap and resin blew through the shed, quite different from the nose-tickle of drying wood in the timber yard, where planks were stacked criss-crossed with air spaces in between. Walking between the high stacks was like being dwarfed by skyscrapers.
The sawdust mountains were a vast moonscape of hills and valleys, grey on the surface, but moistly yellow inside. When they dug into it to make forts and caves, the damp sawdust clung to their hands and legs and feet, and couldn’t be brushed away. ‘Don’t go in deep, you hear?’ the sawmill foreman would shout.
He told them horror stories about children suffocated by collapsing sawdust tunnels, but J J said they shouldn’t be scaredy-cats. He was the king, immortal Arthur to Bobby’s Lancelot and the band of boys who taught them how to stick-fight. Whenever they got carried away and started to win, J J shouted ‘Pax’ and they’d compete at long-jumps instead. Or roll downhill, getting more sawdust up their noses and in their ears and bum-cracks. Bobby’s mother would have to pour warm water over him from a paraffin tin in the backyard to wash it off. Their railway cottage didn’t have an inside bathroom, only a long drop and a tin bath.
Those were the days. Girls didn’t understand the joy of getting filthy playing marbles in the dust or rolling down sawdust hills or low-flying on a foefie slide and landing on your bum and laughing off the bruises. Or digging thorns out of your feet, fishing around under the thick skin with a needle, its tip blued in a candle flame. For years, he’d kept his collection of trophy thorns in a matchbox: hooked buffalo- and monkey-thorns and the long straight ones off paperbarks and fever trees. They were from a time when life was simple: eating and playing and picking off scabs and trying not to cry when things hurt, like when his father beat him to chase out the devil.
The worst beating was when J J stole a tin of condensed milk from his mother’s pantry and punched two holes in it and Bobby helped him suck it dry. Reg Brewitt found the evidence under his bed. Unbuckling his leather belt, he slid it through the loops of his black stationmaster’s pants – sssssssssss, like a snake – and said, ‘Stay away from that rich kid.’
‘But he’s my friend,’ Bobby begged, ‘and he’s not rich. The Kitchings have gone down in the world. Everybody says.’
‘Rich compared to the likes of us. Brewitts are workers. We don’t steal. We work.’ He held the buckle in one hand and tested the belt’s length by flicking it against a leg of the iron bed.
‘I didn’t steal the condensed milk. J J took it.’
‘Brewitts don’t tell tales either. Bend over.’
Bobby whimpered, ‘Mr Kitching only hits him when he’s drunk.’
‘What?’ The belt was arrested.
‘Mr Kitching hits him when he’s drunk.’
‘Don’t try that on me, boy. I don’t drink. And you don’t steal.’ Another flick and his father said, ‘Bend over, you little bugger. I’ll beat the devil out of you yet.’
He beat Bobby’s mother too if she transgressed the Brewitt code. Afterwards, she’d crouch in the bedroom until he went on duty, then flee to the only woman who lived nearby, Dot Kitching, who soothed her with sweet tea and calamine lotion to cool the welts on her back.
Soon after Bobby and Petronella were married, she found the matchbox full of thorns in his drawer and asked, ‘What are these things?’
‘Thorns I dug out of my feet when I was a kid.’
‘Thorns? Rubbish, Bobby, man. What are you keeping them for?’
‘Old times’ sake.’
‘You’re so sweet, keeping thorns as momentos.’
‘Sweet isn’t the right word for a man,’ he mumbled.
‘That’s what you are, skat. A nice, sweet man, unlike most. Your pa must have really got rid of your devil, eh?’
Whenever he talked about his father – less and less as the years went by – she’d wrap her arms round him, tightening them until he stopped. ‘Rubbish, Bobby, man,’ is what she always says when he surprises her. The last time she said it was when he gave her a set of leaf-patterned diamanté earrings, necklace and bracelet for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. She’s wearing them today with her new finery, proud to be as well dressed as the Durban ladies who are not sitting in a place of honour like Bobby and her.
He takes her hand and holds it, giving thanks for his great luck.
‘Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the Kingdom to God.’
Bishop Chauncey is in full cry again, the embarrassing eulogies thrust behind him. He knows that his voice projects well in this big stone church – much better than the township priest’s. It’s a shame that St Ethelbert’s is almost empty now during services. He must make the best of this opportunity to showcase its old-Durban ambience to potential congregants and those who have drifted away to suburbs where security gates are shut against the riffraff. But brides like to be married in old churches, and St Ethelbert’s is still in demand for weddings.
Mtshali, dapper in his new suit, sits behind Hugh thinking, I know the end is coming, but not as soon for me as for Master. He used to tell me to exercise like he did – ‘Physical jerks for twenty minutes every morning, Charlie, that’s the ticket’ – but looking after this family for forty years was enough.
Six in the morning till eight-thirty at night, Thursday and Sunday afternoons off, plus one weekend a month, it had been in the early years. Tea tray up to the bedroom at seven. Take the shoes down for Theodora to clean. Put on the porridge. Lay the table. Cook bacon and eggs. Make toast. Breakfast at eight sharp. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Prepare phuthu for nine o’clock, when he and Theodora and the gardener had half an hour for their breakfast, sitting on kitchen chairs in the backyard. Polish the floors. Bake a cake or biscuits. Morning tea at eleven. Clear away and wash dishes. Clean silver. Lay the table. Prepare lunch for one o’clock and serve. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Help Theodora with the servants’ lunch, then off until afternoon tea at four. Clear away and wash dishes. Prepare dinner. Drinks tray on the veranda by six. Lay the table. Serve dinner at seven. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Back to his khaya by eight-thirty if there were no guests, or anything up to midnight if there were. He read his Zulu Bible for a while until sleep overtook him; in later years he bought Bona magazine, Zulu edition. Drum was too modern with its sin, soccer and sex.
You need strong blood and plenty of sleep to work such hours. But he admits that Master paid him well: all of ten pounds a month at the beginning, then thirty rand, rising every year. Plus rations: boys’ meat, unlimited mealie meal, tinned pilchards, onions, fish oil, tomato sauce, brown bread, tea, condensed milk, sugar, Lifebuoy soap, etcetera. He and Theodora were trusted; Madam didn’t lock up the sugar and tea as other madams did, though the cocktail cabinet was a different matter. More than once he had heard her say to friends: ‘It’s not fair to leave drink standing around when you have servants. Too much temptation.’
As if a Mtshali would ever steal.
‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet –’
Herbie Fredman knows from family history and personal experience that death is the destroyer as well as the enemy. The full revelation of the Holocaust after the war left him unable to believe there can be a God, though he goes through the motions: the Friday night family meal always, shul on occasional Saturdays and the seder at Passover. Herbie invests his faith in people and hard work, and makes donations to young entrepreneurs with good business plans. None of them has let him down, though the Happy Wanderer is another matter. He
misses his vagabond son and yearns for him to come home.
For Herbie, neither this big stone church nor the domed shul he attends have any sense of a divine presence. In his opinion, they’re mini-palaces built to awe the gullible. The point is, God didn’t save him from death in a burning plane, J J did.
He looks at the flag-draped coffin and murmurs a last thank you.
Felix (du Plessis) was a wonderful man. Doc Craven always used to say a captain should be able to know his players and get the most out of them.
– HANNES BREWIS, 1949 Springbok fly half, quoted in The Captains by EDWARD GRIFFITHS
J J was twenty-four when he ran onto the field at Newlands with the Springboks for their first test match in eleven years against the All Blacks. Jittery with nerves, sweating buckets, his heart hammering like a compactor, he stood in position before the kick-off trying to blot out the sight of the huge New Zealand forwards doing the haka, their faces contorted with fury, and to ignore the bone-shivering roar of the crowd in the stands.
Doc had instructed them during his pep talk in the changing room to put the hopes of the rugby-starved nation out of their minds. ‘Just play like you’ve trained, manne. Discipline. Teamwork. Focus and concentrate.’
J J tried to focus and concentrate, telling himself he’d been in far worse places. Doc had welded them into a team at Groote Schuur: making them run laps, jink and pass, practise endless lineouts and scrums, even carry each other piggyback down the field to build up their strength. So why had Brewis blundered into the flag post marking the halfway line as they ran out? And why had he stood blinking away the salt sting in his eyes? Because they were men in a blue funk, that’s why. They had survived a world war, but could they win that crucial game?
Afterwards, he thought he might have shat his pants and brought shame on the Springboks forever if the captain hadn’t turned to them all at the end of the haka and given them the calm half-smile of a man who fully trusts his forces. Retief Alberts – the ‘man of steel’, the rugby reporters were calling him – had given them courage just with a look.