Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  And they won. Okey Geffin scored five penalty goals with the accuracy he had honed day after day on the ruthless gravel of his Polish prisoner-of-war camp. After the series, J J went home a double hero.

  During their return to camp he didn’t join in the hilarity of being alive, or respond to a teasing, ‘Cat got your tongue, J J?’ Secrets have their own constraints. He didn’t feel guilty about the coin in his pocket so much as cagey. It was nobody else’s business.

  · 15 ·

  THERE IS A SUDDEN LOUD BANGING ON THE MAIN church doors and men’s muffled voices calling, ‘Let us in!’ and ‘We want to be in there too!’ Heads in the congregation swivel. The usher scurries to the doors and slams a heavy sliding bar across to lock them – a reflex action going back to times when castles were besieged.

  The bishop stops reading and looks up from the lectern. ‘What is going on out there?’

  Above even louder banging, the usher calls back, ‘Don’t know, Your Grace.’

  ‘Stand guard, then,’ the bishop blusters, unsure what else to say.

  The mayor is never unsure. She rises and moves to the end of the VIP pew, ready to take control of the situation. Flashes glitter in the side aisles again as photographers hurry towards the disturbance. There is uneasy shuffling and shifting as people look around for emergency exits. The Sharks captain unwedges himself, stands up and edges past a row of burly knees.

  The mayor heads for the arched doorway, calling in a powerful voice, ‘Ubani? Who is that?’

  More banging and voices calling.

  ‘I am Mayor Thembi. Identify yourselves!’ Her command reverberates round the hushed church like the boom of the British cannons used against her people during the Zulu wars, then two decades later against the recalcitrant Boers.

  The banging stops. Everyone in this city knows Mayor Thembi. People flock to her imbizos in the townships. Her face is in the newspapers almost daily. Women feel free to stop her in the street, asking for help and advice; men are polite and careful not to cross her.

  A single angry voice shouts above the din, ‘We are war veterans. Let us in.’

  Murmurs sprout among the congregation like noxious weeds. Unrest. Uprising. It’s a riot. MK. Are they armed? Still digging up AK47s. Old arms caches. Coming over the borders too. Hundreds. Thousands. You can buy them in any township. Toyi-toying in the streets. Land grabs. Mugabe. Xenophobia. Now it begins. Knew it would happen here. Inevitable. I thought MK were disbanded. What’s going on? Where are the bloody police when you need them?

  The mayor surges towards the barred doors, demanding, ‘Why are you making all this noise?’ and orders the usher, ‘Open, please.’

  He calls out, ‘Should I, Your Grace?’

  ‘I am asking here. You will open.’

  ‘But is it safe?’ He adds, ‘Will you be safe, madam?’

  ‘I am not your madam. And nobody touches Mayor Thembi.’

  ‘Force majeure,’ someone mutters.

  The usher slides the locking bar back into its cuffs, pulls open the heavy doors, and Mayor Thembi stalks through. On the stone platform outside is a group of men who seem unlikely shouters and bangers, more like platteland farmers who meet at the pub for beers to grumble over drought losses and no more Land Bank loans. They wear tracksuits or khaki shorts, and shirts with blue or green pockets; some are on crutches; one has double hooks instead of hands.

  The mayor surveys them. ‘Who speaks for you?’

  ‘Darius Groth.’ He has a naartjie-peel nose, and stands out among the crowd in a faded camouflage jacket the colours of gum tree bark; his boep hangs over his belt and his belligerent boots are firmly planted. ‘You know the name?’

  A troublemaker: an ex-recce captain from the war in Angola who broadcasts bitter public complaints about disability pensions. He has been known to chain himself to the railings outside Parliament in Cape Town and the Union Buildings in Pretoria in his campaign against the ANC government’s favouring of struggle veterans. She says, ‘Yes, I know you. But now is not the time for talking.’

  ‘Now is the time. We have come to demand –’

  ‘Demand? This is a funeral service.’

  ‘So, what did this Kitching do that we haven’t done for our country? He volunteered. We were conscripted! Forced into the army. Forced to fight. We had no choice.’ His voice gets angrier as the others mutter agreement. ‘We want the same respect.’

  ‘Now is not the time,’ she repeats. ‘Come and see me in my office on Monday. There we can talk about your grievances. Not here.’

  ‘Right here, right now. We demand –’

  ‘Monday, okay? I promise I’ll help you.’

  ‘The hell you will.’ Rage suffuses his face. The men nudge each other, stirring up resentment. The televised funeral of a white war hero is an ideal opportunity for them to put their case to a national audience.

  Summing up the situation, the mayor says, ‘Everybody knows that Mayor Thembi is very, very serious about her promises.’

  ‘Ja, right.’ Groth half-turns to face the bank of cameras. ‘It’s enough now! We’re treated like scum. We want justice. We want compensation for Angola. Also, the names of our dead on war memorials and in the Peace Park.’

  She needs to deal with the disruption before it escalates and delays the service even further. She says, ‘Okay, Darius. Come inside then. Only you.’

  ‘All of us.’

  ‘There are not enough seats.’

  ‘All. We’re tired of being invisible. We are ready again for war.’

  The mayor’s eyes move over the middle-aged men fidgeting behind him. Their expressions range from defiant to sheepish. She says, ‘War?’

  ‘You better believe it. There’s plenty more of us. We can raise commandos. We’ll raid the armouries. We were trained to fight dirty in the border war.’ He has taken her irony for doubt.

  She hears the whirr-click of zoom lenses and the picketa-picketa-picketa of cameras on autodrive. If she doesn’t resolve the situation soon, there’ll be unwelcome headlines tomorrow. Bad publicity for eThekwini.

  She says, ‘Eugène Terre’Blanche made threats like that.’

  ‘We’re not AWB. We fought for our country. We can fight again.’

  ‘Nobody wants a fight. You heard my invitation: come and join in the service as their leader, then I’ll meet you and these men on Monday.’

  ‘No ways. We stand together.’ He plants his boots far apart.

  ‘That’s the deal. And no more nonsense. When I go back inside with the press, the doors will not be opened again.’

  ‘Journalists stay with the real news,’ he scoffs.

  ‘And the real news is inside this church today. I urge you in the spirit of ubuntu to come and join us. Okay? Take it or leave it.’ There are noises in the church doorway and she turns to find it crowded with rugby players, all of them much younger than the veterans and ready for action after sitting for over an hour squashed in their pews. ‘You guys!’ she thunders, pointing a stern finger. ‘Go back. I don’t want any more trouble.’

  ‘Okay, ma’am,’ the Sharks captain says. ‘We just thought –’

  ‘Go back. Go back. The service must carry on.’ Ignoring the offending ‘ma’am’, the mayor herds the rugby players inside. As she disappears through the doorway, she calls over her shoulder, ‘Are you coming, Darius?’

  ‘No. We’ll stay here on the steps and talk to TV and the newspapers.’ The beard parts in a sneer. ‘Stalemate, Mayor Thembi.’

  ‘Your choice.’

  She plunges into the church, followed by the cameras and journalists who are familiar with Groth’s ravings, and the great doors close behind them. The hayi khona speech is today’s hot news and they’re hoping for more.

  The young manhood of South Africa has rallied magnificently to the defence of the country, which faces the future today with a steady confidence in its national preparedness.

  – Rand Daily Mail, January 1940

  Stanley Magwaza
was one of the 80 000 Non-European personnel who joined up, inspired by the red, yellow and blue posters showing men and women striding out in smart khaki uniforms, with slogans that read: ‘MEN ARE WANTED for all UNITS of the UNION DEFENCE FORCE. JOIN UP NOW!’ and ‘MANPOWER for VICTORY. The SA AIR FORCE NEEDS YOU.’ The man with a Red Cross armband carrying a stretcher on the SA Medical Corps poster looked black against the background of planes trapped in searchlights and starbursts of ack-ack.

  But the posters didn’t mean that black men like him would be among the confident striders. He and a company of hoodwinked volunteers were loaded into the bowels of a troopship that steamed via Mogadishu to Alexandria, to assist mechanics servicing army vehicles in the desert. They were not allowed to carry arms. Their battles were with flies, sand, camel meat, hard biscuits with weevils, and the brackish drinking water that gave everyone gyppo guts. The engines he slaved over and under had seized up in the heat. When his overall got so caked with oil and sweat that it could stand up on its own, he siphoned petrol into his tin helmet to help scrub the worst of it off.

  The Libyan Desert was torment after the Drakensberg foothills where he and his brothers had herded cattle and played in streams running through grass bent double with morning dew. He had not known that there could be such different places in the world; such an impersonal war with faceless enemies, where young men who had volunteered to fight for their country were treated like serfs and didn’t qualify for a Cairo pass.

  The iron that entered his soul was the hot metal of clanking tanks and army lorries, and the poker face of a disdainful sergeant. Stanley tried to escape by volunteering as a stretcher-bearer at El Alamein to experience battle at the front, not the back. But it was a worse hell: desert with chaos, clamour and death.

  The wagons they’d loaded didn’t appear at the camp, but two days later a black sedan arrived with two men in the back: a Gestapo officer and a civilian in a dark suit. Major Irving murmured, ‘General alert. Pass the word around. That one’s Kripo. Kriminale Polizei. Evil buggers who do all the dirty work. Something’s up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An escape?’

  ‘Or they’ve heard about the looting.’

  ‘So the Kommandant’s for the high jump.’

  · 16 ·

  THE MAYOR HAS SWEPT BACK TO THE VIP pew and the congregation settles down again, though there is a frisson of heightened alert in the church. Newspaper editors have their heads down thumbing SMS messages on muted cellphones. The politicians look grave and thoughtful, as if debating the advantages of being at a funeral that has become a magnet for aggrieved voters.

  Purkey and Clyde have remained at their post in the side aisle, keeping an eye on the flag-draped coffin on its wheeled trolley. When the church doors opened on the shouting men, Purkey muttered, ‘If they come storming in we must rush the casket into the vestry,’ but to Clyde’s disappointment that hadn’t happened. Resigned to more boredom, he stands clinking his tongue stud against his teeth.

  He’ll drive me mad, Purkey broods. But where do you find trainees today who’ll take on cadavers? Old Kitching here was a tough customer to lay out: strong bones and an athlete’s muscles, even though they were wasted. I saw him on a history newsreel once – the famous Kitchen Boy sending it down the field on one of the Springboks’ glory days in the fifties, legs pumping, ball under his arm, handing off tacklers and grinning as he dived for the try line. Who would’ve believed that in the new glory days it would be Springboks of all colours scoring those tries, with the whole nation cheering them on? But most youngsters want to go to college now. Instead of a willing apprentice I can teach, I get this dingbat with studs in his tongue and ears. Christ. He’ll drive me mad.

  Purkey nudges Clyde. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Playing with that thing.’

  ‘Studs are supposed to be played with. Girls love ’em.’ There are spit bubbles at the corners of his mouth. He has a slug’s pallor too.

  ‘This is a funeral service. Keep it still. Study to be quiet, and to do your own business. First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians.’

  ‘Bo-ring.’ But Clyde stops clinking and edges from behind the stone column to check the congregation for talent.

  Two girls are sitting next to a woman who must be their mother in the pew behind the family. As he moves, their heads swivel towards the copper glints from the little horns sticking out the top of his ears. He slides his tongue behind slightly parted lips to expose the stud and gives them the eye. One returns a heavy-lidded half-smile that says, You’re okayyyy, dude, and he thinks, Yeah, dynamite. Then the other girl gives her a jab and they both look away.

  ‘Nauseating,’ the grey-haired woman whispers from the next pew.

  ‘But it works, ouma. I’m a chick magnet.’ He gives her a teasing leer.

  ‘Thank God I’m not a gel any more,’ she says with a shudder.

  With the congregation re-seated, the bishop picks up the lesson where he’d stopped. ‘And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?’

  Sam has been daydreaming, but that sentence catches his attention. It’s like what Grampa said about the re-supply missions to Warsaw. They’d been sitting on the window seat of his and Gran’s bedroom where he spent a lot of time before the end, gazing out over the sea.

  Grampa had been talking about how he loved flying, then he stopped before saying in a different voice, ‘Loved wasn’t true after we started the missions. It was bloody terrifying. I wanted to run back home every time we climbed into our Lib at Celone airfield.’

  ‘But you’re a hero.’

  ‘That means nothing. Nothing!’ The old man glared at him. ‘We were scared shitless. Never knew if we’d get as far as Poland, let alone make it back. From the time we crossed the coastline of Yugoslavia there’d be at least twelve hours of zigzag flying through darkness and smoke.

  Flames roaring up from fangs of bombed buildings. Flak clattering on the fuselage. Messerschmitts howling out of nowhere, especially near Krakow where the Luftwaffe trained night-fighter pilots. Squadron OC called the flying conditions “extreme jeopardy”, meaning we were flying through hell.’

  There was a silence when Sam didn’t know what to say because Grampa looked awful. He knew that the old man was very sick, but that day for the first time he realised that he was dying. Sam thought, He can’t! though it came out as, ‘But I thought Liberators were bombers. You should have had bombs.’

  ‘No room. We were carrying arms and ammo and supplies to the Polish partisans fighting the Germans who held Warsaw. Libs had the range, but it was such a long flight that it needed extra fuel tanks. Even then there was only ten per cent reserve instead of the usual twenty-five.’

  ‘And you had just a tail gunner to defend you.’

  ‘Right. Bloody nearly defenceless. We were getting slaughtered like the Poles. Everyone in the squadron ate in the same mess. There were more and more gaps. It got so you didn’t want to go to meals in case you saw that another friend had copped it. Or a chap from a nearby hut. Or even someone whose face you knew because you’d stood next to him once.’

  His saggy lower eyelids had filled with tears, and Sam knew that a spillover would halt the story. So he cut in fast with, ‘How did you drop the supplies?’

  The old man knuckled his eyes. ‘God, you’re persistent.’

  ‘I just want to know, Grampa. You promised to tell me.’ Sam looked at him with the expression that always worked with his mother: accusation with a tinge of sadness.

  ‘So I did. Someone’s got to know these things. Ancient history to most people now.’ He cleared his rattling throat and went on. ‘Okay. Ground crew packed everything in metal cylinders that fitted into round canisters about six foot long, strapped into canvas covers with fixed parachutes. We stowed ’em in the bomb racks, twelve at a time. You had to fly low and slow for the drop at the target area, down to a hundred and fifty feet. The bomb doors folded out like wings to either side. We clipped our har
nesses to safety stanchions while we rolled out the canisters.’

  ‘Through an open hole?’ A gasp. Sam is afraid of heights.

  ‘Sure. And we had to do it true and fast so the parachutes deployed without their shroud lines getting snapped. After the drop, the pilot opened the throttles to get out chop-chop before the anti-aircraft guns and Messerschmitts nailed us.’ His bony hands were clenched in his lap.

  ‘And then you did get nailed.’

  This was well-known family history and the old man slid over the facts in a few staccato sentences. ‘Yes. Between Krakow and Tarnow. Second flight in three days. Half the tail blown off. Co-pilot ordered us all out. I grabbed the tail gunner and we jumped. Landed in a beet field. Wehrmacht patrol found us lying there. First stop: Stalag Luft VII at Bankau bei Kreuzburg.’ He sucked in his breath. ‘I couldn’t believe it. In the bag after three weeks of war.’

  ‘And there you sat,’ Sam finished for him.

  ‘And there we sat for five bloody months. Freezing cold. Hacking coughs. Boils. Crawling with lice and fleas and bedbugs. Dysentery that had us crapping rivers of green shit. No hot water so we stank like camels’ crotches.’

  Sam had never been close enough to a camel to tell how bad that was, though he’d once been hit by a stink bomb made with rotten eggs. He has learnt to shield his mother from the knowledge that he is being bullied at school, explaining the smell on his blazer by saying he’d dropped it into a school toilet.

  Grampa went on, ‘We were furious about being sidelined. Fed up with the activities to keep us busy. Choirs. Chess. Bridge. Amateur dramatics with men playing girls’ parts. PT. Lectures. Yawn. For light relief, the hut commanders set us make-work.’

  ‘What does that mean?’