Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  Now he thinks, That turning away made me complicit. Anna and I led our own lives and chose not to see the wrongdoing. As a man people listened to, I should have spoken out about what was shameful.

  Must I apologise now? Or does age absolve me? His mind is full of such questions as he looks back on his long life.

  ‘Don’t respond, men!’ Major Irving rapped. ‘We stand together.

  This is a trick to shift blame. You don’t have to answer.’

  The harangue went on for hours until a man fainted when the Kommandant fired an order, which the Dolmetscher translated as ‘Dismiss. You are confined to your hut.

  No food. No exercise. You will be questioned one by one. Starting with –’

  · 19 ·

  PEOPLE SIGH AND CHANGE POSITIONS IN THE PEWS. Some lean sideways to whisper to their neighbours. Others yawn or watch the pigeons canoodling in the rafters. Bishop Chauncey’s reading is soporific. When he raises both billowing arms and exhorts, ‘Awake to righteousness, and sin not!’ there is none of the usual rustle of indignant denial.

  Only the rugby men sit upright and eyes-front, doing their duty as sports icons – which doesn’t include having to listen to the words. Sitting in a packed church enduring a lengthy chunk of the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians is a big sacrifice on a Friday when players should be carbo-loading and psyching up for their Saturday match.

  J J’s family and old comrades are listening, though for different reasons. When the bishop declares with ringing scorn, ‘Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die,’ the Moths’ eyes glisten. Nelisiwe shivers. Stanley Magwaza nods his whiskery head as he contemplates his new shoes.

  ‘Thou fool … die,’ Lin hears and, with Bridget looking upset on the other side of Sam, feels herself on the slippery slope towards public tears. Throughout the demanding months of her once-powerful father’s decline, she has made it a point of pride to be the dependable daughter, coping with her work, and with doctors, specialists, lawyers, financial advisers, concerned Moths and J J’s few remaining friends. She has sat at her father’s bedside, listening to his worries about what was to happen to Shirley, reassuring him that she’d handle everything, she’s fine, she knows what to do. Now she just wants to cry.

  To her surprise, Shirley had not gone to pieces at first, but moved into a nursing-sister mode Lin did not recognise, dealing firmly with J J when he tried to avoid his medication or postpone oncology and radiology treatments. ‘It’s no good resisting me, John,’ she’d heard her mother say in a no-nonsense voice. ‘I know what’s best for you. Knuckle down and fight this thing.’

  Shirley had driven him to appointments and treatments, and conspired with Mtshali to serve nutritious light meals, maintaining the whisky ritual in the evenings, which always cheered the old man up. She had only succumbed and asked for hospice help when his pain grew more desperate and he needed round-the-clock nursing. With the hand-over of responsibility her brief rule petered out. She kept saying, ‘I don’t seem to have any oomph left,’ and looked ten years older. She dithered in and out of the bedroom where J J lay, fussing over his pills and drips though she didn’t understand the new drugs. People tiptoed around her offering tea and a footstool, which she rejected, grousing that she wasn’t the invalid. Lin stayed in the house so she wouldn’t be alone with the sister on duty – however kind – and the onset of death.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Hugh had asked Lin one afternoon.

  ‘Hanging in. They both need me now.’

  Close up, her defiant eyes challenged him just as their father’s had done. The two of them were so alike. She should have been the eldest, charged with the derring-do and upholding the honour of the family, while Hugh could have coasted through life as a second child, allowed his space and little eccentricities – like not wanting to go to war – in the wake of the achiever. Yet he hadn’t been a complete disappointment; he’d managed a son to carry on the Kitching name that his grandfather had been so proud of. By the mid-fifties, Victor had the DTs and Granny Dot put him in a mental institution, sold the store, and went home to the Herald estate to end her days in the peace of luxury.

  ‘You can’t go on like this, Lin,’ Hugh insisted.

  ‘It won’t be for long. And there’s no one at home. Only my cat, and he can look after himself.’

  The bleak look on her face was a jarring reminder of the troubles she’d had during her brief marriage. After the divorce, Lin had been so determined to rebuild her life that they took her strength for granted. ‘I’ve got things to do,’ she’d say, rejecting sympathy and hiding her scars as J J had.

  Hugh pulled her into a hug. ‘Tell me what I can do.’

  ‘Just take over on occasional nights so I can go home to the flat and spend time with Impaka.’ The name meant witch’s cat – he was black and crabby and as self-sufficient as she was.

  ‘A well-named beast,’ he said. ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘We need to let Dad go, and help Mum to get sorted out,’ she’d mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I don’t know how she’ll cope. She seems so distracted and cross, as though she’s blaming him for abandoning her. As if he can help it.’

  At the funeral now, Lin remembers one of J J’s last days when he’d managed a hoarse whisper, ‘I’m dying, aren’t I?’ She’d answered, ‘Yes. But I’m here. So are Hugh and Mum. We all love you.’ It had given her a chance to tell him what a good father he’d been, and to thank him before he slipped away.

  Had he been a good father? To me, mostly, she thinks. Though Hugh’s right about his high expectations. We both let him define us: Hugh by rebelling and me by idolising him … The bishop’s voice and the murmuring congregation fade as Lin faces the truth she’s been avoiding: My relationships have failed because I chose men like Dad who were used to being worshipped and hiding their secrets. I’ve admired the wrong qualities in him, not appreciated enough the solid core. Poor Dad. His worst nightmares came back when he was dying, Mum said. He looked terrible at the end. Poor both of them. Poor deluded me.

  She begins to weep.

  Sam tugs her hand. ‘Lin? Please don’t cry.’

  She hasn’t cried in years. Now she says, ‘I can’t help it,’ and gropes for the tissues she keeps in her camera bag, but she’s left it at home.

  ‘Here.’ Sam passes a smelly paper serviette that must have been in his pocket for weeks.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Dabbing doesn’t stop the tears. Neither does Shirley who grabs her other arm and hisses, ‘Stop this! Everybody’s watching.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Lin bends her head.

  ‘You’ve got to stop. You know that Dad would have wanted us to keep up appearances.’

  ‘But he’s gone now,’ Lin sobs.

  ‘If I can control myself so can you, for God’s sake.’ Shirley swings round to the next pew. ‘Theodora, can you stop her?’

  There is a creak as Theodora kneels behind Lin and she feels a familiar embrace. ‘Thula, Linnie. Thula, now.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s all too much.’

  ‘Thula, my Linnie. Just hold your tears, darling.’

  It’s the reassuring voice of her childhood, but Lin can’t stop weeping. Heads turn towards them. Shirley is frantic with embarrassment at being the target of so many eyes.

  Including the bishop’s. He sharpens his voice to read, ‘All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts –’

  Sounds like a place of slaughter, Theodora thinks. That full-of-himself bishop is making the service longer to show off his church. Reverend George will have plenty to say about this in KwaMashu.

  Bending over, she gets up and tiptoes round to the front pew where she crouches in front of Lin and holds her hands, trying to quieten her.

  ‘Take her into the vestry.’ Shirley’s face is bright red.

  This is no time to be annoyed by the peremptory order. ‘Okay. Where is it?’

  ‘Ask those awful men.’ Sh
irley flaps her fingers towards Purkey and Clyde in the side aisle.

  Theodora says, ‘Do you want to go out, Linnie?’

  ‘No. Yes. Oh no, I can’t –’

  ‘Just go! You’re ruining the service,’ Shirley insists.

  Lin gives in and allows herself to be helped towards the shelter of the nearest stone column. The bishop stops reading and glowers at them as his voice echoes away into the rafters: ‘– and another of birds – irds – irds – irds –’

  ‘I’m coming too.’ Sam tries to follow them.

  His grandmother clamps a restraining hand on his arm and says in a loud voice, ‘Don’t you dare desert me too. Sit down.’

  Press cameras focus on the boy’s attempt to escape. ‘Hero’s widow says “No can do!”’ is the caption under the Daily News photograph on the front page the next day, taken from a position to the right of the altar. It focuses on the tug-of-war next to the flag-draped coffin in a wide-angle shot of the packed church showing the congregation – though not the bishop.

  Sam is pulled back into his seat. Theodora mimes a silent query at Purkey, who wobbles his chins towards an arched doorway. ‘You can take her through there, ousie.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ If looks could kill he’d have been charcoal.

  ‘Pleasure,’ says Purkey, impervious.

  The bishop clears his throat to regain attention and resumes, ‘There is also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial, but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’

  Are also celestial bodies, surely? Hugh thinks. Dad would have growled, ‘It’s all bull,’ by now. I wish he was still here. Alive, I mean. He looks away from the coffin, blinking to spare his mother the further shame of a son’s tears.

  She has been bristly with him since he said that war isn’t kosher any more. Yesterday she had brought it up again, accusing him of denigrating his father before he was even cold in his grave.

  ‘I wasn’t attacking him. All I meant was that there are better ways to resolve differences than going to war,’ he tried to explain.

  ‘Don’t you lecture me.’

  ‘Can it, bro,’ Lin said. ‘You old lefties never know when to stop.’

  But Shirley raged on. ‘How can you hold forth about war when you know nothing about it? Dad and I put up with your student nonsense and your run-ins with the security police and going to jail, but you’ve never shown any respect for what he did. Those boys joined up straight out of school to save civilisation.’

  ‘Western civilisation.’

  ‘All civilisation. Don’t split hairs.’

  ‘Okay then, all. But I really did respect him. Very much.’

  ‘You’ve got a funny way of showing it.’

  ‘I just –’ But he stifled the riposte and said, ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  Hugh bore all the stigmata of white suburban life until his student years, when reality kicked in and he joined an underground group to wage a just war against the Nationalists. The student cell organised furious meetings and distributed banned pamphlets, but stopped short of actual sabotage. They were arrested for being in possession of seditious literature and sentenced to a month’s detention, though without being tortured which would have provided him with proof of courage to impress the old man. Nothing else seemed to.

  In the past few months, watching him pass on his legacy of war memories to Sam as the cancer spread, Hugh has at last conceded that his father also fought a just war. During his long rebellion against J J’s dogma, he had been too intent on their differences to acknowledge how alike they were.

  ‘I loved Dad. We made our peace, okay?’ he’d said, but Shirley was unmollified. In the days since J J’s death she has changed from the compliant wife and mother they’d always known. Hugh sits wondering if widows are always this angry?

  Purkey murmurs to Clyde, ‘I wouldn’t call terrestrial bodies glorious. It’s obvious he’s never worked with cadavers.’

  Clyde isn’t listening. He’s watching the undulations of Theodora’s buttocks as she helps Lin into the vestry.

  In the voice of every man (and shortly this would be women too) who has fought in any war, or been near one, there is always that tone of regret for intense experiences. We are sensation junkies, predisposed to excitement, and if that means danger and death, we are ready for it. Every generation has been talked into war by the nostalgic voices of the one before.

  – DORIS LESSING, Under My Skin

  When Herbie Fredman first read Lessing’s words, he’d thought they were nonsense. Regret for intense experiences? He’s no sensation junkie, he’s an obedient son who worked hard at school and most of the time followed the rituals of his faith. Ready for death? Hell, if he had thought that going to war would include wiping out in a burning aircraft and labour camp, he would never have joined up. Never.

  You didn’t consider the details or the consequences when you were a schoolboy longing to be a man doing noble deeds. When your mates talked about thrilling adventures flying planes and driving tanks, scanning the sea with binoculars on a greyhound destroyer and gliding through the deeps in submarines, you joined the chorus of ‘Oh boy, let’s go!’ and marched off to fight for freedom and right.

  After he put Lessing’s book down and thought about it a bit more, he had to admit that boys were predisposed to excitement. He remembered the adrenaline rush of looping through thunderhead canyons in the sky, the glorious ratatatat of machine guns on the range, the elation of hitting the bull’s-eye. He remembered the very day the photograph on his desk was taken, standing arms folded with his first (and last) air crew in front of their Liberator, grinning from ear to ear, nineteen years old and proud as punch to be serving his country.

  But after he had been shot down and spent eight months clearing charred, dismembered, rotting bodies and rubble in bombed German cities, then learnt about Hitler’s final solution for the Jews, he wondered how they could all have been so bloody dumb. War was horror, not adventure. He had indoctrinated his sons against it, but only the Happy Wanderer took the caution to its extreme. He’d said, ‘Civilisation sucks so I’m opting right out, Dad. You’ll understand.’

  That’s my regret, he thinks, looking along the row of Moth faces in his pew. I warned that boy of ours too damn effectively.

  J J looked at the Kommandant. The man had a cruel beak like the spread-winged eagle on his belt buckle that had its claws on a swastika and the motto ‘Gott Mit Uns’ in a semicircle over its head. He raked the prisoners’ faces as if trying to gouge out the truth, settling on a haughty expression he recognised from his mirror when he checked the set of his cap in the mornings.

  ‘That one,’ he pointed.

  · 20 ·

  BISHOP CHAUNCEY FORGES ON AFTER THE ANNOYING skirmish in the pews: ‘There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars –’

  That’s too beautiful, thinks Petronella. Like the Mantovani LP from Bobby, which she still plays on the radiogram that was their first luxury. She listens with a rapt expression that spurs the bishop on. But he has lost Reverend George, who spots an escape route in the exodus of Theodora and Lin. Giving the bishop a cursory bob to excuse himself, he ignores the answering frown and goes after them to the vestry.

  By now, many in the congregation are watching the pigeons’ shenanigans and fanning themselves with the Order of Service. Newspaper editors itch to get back to their newsrooms. Women in flimsy sandals rub stone-chilled feet against their calves. The Breweries director hopes that the service won’t drag on too much longer or he’ll miss the early evening flight to Joburg. Other businessmen sit hoping the opposite: that the service ends late enough for them to justify slipping off to their clubs or pubs instead of returning to the office.

  The rugby players togged up in blazers and ties itch in the heat. What did the dead old man do that was so amazing? Rugby then was for amateurs and the war he fought in is too remote for them to imagine. Look at those feeble old far
ts sitting in the two front pews on the other side, some of them dabbing at eyes that haven’t stopped watering since the old spaz read out all the names. You couldn’t imagine them climbing a step, let alone a ladder, up to a fighter plane and then flying it. Or even firing a water pistol.

  Rick Savidge’s teammate nudges him and jerks his head at the Moths. ‘Check the cry-babies, Kaffir.’ He gets such a withering look that he stops grinning and says, ‘What?’

  ‘I told you not to call me that. Fuck off.’

  The furious whisper reaches the Springbok captain who leans forward and skewers Rick with a frown that promises trouble. The team code does not allow swearing in public off the field, and most definitely not in church. This could mean he’s out of the squad. The stupid bastard next to him could have screwed his chances for good. Rick closes his eyes and prays harder than he has ever done in his life – not to God, but for the dead Springbok to intercede for him. J J Kitching would have recognised good intentions, he feels certain.

  From across the aisle Ian Savidge notices his son’s fervent expression, and thinks, His creed seems to be that you can stay fit forever as long as you have a healthy lifestyle and exercise according to scientific principles. They believe they’re immortal at that age, just like the old Moths must have. Still, Kitchen Boy had a good innings. Eighty-one and now praised to the skies at a funeral service covered by TV news cameras. J J wasn’t as lacerated by that war as my poor dad was.

  Ian’s eyes roam to the front pew where Shirley still clutches Sam’s arm. The rest of the family sit in the same pew with Hugh at the end – his young black wife looking a corker in her smart jacket and her hair in a bob. How did such an ordinary-looking guy land that beauty?