Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  b. Description of arms and equipment.

  c. Transport – giving description of, quantities and condition, etc.

  d. Names of senior officers.

  e. The numbers of troops and the types.

  f. Names of places, commands, FDLs.

  g. Morale.

  h. The fact that you can speak or understand the enemy’s language.

  i. Types of armament, and quantity of aircraft.

  j. Landing grounds, and where situated.

  k. Roads, and condition thereof.

  l. Petrol storages and dumps.

  m. All depots for food, spares, etc.

  n. Number of our casualties.

  o. Number of casualties suffered by the enemy, and the number of prisoners taken by us.

  p. Bridges and the conditions thereof.

  q. Food and liquors, prices, etc.

  r. Broadcasts.

  s. Politics.

  t. Don’t be clever in giving false information.

  u. Conditions under which you have been living.

  · 26 ·

  THE AFTERNOON MYNAH-SQUABBLE IS ALMOST as deafening as the traffic noise when the pall-bearers walk under the arched doorway of St Ethelbert’s, guiding J J onto the platform at the top of the steps. Bishop Chauncey has moved to one side and stands gazing across the city like an emperor surveying his dominions. Passers-by stop and stare at him and the flag-draped coffin and the emerging congregation. Older men hold their hats over their chests. Faces are pressed to bus and taxi windows. Picketa-picketa-picketa go the press cameras. The province now known as KwaZulu-Natal has always been impressed by pomp and ceremony.

  It’s a brief though gratifying moment for the bishop. The burial with family and friends will be free, thank God, of Reverend George who has hurried off to prepare for a township night vigil. What makes people like him so damn pleased with themselves? wonders the bishop. We all try to do good in our own way; some just broadcast it less. Maybe that’s a mistake. The diocese should think of hiring a PR person.

  The TV crews have set up their tripods to one side of the steps, ready to zoom in on well-known faces.

  After the family, the first to sweep through the door is the mayor, who pauses at the top of the steps to accommodate the surge of waiting journalists. The editors have summoned their shock troops.

  ‘Madam Mayor! Can you give us a statement for the record?’

  ‘Are you planning a new political party?’

  ‘Madam Mayor! Do you –’

  She cuts in, ‘I’m always telling you people it’s Mayor Thembi. I’m no madam.’

  They laugh as they always do and go on. ‘What did you imply by saying, We will have no time for tsotsis?’

  ‘Was this a spur-of-the-moment idea or was it planned?’

  ‘Inspired, rather.’ She addresses the snout of the e.tv camera. ‘I was inspired by this very hero. Where are our heroes today? Who can we look up to now that Madiba and Tutu have grown old? We need to start a new struggle against violence and corruption. We must say Hayi khona! to criminals.’ She pauses, conscious that sound bites have maximum impact and the Sunday papers maximum readership. ‘I’ll make a full statement tomorrow morning, ten sharp, in the press room at the municipal offices. Thank you.’

  The clamour round the mayor and people chatting in groups on the steps have been a godsend for Purkey. He is able to inspan Hugh as well as Theodora and Mtshali to help him guide the trolley down the ramp towards the hearse, which he’d had to leave parked in the loading zone. Two pink tickets flutter under a windscreen wiper. Purkey thinks, Serves Mr Digby Senior right for economising on a second driver. The three hired black limos waiting for the family aren’t top-class either. Digby & Smith is going downhill. He needs to look for a position with an outfit that appreciates experience and doesn’t employ unreliable apprentices. Maybe he should start his own?

  Wendell Purkey knows he’s a class act.

  The four of them slide the coffin in with only one anxious moment when the trolley won’t collapse and has to be forced into place. He says, ‘Thanks, eh? I appreciate the help, really appreciate. Just one more thing. Maybe someone could just bring the wreaths? They go in at the sides.’

  ‘I’ll ask the rugby players.’ Hugh goes up into the church again.

  ‘I’m okay from here to the cemetery,’ Purkey tells Theodora and Mtshali, ‘then I’ll need more assistance. The graveyard staff will have got the site ready, lowering mechanism and green mats and so forth, but they aren’t dressed for public duties. Are you riding with the family in one of the limos?’

  ‘Yebo.’ Mtshali will be driven with Barbara and Theodora, Bridget with Sam and Neli, Shirley in the front one with Lin and Hugh. Lin has arranged a lift for Stanley.

  ‘We are very happy to help.’ Theodora arranges her handbag on her arm.

  ‘Thanks, eh?’ Purkey says yet again, his cheeks going pink. Black women have changed from when they were all nannies or shopgirls, he thinks.

  At the top of the steps Shirley frets, ‘Where’s Hugh?’

  ‘He was helping down there,’ Lin points, ‘though I can’t see him now.’

  ‘He should be here. All these people I don’t know –’

  ‘Just stand next to me. Bridget and Neli and I will deal with the ones who want to say something, okay?’ Hugh’s wife and ex-wife are standing nearby. Barbara holds court further down the steps with some of her cronies.

  ‘There should be a man of the family with us.’

  ‘Why?’ Lin can’t stand it when her mother lapses into clinging-vine mode. It’s so stupid, thinking you need a man for everything. So fifties.

  ‘Don’t you start again.’ Shirley’s rage flares. This daughter thinks she’s so clever, yet look what a mess she made of her marriage. Women just want careers now without a thought for families. It’s so selfish. They wouldn’t know or care about having to give up babies. She feels everything boiling up inside her – John’s illness and death, this daunting funeral, the crowding memories, the lonely future – and blurts, ‘You and Hugh aren’t the only ones, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have another son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Another son, older than you.’

  Shirley’s face has gone bright red again. Lin whispers, ‘Where?’

  ‘Back in England now. He’s a diplomat. He was born before I met your father. I had to give him away for adoption. John never knew.’

  ‘What? Is this true?’

  ‘Yes. You think I’d lie about something so important?’

  They’re in a bubble, isolated from the chatter around them: Shirley defiant and Lin shocked by the revelation that came hurtling at her. Hugh is not her mother’s eldest and her much-loved father was deceived for fifty years. She lashes back, ‘Dad married damaged goods, then.’

  ‘How dare you call me that!’

  ‘You deceived him.’

  ‘No. I just didn’t tell him everything.’

  ‘You lied. He thought he was marrying a –’

  Her mother flinches and she stops.

  ‘He didn’t need an adoring little virgin. He needed me. Me. Someone who understood and could put up with his horrors.’ Shirley speaks in a low voice so no one else will hear. ‘He never asked about mine. You can’t begin to understand what it’s like to give up a newborn child. You have no right to judge.’ For the second time that afternoon she is on the edge of tears, struggling to control emotion which should be private. ‘Stiff upper lip, my girl,’ her father used to say if she got hurt and looked as though she was going to cry. ‘How you feel is your business.’

  ‘You’ve been keeping this secret all these years,’ Lin accuses.

  ‘I had to. But my son tracked me down after he had children. He looks like Hugh. Taller, though.’

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  ‘He visits me sometimes. Never when anyone’s at home. And we stay in touch with letters and photos. I have grandchildr
en in England. Now I can go and visit them. I couldn’t when John might find out. It’s been so hard.’

  There is a mixture of grief and pride and longing on her face and Lin realises with a shock what she’s doing: attacking her mother at her most vulnerable, after a blurted secret she must have dreaded telling. How could she have called Shirley damaged goods? That was ‘so fifties’.

  Lin says, ‘Forgive me, Mum,’ and folds her in a hug. The reproaches can wait. They both have enough to deal with on this muggy city afternoon surrounded by strangers and people who are pushing forward to smother them in sympathy.

  ‘I’m giving in – today of all days,’ Shirley mumbles and bursts into tears.

  Bridget says to Neli, ‘Poor Mum. I knew she’d break down in the end.’

  ‘She’s a tough nut, nè?’ Neli can’t summon up much compassion for her mother-in-law.

  ‘More annoying than tough. She gave me hell when Hugh and I split. Said it was all my fault.’

  ‘Mothers,’ Neli commiserates. ‘You can imagine what she thinks of me. The black witch who stole her son away.’

  ‘She’ll come round. Talking of sons, have you seen Sam?’

  ‘He must have gone inside with Hugh. I’ll go and look for them.’

  Neli finds Sam in a state of glory. He has waylaid the rugby players and stands in respectful awe as one after another signs the Order of Service with Grampa’s photo on the front. His reputation will soar at school with the signatures, specially those of the Springbok and Sharks captains.

  ‘So you’re Kitchen Boy’s grandson?’ they ask. ‘That’s fantastic. Bakgat! He must have been an amazing guy.’

  ‘He was,’ Sam says. ‘He told me so many stories about the war and the tests he played in.’

  ‘Write them down.’ The Sharks captain ruffles his hair. ‘That’s history.’

  ‘I will, sir.’

  As they walk out of St Ethelbert’s – a procession of burly men bearing floral wreaths, making a touching photograph in the next day’s papers – they will also carry the memory of a glowing boy who has reminded them that heroes are defined by their admirers.

  If I live through this terrible war, I hope to go home and find a quiet piece of land and live in peace and quiet for the rest of my life.

  – D-Day veteran quoted in a D-Day programme on

  the History Channel

  February 1946.

  J J didn’t want peace and quiet after his convalescence in the military hospital or at home after being demobbed. He wanted constant action that would blur the memory of Kenneth’s injuries and the look on his face when he limped up to him at their first Moth meeting.

  ‘I hear I owe these, and worse, to you.’ Kenneth had held up his right hand, its fingers still in orthopaedic splints.

  J J said, very fast, ‘Major Irving ordered us not to respond.’

  ‘And you kept quiet about the loot in your pocket.’

  ‘Not loot. The guard gave it to me. Just a small coin.’

  ‘A gold coin and you hung onto it without a word to the rest of us.’

  ‘We were in a war.’

  ‘So it was each man for himself, eh? And bugger your comrades.’ Arctic scorn in his eyes.

  ‘No! I was terrified that day. The Kommandant would have shot me dead like the guard.’

  ‘Instead of ordering a Gestapo thug to assault and cripple me, you mean?’

  J J felt a wave of shame rising from his guts to his heart to his cheeks. He had no answer but, ‘I didn’t rat on you.’

  ‘No. He picked me out. The lucky winner.’

  J J seized on the admission that he was not altogether guilty. ‘What would you have done in my place?’

  ‘The same, I suppose. As you say, we were in a war. We all suffered. But I’ve suffered more because of you. And I have to live with it. Fuck you, J J.’

  ‘I want to make amends.’

  ‘How? By giving me back the use of my fingers?’

  ‘By giving you the coin. Get it off my conscience.’

  ‘And unloading it onto your victim? Like I said, fuck you, J J.’

  ‘You could sell it for a good cause. That’s what Major Irving said.’

  They stood face to face, the still centre of a hubbub of comrades congratulating each other on surviving.

  Kenneth said at last, ‘Okay, you bastard, I’ll take it. Not to sell but to keep as a reminder never to trust anyone. Who needs enemies when they’ve got friends like you?’

  They avoided each other in the years that followed, except for the curious hiatus with Lofty at Twiggie’s Pie Cart, driven for those few months by the need to be with others who had known war. If they did meet, there was nothing more than a nod before moving away. The knowledge that the coin was still there, lying like an unexploded bomb between them, stoked J J’s nightmares until he learnt to submerge it under a blanket of exhaustion. He trained harder than anyone in those years that took him from the university First Fifteen at Woodburn to playing for Natal in the Currie Cup to selection for the first Springbok team after the war. Driven men, agreed the coaches who watched him and other ex-servicemen battering each other to obliterate their ugly memories. Only when he had joined the Breweries sales staff in Durban and begun to enjoy the job and the kudos of being a Springbok could he let up a little. Beers with his teammates hazed the flashbacks and there was the beach at weekends, surfing in exhilarating waves and lying in the sun afterwards, the heat baking his brain into a dreamy stupor.

  He thought he was over the shell-shock when his appendix burst in 1952 at the end of the triumphant Springbok tour of Britain and France, but the fever of septicaemia brought the nightmares crowding back again. It was years before they began to fade, years of flying through war looking down on death, plunging into flames, stumbling through snow and mud. Holding a coin that burned into his palm, hearing Naylor scream as his balls were kicked and his fingers hammered, waking clammy and shivering to Shirley with her arms round him repeating, ‘It’s okay, John. I’m here. You’re safe. I’m here. You’re safe. It’s okay, darling.’

  He was one of the walking wounded who soldiered on in the knowledge that there were times when rules didn’t apply. The only ethics in war were the bonds of duty and comradeship, and he had failed both. The short cuts and occasional kickbacks of later years were minor transgressions compared with that.

  It was years before he could convince himself that he had a right to enjoy being alive.

  · 27 ·

  STELLAWOOD CEMETERY LIES IN A GREEN TERRACED VALLEY, sloping up on both sides. Narrow roads meander between stretches of shaggy grass interspersed with old tombstones, past lush trees and a wall of remembrance in front of the imposing not-quite-Spanish crematorium. There is a little office outside the first cemetery entrance where visitors can locate a forebear’s grave with the help of an attendant who will reach for one of the ledgers, now falling apart, and run a finger down copperplate entries going back decades.

  The military section and more recent family graves are accessed beyond the second entrance, which leads to a knoll with a clipped lawn, ranks of tall palm trees and long views over Durban harbour and the Bluff.

  Soldiers from both world wars lie under granite headstones engraved with a springbok head in a laurel wreath and the old motto ‘Unity is Strength’ – ‘Eendrag Maak Mag’. All died on active service, from wounds or training accidents or natural causes: TB, typhoid, cerebral malaria, raging infections. Bodies washed up on Natal beaches from torpedoed ships had been mutilated by sharks; sometimes there was only a shredded torso to bury. Presiding over the war graves is a Cross of Sacrifice on a plinth with the Kipling quote: ‘Their name liveth for evermore.’

  Half a century on, most of the names and sacrifices have been forgotten, except by aging relatives and the dwindling number of survivors.

  After they’ve parked the car, Lofty squeaks along next to Kenneth with the help of his crutches, wondering if his rotten leg had been buried or gone up the prison
er-of-war camp chimney. Gangrene to ashes rather than to dust.

  ‘We’re early,’ Kenneth says. ‘I didn’t want to tag on to the funeral procession. My transmission doesn’t do snail’s pace.’

  ‘I bet it doesn’t.’ Car’s more at home on a high-speed autobahn, Lofty thinks. Those Huns recovered bloody fast. He remembers J J talking about the Long March and the abject people fleeing the Russians. Who’d actually won that war?

  ‘We should see more of each other.’

  Lofty stops and turns to him. ‘Aren’t you busy? I heard that you still consult.’

  ‘I’m –’ Kenneth stops himself from saying ‘lonely’ and substitutes ‘fully retired’. Then he says, ‘And I feel released this afternoon. J J and I were like cacti all these years: sour and prickly with each other, not seeing the man for the thorns. Me more than him. He had a family to keep his mind off. I’ve only had my work and possessions.’

  Trying not to sound sarcastic, Lofty says, ‘And they aren’t enough?’

  ‘No. I’m bored. Jumped at the chance to be a pall-bearer today.’

  ‘I thought you were chairman of that retirement place.’

  ‘Gave it up. People made too many demands. The thing is, I need a new direction.’ He speaks with the off-hand gruffness of a man trying not to sound as though he’s asking for favours. ‘A cause, you know? Something to spend my time and money on.’

  ‘Try me.’ Lofty snorts.

  ‘You’re a wasting asset. No offence,’ Kenneth adds.

  ‘And heaven forbid you waste your precious time and money on one of us.’

  ‘Didn’t mean that. I feel the need to stick together. We’re the last of the Mohicans, as J J used to say.’ Kenneth gestures ahead. ‘And here we are at his final tepee.’

  They have reached the Herald family plot, bigger and grander than most, headed by an obelisk of rose granite with names engraved on a scroll at its base. Old man Herald hadn’t gone in for marble angels, but bought plenty of room for his tribe. Dot Kitching lies there next to her mother and father, waiting for her champion son to join her. Barbara and Shirley will too, one day. Victor isn’t one of the elect, having been cremated and his ashes scattered on Lake Eteza before it was drained for cane lands. J J and Barbara had a private joke about the poetic justice of their father being reincarnated as cane spirit.