Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  A square section of culvert had been abandoned months earlier in a borrow pit where the road verge sloped into the bush, and was now almost obscured by long grass and weeds. One afternoon, he noticed a pair of polished brown leather brogues sitting on the concrete, gleaming in the last rays of the setting sun. He leaned over the road barrier to look down and saw a spiral of smoke, and a path trodden through the grass. Squatters, he thought. These buggers will move in and set up anywhere they can find. Next thing, there’ll be a fire. He called, ‘You down there!’ and swished his induku in the grass to flush them out. After a while, a voice said, ‘Yes?’ but no one appeared.

  ‘Come out!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m telling you. Get out of there.’ He swished again.

  There was a longer pause, then, ‘Is that an order, sir?’

  ‘Yes. You’re trespassing.’

  ‘This is your property?’

  ‘It’s my road. I’m a ratepayer. You can’t just waltz in and live here.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’ J J swept his induku in an arc that sliced through the grass, whhhoosh!, scattering seed heads. ‘I’ll call the police.’

  ‘That is a heavy threat.’

  Grey dreadlocks emerged from the mouth of the culvert, followed by a bent old man in a faded T-shirt and the remains of a pin-striped suit. His feet were bare and dusty. He brushed down his trousers before straightening up with gingerly care. J J saw the bearded face of a patriarch on a holy icon darkened by centuries of candle smoke: shaman eyes under drooping eyebrows.

  His first thought was, Hell, he’s as old as me. Then, But he still shouldn’t be here. He said again, rapping the ground with his induku, ‘You’re trespassing.’

  ‘On the edge of a road?’

  ‘You can’t live here like this.’

  ‘And you don’t own it. Checkmate.’ The beard parted in a whiskery toothless smile.

  This wasn’t an ordinary squatter. Change of tactic. J J shifted his accusing glare to the shoes that had caught his attention. ‘Those yours?’

  ‘Yebo. A donation from a kind lady down the road whose husband died. We old ones know how to look after our shoes, eh?’

  Trying to placate me, J J thought, but it was true. He was careful with his good shoes, kept them for years by using wooden lasts and having them polished often. His family teased when he boasted how old they were, calling them ‘Dad’s antique footgear’.

  Shirley persisted in trying to give away his comfortable old clothes and shoes, until he forbade her to touch them and she’d countered with, ‘If your things are so damn sacred, see to them yourself.’ So he did now. He took his tweed jacket and lambswool sweaters with fluffballs and thinning elbows to the dry cleaners, and polished his shoes once a week at a table covered with newspaper. It gave him a lot of satisfaction, applying the oxblood or tan or black polish with a different brush for each colour, then working it into the leather and buffing up a shine with rags.

  He blurted, ‘I polish my own shoes.’

  ‘Bully for you, sir.’ The toothless smile widened.

  ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘Never.’ His hands went up in mock defence. ‘I don’t want trouble, boss.’

  J J backed off. ‘I’m not your boss and I wasn’t being serious about the police. But you really shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It suits me: warm and dry most of the time.’

  ‘An old person like you –’ The familiar sense of guilt while driving past leaky shacks crammed on hillsides stopped him.

  ‘No older than you, sir.’

  ‘I have a roof over my head.’ A lot more than a roof, to be exact. He added defensively, ‘What about the RDP houses our government is building?’

  ‘I don’t qualify. No family.’ He shrugged.

  ‘No family at all?’

  ‘Some few Up North. I’m a surplus khehla. It’s okay. I’m alive.’

  ‘Up North.’ Nightmare words. J J’s hands locked on the induku to try and stop the trembling. Cairo. Alex. Lydda.

  Observing the reaction the old man said, ‘Ah, sorry, sorry. I was there too, nè? In Tobruk with the Native Military Corps. So.’ He began to climb the bank, labouring through the long grass, ‘So. We are brothers in shoes and war.’

  Brothers. J J reached down with his free hand and grasped an elbow where the skin wrinkled over knobbed bones, muttering, ‘God rot those fucking murdering Huns.’

  ‘Peace now, my friend. It’s long over. Make peace now.’

  He found himself embraced by an old black man who smelled of wood smoke, and went back often to the culvert to talk about things his family wouldn’t understand.

  At J J’s funeral service, Stanley Magwaza walks behind Retief, Sam and Herbie, wearing his friend’s favourite suit.

  Kenneth Naylor was the law student who objected to having to sleep on a wooden platform next to J J – a mere matriculant – in Stalag Luft VII from the end of August 1944 until January 1945.

  ‘Be bloody grateful you’re not on the floor,’ the hut commander rasped when Kenneth complained after the first night.

  ‘But I’m his senior.’ And better, ran the subtext.

  ‘You’re both lieutenants. Get used to it.’

  ‘I’m a pilot. I should be with others of my –’ Standing, he wanted to say, having been at a private school before university.

  The hut commander cut him off. ‘I don’t care if you’re the Virgin Mary, Naylor. You sleep where you’re billeted. We’re all in the bag together.’

  Kenneth’s superior manner wore thin as hunger set in and food became more important even than the sport of searching for fleas, bedbugs and lice to squash between thumbnails, with a daily highlight when the tallies were laid out and winners rewarded with a cigarette. Enforced visits to the camp delouser knocked everybody’s scores until the little sods hiding in wall cracks and bedding and motley uniforms got busy breeding again.

  Camp meals varied between small servings of cabbage and potato soup, pea and potato soup, groat and potato soup, dandelion and turnip soup, and – the Sunday treat – baked potatoes. With the German army battling the advancing Russians, and the railways clogged with military requisitions, Red Cross parcels were scarce and arrived in Bankau bei Kreuzburg at unreliable intervals. The prisoners were desperate for even the shreds of tinned Spam they shared.

  J J was a Zululand boy who’d hunted field mice and cane rats in the cane fields bordering the marshes round Lake Eteza. He and Bobby also stole crocodile eggs and kept them in a wooden box of sun-warmed sand on the back steps of the trading store until they hatched, their tiny snouts nibbling through the leathery shells to snap at the light. Women coming up the steps screamed and jumped away when they saw them. At the commotion, Dot Kitching swooped down from the house and forbade the boys – every time – to do it again, summoning Landela to cart the box in a wheelbarrow down to the lake and let the little things go. Victor roared at night over his gin, ‘You’re too ruddy soft, my girl. I’d have finished the little bastards with a hammer. They’re vermin.’

  In camp, meat was meat whether cat or vermin. J J volunteered his skills and was given free run of the barracks to hunt Polish rodents, poking down holes and under floorboards with a length of wire to flush them out, egged on by the other prisoners waiting with staves to clobber them. A teaspoonful of rat stew in a tin dish of watery soup gave a faint whiff of meat. After days of queasy refusals at the sight of blood-soaked grey fur being sliced open and tiny bones bobbing in the stew, Kenneth succumbed and asked for a share, gulping it down to a general cheer.

  That night he said a brief ‘Thanks,’ before turning away from J J and hunching into the blanket that crawled and itched all night.

  Camp life dragged on as the bleak world beyond the barbed wire turned to ice and snow. J J caught and skinned rats. Kenneth designed improvements to blowers and stoves made out of Klim tins, changing perforations to allow more air into the firebox so that they
burned faster, boiling dixies of water for brew-ups.

  For nine months in three POW camps and a long march they were allies, though never quite friends. But everything changed in the last week of the war when Kenneth was punished by a Nazi thug for something J J had done and only confessed to much later. Kenneth had compounded the guilt by not admitting that his cold stare fixed on the Kommandant had probably made him a target for retribution. Except for an odd period of grace after the war, they met each other only at Moth meetings, aging compatriots drawn together by tales of tunnel digging, goon-baiting and rat hunts that helped to cloak the ugly memories.

  Why did Moosburg make me so bitter? Kenneth wonders. It was as much my fault as his. We were both victims.

  When the call came from Barbara Kitching inviting him to represent the Moths as a pall-bearer, he didn’t hesitate. Now he walks with his high-bridged nose in the air, trying not to show his annoyance at being placed behind the family cook. J J is free of the black mole of guilt that has burrowed through his life and blighted Kenneth’s. He has brought the gold coin with him, not sure what he’ll do with it, but knowing that this is his last chance to wipe the slate clean.

  The day before the funeral, Lin says she also wants to be a pall-bearer. Shirley refuses. ‘You can’t. Men are supposed to do it.’

  ‘He’s my father. I’m staying by his side right to the end.’

  ‘But we’ve already decided on the pall-bearers. Eight, including Sam.’

  ‘You’d let a child perform this last rite instead of me?’

  ‘He’s John’s grandson.’

  ‘I’m John’s daughter.’

  ‘Anyway, coffins are too heavy for women.’

  ‘For God’s sake, it’ll be on a trolley thing.’ She turns to mutter to Hugh, ‘Sam will faint halfway up the aisle, if I know that boy.’

  ‘What did you say, Linda?’

  Shirley reverts to the detested sixties name when she’s cross, which seems to be all the time since J J became so ill. It must be the stress, Lin thinks. She’s always taken her mother’s affection for granted, as a place she can return to when things get tough. Her father has been her mentor, but he’s gone now. Shirley must be feeling the void too.

  She says in a less combative voice, ‘I asked Hugh what he thought.’

  ‘It’s not for him to decide. The bishop won’t like it.’

  “You tell him it’s against our Constitution to discriminate against women.’

  ‘It doesn’t apply to religions. The Catholics don’t allow women priests.’ This comes out in an angry rush that surprises them both.

  ‘Take it easy, Mum. I’m not asking for the moon. Just to be there for Dad.’ Lin tries a placatory smile and a hand on her arm.

  ‘You all know I’m against this big funeral, yet you’ve worn me down,’ Shirley protests. ‘I don’t feel up to fighting any more. Or taking on the bishop.’

  ‘Barbara will do it. She’s not afraid of men in skirts.’

  ‘Suit yourself, then.’ Shirley stamps out of the room. Lin is so like her father: confident, opinionated and assertive, with the same quick-firing response to challenges. They keep their worries and doubts hidden behind well-guarded defences. With sudden insight she realises that he’s passed some of the war damage on to their daughter, and starts to cry again. When will it stop?

  It’s Barbara who tells the bishop that Lin wants to be a pall-bearer, adding, ‘Humour us, will you?’

  ‘No need, my dear. We embrace women in the Anglican church.’

  ‘As bishops, too?’

  ‘Not yet, but we’re getting there.’ He has the bland smirk of a prelate who believes that his chosen faith is superior.

  ‘Yuk,’ says Barbara to Lin afterwards, ‘I thought he was going to enfold me in an ecumenical hug.’

  ‘It would be a different experience.’

  ‘I don’t go for clergymen. This one in particular. I’m told he’s got his eye on the archbishop’s pile in Cape Town.’

  ‘Where do you hear these things?’

  ‘On the granadilla vine.’ Barbara knows all the Durban gossip.

  Since Lin has fought to be a pall-bearer, she can hardly object when she is asked to walk behind the phalanx of men and one boy accompanying her father’s coffin up the aisle. Bishop Chauncey had given her a condescending smile when they assembled outside, and said, ‘A female pall-bearer is a first for me. I’m relying on you to bring up the rear with aplomb, my dear.’

  Female. Aplomb. My dear. Now she is seething. Why the hell did I insist? Dad won’t know.

  My one trouble is what am I going to do when the war is finished. It will take me years, certainly many months to settle down to civilian life again …

  I am taught to destroy, people, material, anything and everything. Not heeding the consequences. There is none except good ammo. The more I destroy the greater the deed done. Horribly warped minds we will have when we get back to a life of creating instead.

  – LIEUTENANT COLIN WALTERS of the South African Engineer Corps in a letter from North Africa dated 20 October 1941

  Natal University College, Pietermaritzburg, 1946.

  They travelled between varsity and Oribi Res in gharries – lumbering old troop carriers with benches under half-perished canvas canopies that had done long duty in the northern desert.

  Oribi had been an army camp. Now the prefabs were jam-packed with too many students, from just-out-of-school boys to haggard ex-servicemen in a hurry to make up for years lost to war. They studied and partied and drank, trying to cram everything in. Men seen vomiting last night’s jerepigo down the steps of the Student Union in the early mornings would be in lectures an hour later, tidied up though still smelling of sick. They were brusque and jittery, chain-smoked, and had no small talk. With a swagger, they wore their striped varsity blazers and baggy corduroys to dances, wrestled girls into dark corners and inveigled their hands down bras and up skirts, navigating suspenders and roll-ons instead of planes and tanks. Mothers warned their daughters that chaps would try anything and always to keep one foot on the floor.

  The girls who gave way usually regretted it. Ex-servicemen were forceful lovers with no time to waste and FLs in their pockets. They weren’t going to be caught getting anyone pregnant – not when life was beginning again and there were exams to pass if they were to catch up with the gutless bastards who hadn’t volunteered.

  After J J was demobbed, he spent several months at home eating Dot’s lovingly cooked meals and cakes, and sleeping. During the days he sat slumped on the veranda, gazing at Lake Eteza through the fly screens as he fought surges of guilt and panic and tried to forget the coin hidden in his wardrobe. Dot came running into the bedroom when he woke screaming and sweating under the mosquito net that tangled round him like smoke hissing from incendiaries. She stroked his forehead, her fingers making concentric circles, until he was back again in the peaceful nights of his childhood, listening to owls and nightjars.

  In the last months of 1945 there were blazing sunsets from dust in the stratosphere generated by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Victor began grumbling that J J should make up his mind about what he was going to do. ‘You can’t just bloody sit there. Move your arse, boy. Come and help me in the store.’

  ‘Leave him alone, Vic. He’s recuperating from shell-shock. And he’s not a boy any more.’ Dot always rose bristling to his defence.

  ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to go on supporting him ad infinitum.’

  ‘He wouldn’t want that,’ she said in a sarcastic voice unfamiliar to J J. She looked worn, without the spark he remembered.

  His father’s annoyance galvanised him to enrol for a BA at the university in Maritzburg, thinking he might be a lawyer like Kenneth. But he was bored by the old profs who droned on about classics and Latin that seemed like stuffed quaggas in a museum, irrelevant to the living who fought and made love and got wounded and went mad. He changed the following year to a BSc in agriculture, and fou
nd the study of grasses and pastures and farming economics soothing, but dull. For a bit of excitement and to revive the brotherhood of war, he joined the Survivors B Team and invested his continuing rage in rugby.

  The cards were being shuffled and dealt again.

  They were frogmarched through a dream of sunlight slanting through tall tree trunks, fronds of bracken unfurling from leaf mould and a scent of fresh piney resin, worlds away from war.

  And it was all the more surreal because they weren’t lined up and shot.

  · 4 ·

  THE FIRST HYMN IS J J’S FAVOURITE, ‘HE WHO WOULD valiant be ’gainst all disaster’. Organ music and song swell up into the rafters as older people belt it out in hearty voices, followed a beat later by those who remember the tune from school assemblies. Some of them are reading the words from the Order of Service with J J’s photograph on the front. Non-believers and people of other religions stand in respectful silence, though for most it is hard not to hum along when the music is so stirring.

  Shirley thinks about John as she mouths the words.

  He had his failings. He may be a hero to the world, but she has lived with his need to win: a case of beer for a referee, a palmed card at canasta, favours for useful executives, a golf ball nudged with his shoe when he thought no one was looking. Famous sportsmen in the liquor trade are under pressure to perform, entertaining important customers in company boxes at sports events, welcoming foreign teams, posing for publicity shots, handing out prizes. J J Kitching had a name for candid speaking to trusted journalists, so his face and opinions were often in the newspapers. SA Breweries-sponsored sports stars were paraded at congenial press shindigs whenever the players represented their province or country, and J J would host the Durban ones.