by Jenny Hobbs
All too soon Dot learnt how wrong she’d been about a dashing polo player who could put away more cocktails than anyone else. But Landela had moved with his family into the backyard rooms behind the store, and his loyalty and kindness sustained her.
Paintings with gold frames were stacked against layers of tapestries draped over a balustrade. Crystal chandeliers hung skew on the stair posts. Stout sofas and leather armchairs had been pushed back to make room for piles of Persian carpets.
‘Loot,’ someone whispered.
· 9 ·
HALFWAY THROUGH PSALM 39, REVEREND GEORGE gets into his stride. He raises his head and aims his demand at the Almighty. ‘And now, Lord, what is my hope?’ then pauses as though waiting for an immediate answer. ‘Hope – ope – ope – ope–’ echo the microphones.
The bishop’s eyes are panning across the congregation. How are the VIPs reacting? The mayor seems to be calculating the number of dust motes in a thin beam of sunlight from a high window. A notorious newspaper editor drums his fingers on his knees. Mr Pillay, the hotel magnate, murmurs to the sharp-suited man sitting next to him – the Breweries’ director from Joburg?
As if underlining the bishop’s speculative survey, a TV cameraman in the side aisle zooms in, first on the two men, then on the current Springbok captain. International rugby players are so huge and powerful these days, thinks the bishop, he’d be afraid to meet one of them on a dark night.
He had once hoped for glory on the rugby field, but settled instead for theological college when he failed to make the second team at school. Now he has his eye on a more elevated position. The archbishop is retiring in a year’s time and the synod meets soon to choose his successor. An appearance on evening television news, presiding over the funeral of a national hero in a gracious old church, can’t fail to impress the delegates.
Bridget sits worrying about Sam. He seems okay, with his asthma under control, but he does bury himself in the war stories he carries around in her tatty little suitcase. What is it about war that appeals to boys, even the gentle ones? Though she has to admit that Hugh is different. He has always been anti-war and stood up bravely to his fierce father. She finds it hard to believe that the old boy is dead. He was so vital. And so interfering when his children’s marriages hit the rocks.
She remembers him accusing her, ‘You went off and indulged yourself.’
‘It wasn’t an indulgence. I was invited to join a crucial research team because MDR-TB is a serious threat. And anyway, Sam is at school most of the day.’
‘A mother’s place is at home with her family.’
‘Don’t be so old-fashioned, Dad,’ she’d protested. ‘It’s okay for mothers to work now. We need our space.’
He’d struck back, ‘Don’t you call me Dad any more. You’re a deserter. I won’t have any truck with you.’
He had been stunned when Hugh married Nelisiwe a year after the divorce. Bridget suspects that the weekend invitations to Sam were as much to shield him from Hugh and Neli’s convivial multiracial circle of friends as for the pleasure of having the boy to stay.
She glances down at her son, with his spikes of brown hair and his school blazer worn at the cuffs which are well short of his wrists. He’ll be going to high school next year and it isn’t worth buying a new one. She wonders whether he has absorbed enough of the old man’s rigid code of honour to consider her a deserter too.
The distracting whispers behind him have stopped, so Sam tries to refocus his mind on Grampa when he was alive and telling stories about being a Springbok and the war. Since Sam isn’t allowed to play strenuous sports that might make him wheeze, he loves to listen to the war stories.
‘Where did you learn to fly?’ had been a productive question one afternoon when they were sitting on the glassed-in veranda, hoping to spot a Southern Right whale and its calf.
J J put down his binoculars. ‘That was the best part. Maurice and I joined up at the beginning of December ’43, straight after writing matric, and they put us Durban chaps on a train to Pretoria and 100 Air School at Valhalla for our basics. You know what Valhalla was, don’t you?’
‘No. Sorry.’
‘It’s from Norse mythology: the great hall of Odin, god of wisdom, war and the dead, where the warriors who died as heroes in battle were taken. They were chosen and carried there by twelve terrifying maidens called Valkyries who rode with drawn swords on swift horses. And then they waited on the heroes for evermore as they held magnificent feasts, carving wild boar with their swords and drinking ale from the bleached skulls of their enemies. Ferocious bunch, those old Scandinavians. Though I wouldn’t mind a few maidens dancing attendance on me when I go.’
Despite the softening in Grampa’s eyes, Sam shivered. ‘Was there really a Valhalla in Pretoria?’
‘Still is. It’s the suburb around the Air School. But whoever named it forgot that Valhalla was for dead brave men. Nobody warned us.’ He drifted off into his thoughts.
Sam said, to bring him back to the point, ‘Why from Durban, Grampa? I thought you lived in Zululand.’
‘We did, of course, but Maurice and I were boarders at DHS. Great days.’
Sam had heard all about Durban High School’s first-team rugby triumphs with girls swooning on the sidelines, and hurried his grandfather on. ‘You were going to tell me about learning to fly.’
‘Ja. Well. Okay.’ J J relinquished the sudden sharp memory of a winning try scored in a broad-banded jersey. ‘All the SAAF volunteers did their three months basics at Valhalla. At the beginning of March, Maurice and I were posted down to 41 Air School at Collondale, now the East London Airport, for specialist training. RAF Bomber Command sent men there too under the Joint Air Training Scheme, pale chirpy blokes who thought learning to fly in “Sarf Africa” was a lark. Poor buggers.’
He sat remembering an airfield where the bellying windsock was often horizontal and the planes bucked gusts of sea spray as they crossed the coast at low level to land.
‘My old man had let me go up a few times with Jackie Goble in the Mtubatuba Flying Club’s Gypsy Moth, so I thought I knew the essentials. Soon found I didn’t know a bloody thing. They tested our eyesight, abilities and endurance. Drilled us. Flogged us over obstacle courses. Sorted us into groups: pilots, flight engineers, observers, gunners, wireless operators, ground crew. Then there were the ground school lectures. Learning to fly in Airspeed Oxfords and Avro Ansons. More specific lectures. More flying. Long, boring sea patrols looking for submarines so our flying hours mounted up. They hurried us through because the SAAF and the RAF needed airmen, fast. Our boys were being shot down over the Med, Crete, Italy, Yugoslavia –’ He drifted off again.
Sam waited a few impatient minutes before asking, ‘And then?’
‘Steady on, boy. I’m getting there.’ J J eased his back against the cushions of his basket chair, a creaking refuge since he’d retired. Shirley would bring him cups of tea and he could read the paper and watch the sea, protected from the wind. The Zeiss binoculars presented to him by the rugby selectors at his farewell meeting helped him to identify the emblems and flags on passing ships. He watched whales and schools of dolphins – the numbers grew every year – and surfers creaming down waves on streamlined fibreglass ailerons that were light years on from the stubby plywood surfboards of his own beach days.
‘Grampa? You were saying about being hurried?’
‘Ah. Yes. We were needed chop-chop. Observers like me did navigation exercises morning, noon and night. First at our desks, later in the planes. We were also trained as bomb aimers. Our instructors told us not to think about the people we’d be bombing. They were the Hun. So we didn’t think. We obeyed. We were fighting for right. Avenging angels.’
Sam had an odd thought: Grampa was sounding sarcastic, like Dad when he talked about fighting. He said, ‘And after that?’
‘Italy had collapsed in September 1943, just before we wrote matric. The Allied air forces moved in behind the army boys. By the end o
f June, SAAF’s 31 and 34 Squadrons were based at Celone airfield near Foggia, flying Liberator bombers, courtesy of the Yanks. Maurice and I would be posted to the Heavy Conversion Unit at Lydda in Palestine to convert to Libs before joining them for operational training.
‘After a few days’ leave back home, we were flown Up North in a loaded Dakota that took off from Zwartkop Air Station. We sat on metal benches running the length of both sides, strapped in with canvas belts: us in khaki with our red shoulder tabs to show we were volunteers, the RAF boys in blue. All of us rookies. Pilots who had hardly flown fifty hours solo, flight engineers chosen because they understood tractors, ground crew crammed in at the back where the tail swayed, puking into paper bags.’
‘I get sick in the car sometimes,’ Sam said.
‘I wasn’t sick, but I prayed like hell to God and my ma, though only in my head in case the others laughed. The flight went on for two nights and a day, short hops with the plane landing every so often on an airfield where they’d let us off to stretch our legs, have a bite and a pee while it was refuelled. Two hours to Bulawayo. Three to Ndola. Nearly four to Tabora. Two to Kisumu. Then Juba. Malakal. Khartoum. A flying safari through Darkest Africa.’ Grampa is on a roll now. ‘Twice they let us kip for a few hours in a shed with our heads on our kitbags before being loaded up to take off again. The last stretch was Khartoum to Wadi Halfa to Cairo, where we were split up. Observers for Heavy Conversion Unit flew on a Lockheed Ventura to Palestine.’
‘Is that the place where they’re always fighting?’
‘Yes. Tragic business. Lydda is in Israel now: Lod Airport. Dry as hell. Hot winds rattled the palm trees and made our tents buzz with sand that heaped up against the flaps so we had to dig out in the mornings. Millions of flies. They got in our eyes and ears and mouths, and crawled down our necks and up our shorts. We worked like dogs, day and night. Often too tired to think.
‘They were our last days of being boys. I had my nineteenth birthday in a souk bar with some Aussies and too much arak. Maurice ended up cavorting on the table with his pants round his ankles, chaffing he was a belly dancer. We nearly wet ourselves laughing. He was dead four months later.’
There was a look of terrible sadness on his face. ‘Why?’
‘Shot down over Romania on a bombing run. Nineteen like me, and missing in action. They never found him. His name is on the Malta Memorial for Missing Airmen. I’ve seen it. Shameful waste.’
He was quiet for so long that Sam thought he might have fallen asleep. Then he heard him mutter, ‘We were learning the mathematics of destruction. And we got punished.’
Looking at his grandfather’s coffin now, where it rests under his medals and his country’s new flag in a church filled with people come to honour him, Sam wonders what his punishment was.
‘– and make me not a rebuke unto the foolish.’ With a curling lip, Reverend George aims this admonition at the fat-cat Durban businessmen in their expensive linen and lightweight woollen suits and silk ties. There is uneasy shifting in the pews.
Bishop Chauncey formulates a vow: when I’m in charge, this one will be posted to a distant parish where he can’t do us any more damage. Kuruman, perhaps? Pofadder? Die Hel?
Only Purkey, a regular observer of clergy, notices the shadow of a smile on the bishop’s face. Clyde’s eyes have slid sideways to Nelisiwe again as he wonders what it’s like to fuck a black girl.
We trusted each other implicitly. There was never even a question of someone who could not be trusted. In other words, I would put my life on the line for somebody else and they would do the same for me.
– Pilot in Thunderbolts: The Conquest of the Reich, on the History Channel
SAILOR MALAN’S TEN RULES FOR AIR FIGHTING
1. Wait until you see the whites of his eyes. Fire short bursts of one to two seconds only when your sights are definitely ‘ON’.
2. Whilst shooting think of nothing else; brace the whole of your body; have both hands on the stick; concentrate on your ring sight.
3. Always keep a sharp lookout. ‘Keep your finger out.’
4. Height gives you the initiative.
5. Always turn and face the attack.
6. Make your decisions promptly. It is better to act quickly even though your tactics are not the best.
7. Never fly straight and level for more than 30 seconds in the combat area.
8. When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as a top guard.
9. INITIATIVE, AGGRESSION, AIR DISCIPLINE and TEAMWORK are words that MEAN something in air fighting.
10. Go in quickly – punch hard – get out!
Adolph Gysbert ‘Sailor’ Malan, DFC, DSO & Bar, of the Royal Air Force 74 ‘Tiger’ Squadron was a South African and one of the outstanding fighter pilots of WWII, and the top scorer at the end of 1941 with 32 kills plus two unconfirmed.
They slept on the carpets that night and the next. Their guards spent two days rummaging through every room in the lodge – in chests, cupboards and drawers – for portable treasure. It’s the Kommandant’s exit stash, Kenneth guessed as they wrapped silver goblets and platters and cutlery to stow in trunks loaded onto wagons.
II
KICKBACK
TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, J J BEGAN TO THINK that he’d had to face more moral dilemmas than most people.
Deciding to join up straight after school wasn’t one of them. He burned to be fighting Hitler and to get as far away as possible from his father, only wavering when his mother’s eyes filled at his announcement. But all she said was, ‘You must do what’s right for you, Johnny.’
Victor had yelled, ‘For God’s sake, think about it first, boy! You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. And I don’t want a dead son.’
He straightened with the self-conscious dignity of an eighteen-yearold. ‘Maurice and I have thought about it. We’re not boys any more. We’re joining the Air Force.’
‘You’re lusting after war like all the other bloody idiots who don’t know any better. Did it myself, but got away with it. Showered in glory for doing peanuts. This war is a different kettle of fish. You’re fucking mad.’ Victor would not talk to him again until the train to Durban pulled out of Eteza Station, when he called out, ‘Don’t do anything stupid, you hear?’
J J and Maurice were effervescent with the joy of being young and keen and on their way to live combat, and he called back, ‘No I won’t, Pa. Promise!’
But he had done plenty of stupid things in his life. Driven too fast, too often. Voted at a rugby selectors’ meeting for a player he knew wasn’t good enough, just to please the chairman, a business client. Lusted after his blonde private secretary Valerie, though he’d stopped short of getting involved. And there’d been a time when he’d foolishly taken a kickback that almost cost him his life and wrecked another man’s: at Stalag VIIA, Moosburg, in April 1945.
That was when the nightmares began. The medics put them down to shell-shock compounded by malnutrition, but he knew it was plain guilt.
‘It’s the Kommandant’s exit stash,’ Kenneth guessed.
He’s planning to sneak away before the Yanks arrive.’
‘Hard to sneak this lot. You can bet they’re watching each other.’
‘They’ll collude and hide it. Plenty of caves in this area.
After we’ve loaded it all up, then what?’
· 10 ·
REVEREND GEORGE AIMS HIS NEXT BROADSIDE AT A CLUSTER of dressedto-kill women with conspicuous handbags. The widening gap between rich and poor is his crusade and he denounces big spenders with grim zest. ‘Take your plague away from me!’ he commands.
The bishop purses his mouth and tries to look as though his colleague’s righteous rage has nothing to do with him. A number of the old people in the congregation have fallen asleep. Two pigeons are cooing and flirting with each other up in the rafters; a dropping plummets onto the mayor’s orange headwrap in a splish of grey and white. In the organ loft above
the VIP pew, a former civic manager nudges his neighbour and points downwards.
‘Her high and mightiness is in the poo, now.’
‘Shit happens, my grandson says.’
‘I still can’t believe she fired us.’
‘Retrenched, they said, as if it made any difference. After twenty-nine years working for eff-all.’
‘I did thirty-seven. Eight years off full retirement.’
‘It’s a bloody disgrace. Where would this country be without us?’
‘And my job goes to a poppie in high heels who hasn’t a clue about municipal systems. They don’t have logical brains.’
‘That’s no lie. Can you believe Kitchen Boy’s son who’s at the university marrying a black girl?’
‘Everything’s changed.’
‘People shift according to how the wind blows. Nobody admits to voting Nat now.’
Leaning closer, the other ex-civil servant says, ‘Kitchen Boy wasn’t a Nat, I know for a fact. He was Torch Commando.’
‘You don’t say?’
Though they keep their voices low, people nearby are listening. Psalms do tend to drone on.
‘I’m telling you. My Pa saw him with his own eyes outside the City Hall one night in 1952. Hundreds of ex-servicemen carrying flaming torches marched down Smith Street and fetched up by the Cenotaph. It was something to do with coloureds voting and they were shouting ‘Down with the Nats’. A lot of people thought it was the end for Dr Malan and them. But the Torch Commando went phut soon after.’
‘Why?’
‘Too liberal. Some of the marchers even said that natives should get the vote. In 1952, I ask you.’
‘Never! They’d only just come down from the trees, man.’
‘Would you like to repeat that?’ The demand comes from a man behind who has leaned forward and speaks into a hairy pink ear. Its owner swings round to find himself inches from the furious face of the CEO of the empowerment consortium that manages the Durban Municipality Retirement Fund.
