Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  The old man grumbled, ‘Handicrafts, like making braziers and blowers and illegal radios. One bloke even embroidered his regimental badge on his kitbag. Then there were the so-called sports played on gravel: deadly serious soccer and rugby with everyone shouting, “Good show, chaps!” It was all such a fucking waste. I was nineteen and the highlights of my life were sleep, farting and pig-food: mouldy potatoes, turnips, cabbage, rat stew.’

  Sam saw the fleeting smile of remembrance. ‘Did you really eat rats?’

  ‘For flavouring. The only other meat we had was a stray cat. Plus tinned Spam if Red Cross parcels came through. Big if by then, because the Allies were bombing the hell out of the Hun railways. You never forget those parcels as long as you live. When they were divvied up, we’d each get a teaspoon of Spam or half a sardine, a thumb of cheese, a blob of jam, a square of chocolate, a pinch of Klim for our tea. Cigarettes too. You’d give your back teeth for a smoke.’

  Sam made the mistake of saying, ‘It sounds like camping.’

  ‘Bugger that! It was prison, boy. I was sentenced to jail for serving my country. We just had to sit there with the war raging on without us. You could hear far-off explosions sometimes, but that was it. Beyond the barbed wire was snow and black fir trees and eerie silence, not even a farmhouse. Do you know what helpless feels like?’ he barked. ‘Having your whole reason for being taken away. Having your guts sucked through your arsehole. Being at the mercy of Nazi thugs who have the power of life and death over you.’

  ‘The guards.’

  ‘The guards.’ The old man shivered all over like a dog shaking off water and his eyes began to fill again. ‘At the end of January they herded us into cattle trucks to be shunted off to Stalag Luft III at Sagan. That was worse.’

  Sam saw his grandfather’s face closing up in a way that meant he’d stop talking if not jogged again. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Enough for today, son. I’m dog-tired.’ Grampa’s face was the colour of Barbara’s old ivory bangles, yellow-tinged and etched with pencil lines.

  In the church now, Sam sees that the fat candles burning on the altar and in tall candlesticks at the head of his grandfather’s coffin are all the same colour, except at the top where they glow a warmer yellow, cupping the flames. He knows that the body inside will be eaten by worms and turned to dust, but hopes with all his heart that Grampa’s spirit is in Valhalla, strong again and being celebrated by other heroes.

  Bridget looks down at her son gazing at the coffin and wonders what is going through his mind. She has seen so little of him during his schooldays, though she’s tried to make up for it in the evenings with the working-mother’s standby, quality time: helping with homework, talking to him over supper and tucking him up in bed to read. He’s a serious boy, very quiet in class according to his teachers. She suspects that his asthma and lack of interest in games make him seem a nerd at school. Perhaps he’ll do better in the co-ed high school where she and Hugh plan to send him. Hugh knows only too well what it’s like to be non-sporty in boys’ schools.

  She remembers her dead father-in-law’s accusation: ‘You just went off and indulged yourself. It’s wrong. A woman’s place is with her family.’ But damn it, that was unfair. Sam is as much Hugh’s responsibility as mine. And Neli’s too. She leans forward past Barbara and glares at them.

  Shirley registers Bridget’s glare and wonders why her ex-daughter-in-law is upset. She and John hadn’t exchanged more than a few words since the divorce, so the emotion can’t be directed at him. Why is she so angry with Hugh?

  She’s been a good daughter-in-law. At least Shirley can talk to her without feeling she has to apologise for being an apartheid-era white woman who didn’t join the Black Sash or do anything meaningful to help the underprivileged. Blame it on Durban, she thinks, where the living is easy. John loved Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. She wishes she had thought to ask the organist to play it during the service.

  One bullet, one German.

  – Polish Resistance sniper motto

  SAAF, RAF AND POLISH AIR CREW LOSSES ON THE WARSAW RE-SUPPLY MISSIONS, 14 –17 AUGUST 1944

  In these four days, fourteen SAAF Liberator VI flights from Italy to Poland went down while flying supplies to partisans:

  EW105 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Warsaw and crash-landed on the Warsaw Aerodrome. Six airmen became prisoners of war; one went missing.

  EV961 Broke up in flight after being hit by anti-aircraft fire and crash-landed into Kamionski Lake in Warsaw. Six airmen were killed; one became a prisoner of war.

  KG939 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the outskirts of Warsaw and crashed in flames at Michalin; three airmen were killed; five survived.

  KG828 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Zdzary area. All seven airmen were killed.

  KG871 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at Goledzinow on its second mission to Warsaw. All seven airmen were killed.

  EW264 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Krakow area. All seven airmen were killed.

  KG836 Crashed in flames in Warsaw Central Square after the aircraft wing hit the rooftop of a building. All seven airmen were killed.

  KG890 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire. All seven Polish airmen were killed.

  KG873 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire on the return flight and crashed in the Krakow area. All seven airmen were killed.

  EV941 Shot down by Luftwaffe night fighters on the return flight and crashed at Kocmyrzòw. All eight airmen were killed.

  EW275 Shot down by anti-aircraft fire. All seven Polish airmen were killed.

  EW248 Hit on its second flight by machine-gun fire from Luftwaffe night fighters and exploded in mid-air between Krakow and Tarnow. Seven airmen were killed; one survived.

  EW161 Shot down by Luftwaffe night fighters over Łysa Góra. All seven airmen were killed.

  KG933 Shot down by Luftwaffe night fighters and crashed in the Krakow area. Three airmen were killed, one survived and two became prisoners of war.

  Of the 100 airmen, 83 were killed, 7 survived, 9 became POWs and one went missing in action.

  The Polish Resistance HQ in Warsaw radioed: ‘The exertions of your Air Force have enabled us to continue fighting. Warsaw in arms sends the gallant airmen their words of thanks and appreciation. We bow our heads to those who have fallen.’

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

  There were cheers, stifled when he marched out of his office with a Heil Hitler salute to usher the two men in. The usual straggle of POWs gathered to watch. Half an hour later, the guard J J had caught out was dragged into full view and shot by the Gestapo officer. Standing over his twitching body, the Kommandant ordered Major Irving to gather his men in the guards’ canteen, where they were harangued.

  · 17 ·

  ‘I PROTEST BY YOUR REJOICING. I DIE DAILY,’ the bishop intones.

  Me too. My life has shrunk to so little. Barbara often thinks back to Umfolozi, when life was like a child’s garden path with flowers on either side, curving ahead into a future full of promise. She’d felt so secure in her bedroom with its iron bed on stork legs, her knobbly white counterpane and paisley eiderdown, her embossed china potty under the bed, and a mosquito net dangling from the high ceiling, knotted up during the day. She’d rinse her face in a basin on the marble wash stand before cleaning her teeth and spitting into an enamel slop bucket, watching the toothpasty blobs slide down the sloping sides of the lid into the covered hole in the middle. She liked lying in the dark under the tucked-in net, safe from frenzied mosquitoes whining for her blood.

  The engine that pumped the borehole water also powered the lights, throbbing in the pump house all evening like a heart beating, unnoticed until it was switched off. Then the bulb filaments turned orange and went out, and darkness invaded the house. If she got scared and called her mother, Dot came with a candle, murmuring songs that sent her to sleep.

  Barbara remembers t
he trading store as a theatre set, with people’s feet shuffling all day on the gritty wooden floor. Scenery painted with rising wooden shelves of medicines in red and yellow boxes, packets of seeds, candles, cooking pots, stacks of green enamel plates and tin billycans, leather shoes, belts with round brass buckles, bales of dark blue and brown printed cotton, stacked pyramids of Lion matches, bottles of gobstoppers and niggerballs, squat brown paper packets of ‘gov’ment sugar’ and mealie meal, calico sacks of flour. Overhead, swaying racks of starched new shirts, dresses, trousers, overalls, black umbrellas, blankets and bicycle tyres. And she sitting on a step ladder behind the wooden counter, watching assistants reach up for items with long hooked poles or lowering the racks with a squeak of pulleys for customers to make their choice.

  On the counter stood a row of big-mouthed jars of motto sweets in fancy pastel shapes smelling of vanilla and violets, with faint red letters reading ‘Ek het jou lief’ or ‘Baby come closer’ or ‘Kiss me sweetheart’. On good days, Victor sometimes gave her a beehive – a chocolate-coated blob of sweet foamy white stuff with a cherry on the top. On bad days, she kept away from the store and played solitary games with her dolls, lacking Johnny’s ever-available playmates.

  Boys always have it better, she thought then and still believes. After her brother had gone to war, Umfolozi wasn’t the same. She’d felt trapped, hating the tea parties and teenage hops mothers arranged, watching beady-eyed from doorways, and the visiting and shopping in hats and gloves, high heels tapping along hot pavements. It wasn’t for her; it wasn’t for her! She watched flickering newsreels where women wearing doeks welded planes in factories, turning to give the camera a cheerful thumbs-up, and gung-ho war films where women spies were parachuted into enemy territory to become sultry vamps with Veronica Lake hairdos and Betty Grable legs, worming secrets out of supercilious Nazi officers in immaculate uniforms. That was more like it.

  After some well-rehearsed tantrums, Dot persuaded Victor to let Barbara go to a college in Durban to study elocution. ‘What the hell for?’ he roared at first. ‘It’s money wasted when she gets married.’

  ‘If, Dad,’ she’d flounced, not knowing how prophetic it was.

  ‘You’ll just run around with boys. I’ve seen you looking at them.’

  ‘I won’t! You haven’t! That’s disgusting! You’re a pig!’

  ‘And you’re a saucy little trollop. But your mother insists and she always gets her way. So go if you must. But don’t expect me to pay.’ Her father had got very drunk that night.

  Dot swallowed her pride and asked her father for the tuition fees, saying, ‘I owe Barbara the opportunity to make better choices in her life than I did. You understand.’

  ‘Abandon that no-good alcoholic when she leaves, and come home.’

  Watching from the doorway, Barbara saw the longing on her grandfather’s face.

  ‘I can’t do that. We jog along, Vic and I. He’s not like that all the time.’ When old man Herald’s shaggy eyebrows went up, Dot had added, ‘We love each other in our own peculiar way, you know? I wouldn’t have stayed otherwise.’

  ‘Your mother and I never dreamed that you would. We thought you’d come running home one day.’

  She nodded. ‘I should have realised. That’s why you wouldn’t help out with cash. But Johnny and Barbara need a father. Even Vic –’ She began to cry.

  Old man Herald said in a voice that cracked and broke, gathering her into his arms, ‘Ah, Dorothy. What terrible mistakes we make.’

  So grandfathers cried too.

  Kenneth says to Lofty, holding the Order of Service over his mouth again, ‘Re our spell in the bag: who told you about Moosburg?’

  ‘Ed Usher. Years ago.’

  ‘Ed should have kept his gob shut.’

  ‘J J had nightmares all his life about the thug who tortured you because of what he’d done.’

  ‘All he did was not tell anyone what the guard had given him. Hardly a major sin. But he chose to grovel under the blame after I was picked out for punishment, and I didn’t stop him. He was always so damn popular.’

  Lofty thinks, So that’s why. Mr Know-it-all Naylor was jealous. He says, ‘That’s no reason. People need to believe in heroes.’

  ‘I was a hero too, damn it.’

  ‘We all were.’ Lofty can’t suppress a twisted smile.

  Kenneth is looking at him with what could be empathy, though it’s hard to read emotion on a face skilled at hiding it. ‘I regret now letting him suffer. Any one of us could have made the same choice. We were terrified and starving.’

  ‘Beyond starving. I would’ve killed my grandmother for a mixed grill like the ones we used to wolf down at Twiggie’s. Remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  Even a year after being demobbed, they were always hungry. Kenneth had carried on with his interrupted law degree and J J started his BA at university in Maritzburg where they managed to avoid each other.

  Then Lofty was sent to Grey’s Hospital on a special three-month course of physiotherapy to get used to the awkward plastic leg. He had met them both at ex-servicemen’s gatherings and looked Kenneth up, suggesting that they ask J J to join them for a meal one evening.

  ‘I won’t talk to him.’ Kenneth was emphatic.

  ‘Why not? You were in the bag together.’

  ‘There was a problem.’

  ‘Oh.’ You didn’t question wartime problems.

  J J’s answer was much the same. ‘I’ll meet you. Not Naylor.’

  But Lofty persisted, telling them, ‘I need your support. Just once for old times’ sake, eh?’

  You didn’t refuse a plea for help from a comrade either. After the ‘just once’ it became once a week, as though a temporary truce had been declared. They were men among the boys who hadn’t gone to war, three survivors who’d lived through horrors and needed to feel they weren’t alone.

  On Friday evenings at Twiggie’s Pie Cart in the Market Square, they were like members of a secret society meeting under cover of darkness with an exchange of key phrases, reading each other’s faces in the light spilling from the serving hatch where Twiggie ruled till the early hours of the morning, yelling irritable orders at the black cook sweating in the galley. ‘Mixed grill! … Hoddog! … Pie and hotters! … Cowboy breakfast!’

  When the heaped plates with still-sizzling chips were handed down – ‘Here you are, cock. Okay?’ – they’d stand along the counter and bolt the food, then gulp down cups of coffee making small talk before separating with muttered goodbyes.

  The ritual meal at Twiggie’s was an affirmation of liberty as satisfying as each one’s solitary walk back to his digs, often in a fine Midlands drizzle with street lights shimmering on the tarmac. Freedom was choosing to go a different way each time, mackintosh collars pulled up to protect ears that carried the scars of frostbite, their feet in warm socks inside the velskoens swishing through puddles on the pavements. After Lofty went home to Durban, the three of them only met again in later years at Moth funerals.

  Except just the once when the coin changed hands.

  But right now, Kenneth isn’t recalling Twiggie’s Pie Cart on film noir nights, he’s thinking about kickbacks and their consequences. He has taken more than a few during his otherwise distinguished career. He likes living well: wearing tailor-made suits and shirts, belonging to clubs, drinking French wines and single malts, and, for many years, patronising an Italian barber whose speciality was a close shave with a cut-throat razor, followed by a wrapping in warm towels. That the barber had been an enemy prisoner of war who stayed on in South Africa gave a sense of titillating menace to the routine.

  Kenneth is long retired from the Bar, but there is still a demand for favours, and he has taken care to restrict them to good payers he can trust with his reputation. The most recent was a former client eager to place his mother in a good retirement home before anyone noticed the early signs of Alzheimer’s – most homes have useful rules to avoid accepting the already frail. A
s a past Chairman of the Board of Homeleigh, a ‘luxury sunset complex’ on the South Coast, Kenneth still has influence over the choice of residents. And he liked the old girl, a retired boarding-house owner with startling red hair.

  ‘My son wants to palm me off before I go completely gaga,’ she said when they met, ‘and the last thing I want is to be a burden to the dear boy. Can’t remember my fucking phone number these days.’

  When the ‘dear boy’, all of sixty and a CEO, protested that he only had her interests at heart, she said with a throaty chuckle, ‘I should hope so. I’ve worked hard and it’ll be nice having minions dance attendance on me for a change. The only thing I worry about is letting cats out of the bag when I start babbling. My lovers could always rely on my discretion. Hate to let ’em down.’

  ‘Hang on, Mother.’ The corporate face had gone puce.

  ‘No secret. How do you think I paid for your expensive education after your father ducked out?’

  ‘I thought the boarding house kept us going.’

  ‘Boarding house, my foot. It was services rendered to lonely men. An honest currency. Unlike this transaction.’ She’d shot Kenneth a shrewd glance.

  ‘Depends on how you see it, ma’am.’

  ‘Ah. You like it both ways, as I do. And you can take that any way you want. It’s all hoo-ha anyway.’ She was still chuckling when her embarrassed son pushed her away in her wheelchair.

  Kenneth thinks of her now, wishing he’d found a woman like her to fill the void that began as a crack when he came back from war with gnarled fingers and a ruptured scrotum, widening to a chasm that he could never bridge. He’d been kept at arm’s length by others all his life, except during those months when he and J J had huddled together under blankets busy with bedbugs and lice. And on those pie cart evenings in the glow of the light bulbs dangling above the steamy cave where Twiggie presided, sultan of the hungry on Maritzburg nights.

  Was it the war, Kenneth wonders, or his adamant nature – so like his hated father’s – that had hardened him against people, and them against him? When he’d said goodbye to the woman with red hair, bending to kiss a hand splodged with liver spots, he’d had an intense pang of longing to be close to someone who could make him laugh.