Kitchen Boy (27 page)

‘He visits me sometimes. Never when anyone’s at home. And we stay in touch with letters and photos. I have grandchildren 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.

S
TELLAWOOD
C
EMETERY 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 prisoner-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.

Green matting is laid over the soil from the freshly dug grave, with the brass rails and lowering mechanism in place, and a semicircle of plastic chairs set out.

‘Thoughtful,’ Lofty says, collapsing into the nearest of them. ‘My stump is giving me what-for.’

‘The daughter – Linda, is it? – arranged everything.’

‘She’s taking J J’s death hard.’ Kenneth had watched her sobbing exodus during the service.

‘All death is hard. But he had a good innings.’

‘Herbie will too, by the looks of him,’ Lofty says. ‘Quite the mogul. Funny how we all went in different directions after being demobbed. You share some wooden boards and a blanket with a chap, swapping fleas and lice, and next thing he’s a millionaire.’

‘Good man, Herbie. I represented him when he needed an advocate. Won all the cases.’ Kenneth stands a little straighter at the memory.

‘He was bloody lucky to get through the war without being spotted.’

‘Being in a work camp had its advantages. No gas chambers.’

‘We had our terrors, but that –’ Lofty shivers. Herbie had told them about the poor buggers in his labour camp who were sent to Auschwitz to construct a so-called synthetic oil plant, which supposedly explained the black smoke later coming from the chimneys.

‘Called ethnic cleansing now. Hard to believe it’s still happening.’

‘Hard to believe war, full stop. We must have been mad to volunteer.’

‘I’d call it ignorant.’

‘Some men loved it.’

‘Some men are fools.’

The conversation peters out as they wait for the other mourners to arrive. After a while Kenneth sits down too, feeling for the coin in its paper wrapping in his blazer pocket. He knows what to do now.

As soon as Lin has Shirley settled next to her in the leading limo, she says, ‘Are you going to tell Hugh, or shall I?’

Shirley looks at her son and the limo driver helping Purkey slide the wreaths into position down the sides of the coffin. ‘You mean now?’

‘Yes. You owe it to him.’ Lin tries not to look accusing.

‘Right now?’

Her mother looks a mess: swollen eyelids, rumpled dress, lipstick worn off and her hairdo awry. Lin says, ‘Yes. You’ve avoided telling us long enough.’

‘I don’t want it spread around. I couldn’t bear people gossiping about John not knowing. It would make him seem less of a –’ She falters.

‘We
know
he wasn’t a paragon of virtue.’

‘I thought you idolised him.’ The flatness in Shirley’s voice betrays what she has always felt about her children: that they admired their father more than her. She may have been the dutiful wife and mother who’d given up her career, but he was the valiant breadwinning father they respected and loved.

‘Oh, Mum.’ Lin looks into her mother’s uncertain eyes. ‘No more than we idolise you. Hugh and I think you’re a great mother. We wouldn’t dream of hurting you. Please don’t worry. We’ll keep your other son’s existence a secret.’

‘My other son’s name is Langley Adamson, after his adoptive father.’

‘Langley Adamson. Frightfully English.’ Lin tries to sound flippant to cover the rawness she feels. ‘Are the parents still alive?’

‘No, and nor are his wife’s. My grandchildren need a granny, not just a photograph. They’re quite young still: ten, eight and five. Two girls and a boy. I’m longing to meet them.’

Not just a half-brother, then. A whole family, with kids. It’s a dizzying thought. Lin says, ‘I wonder how Sam will feel.’

‘Sam thought the sun shone out of John. He won’t like it.’

‘Hugh’s reaction might be more of a problem.’

‘Yes. He was a dear little boy, sensitive like Sam.’

Lin can’t help saying, ‘Not tough like me?’

‘Different. You are so like your father. But both of you were a tremendous comfort to me after losing my baby. To hold a child, feeling a little body warm against you, knowing how much you’re needed –’ Her eyes fill with tears that spill down her cheeks past her dabbing tissue.