Kitchen Boy (16 page)

Six in the morning till eight-thirty at night, Thursday and Sunday afternoons off, plus one weekend a month, it had been in the early years. Tea tray up to the bedroom at seven. Take the shoes down for Theodora to clean. Put on the porridge. Lay the table. Cook bacon and eggs. Make toast. Breakfast at eight sharp. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Prepare phuthu for nine o’clock, when he and Theodora and the gardener had half an hour for their breakfast, sitting on kitchen chairs in the backyard. Polish the floors. Bake a cake or biscuits. Morning tea at eleven. Clear away and wash dishes. Clean silver. Lay the table. Prepare lunch for one o’clock and serve. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Help Theodora with the servants’ lunch, then off until afternoon tea at four. Clear away and wash dishes. Prepare dinner. Drinks tray on the veranda by six. Lay the table. Serve dinner at seven. Clear away and wash dishes, clean the kitchen. Back to his khaya by eight-thirty if there were no guests, or anything up to midnight if there were. He read his Zulu Bible for a while until sleep overtook him; in later years he bought
Bona
magazine, Zulu edition.
Drum
was too modern with its sin, soccer and sex.

You need strong blood and plenty of sleep to work such hours. But he admits that Master paid him well: all of ten pounds a month at the beginning, then thirty rand, rising every year. Plus rations: boys’ meat, unlimited mealie meal, tinned pilchards, onions, fish oil, tomato sauce, brown bread, tea, condensed milk, sugar, Lifebuoy soap, etcetera. He and Theodora were trusted; Madam didn’t lock up the sugar and tea as other madams did, though the cocktail cabinet was a different matter. More than once he had heard her say to friends: ‘It’s not fair to leave drink standing around when you have servants. Too much temptation.’

As if a Mtshali would ever steal.

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet –’

Herbie Fredman knows from family history and personal experience that death is the destroyer as well as the enemy. The full revelation of the Holocaust after the war left him unable to believe there can be a God, though he goes through the motions: the Friday night family meal always, shul on occasional Saturdays and the seder at Passover. Herbie invests his faith in people and hard work, and makes donations to young entrepreneurs with good business plans. None of them has let him down, though the Happy Wanderer is another matter. He misses his vagabond son and yearns for him to come home.

For Herbie, neither this big stone church nor the domed shul he attends have any sense of a divine presence. In his opinion, they’re mini-palaces built to awe the gullible. The point is, God didn’t save him from death in a burning plane, J J did.

He looks at the flag-draped coffin and murmurs a last thank you.

Felix (du Plessis) was a wonderful man. Doc Craven always used to say a captain should be able to know his players and get the most out of them.

– H
ANNES
B
REWIS
, 1949 Springbok fly half, quoted in
The Captains
by E
DWARD
G
RIFFITHS

J J was twenty-four when he ran onto the field at Newlands with the Springboks for their first test match in eleven years against the All Blacks. Jittery with nerves, sweating buckets, his heart hammering like a compactor, he stood in position before the kick-off trying to blot out the sight of the huge New Zealand forwards doing the haka, their faces contorted with fury, and to ignore the bone-shivering roar of the crowd in the stands.

Doc had instructed them during his pep talk in the changing room to put the hopes of the rugby-starved nation out of their minds. ‘Just play like you’ve trained, manne. Discipline. Teamwork. Focus and concentrate.’

J J tried to focus and concentrate, telling himself he’d been in far worse places. Doc had welded them into a team at Groote Schuur: making them run laps, jink and pass, practise endless lineouts and scrums, even carry each other piggyback down the field to build up their strength. So why had Brewis blundered into the flag post marking the halfway line as they ran out? And why had he stood blinking away the salt sting in his eyes? Because they were men in a blue funk, that’s why. They had survived a world war, but could they win that crucial game?

Afterwards, he thought he might have shat his pants and brought shame on the Springboks forever if the captain hadn’t turned to them all at the end of the haka and given them the calm half-smile of a man who fully trusts his forces. Retief Alberts – the ‘man of steel’, the rugby reporters were calling him – had given them courage just with a look.

And they won. Okey Geffin scored five penalty goals with the accuracy he had honed day after day on the ruthless gravel of his Polish prisoner-of-war camp. After the series, J J went home a double hero.

During their return to camp he didn’t join in the hilarity of being alive, or respond to a teasing, ‘Cat got your tongue, J J?’ Secrets have their own constraints. He didn’t feel guilty about the coin in his pocket so much as cagey. It was nobody else’s business.

T
HERE IS A SUDDEN LOUD BANGING ON THE MAIN
church doors and men’s muffled voices calling, ‘Let us in!’ and ‘We want to be in there too!’ Heads in the congregation swivel. The usher scurries to the doors and slams a heavy sliding bar across to lock them – a reflex action going back to times when castles were besieged.

The bishop stops reading and looks up from the lectern. ‘What is going on out there?’

Above even louder banging, the usher calls back, ‘Don’t know, Your Grace.’

‘Stand guard, then,’ the bishop blusters, unsure what else to say.

The mayor is never unsure. She rises and moves to the end of the VIP pew, ready to take control of the situation. Flashes glitter in the side aisles again as photographers hurry towards the disturbance. There is uneasy shuffling and shifting as people look around for emergency exits. The Sharks captain unwedges himself, stands up and edges past a row of burly knees.

The mayor heads for the arched doorway, calling in a powerful voice, ‘Ubani? Who is that?’

More banging and voices calling.

‘I am Mayor Thembi. Identify yourselves!’ Her command reverberates round the hushed church like the boom of the British cannons used against her people during the Zulu wars, then two decades later against the recalcitrant Boers.

The banging stops. Everyone in this city knows Mayor Thembi. People flock to her imbizos in the townships. Her face is in the newspapers almost daily. Women feel free to stop her in the street, asking for help and advice; men are polite and careful not to cross her.

A single angry voice shouts above the din, ‘We are war veterans. Let us in.’

Murmurs sprout among the congregation like noxious weeds. Unrest. Uprising. It’s a riot. MK. Are they armed? Still digging up AK47s. Old arms caches. Coming over the borders too. Hundreds. Thousands. You can buy them in any township. Toyi-toying in the streets. Land grabs. Mugabe. Xenophobia. Now it begins. Knew it would happen here. Inevitable. I thought MK were disbanded. What’s going on? Where are the bloody police when you need them?

The mayor surges towards the barred doors, demanding, ‘Why are you making all this noise?’ and orders the usher, ‘Open, please.’

He calls out, ‘Should I, Your Grace?’

‘
I
am asking here. You will open.’

‘But is it safe?’ He adds, ‘Will
you
be safe, madam?’

‘I am not your madam. And nobody touches Mayor Thembi.’

‘Force majeure,’ someone mutters.

The usher slides the locking bar back into its cuffs, pulls open the heavy doors, and Mayor Thembi stalks through. On the stone platform outside is a group of men who seem unlikely shouters and bangers, more like platteland farmers who meet at the pub for beers to grumble over drought losses and no more Land Bank loans. They wear tracksuits or khaki shorts, and shirts with blue or green pockets; some are on crutches; one has double hooks instead of hands.

The mayor surveys them. ‘Who speaks for you?’

‘Darius Groth.’ He has a naartjie-peel nose, and stands out among the crowd in a faded camouflage jacket the colours of gum tree bark; his boep hangs over his belt and his belligerent boots are firmly planted. ‘You know the name?’

A troublemaker: an ex-recce captain from the war in Angola who broadcasts bitter public complaints about disability pensions. He has been known to chain himself to the railings outside Parliament in Cape Town and the Union Buildings in Pretoria in his campaign against the
ANC
government’s favouring of struggle veterans. She says, ‘Yes, I know you. But now is not the time for talking.’

‘Now
is
the time. We have come to demand –’

‘Demand? This is a funeral service.’

‘So, what did this Kitching do that we haven’t done for our country? He volunteered. We were conscripted! Forced into the army. Forced to fight. We had no choice.’ His voice gets angrier as the others mutter agreement. ‘We want the same respect.’

‘Now is not the time,’ she repeats. ‘Come and see me in my office on Monday. There we can talk about your grievances. Not here.’

‘Right here, right now. We demand –’

‘Monday, okay? I promise I’ll help you.’

‘The hell you will.’ Rage suffuses his face. The men nudge each other, stirring up resentment. The televised funeral of a white war hero is an ideal opportunity for them to put their case to a national audience.

Summing up the situation, the mayor says, ‘Everybody knows that Mayor Thembi is very, very serious about her promises.’

‘Ja, right.’ Groth half-turns to face the bank of cameras. ‘It’s enough now! We’re treated like scum. We want justice. We want compensation for Angola. Also, the names of our dead on war memorials and in the Peace Park.’

She needs to deal with the disruption before it escalates and delays the service even further. She says, ‘Okay, Darius. Come inside then. Only you.’

‘
All
of us.’

‘There are not enough seats.’

‘
All
. We’re tired of being invisible. We are ready again for war.’

The mayor’s eyes move over the middle-aged men fidgeting behind him. Their expressions range from defiant to sheepish. She says, ‘War?’

‘You better believe it. There’s plenty more of us. We can raise commandos. We’ll raid the armouries. We were trained to fight dirty in the border war.’ He has taken her irony for doubt.

She hears the whirr-click of zoom lenses and the picketa-picketa-picketa of cameras on autodrive. If she doesn’t resolve the situation soon, there’ll be unwelcome headlines tomorrow. Bad publicity for eThekwini.

She says, ‘Eugène Terre’Blanche made threats like that.’

‘We’re not AWB. We fought for our country. We can fight again.’

‘Nobody wants a fight. You heard my invitation: come and join in the service as their leader, then I’ll meet you and these men on Monday.’

‘No ways. We stand together.’ He plants his boots far apart.

‘That’s the deal. And no more nonsense. When I go back inside with the press, the doors will not be opened again.’

‘Journalists stay with the real news,’ he scoffs.

‘And the real news is inside this church today. I urge you in the spirit of ubuntu to come and join us. Okay? Take it or leave it.’ There are noises in the church doorway and she turns to find it crowded with rugby players, all of them much younger than the veterans and ready for action after sitting for over an hour squashed in their pews. ‘You guys!’ she thunders, pointing a stern finger. ‘Go back. I don’t want any more trouble.’

‘Okay, ma’am,’ the Sharks captain says. ‘We just thought –’

‘Go back. Go back. The service must carry on.’ Ignoring the offending ‘ma’am’, the mayor herds the rugby players inside. As she disappears through the doorway, she calls over her shoulder, ‘Are you coming, Darius?’

‘No. We’ll stay here on the steps and talk to TV and the newspapers.’ The beard parts in a sneer. ‘Stalemate, Mayor Thembi.’

‘Your choice.’

She plunges into the church, followed by the cameras and journalists who are familiar with Groth’s ravings, and the great doors close behind them. The hayi khona speech is today’s hot news and they’re hoping for more.

The young manhood of South Africa has rallied magnificently to the defence of the country, which faces the future today with a steady confidence in its national preparedness.

–
Rand Daily Mail
, January 1940

Stanley Magwaza was one of the 80 000 Non-European personnel who joined up, inspired by the red, yellow and blue posters showing men and women striding out in smart khaki uniforms, with slogans that read:
‘MEN ARE WANTED
for all
UNITS of the UNION DEFENCE FORCE. JOIN UP NOW!’
and
‘MANPOWER
for
VICTORY
. The
SA AIR FORCE NEEDS YOU.’
The man with a Red Cross armband carrying a stretcher on the SA Medical Corps poster looked black against the background of planes trapped in searchlights and starbursts of ack-ack.

But the posters didn’t mean that black men like him would be among the confident striders. He and a company of hoodwinked volunteers were loaded into the bowels of a troopship that steamed via Mogadishu to Alexandria, to assist mechanics servicing army vehicles in the desert. They were not allowed to carry arms. Their battles were with flies, sand, camel meat, hard biscuits with weevils, and the brackish drinking water that gave everyone gyppo guts. The engines he slaved over and under had seized up in the heat. When his overall got so caked with oil and sweat that it could stand up on its own, he siphoned petrol into his tin helmet to help scrub the worst of it off.

The Libyan Desert was torment after the Drakensberg foothills where he and his brothers had herded cattle and played in streams running through grass bent double with morning dew. He had not known that there could be such different places in the world; such an impersonal war with faceless enemies, where young men who had volunteered to fight for their country were treated like serfs and didn’t qualify for a Cairo pass.