Kitchen Boy (18 page)

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

KG
933 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.

‘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 the 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. As 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.

The Germans knew that we had receiving sets … They were a triumph of ingenuity ... News time in the evening was, apart from the weekly issue of Red Cross parcels, the highlight of our existence.

No one was allowed to talk or cause a disturbance while the news was being read.

– S G W
OLHUTER
,
The Melancholy State

Stalag Luft VII, Bankau bei Kreuzburg. November 1944.

The worst thing was the soul-rotting knowledge that they were sitting around like spare parts while a war that could change the world raged on outside the barbed wire.

Older officers tried to keep the younger men busy with activities that still made them howl at the tedium. Rat hunts were the highlight of J J’s days. His midnights were defined by the faint crackle of the BBC news in a hut full of silent men straining to hear. In between, he did what he was told with the sullen acquiescence of a trapped adolescent burning with injustice. He raved about killing Germans to anyone who would listen.

With his usual disdain, Kenneth said from the workbench, ‘That’s puerile. Help me with this blower. Or go and kick a ball somewhere.’

‘Boy Scout.’J J had loathed the DHS scout troop that Victor made him join to learn some bushwhacker tricks.

‘It’s better than doing nothing. OC’s always on about idle bastards not pulling their weight.’

‘Bugger that. We volunteered for action, not prison. I want to dig an escape tunnel or shoot Huns.’

‘Oh, grow up.’ Kenneth was two years older and thought he knew it all because he’d been to university and had his pilot’s wings.

J J couldn’t sit and do nothing. A handful of dried peas stolen from the camp kitchen to make contraband soup gave him an idea that caused him and other conspirators weeks of grief.