Lofty looks away from his glare. Jesus, the poor bastard couldn’t get it up afterwards. So that’s why he didn’t marry. Never dreamed I had it better than Mister Altogether Vanity.
‘No. S’pose not, if you put it that way,’ he mumbles.
‘Deliver me from all my offences,’ fulminates Reverend George, his eyes switching from Kenneth to the bedizened old woman who sits in the right front pew with the family, dressed in a turquoise-and-yellow kaftan with garlands of tusks and seeds tangled round her neck. She looks as though she intends to make incantations to pagan gods beside the grave.
Where did Hugh find this righteous bozo? Barbara wonders. She’s fond of Hugh who has a good heart, though none of Johnny’s charisma. That seems to have gone to Lin and young Sam who both have a spark to them – as she does. Small consolation, now that she’s a hard-up pensioner living alone. She hopes like hell that Johnny hasn’t forgotten to leave her a few bob.
Their mother always talked about ‘a few bob’: ‘They only cost a few bob, Vic,’ she’d plead when he ranted over new shoes for the children or glasses to replace the ones he’d smashed.
The brutal truth is that Barbara will need more than a few bob to keep going. If Johnny hasn’t seen her right in his will, she’ll have to ask Hugh and Lin to help out. She could never ask Shirley, who for some reason thinks she’s extravagant.
It’s so unfair that her drab sister-in-law should be left a well-off widow with a huge house and two cars while she has to live in a poky flat on Berea Road scrabbling for bus fare to get anywhere.
Her mother had warned her that life was unfair, and she didn’t believe it until her own sad chickens came home to roost.
The finest sport in the world is hunting the Hun. Join up and
have a cut at the beggar.
– Quoted in ‘South Africa’s Yesterdays’,
Reader’s Digest
As a young man, Victor Kitching had the luck of the devil: born into a well-off Durban family and considered a dashing fellow by the girls. When he volunteered to join what was left of the South African Brigade in France in June 1918, half a dozen young ladies were at the docks with lace hankies to wave goodbye to him and his fellow officers as they embarked – a cohort of Natal’s finest in scratchy khaki uniforms.
Thanks to a minor leg wound that became infected, Victor only served a few weeks in the trenches before returning home to a blizzard of flags, jubilant cheers and a free farm on the Umfolozi Flats.
Sugar cane was the recommended crop and there was plenty of help for returned soldiers, who also qualified for generous bank loans. The farm prospered and he took up polo, which the girls considered even more dashing than soldiering. One of them was Dorothy, nicknamed Dot, granddaughter of the sugar baron Joseph Herald of Two Rivers. Their son John Joseph was born in 1925, and their daughter Barbara three years later in 1928.
Life was good. Victor was captain of the local polo club and played matches all over the province, while Dot looked after the children and ran the farm with one of her father’s trusted indunas, Landela. Having grown up in the caramel air of sugar mills, both understood the combinations of soil, rain, temperature, ratoon stock and labour that allowed cane to flourish. And life was safe on the farms then, when everyone knew their place. Victor, in full cry on his polo fields, never had a moment’s worry about his little woman holding the fort back home.
Then his luck changed. There was a prolonged drought in the late twenties and the cane shrivelled to dry husks. Cane trucks stood in empty rows on their winding narrow-gauge lines and the sugar mills were silent. Soon the Depression was raging and banks foreclosed. Joseph Herald II refused a bail-out loan to his playboy son-in-law who had allowed crops to fail on fertile river soil. Instead, Dot’s father bought the trading store at Umfolozi and its adjoining house, so his daughter and grandchildren would have a roof over their heads and an income. Victor, bankrupt and furious, was forced to become what he most dreaded: a counter jumper.
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.
H
ALFWAY THROUGH
P
SALM
39, R
EVEREND
G
EORGE
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 of 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.’