Home at last, he started rugby as soon as he was fit enough. It felt good to be back on a green field playing games where rules prevailed, and the Survivors B Team offered a way to sweat out the shame. Few could afford a car after the war, and if they arrived early at the grounds after cadging lifts or taking buses, they’d play cards in the changing room.
Udwayi Dent, the fullback, liked to deal. His Zulu nickname meant ‘the strider’ – he had long legs like a secretary bird, and could be as slow. The only time he really came alive was with playing cards in his hands. He’d shuffle them two ways: back and forth in a cupped hand and then face-down in two parts, allowing the lifted corners to knit together as they riffled down. Then he’d thump the pack on the bench to square it off and say, ‘So, what’s it today?’
Poker usually, though Herman sometimes voted for Snap in honour of his tank crew who had been blown up by a Teller mine near Monte Cassino on a day when he’d stayed behind in camp, flattened by dysentery. Lethargic games of Snap had helped to take their minds off the hell-oven claustrophobia before battles.
If a match was late, the team often smoked through a box of fifty Springbok, fogging up the changing room before they had to run on. Udwayi liked to win at cards and they learnt to let him triumph before hard games. When he lost, he could go into a dwaal that had to do with the slanting scar across his forehead, souvenir of an Italian bayonet.
They all had souvenirs. There were times when J J began to shiver and couldn’t stop. If it happened on the field, one of the team would sham an injury and lie writhing on the grass to bring the St Johns man running on with his first aid bag, while the others huddled round J J and held his arms close to his body until he quietened down.
As Udwayi said, ‘It could be any one of us, boet.’
That was the hard thing – you had to get your mind around the arbitrary luck of being alive and able to play games, with so many mates dead and gone. The army psychologists had a name for it: survivor’s guilt. That’s why they called themselves the Survivors B Team.
There was no A Team.
J J is hounded all his life by two questions: Why all of them and not me? and, What made me chicken out that day at Moosburg? He dies hoping he’s been forgiven. He’d spent a lifetime trying to make up for it.
G
REAT STUDDED DOORS STAND OPEN TO CRAWLING
Friday afternoon traffic, irritable honking and a din of mynahs in the palm trees. St Ethelbert’s stone floor gives it a dank chill after the muggy Durban heat. The men who sweated up the steps in formal suits and ties are more at ease now, cooling down and looking round to see who else has taken the afternoon off to honour J J Kitching.
Outside on the stone platform at the top of the steps, the pall-bearers stand with Bishop Chauncey and Reverend George, the township priest, waiting for the hearse. When it glides into the loading zone not quite five minutes late, Purkey the driver says something to Clyde who opens the passenger door before it stops, his pointy black shoe sliding along the tarmac. They get out and hurry towards the back, the khaki lab coats replaced by black tails, wing collars, bow ties and striped waistcoats. Cameras whirr and flicker as they slide the mahogany coffin onto a steel trolley on scissor legs. Purkey leans inside the hearse for a folded South African flag, which he shakes out with a flourish and drapes over the coffin, placing J J’s battery of medals at its head and a bunch of flowers in the centre.
Because some of the pall-bearers are too old to carry teacups, let alone push a coffin, Purkey beckons only Hugh and Mtshali – the cook J J always called Charlie. The two men help guide the trolley up the ramp to one side of the steps while Clyde propels it from the back. When they reach the stone platform, Reverend George fusses everyone into position, then takes his place behind the bishop waiting at the head. As the procession begins, Purkey and Clyde fade through a side door.
So J J moves, feet first, into the church he’d rejected after the war destroyed his boy’s faith in God, making rare exceptions only for Remembrance Day services and friends’ funerals. The bishop has ignored his apostasy because a hero’s funeral is useful publicity. It’s a struggle to fill more than a few pews at St Ethelbert’s on Sundays, when litter in the empty streets outside is the sole evidence of busy city weeks.
The usher closes the doors as the procession moves towards the altar with the organ burbling the Death March. Shirley, her eyes still puffy but resolutely dry, sits in the left front pew with Barbara, Bridget and Nelisiwe, leaving room for the family pall-bearers to join them when the service begins. The right front pews have been reserved for the Memorable Order of Tin Hats: two rows of grave old men (and a few women) with white hair and shaky jowls, in black blazers with badges of crossed rifles ringed by stars. Ranks of medals hang from faded ribbons above their hearts. They sit with clasped hands and distant eyes, gone back to war.
All the pews are full, some more packed than others. The Springbok and Sharks team representatives sit shoulder to mighty shoulder, looking straight ahead with solemn faces. It wouldn’t do for the press photographers lurking in the side aisles to catch a wrong expression on this day of young rugby heroes paying tribute to a legend. J J’s obituaries have mentioned other dashing South Africans of his time – Sailor Malan and Bill Payn, their official war photos reviving memories of the level manly gaze and ruler-straight hair parting.
A wheel squeaks as the coffin is escorted up the red-carpeted aisle by J J’s children, friends, grandson and cook. The altar dais is banked with flowers and propped-up wreaths; one reads KITCHEN BOY in pearly everlastings. Lin has helped Shirley pick red clivia and maidenhair fern in the shade garden for the bunch that lies on the flag with a card reading: With All My Love, Forever Your Shirl. The writing in blue-black ink is shaky and blotched.
Morné du Plessis has said of Springbok captains: ‘Personally, I don’t have much belief in the born-leader syndrome. I am absolutely certain that good leaders are made.’
Retief Alberts was a case in point: a captain tempered in a steel mill. His father, born in a Boer concentration camp, had forbidden him to go and fight for the British swine when he left school in 1940. But he wanted to prove himself, so his next option was an essential occupation. Iscor in Pretoria was churning out steel for the armoured cars and tanks and munitions being manufactured for the Allies by South African Railways and in the mine workshops, so he applied to become an apprentice fitter and turner.
Retief pushed his body to extremes, working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week. He was a quick learner, and fast-tracked through welding school and the operation of metal lathes spinning off spirals that clung to his brown overalls like steel tresses. He volunteered for extra duties on repair teams, fixing blast furnaces and grab buckets, toiling up and down ladders with bags of tools and replacements for faulty overhead cranes. To feel and hear what war was like, he would stand by at the end of a blow when the Bessemer converter was tapped, his body streaming sweat as molten steel arced into ladles for teeming into ingot moulds. He watched as slag cracked into black islands on the intense redness of the melt and tried not to think of his friends trapped in burning tanks in the desert Up North. When shifts allowed, he went to the rugby club and trained: running laps, exercising with dumbbells, doing press-ups, scrumming against other straining men on the crisp grass of winter afternoons as shadows crawled across the field. He was always the last to leave the changing room.
Within four years, he had risen to be the youngest-ever foreman of the sheet steel rolling mill. By the time the war ended and men could think of playing serious rugby again, he was captain of the Iscor team and later chosen to play No 8 for Transvaal in the Currie Cup. When J J Kitching was selected as a wing three-quarter in the first post-war Springbok team in 1949, Retief was his captain.
It is a coup to have a man as revered as Retief Alberts at the funeral; he is not far off ninety and doesn’t like to leave his cattle farm near iNgogo in the shadow of Majuba. He leads the pall-bearers on the right, his quavering hand resting on the flag draped on the coffin. This bright new flag – so different to the old flag – makes him feel just as proud. When he makes his rare speeches now, he says that we are indeed a great nation to have come to an agreement rather than fighting to the death. He ends by saying that war is a curse, never adding that there was a time when he would have rushed off to fight if he hadn’t been a dutiful boereseun. Yet that is what he thinks now, walking beside his dead teammate into St Ethelbert’s.
Sam is eleven when he becomes his grandfather’s solace – old enough to listen and be impressed, too young to have heard repeats of the stories that give the rest of the family glazed eyes. He’s an only child who is too often alone and gets lost in dreams. Other boys avoid him because of his asthma; blue veins show through his skin and he looks like he’d bruise if you touched him. His teachers complain that he doesn’t pay attention in class.
Sam’s passion is war history. He reads a lot about knights and bowmen, swords, sieges, Mongol and Zulu warriors, Roman legions, cannons and battles, but feels funny at the sight of blood – even the watery stuff that comes out of raw chicken. He keeps a travelling war library in his mother’s old brown school case covered with stick-on labels; it goes with him everywhere except school. When she fished it out of a garage cupboard for him and said with a smile that it was made of extra-tough Samsonite, he thought of Superman with his kryptonite and felt chuffed. Most of the boys he knows play computer games when they’re not kicking or hitting balls, and they think that reading is a drag. He says he doesn’t care that they call him a sissy, because his grampa is a Springbok
and
a war hero, and nobody can beat that.
But he does care. How do you know whether you’re a sissy or not unless you’re tested? In combat, say, or in a situation where you can save the day with a valiant act of courage. He knows about olden-day heroes, like Jason and Shaka, and the war heroes Grampa talks about, like Guy Gibson and Edwin Swales VC. When other boys talk the same way about computer avatars and sportsmen and rock stars, he’s puzzled.
Grampa is scathing about chaps with girls’ hair who wear earrings. He calls them nancy boys and says, ‘
We
were flying war planes and fighting the Hun before we were twenty.’
‘Tell me more,’ is the key Sam uses to unlock catacombs of memory. ‘Tell me about flying from Italy to Poland in a bomber when you saved the tail gunner and baled out just before it crashed.’
‘You’ve heard that one.’ J J shifts in his chair, easing his bladder.
‘But I want to know more. Where did you drop the bombs?’
‘Not bombs. We were parachuting supplies to Polish partisans: hand grenades, radio equipment, Sten submachine guns, automatic pistols, two-inch trench mortars, shoulder-fired PIAT anti-tank weapons –’
‘What are those?’
‘A smaller British version of a bazooka,’ he explains. ‘Plus warm clothes and food and medical supplies. It was August 1944. Rain and mud everywhere. The partisans had been training in secret for months. When our so-called Allies, the Russians, got close enough, the partisans rose up against the occupying Germans. But those fucking Reds stopped outside Warsaw and sat there watching the Nazis hammer the Polish Underground Army. They were fighting from street to street, hiding in cellars like rats, starving. Backs to the wall, poor sods. The Polish government in exile in London asked the RAF for help and they roped us in.’
‘You flew Liberators,’ Sam prompts.
The old man nods. ‘Built by the Yanks: big ugly brutes with glass turrets in the nose and tail for the gunners. Wings with four prop engines and a pair of bloody great ovals for tail fins, all mounted above the fuselage. This meant a very high lift-to-weight ratio, so Libs could take off from short runways and carry heavy loads over long distances. They could do the two thousand miles from Foggia to Warsaw and back in ten or eleven hours on a good night, up to thirteen in foul weather.’
‘What’s Foggia?’
‘Where, you mean. North-east of Naples, near the Adriatic Coast. SAAF 31 and 32 Squadrons flew from there over occupied Europe: first the Adriatic, then Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland. Those Libs were rugged as hell, took a lot of punishment from flak and awkward landings.’
‘Did the enemy keep trying to shoot you down?’
‘Not all the time. Over the cities. Airfields. Railway yards. Refineries. Factories –’ He trails off, not wanting to add ‘labour camps’. He remembers cowering into filthy sacking night after night in a transit camp near Krakow, terrified that his own side’s bombs would kill him before the Nazis did.
The old man’s eyes droop and Sam fires another question. ‘Tell me again what you did in the Liberator, Grampa?’
‘Ah. Yes.’ He picks up the thread. ‘Mostly I sat at the navigation table in the cockpit, plotting a course over the Carpathians for the Vistula River to lead us to Warsaw. But when we started the run for a drop, I had to crawl down to a bench halfway towards the front turret, just above a perspex window where the bombsight was mounted. You lay flat on your tummy to operate it.’ He has explained to Sam that navigators were called observers in the South African Air Force and trained as bomb aimers too.
‘Who sat in the front turret?’
‘Nobody, on those runs. Because we flew at night when attacking fighters could only see our exhaust flames from behind, the front turret guns were dumped so we could carry heavier loads. I lay there alone above that window, looking down on hell. Burning buildings. Tongues of fire licking up. Bomb explosions. Thick black smoke. Screaming ack-ack. Shrapnel rattling all around us.’
Sam whispers, ‘You must have been so scared.’
‘Shitless. Every time I climbed up those metal steps I’d think: I could die tonight. These may be my last moments on Earth. And I was hardly out of school. Short on ball hairs. Cut the tops off my pimples when I was shaving.’