Kitchen Boy by Jenny Hobbs Read Free Book Online

when they assembled outside, and said, ‘A female pall-bearer is a first for me. I’m relying on you to bring up the rear with aplomb, my dear.’
    Female. Aplomb. My dear. Now she is seething. Why the hell did I insist? Dad won’t know.

My one trouble is what am I going to do when the war is finished. It will take me years, certainly many months to settle down to civilian life again …
I am taught to destroy, people, material, anything and everything. Not heeding the consequences. There is none except good ammo. The more I destroy the greater the deed done. Horribly warped minds we will have when we get back to a life of creating instead.
    – L IEUTENANT C OLIN W ALTERS of the South African Engineer Corps in a letter from North Africa dated 20 October 1941
    Natal University College, Pietermaritzburg, 1946.
    They travelled between varsity and Oribi Res in gharries – lumbering old troop carriers with benches under half-perished canvas canopies that had done long duty in the northern desert.
    Oribi had been an army camp. Now the prefabs were jam-packed with too many students, from just-out-of-school boys to haggard ex-servicemen in a hurry to make up for years lost to war. They studied and partied and drank, trying to cram everything in. Men seen vomiting last night’s jerepigo down the steps of the Student Union in the early mornings would be in lectures an hour later, tidied up though still smelling of sick. They were brusque and jittery, chain-smoked, and had no small talk. With a swagger, they wore their striped varsity blazers and baggy corduroys to dances, wrestled girls into dark corners and inveigled their hands down bras and up skirts, navigating suspenders and roll-ons instead of planes and tanks. Mothers warned their daughters that chaps would try anything and always to keep one foot on the floor.
    The girls who gave way usually regretted it. Ex-servicemen were forceful lovers with no time to waste and FLs in their pockets. They weren’t going to be caught getting anyone pregnant – not when life was beginning again and there were exams to pass if they were to catch up with the gutless bastards who hadn’t volunteered.
    After J J was demobbed, he spent several months at home eating Dot’s lovingly cooked meals and cakes, and sleeping. During the days he sat slumped on the veranda, gazing at Lake Eteza through the fly screens as he fought surges of guilt and panic and tried to forget the coin hidden in his wardrobe. Dot came running into the bedroom when he woke screaming and sweating under the mosquito net that tangled round him like smoke hissing from incendiaries. She stroked his forehead, her fingers making concentric circles, until he was back again in the peaceful nights of his childhood, listening to owls and nightjars.
    In the last months of 1945 there were blazing sunsets from dust in the stratosphere generated by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Victor began grumbling that J J should make up his mind about what he was going to do. ‘You can’t just bloody sit there. Move your arse, boy. Come and help me in the store.’
    ‘Leave him alone, Vic. He’s recuperating from shell-shock. And he’s not a boy any more.’ Dot always rose bristling to his defence.
    ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to go on supporting him ad infinitum.’
    ‘He wouldn’t want that,’ she said in a sarcastic voice unfamiliar to J J. She looked worn, without the spark he remembered.
    His father’s annoyance galvanised him to enrol for a BA at the university in Maritzburg, thinking he might be a lawyer like Kenneth. But he was bored by the old profs who droned on about classics and Latin that seemed like stuffed quaggas in a museum, irrelevant to the living who fought and made love and got wounded and went mad. He changed the following year to a BSc in agriculture, and found the study of grasses and pastures and farming economics soothing, but dull. For a bit of excitement and to revive the