Kitchen Boy by Jenny Hobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

lady next to her former maid and realises she should have paid more attention to skin care, as Penny Coelen urges in the cosmetic advertisements. The former Miss World doesn’t look a day over forty, yet she and Shirley are the same age.
    She’d asked Lin to tell Theodora that she needn’t come all the way into town again for the funeral, adding, ‘Those taxis they travel in are death-traps.’
    ‘Oh, she’ll be there. She respected Dad because he spoke Zulu to her.’ Lin remembered Theodora’s reply when she’d asked her why she never taught Hugh and her to speak Zulu when they were young: ‘The money was too small, and I wanted to learn your English for my kids.’
    Until then, Lin had assumed that Theodora loved them like her own children, skating over the fact that she was a full-time paid worker who had to live apart from her children. She’d been there from early morning orange juice to bath time, when Shirley and J J sat out on the veranda having their evening spot, then helped Charlie afterwards with the supper dishes before going to her khaya in the backyard.
    All four of Theodora’s children went to college and became teachers, and the eldest was now a professor senior to Hugh at the university. Their first priority as wage-earners was to build their mother a substantial brick house on the family homestead near Inanda. Shirley was extremely put out when she gave notice, saying it was her turn to sit with her feet up. Finding a new maid even halfway as good wasn’t easy.
    Shirley had gone on yesterday in a wobbly voice, ‘So many outsiders are insisting on coming. I still think we should have had a quiet funeral. John would have hated all this fuss.’
    ‘You can hardly call her an outsider. And the Moths will enjoy the flutter.’ Whenever she can, Barbara works at raising a laugh.
    ‘There are only three 1945 veterans left in his Shellhole now.’ Shirley began to weep again, and for the thousandth time Barbara wondered why her handsome hero brother had chosen such an ordinary woman for a wife.
    The reason will die with Shirley, who has never told anyone about the crisis she nursed John through when he lay in hospital with a fever and septicaemia from a burst appendix. It was early 1952, and the Springboks had arrived in Cape Town on the Carnarvon Castle after the victorious Springbok tour of Britain and France. The crowds waiting for the mail-boat went wild. Hennie Muller – the captain who had trained on mine dumps to keep fit – was chaired shoulder-high along the quayside to a flag-bedecked bus.
    J J Kitching had an excruciating gut-ache that day, but he refused to miss the moment. He took a handful of aspirins for the pain and followed his teammates down the gangplank into the back-slapping mob. The aspirins wore off at the welcome-home reception, where he collapsed and was rushed by ambulance to Groote Schuur and an emergency operation. Shirley was the night nurse on his ward. His tormented whimpering kept the other patients awake and he was moved to a private room where she sat with him, calmly soothing as he raved on about his guilt and betrayal and dead friends who hadn’t come home. She bent to kiss his forehead one night as he sank into an exhausted sleep and he mumbled, ‘I love you, Shirl.’ After his striving mother, the chaos of war and the physical hammering of international rugby, Shirley was like home-made vanilla ice cream.
    When the penicillin had begun to work and he was well enough to sit up, Hennie Muller and his wife came to visit one evening. ‘Meet my guardian angel, Sister Shirley Barnes,’ John said, introducing her. ‘She got me through all this. I’m lucky to be alive and I’m going to marry her.’
    ‘Veels geluk, J J. A man needs a good wife.’ Hennie shook his hand, and then the blushing Shirley’s. ‘Florrie and I wish you both every happiness.’
    Before leaving the hospital, John begged Shirley never to tell anyone about what he’d done and