Free Kitchen Boy by Jenny Hobbs Page B

so focused on living up to her father’s expectations – getting a good degree, finding a challenging job in IT, then working her way up in the organisation – that there was no space for cooking or sewing or gardening.
    ‘How will you survive if there’s another depression?’ Shirley said more than once. ‘If there are more atom bombs or disasters like earthquakes that change life as we know it? We’d all have to grow our own food. You’d be helpless without your computers and car and all those restaurants where you eat.’
    ‘Don’t be such a doom-monger, Mum.’
    ‘Your father and I lived through a time like that. I worry about you, darling. Being clever and competent is not enough.’
    ‘You don’t have to worry. I can pay people to do things.’
    But her mother nagged on. ‘You need to think about your future, Linda. I wish you could find a nice steady man to marry.’
    Like Dad? Lin thought. No way. Too domineering – like all men of his generation. I couldn’t stand it. But all she said was, ‘You know I’m too independent to be tied down to domesticity. My career’s important to me.’
    ‘You’ll be on the shelf for good if you wait much longer.’
    One of Shirley’s skills was prescience. When Lin married a senior colleague who seemed compatible, it lasted a year before he started sleeping with other women, saying Lin was too bossy. After a messy divorce she had to leave the organisation and start job-hunting again. The only halfway interesting position was in the KwaZulu-Natal archives, where she is in charge of the genealogy database and photographic library. Shirley says she’s wasting her life there. Lin thinks her mother has wasted her life in the shadow of a hero.
    Jesus H Christ, Lofty Munn fumes, not one of these folk dressed up to the nines knows a damn thing about what ungodly really means. They don’t realise that God abandoned us when he saw another world war breaking out, and never came back.
    Lofty had been a corporal with the 5th South African Brigade overwhelmed by the tanks of Rommel’s Afrika Korps at Sidi Rezegh on 23 November 1941. The officers and wounded were taken away in vehicles. Lofty and two thousand other ranks were made to walk for almost four days in blazing sun, with no water for the first two days, and after that only half a biscuit and a brackish mouthful. Italian guards hustled them on. Staggering, delirious men collapsed all around him, their burnt faces bloating. Reason evaporated like the shimmering desert mirages. Newman Robinson of the 10th South African Field Ambulance, also on the Thirst March, wrote: ‘All the known precepts of civilised society had vanished. Men fought for water like hyenas after carrion.’
    That was only the beginning. They were kept in wire cages, shouted at, slammed with rifle butts, bullied, threatened, starved, and scoured by dysentery. When they were stumble-marched to the ships that would take them to prisoner-of-war camps in Italy, so many were crammed into the holds that they could not lie down. Sitting upright, squashed together, they slept in puddles of stinking pee and shit. And that was before his leg went vrot.
    Every evening for years, Lofty Munn has sat in his veranda-cave of golden shower overlooking the railway in Jacobs, remembering pain, starvation, filth, the foul smell of gangrene. After Italy capitulated and he was released and sent home to Durban, there were no jobs for one-legged men on crutches. He seldom wore the surgical pink artificial leg fitted by UDF orthopaedic surgeons because it felt all wrong, like a clumsy alien leeching on him.
    He lived alone, eking out his war pension until he met Joyce on a bench in Albert Park, feeding the pigeons. She took him on, stump and all, to help run her tobacconist shop in Smith Street and to jazz up her nights. That’s what she said: ‘You jazz up my nights like a crazy cricket, Lofty, man.’ Just looking at her gave him a hard-on. She loved sex and cigarettes