Kitchen Boy Read Online Free PDF

confectionery.’
    Bobby shuffles next to his oldest friend now, remembering far back to an afternoon when Mrs Kitching squelched half-oranges on a glass squeezer and gave them mugs of juice to carry out to a rug spread in the fig tree’s shade. He sees J J’s baby sister Barbara sleeping in a Moses basket next to them, and the cobra that rises above the plaited cane weaving a figure of eight over her, as he freezes in fear. And J J jumping up and yelling, ‘Mfezi!’ – his mug tumbling away as the snake whips into the grass and is gone.
    Bobby walks behind Hugh thinking, Even then J J was a hero. What made him so different?
    On the evening of the death, eight places are laid at the rosewood table in the dining room. The cook known as Charlie has spent the afternoon polishing the silver. Gleaming cutlery lies next to bone china and the beaded place mats that affirm Shirley’s recent pledge to be Proudly South African. Charlie has arranged a mass of dusky pink bougainvillea in the rose bowl presented to J J Kitching when he retired from South African Breweries. A dinner with all the trappings is his salute to the man he has called Master for forty years.
    At the beginning of the nineties and new political realities, J J asked Charlie to call him Mr Kitching and said that he and the Madam would use his correct name, Mtshali. But it was too late for Shirley, who kept slipping back into ‘Charlie’, and also for the cook whose respect code had been drummed in by a stern mother. Although J J had spoken fluent Zulu from childhood and could greet and enquire about family and the state of the cattle and crops back home, he remained ‘Master’. Affable and generous though he was, J J was always the authority in the big house with the sea view – just as Gilingwe Mtshali is at his village near uMzimkhulu.
    Satisfied with the table setting, Mtshali stalks back into the kitchen. His white jacket and trousers crackle with starch above tennis shoes crisp with freshly applied whitener.
    He thinks: when we were young, people used to call us both kitchen boy, yet we grew into men of dignity. A warrior’s cow-hide shield used at the right angle can deflect words as well as spears.
    Mtshali is the pall-bearer who walks behind Hugh and Bobby.
    Herbie Fredman was the tail gunner in the Liberator crippled by antiaircraft fire on the outskirts of Warsaw, then shot down by a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt near Krakow on 17 August 1944.
    With J J gone, he is the sole survivor of the air crew photographed in front of the open bomb bay at Celone airfield near Foggia on the afternoon before they left. They sit there still in the framed Box Brownie photo on Herbie’s desk. Seven young men in two rows, with combed hair and folded arms, wearing desert khakis: shorts and military shirts with rolled-up sleeves, long socks to below the knees, lace-up leather shoes. All except one are looking at the camera with the nervy determination of men intent on doing a decent job of work in difficult conditions. The exception is Sergeant (Air Gunner) Herbert Fredman standing on the right in the back row, ears sticking out and a boy’s grin under a thicket of dark hair. The three in front are sitting on a bench, one leg cocked over the other knee. The pilot in the centre with the Clark Gable moustache is a year older than the others, flanked on one side by the co-pilot and on the other by the navigator who also aimed the supply drops, Lieutenant J J Kitching.
    Herbie has kept up with him through the years, even though their lives diverged. After his war service, Herbie studied engineering and went into his father’s die-casting business in Pinetown, expanding it into a major supplier of fittings for the building and motor trades. The Fredman mansion juts out of a Kloof hillside and features in books of modern South African architecture. The Fredman sons and daughters are doctors, lawyers – and a poet who trawls the oceans alone in an old yacht, navigating by the