Kitchen Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

sun and the stars. Herbie calls him the Happy Wanderer and has cut him off without a penny to encourage him to come home and join the real world. His mother sends him a discreet monthly allowance.
    Herbie owes his life to J J, who struggled through the hatch of the rear gun turret after a series of violent bangs on a supply run, yelling, ‘We’ve been hit. Pilot’s copped it. Half the crew’s gone. Bale out!’
    ‘Can’t. I’m stuck.’ Herbie was trapped by the jammed buckle of his harness webbing, bug-eyed with terror at the tongues of fire licking from the tail fins.
    ‘Cut yourself out, man. We’ve got to go now .’
    There was a frightening sideways lurch as the plane corkscrewed before righting again. ‘You go,’ Herbie sobbed.
    J J screamed, ‘No!’ and grabbed the harness and wrenched it apart, then heaved him up and rammed him through the hatch, scrabbling after him. There was a howling black void where the wireless operator had sat. Herbie teetered on the edge, too shocked to resist when J J shoved him through, shouting ‘Yee-ha!’ as they plummeted into the Polish night.
    He doesn’t remember pulling the cord, just the heart-stopping jerk when his parachute snapped open. In a book called Captives Courageous he has read and shuddered over Lieutenant John Colman’s account of his escape from a burning plane over Hungary:
    I knew I was going to die. It would be quick, anyway. God, it was hot! … My parachute swung above, big and white and ghostly … I was feeling almost happy. Then I looked up. I hope I shall never again feel such raw fear. Bits of fire leapt about the parachute. The sky was full of flame and spark, darting here, hovering there. It seemed I must soon plunge to earth in a trail of silk ash. God help me. I hung in abject terror.
    That was it. Raw fear. Abject terror. The smells of near-death: searing metal and blood and burning. Then an eerie stillness swaying in sickening arcs through alien dark. They fell into an oblivion of mud, sugar beets and the thud-flash-boommm of their plane exploding nearby. Day broke with a German army patrol aiming rifles at their groggy heads.
    They were jailed, interrogated and separated a week after their arrival at Stalag Luft VII, Bankau bei Kreuzburg. Herbie was bundled into a lorry and taken away to a labour camp. But in the random way of war, he was home months before J J stumbled down the gangplank of the Arundel Castle in Durban harbour. It was only after the psychologists at the Union Defence Force camp in Brighton had judged him able to cope with civilian life that he’d been demobbed. Herbie was there, standing on a quayside bollard next to his father’s black Buick, waving and shouting, ‘Yee-ha!’
    Now he walks beside his comrade in an unfamiliar stone church, remembering the stench of fire and scalding metal and fear. Every morning without fail, after he has mourned his aunts and uncles who’d gone into Auschwitz, he gives silent thanks to J J. Herbie is the third pall-bearer on the right, behind Retief and Sam.
    In the last months of his life, J J Kitching became friends with a philosopher who lived in a concrete culvert. Shoes and war were the catalysts.
    J J could no longer manage the long flight of steps up from the beach. Instead, he took a slow afternoon stroll with his carved tambuti induku along the hilltop road with its views over the Indian Ocean on one side and the Valley of a Thousand Hills on the other. Being able to see so far revived his spirits after the stench of chemotherapy and the busybody clatter of nurses.
    A square section of culvert had been abandoned months earlier in a borrow pit where the road verge sloped into the bush, and was now almost obscured by long grass and weeds. One afternoon, he noticed a pair of polished brown leather brogues sitting on the concrete, gleaming in the last rays of the setting sun. He leaned over the road barrier to look down and saw a spiral of smoke, and a path trodden through the