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Authors: Jenny Hobbs
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later, when they’d escaped Victor’s usual evening rant and were sitting on the veranda steps watching fireflies flit among the aloes in the rockery. She’d thought they were fairies until the night he and Bobby caught some in a jar and showed her the unremarkable little winged insects, their abdomens tipped with an eerie pulsing green. ‘See? Just goggas with tiny little torches going on and off in their bums.’
‘But where do the batteries go?’ she’d asked, mystified.
J J and Bobby fell about laughing and she’d felt stupid and gullible.
He was no longer the impatient boy who had rushed off to war, but a driven man who trained obsessively and basked in the roar of a rugby crowd. Hands-off with women, though. ‘They just want to trap you,’ he’d say. Men gathered around him at parties, ignoring the hopeful girls. Barbara had wanted to introduce him to her friends – he was a real catch – but he said he didn’t have time for complications.
After he was chosen for the 1949 Springboks, South African Breweries in Durban offered him a job as a salesman which would give him all the latitude he needed to go on playing for his country. He left university the next day, saying, ‘Thank God for that. I was bloody bored stiff.’
His boss was a sapper who had joined up at thirty, been taken prisoner at Halfaya Pass, and then spent three-and-a-half years in POW camps in Italy and Germany. He had a nervous tic in his right eye and no time for fools. They stuck together, the war-damaged.
The cheery hit song that year was ‘I’m looking over a four-leafed clover’. As if everything was all right with the world again. As if.
The gravel road opened onto a clearing and they faltered to a stop, a line of scarecrows in worn-out uniforms, gaping at the great log chalet. ‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.
· 5 ·
B ISHOP C HAUNCEY ASCENDS THE STEPS IN FRONT of the high altar, resplendent in a cope of purple brocade set off by billowing sleeves of snowy lawn. He inclines his mitre towards the crucifix and veers to face the congregation, changing course like a galleon in full sail, his jewelled pectoral cross heavy as an anchor on its gold chain.
By his side, Reverend George does an abrupt rotation, playing up the contrast in his role as the people’s priest. His black cassock is overlaid with a k-sheeting tunic embroidered with Zulu motifs by women parishioners in KwaMashu.
Two microphones on long stalks dangle above the two priests.
‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,’ the bishop intones, ‘and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
Shirley thinks: John stopped believing in God after the war, so where does that leave him? Just plain dead. It’s not fair. This is all wrong. Good people should go to heaven, whatever they believe.
Hugh is still standing next to the coffin with the other pall-bearers, all of them uncertain what to do next. He wonders if the King James Bible translators had written these Church of England services. While researching Jacobean plays, he’d paged through the Book of Common Prayer and discovered some gems: ‘A Commination or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgments Against Sinners’; ‘Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts’; ‘The Ministration of Baptism to Such as are of Riper Years and Able to Answer for Themselves’. Even a ‘Table to Find Easter-Day from the Present Time Till the Year 2199 Inclusive’. That was looking ahead, for sure.
Purkey and Clyde have moved up the side aisle on the left like two giant cockroaches – one portly short, one gangly – and are now standing in the shadows, their hands cupped over their flies. Clyde finds it hard to keep still. He clatters his tongue stud against his teeth and his little finger plays with the metal tag of his trouser zip. Purkey wishes he could send him outside, but respectful
‘But where do the batteries go?’ she’d asked, mystified.
J J and Bobby fell about laughing and she’d felt stupid and gullible.
He was no longer the impatient boy who had rushed off to war, but a driven man who trained obsessively and basked in the roar of a rugby crowd. Hands-off with women, though. ‘They just want to trap you,’ he’d say. Men gathered around him at parties, ignoring the hopeful girls. Barbara had wanted to introduce him to her friends – he was a real catch – but he said he didn’t have time for complications.
After he was chosen for the 1949 Springboks, South African Breweries in Durban offered him a job as a salesman which would give him all the latitude he needed to go on playing for his country. He left university the next day, saying, ‘Thank God for that. I was bloody bored stiff.’
His boss was a sapper who had joined up at thirty, been taken prisoner at Halfaya Pass, and then spent three-and-a-half years in POW camps in Italy and Germany. He had a nervous tic in his right eye and no time for fools. They stuck together, the war-damaged.
The cheery hit song that year was ‘I’m looking over a four-leafed clover’. As if everything was all right with the world again. As if.
The gravel road opened onto a clearing and they faltered to a stop, a line of scarecrows in worn-out uniforms, gaping at the great log chalet. ‘Go!’ The guards prodded them forward with rifles.
· 5 ·
B ISHOP C HAUNCEY ASCENDS THE STEPS IN FRONT of the high altar, resplendent in a cope of purple brocade set off by billowing sleeves of snowy lawn. He inclines his mitre towards the crucifix and veers to face the congregation, changing course like a galleon in full sail, his jewelled pectoral cross heavy as an anchor on its gold chain.
By his side, Reverend George does an abrupt rotation, playing up the contrast in his role as the people’s priest. His black cassock is overlaid with a k-sheeting tunic embroidered with Zulu motifs by women parishioners in KwaMashu.
Two microphones on long stalks dangle above the two priests.
‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,’ the bishop intones, ‘and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
Shirley thinks: John stopped believing in God after the war, so where does that leave him? Just plain dead. It’s not fair. This is all wrong. Good people should go to heaven, whatever they believe.
Hugh is still standing next to the coffin with the other pall-bearers, all of them uncertain what to do next. He wonders if the King James Bible translators had written these Church of England services. While researching Jacobean plays, he’d paged through the Book of Common Prayer and discovered some gems: ‘A Commination or Denouncing of God’s Anger and Judgments Against Sinners’; ‘Tables and Rules for the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts’; ‘The Ministration of Baptism to Such as are of Riper Years and Able to Answer for Themselves’. Even a ‘Table to Find Easter-Day from the Present Time Till the Year 2199 Inclusive’. That was looking ahead, for sure.
Purkey and Clyde have moved up the side aisle on the left like two giant cockroaches – one portly short, one gangly – and are now standing in the shadows, their hands cupped over their flies. Clyde finds it hard to keep still. He clatters his tongue stud against his teeth and his little finger plays with the metal tag of his trouser zip. Purkey wishes he could send him outside, but respectful
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