Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

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Growing up in one part of a vast young country can be very different from growing up in another, and in South Africa this difference is not only a matter of geography. The division of the people into two great races — black and white — and the subdivision of the white into Afrikaans- and English-speaking groups provides a diversity of cultural heritage that can make two South African children seem almost as strange to each other as if they had come from different countries. The fact that their parents, if they are English-speaking, frequently have come from different countries complicates their backgrounds still further. My father came to South Africa from a village in Russia; my mother was born and grew up in London. I remember, when I was about eight years old, going with my sister and mother and father to spend a long weekend with a cousin of my father’s who lived in the Orange Free State. After miles and miles of sienna-red ploughed earth, after miles and miles of silk-fringed mealies standing as high as your eyes on either side of the road and ugly farmhouses where women in bunchy cotton dresses and sun-bonnets stared after the car as we passed (years later, when I saw Oklahoma! in a Johannesburg theatre, I recalled that scene), we reached the dorp where the cousin lived in a small white house with sides that were dust-stained in a wavering wash, like rust, for more than a foot above the ground. There we two little girls slept on beds of a smothering softness we had never felt before — feather beds brought from Eastern Europe — and drank tea drawn from a charming contraption, a samovar. There — to our and our mother’s horror — we were given smoked duck, flavoured with garlic, at breakfast.

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