'All the days of my life'
Shirley, Goodness and Mercy: A childhood in Africa
Chris van Wyk
2005, Picador
315 pages
Reviewed by Irene Madonko
Expect to laugh, sigh and ponder when you read this childhood memoir. It is a book where the author lavishes the reader with succulent tales found only in the ghetto. You will meet the notorious Yellow Vipers gang or the legendary Lekkerbek (Nicemouth) who robs, rapes and supplies the newspapers with many a headline. Then there are young Van Wyk’s little friends whom he astonishes with his knowledge of where babies come from and the priest who beats the life out of husbands who abuse women from his parish.
But there are also the not-so-funny moments. As a squint-eyed boy, Van Wyk’s self esteem suffered defeat. And when the optician suggests that he wears an eye patch to correct his squint, half the boys in his township have a field day taunting him. He also throws in the nasty bits about his father, who though a great goalkeeper of the popular Rosebuds football team, constantly spews torrential expletives on his young children and defenceless wife. Young Van Wyk is bantered at and says he never forgot the time his father yelled at him: ‘You are so … useless that you should have been a girl.’
He masterfully tugs at our emotions with the topical issues he raises. He says, for example, that more than pleasure, books were perhaps the one place in his world where he encountered no borders. He says that no matter how tatty a book was, they alone could take him to journeys to ‘Whites Only’ places. He explains how there’s no warning on page 13 or 14 that says: ‘Stop reading. For Whites Only’ like the signs he notices in shops, restaurants and post offices.
Unlike most Coloured boys up his street, Van Wyk had some one to teach him the riches of reading. He says his mother did not sit him down and tell him to read books. Rather, he recalls watching her on an armchair or in bed, reading avidly and laughing out loudly, gasping or shaking her head in disbelief. The pleasure she derived from reading inspired him to delve into books and tap into the joys of reading at an early age. So that by the time he is 12, he is a ‘word collector’: he leaves his parents and cousins baffled when he proudly announces that he is a philatelist.
Fortunately, his squint eye doesn’t seem to deter the pretty girls and the reader is soon enchanted with the great love story of his life when he meets Kathy, a cheeky girl with a fringe that won’t lie flat on her forehead so she has to keep patting it down. And be sure not to miss the bits about his beloved granny or Ouma. The poem he wrote about her explains why she’s worth knowing. Here’s an excerpt:
And once upon a holiday I came
for my umpteenth - but almost last - time to ouma’s
there was my cousin Richard with a new gun
and without blinking, Ouma, the fastest gun alive
snapped the symmetric plastic in two; one for me
and one for Rich, who didn’t mind one bit. Then
we tamed the pillows into horses and shot each other
down until we both died laughing
Irene Madonko is a Zimbabwean journalist working in London.
