The Go-Away Bird
Digby Durrant
FRANKIE AND STAN KIE by Barbara Trapido Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 307 ISBN 074756034X Did Barbara Trapido tell brilliant bedtime stories to children and one day simply decide to do the same for adults? Her novels abound in the same strange coincidences, small but significant miracles, cruel and unexpected deaths, virtue surprisingly rewarded, and love flaring up between unlikely people. But in her new book about her South African childhood she has almost more vivid memories than she can handle and nothing to invent but a new name for herself: Dinah de Bondt.
When her father, Fred, a Dutch mathematician, meets a German refugee, Marianne, he finds her beautiful, 'like Marlene Dietrich without the pencilled eyebrows' but then he sees her feet and doesn't; 'each toe had a raised red corn with an oozy yellow surround glowing on its summit'. In Germany her huge feet were ridiculed so she'd squeezed them into smaller boots but then couldn't change them because she was rationed to one pair. Nevertheless he marries her after he's explained that the man whose proposal she'd been expecting is a homosexual.
Their firstborn is Lisa who has a paralysed arm and their second, Dinah, is an asthmatic whose mouth hangs open. We are to share their lives, to play their games, including one about two clowns, Frankie and Stankie, who mysteriously become the book's title, accompany them to school, and go up and down with the mercury of their thermometers. It's a relief when they grow up. Dinah rids herself of Lisa and her asthma too, despite nights spent in unwashed sheets out of respect for the dead Kaiser to whom they belonged until knocked down to her mother at an auction.
Dinah becomes 'a swanky slouch with street cred' who one day hears Pride and Prejudice being read aloud and there's a sharp click. 'It's like being lifted off the ground.' •She wins an award for 'the best Matric English Essay in the whole of the South African Union'. At university, she casually loses her virginity without knowing whether her partner had been through the wordless ritual of spinning his half
crown on the chemist's counter to get the rubber. And then she meets Sam, a brilliant Jew and political activist. 'I love this person. Because he's nuts.' And off she goes with him to London before the police lock him up.
This book is like a film epic packed with myriad details, thousands of extras and cameras always moving on to the next scene. Nothing is left out, including a running commentary on the Nazis and the growth of fascism in South Africa itself. Trapido should have left more to Dinah to bring these realities of apartheid horribly to life by what she says, reads and above all hears. Listen: 'I've always wanted to shoot a kaffirjee for my 21st, your honour.' One black hair recovered from the pillow, your honour." Never say sorry to a native girl.' Trapido's ear is always faultless. It is her great gift. Nothing else is required.
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