Читать книгу Childish Things - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 5

I had resolved never to write about my youth. After all, what can you say about the seventies – except to wish you hadn’t been there?

The sixties produced hippies and sex, the eighties yuppies and money. But the seventies? What can you say about platform shoes and trousers with absurdly wide legs, David Bowie’s hacked hairdo, John Travolta’s disco dancing and Abba’s music?

It was probably the most ephemeral decade in the history of the world. Disposable fashion, disposable dances, disposable music. And disposable lives in the warm country where I grew up. Young white boys shot on the border for the good of the nation and the country. Black schoolchildren shot in townships for another nation in the same country.

But eventually I realised what all storytellers have to realise before they can break free from the past: it’s not what you want to tell, it’s what you have to tell.

So here I am travelling through time, in more ways than one. Rushing towards a child I have never seen, while remembering the child I used to be. With another child next to me. And I am writing about my youth, about the seventies, about that country of contrasts.