Creative Nonfiction: Writing an Unauthorised Biography of David Kramer

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The street was quiet: no cars, no children racing on bicycles. Walking along was a teenage boy. He was slightly built, but had an air of purpose about him. His straight dark hair was as long as the school rules would allow, with a fringe that fell to his eyes. He was wearing his school uniform: grey trousers, light-blue shirt, and school tie. The tie was navy-blue, with light-blue and white stripes running diagonally. It was the Worcester Boys High School uniform. The houses here were old and rustic. Most had roofs of corrugated zinc, and there were usually smooth cement stoeps in front of them, with old chairs, now empty, in the shade.
Some of the houses had wooden shutters which could be pulled closed over the windows against the glare of the South African sunlight. The trees in the large yards were ancient, with gnarled stems and dark leaves. The smell of rotten fruit on the ground was heavy in the dry late-summer air of Worcester. There were loquat trees in the yard of the house David was walking past now, the fruit bright yellow against the dark leaves, but where they lay on the ground they were brown and soft, lying between dried-out leaves. This house also had a stoep, in front, and running along the side. It was red, and David wondered how they managed that, whether is had been painted red, or had something been mixed into the cement when it was made? Behind the roofs and trees, in the distance, were pale-blue mountains which towered into an even paler sky.
It seemed that in any direction one looked in Worcester, there were mountains. In the winter the snow came and it always surprised David just how low the snow lay, how beautiful it looked. Slowly, as the snow thawed in the warming weather, waterfalls would appear on the side of the mountain. “Hey, Sweetpea!” someone called. “Howzit.” David Kramer looked up. He saw the caller on the other side of the street and broke into a grin. When he smiled he was pure charm, soulful eyes alive with warmth, stretching from ear to ear. It was easy to understand why girls were attracted to him. It was because his mother and her friends also considered him cute, that they called him Sweetpea, after Popeye and Olive Oyl’s baby. “Howzit,” David replied. Through the small-town quiet came the sound of a saw. Someone was playing it. One put the saw over one’s lap and rubbed the edge with a bow, the same bow used to play a violin. The blade was bent up or down to make the tune. The mournful music reached the boys, exaggerated tremolo notes trembling on the fruit-scented air. “What kak is that?” the boy across the street scoffed, but David listened intently, captivated.
Yes, it was overly-sweet kitsch, but it was a kitsch so bad that it had gone full circle, and was now beautiful in its own way. Most of the pop music David heard on the radio was beamed in from outside South Africa, LM Radio from Mozambique, or if you wanted the really heavy stuff you tuned in to Swazi Music Radio. This could only be heard at night on medium wave, and sometimes the signal was very faint, but they played music like Audience’s album House on the Hill. In 1962 Worcester had no traffic lights, or robots, as they were called by the locals. Even High Street, the most important street in the town, had none. The joke in town was that if there was a robot and it turned green, the cows would eat it.
When David walked down the hill from Langerug to High Street, he would find himself at the western side of town. Here High Street ran into The Drostdy, one of the high schools. Drostdy was the arch enemy of Boys High, which David would soon be attending. Turning left, David strolled on past the Shell garage. A little further along was the Caltex. He crossed over Porter Street, and now the Mobil garage was to his left, next to the Worcester Standard, the weekly newspaper. Across the road was the Koffiehuis Café with the fish and chips shop, Madeira, next to it. Mr. De Nobrega had been the first shop owner in town to get one of the Curly Whip ice cream machines, and the town flocked to his shop, anxiously watching as he pulled the lever, letting a thick, delicious flow of ice cream ooze down into the cone. He would move the cone around and around, letting the ice cream pile up. One, two, three turns. You could have a Flake in the cone, so that the ice cream covered it, with a cherry on top.

CONTENTS :

• Abstract
• Opsomming
• Part 1 – David Kramer – an unauthorised biography
  • 1. Foreword
  • Chapter
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  • 2. Epilogue
  • 3. Discography
  • 4. Musicals
  • 5. Shows
  • 6. Prizes and Awards
  • 7. Printed publications
  • 8. Timeline
• Part 2 – Creative Nonfiction: Writing an Unauthorised Biography of David Kramer
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Fiction versus Nonfiction
  • 3. A Brief History of Biography Writing
  • 4. Comparing Biographical Styles
  • 5. Findings – The Process of Writing the Kramer Biography as a
  • Creative Nonfiction text
  • (i) Problems of Research
  • (ii) The Bilingual Nature of the Text
  • (iii) Fictionalisation
  • (iv) Ethics
  • (v) Influences
  • (vi) Make-believe
  • (vii) Approach to the Biographical Subject
  • (viii) Intertextuality
  • (ix) Biography Writing
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Bibliography

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