My Own Private Orchestra

By Ian Fraser

Originally published by Penguin Books, the work was nominated for a literary award in '94.

'A Remarkable Memoir'

"I am simply in awe of this little gem. The writing, the imagery, the feeling . . . it's all beautifully done. It isn't easy to know that such terrible things have been experienced by anyone, but it is the realization that someone can endure those things and emerge as a human being who can assimilate those things and emerge - not unscathed, not undamaged, but far from destroyed by them - that is truly remarkable. "

Ian Fraser's brutally frank autobiography of a turbulent childhood and life in the army under Apartheid was first published by Penguin Books in 1993. The work earned a CNA Literary Award nomination in 1994.

Quoting from the jacket of the print edition: 'Ian Fraser is a powerful voice in South African theater. Satire is his vehicle for the most part and he is probably best known for his one-man shows and his plays, which have gained him the respect and admiration of critics and public alike. He won the 1990 Vita Award for comedy and, in 1992, the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award. His plays have been performed widely around South Africa. This is his first book.'

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian Fraser
• Release date: Dec 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781507061046

Book preview

My Own Private Orchestra

-by Ian Fraser

Nomination: the CNA Literary Awards, 1994.

First published by Penguin Books 1993.

Copyright © 2011. Ian Fraser

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of

the publisher.

All Rights Reserved.

Photograph copyright Ismail Lagardien

For Alex and Joshua.

www.ianfraserlive.com

––––––––

One

I’m a classic textbook case in some respects: the bedwetting, stuttering and nailbiting fat kid who then discovers at the age of twelve that he’s adopted, and whose life rapidly turns to shit.

I lived most of my life in a dreamlike state up until the Army, and whereas relatively together people can be made to become unglued in the Army, I was lucky enough to be so unglued by the time I arrived in it that it couldn’t break me, it could only kick me awake. I went from being a passive Observer of Reality through eyes which happened to be mine, to a state of Curiosity about Reality. Until then I’d paid no attention to years, being uninterested in their passing, and had read no newspapers, and listened only to film soundtracks and classical music. I was a little snob, and consequently I find myself in the weird position of never having heard any pop music or item of news throughout my childhood. When I wasn’t watching movies I sat at home and read twenty books a week, and ate, under the ever more neurotic gaze of a mother who didn’t quite have it all together.

With hindsight I realize that the reason I screwed up school was because I was bored. I was already running into trouble by Standard Four. Yeah, I was the weirdo who’d hang around in the toilets during break and hide there, rather than undergo the ‘fatboy fatboy’ stuff as I staggered around trying to find something to do and hoping someone would talk to me.

I don’t sound like a traditional South African when I speak. My voice seems to be able to go any which way – American or British – it has a transatlantic quality to it, brought about by years of taping film soundtracks and eventually memorizing entire films, picking up into my own speech patterns aspects of this or that accent I found pleasing. Vocally I’m a slut. If you put me with someone who has a different accent to mine, my voice begins to duplicate theirs. Right down to colloquial phrases which they may not even have used. Give me a Texan and in half an hour I’ll sound like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in Doctor Strangelove.

Such is the byproduct of escaping from Reality by immersing myself in the cinema. All the stories of all the films I saw were very real to me. I knew the clinical techniques of achieving the shot footage, but at the same time those characters and their stories I watched up on the screen were far more real to me than my own reality. That’s how I felt then.

Another indication of how I felt was the fact that I’d consciously avoid going to cinemas where there were mirrors in the foyer. I had no desire to see myself. It was hard enough just to put myself in a public place to start with, without going through the teeth-gritting experience of catching sight of this grotesquely fat person who didn’t look like I felt, but was me none the less.

My father was an architect. I use past tense for reasons I’ll go into shortly. When I was a kid he had brownish hair; now the hair on his head is dead and I’ve come to terms with the fact that he is old and will die. I hug him when I see him, which embarrasses him, but I’m aware that he likes it secretly. I’ve told him that I love him, which I think is the correct thing to do, and I know he knows this and is in no doubt as to the regard I hold for him. Too many people in this world go through their existence in a strangled, inarticulate, endlessly wondering phase.

I believe honesty is important — real honesty, not the sniveling sniping done by the insecure who use the word as a camouflage for bitterness. Honesty is also a good tactic. Surrounding yourself with honesty means any bullshit artists can be seen coming a mile off.

My father has the misfortune of being a kind and compassionate human being which meant, I think, that he got screwed a lot over money. He was a typical closet artist — his hobbies showed this, although ‘hobby’ is not a sufficiently eloquent word to describe the degree of thoroughness and proficiency with which he approached each latest interest.

My father was always doing something, creating something – helping to start a local theatre group in Pretoria called the Lodge Players almost as a casual side thought, before he and my mother and sister carried the bundle that was me down to Durban to begin the process called childhood. But even through all of that, the theatre was to me a place of wonder and exhilaration – the stuff of dreams. Both down on the coast and during repeated visits up to the Transvaal, I have heart-pounding memory fragments of green-skinned genies in pantaloons, and bewigged courtiers, and sexually ambiguous pantomime boys-who-were-not-boys. The lights fade and in that moment of expectation, all things are possible, all parts of the universe, uncharted and not, become potentially close by, near to hand.

The smell of powder, spirit gum, greasepaint – these are all evocative smells from my childhood, from fiddling on the quiet in my father’s many-drawered make-up box, filled with strange bits and pieces that, when applied in the right order, made you into something other than what you were. No wonder I was fascinated. Down in Durban, my mother slowly but surely found Tupperware and God – not necessarily in that order – but being in the choir at the local Methodist Church probably served a dual function in that regard. She could offload the nasty stuff on her fellow songsters.

I was probably three or four when I first cottoned on to this acting thing that my father was getting up to, and so it didn’t seem very out of the ordinary – just another one of those strange things that adults did. I recall being amazed at a script my father was doing down at the little hall alongside the church, about Adam and Eve hiding in a hole in the Garden of Eden with a really large pissed-off elephant hunting for them - it was lovely discovering a different view of reality. Even back then I had subconsciously resigned myself to not expecting much entertainment from any source other than myself, precocious child that I was. I was about seven when my father gently nudged me towards listening to Jesus Christ Superstar, and then swiftly backed off – having realized by then that I displayed an innate stubborn rejection of anything I sensed I was ‘supposed’ to do. I listened and raved my head off, in time learning all the words and considering myself expert enough to be horrified at the weird blasphemy of one night hearing a bunch of actors reciting the words without music, at yet another church venue. I was given the job of working the lights, feeling mightily important.

My father became the first non-Catholic head of the Durban Catholic Players Guild. This meant that I once ended up wearing a robe, waving a palm leaf and shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ along with a hundred others on stage at the city hall.

My father painted too, and held art classes in the garden, while I toddled around, too small to see up on to the tables. He sculpted and made intricate wire-framed little humanoids. Then pottery started. I had sort of an aunt in Durban who ran a pottery business called the Mad Potter. My dad acquired a potter’s wheel, and off we went again, me making little thumb pots, him throwing strange and wondrous things on the wheel.. Pottery pissed me off, though; I could never handle having to clean up all the crap afterwards. Still, a couple of the sculptures I made now rest like Easter Island heads on my window-sill.

Vintage motorbikes next. My father started rebuilding the things from scratch, hunting down bits and pieces from all over the place. Night after night of tinkering away in the garage, and he had a number of working bikes after a while. He rode in the D], the Vintage Motorbike Rally. Then he found an old Studebaker and started working on that as well. I had my first motorbike ride on a vintage bike, a Royal Enfield. Building model yachts and sailing them, then building real yachts and sailing them, my father also became Rear Commodore of the Point Yacht Club in the process

Amidst all of the above, I grew up.

However, I did not grow up with my dad. I grew up with my mother, who was another case entirely. They lived in the same house but, I now realize, existed in different worlds. My father had boundless energy and he had creativity for a release, but my mother had no such outlet. I don’t ever recall reasoning with my mother, just endless yelling and coat hangers being broken on me. I was the perfect child, given my mother’s approach: I sat in my room and read, and ate myself sick, and rarely went out, and never had contact with anyone outside of the home environment. Which was what my mother wanted, and of course if you don’t know there’s a world out there for you to experience, you’ll be quite happy to sit and sloth out and read about it. Which is what I did.

My mother was a housewife in the old sense of the word. She did housework (or, rather, the maid did) and sold Tupperware religiously on the side. And for the rest of the time she did her best just to cope, swallowing her Grandpa Headache Powders on a daily basis, so that I had to deal with a frustrated, neurotic mother on speed, which wasn’t easy.

On the one hand, my mother had the ultimate pliable son sitting at home, doing nothing threatening, showing no interest in leaving the family. On the other hand, having achieved this state, she didn’t know what the hell to do with me. I read and I ate, and once a week went to Saturday morning movies with my tape recorder under my arm, and that was it.

My sister was always a lot sharper than I, more able to fit in. I was a fat, stuttering little brother with no one to say ‘Hey, look, maybe it’s about time you had a bath’ – so I stank in all senses of the word in her eyes. Also, being a stutterer, I could never win an argument. I’d still be trying to make a point and she’d already have won it. As the years go by, I find I hate her less and less and, judging from the way she Behaves with me, the same process is occurring in her. As soon as she was old enough to understand the weird dynamics at play around our mother, she got the hell out.

A geology student called Gavin entered the picture (and my sister). Freezeframe: my sister’s red face as Gavin meets me for the first time and shakes my hand. Gavin is the typical average South African male, good-natured, easygoing and somewhat repressed. Sister falls pregnant and now, when I phone her up, fourteen years later, to ask advice on this or that chemical, I get to talk to a cute, gushing fourteen-year-old girl to whom I’m ‘uncle’ — and I generally