Review: Vivien Horler

Blood’s Inner Rhyme – An autobiographical novel, by Antjie Krog (Penguin)

I have a magnet on my fridge that reads: “No matter how old she is, a mother watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”

My mum was like that, and so clearly was the late Afrikaans writer Dot Serfontein, mother of poet and prize-winning writer Antjie Krog.

Very early on in this book Krog, who has spent a year overseas, goes home to the Free State to visit her mother.

And more or less the first thing Serfontein says: “Jeez, but your hair looks rejected! What was wrong with the German hairdressers?”

I know the feeling.

Serfontein was born in 1925 and died in 2016, so was an almost exact contemporary of my mother. And while my mother grew up in the UK and Serfontein in Kroonstad, there were distinct similarities. Neither was touchy-feely, both were brisk and unsentimental.

There is an Antjie Krog poem in which she asks her mother what she did when she had hot flushes. And the mother says something to the effect: “Ag, kind, I’d have a cold shower and get on.”

Serfontein was the child of people who had survived the Boer War, and remained a committed Afrikaner Nationalist all her life.

From her flat in a care home in Kroonstad she writes to Krog that Krog and her contemporaries are “like plants on a headland… one doesn’t know what you stand for. My parents, and we, lived with every breath for what nobody wants to say the name of anymore, the Afrikaner-volk.”

But later in the same letter she says what she learnt in the Afrikaans youth movement, the Voortrekkers, now seems futile. “…sometimes I imagine myself being asked by God: And what did you do for the spiritual welfare of your eldest daughter? And how I would answer: I gave her an Elna sewing machine and a light-blue Voortrekker dress – neither of which she ever used.”

This book is based on letters, diary entries and home-care records, as well of course on a lifetime of Krog’s memories.

Serfontein is physically frail and lives in a flat in a care home, but her writing is educated, insightful and often very funny.

Serfontein and her husband Willem Krog go to vote on April 27, 1994, and encounter what Serfontein refers to as “the new Equity”. They are queueing behind their own farmworkers, when someone from the IEC calls from the voting station doorway: “Make way for the b –“

Serfontein writes: “On the brink of saying baas, she deftly corrected herself) … the elderly.”

Willem Krog says, in Sesotho, “to great acclaim”, that today all calves drink from the same trough, and stays where he is, but Serfontein writes: “I thought, listen people, I have meat in the oven, my sourdough is rising, the poultry needs feeding, that is my Equity”. and went in to vote.

“But jirre, my dear, when the faces of our new country’s Great Hope lay beneath my hand on the ballot paper, I was so desperately sorry for everyone. Everyone. Thank the Lord that it isn’t up to the Afrikaner to get this wagon through the ford.”

Krog – and her four siblings – were frequently exasperated by Serfontein; there is one telling episode where they get together about a year before her death to discuss plans for her 90^th birthday and parade some of their less kind memories of her. As one sibling says, they’re gossiping, “but with who else?”

The everyday problems of SA life are there – the siblings are divided on whether the farm on which they grew up should be sold. It’s not making money, and it’s too close to town, which means they have a problem with stocktheft.

And the narrative becomes incredibly sad as Serfontein begins to fade. Even that sharp mind isn’t what it was. She is lonely and depressed, misses her husband, is in pain, and tells people the children don’t visit, although one does virtually every day.

Her sufferinrg becomes her children’s suffering. The end is sorrowful, because we’ve come to admire and enjoy Serfontein, despite many of her views.

One of the stars of the supporting characters is Victoria, who cares for Serfontein – as a job – but genuinely cares for her. Towards the end, when Serfontein is scarcely eating, Victoria remembers how Serfontein liked to paint “thin paintings” (watercolours), and suggests she eat some sunshine yellow (pumpkin), some field green (spinach) – and the old lady opens her mouth.

Another theme of this volume is the physical beauty of the Free State – the farm, the rivers, trees, fields and wide blue skies – that is felt viscerally by all the family.

Blood’s Inner Rhyme is subtitled  “an autobiographical novel”, so is any of this stuff made up? Krog says in a note she wrote the book because: “There was so much from my mother still not releasing me that I had to find a way to continue our converstions in an attempt to find clarity of closure”.

She says many people, places, narratives and events have been radically changed to protect the privacy of individuals while at the same time preservng “the groundtruths” of their words.

“Many previously published texts have been changed, distorted, reimagined to assist me with context in pulling everything together. The moment truth is brought into language, it becomes fiction in any case.”

So there you have it. But true or made up – and I believe her when she says she has tried to preserve “the groundtruths” – this is a fascinating, beautiful, touching and moving book.

• Blood’s Inner Rhyme was one of Exclusive Books’s top reads for May.