Getting under the skin

Barbara Trapido's new novel is her most personal: a poignant journey back to the apartheid of her youth. Louise East reports.

It is not quite the done thing to admit your latest novel is autobiographical. Even when fictional details match biographical ones like teeth in a zip, authors are at pains to point out they've been put through the creative spin cycle. So it's a surprise when Barbara Trapido cheerfully admits that Frankie & Stankie, her new novel, is "entirely autobiographical, completely non-made-up. Basically, it's a kaleidoscope of my story, my family's story and my friends' stories".

What may come as an even greater surprise to fans of Trapido's previous five novels - novels as full of coincidences as Shakespeare's comedies, as clearly observant of British manners as the Mitford sisters' and as rich in character detail as Dickens's - is that their author was born and educated in South Africa.

Like Dinah de Bondt in Frankie & Stankie, Trapido grew up in Durban with a Dutch mathematician father and German mother. As Dinah goes to fancy-dress parades, reads Enid Blyton and makes dresses from Vogue patterns, the National Party comes to power and puts apartheid in place. Soon playground discussions centre on whether it's worse to have a "native or a koelie" - or Indian - make your sandwiches, and Dinah's favourite lift man is sent "back to the farm".

Trapido conveys with great poignancy just how possible it was to live a life of great ordinariness if your skin was the right colour. "Part of what I was trying to show is that while people so easily believe that in that situation they would be manning the barricades, in fact people just get on with their little lives," she says.

Both European and academic, Dinah's (and, by extension, Trapido's) parents were liberals - "In Dinah's childhood, a liberal is a person who doesn't recoil at the thought of a black person drinking out of his teacups." Yet Dinah is as keen to hide this fact as she is to hide her parents' worrying foreignness at a time when Germans are known simply as the Huns. "I was always uncomfortable with racism, because I was unfamiliar with it and I knew it was wrong. School was quite a shock, but I don't remember thinking, dear me, such racism. Children anywhere are anxious not to stick out and say the wrong thing."

But by the time she finished university in Durban and met her future husband, the historian and activist Stan Trapido, she describes herself as "burdened with this useless white guilt, which didn't do anybody any good except that it thwarted me. It left me feeling I didn't have the right to any sort of self-fulfilment, because why should one have that right when so many people didn't?"

In 1963 they moved to London, a place Trapido knew well from childhood books. The parks, the tube and the seasons instantly charmed her, even while the casual racism appalled her. "I was so preoccupied by South Africa being evil and racist, I somehow imagined we had the monopoly on it. So coming to London to find that awful 1960s petit-bourgeois racism was a shock. I remember refusing to buy South African fruit, and the greengrocer would agree and say: 'Yes, when you think of those black hands crawling all over it, it puts you off.' "

She blocked out her South African past, not returning to her home country for 12 years and immersing herself in her new life as a schoolteacher, wife and mother. Her first novel, Brother Of The More Famous Jack, was published in 1983, the year she turned 40. "Although to be honest," she says, "I had been writing it in my head for eight years. I knew it off by heart by the time I actually wrote it." It was set in London with an English cast.

"There was a great weight on fiction writers in South Africa. The place was so awful, and the writer's role was to document that. So there was a feeling that the appropriate way to write about South Africa was with a sombre gravitas. There were people like Tom Sharpe, who wrote knockabout sitcoms about the awfulness of it, but I never thought it was ridiculous. To me it was always just violent and brutal."

If writing about the country of her childhood was a task to which she felt temperamentally unsuited, then writing itself came naturally. "After my childhood I got rather used to playing the ventriloquist, and it gave me a bit of a high, becoming all those different kids of English people. My memory of going to school was that you very quickly had to learn to be somebody else."

She neither plots her novels in advance nor forms her characters by borrowing from real people. "Mine come to me fully formed, a bit like people in dreams. I don't see their faces all that clearly, but I hear their voices and see them in silhouette, a bit shadow world. Sometimes, years later, somebody will be walking towards me on the street and I will recognise one of my characters."

This would sound fey from anybody else, but Trapido is matter of fact and seems astonished by authors whose characters don't "push them around" and by the legions of friends and fans who see themselves in her vividly drawn stories. "I even got a letter from a lawyer who insisted one of my characters was based on his client. I wouldn't mind, but when I was writing that particular book I wondered whether it might not be a bit clichéd, a bit far fetched."

Her books, with their eccentrically named characters - Ishmael Valentine Tench, Peregrine Massingham - easy style and rewarding plots, wear their knowledge lightly yet are rich with allusions to Schubert, Dr Seuss and Shakespeare. Full of narrative sparkle, they were in danger of being unfairly pigeon-holed as fluffy until her last, The Travelling Hornplayer, pulled a legion of diverse but loyal fans - Anita Brookner, Michael Dibdin, Philip Hensher, Fay Weldon - out of the woodwork and the book was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award.

During a tricky patch writing her next novel, she found herself suddenly filling up school exercise books with stories from her childhood, and Frankie & Stankie was born.Trapido feels that the book - partly a way of keeping company with her mother, who died 10 years ago - was prompted by the end of apartheid. "In a way, the novel was a celebration of that, to be able to look at this stuff as the past, something over." Yet Trapido still opted to write about her childhood as a novel rather than as a memoir, with somewhat mixed results. In sticking to real anecdotes but giving them a fictional shakedown, Frankie & Stankie has neither the impact of fact nor the narrative force of fiction. So why did she chose to fictionalise her own story?

"It wasn't to disguise the fact I was writing autobiographically. I think it was a device to help me distance myself from those little girls and to stage the story as I would any other story rather than just develop a self-obsession," she says. "In a sense, you need to become your own audience, to check whether it works for somebody that isn't you."

The abandoned novel is now back in progress - its working title is Having Sex With Strindberg - and Trapido thinks it will incorporate ballet, Italian masques and deception. She doesn't think South Africa will feature strongly in her work again - "I know nothing of the nuances of South Africa in the now," she says - yet in Trapido's world, where characters are bossy and she is the last to know where her story is going, anything might happen. "I really want to write a dog story," she muses, "one narrated by a dog, and I've heard there was a conference on dogs in South African history. I fancy I might get a hold of those papers."

Frankie & Stankie is published by Bloomsbury, £16.99