CHARMAIN NAIDOO: Donald Trump and the boy who wore the frilly knickers
I was a plump giggly teenager with bad skin, terrified of what people thought of me, and with good reason since I was often a figure of ridicule from other teenage girls, and boys, who talked about me with mouths covered by hands.
I was also clever. Apart from maths, academic school was easy for me. I loved history and read books, mostly fiction – novels to be precise – voraciously. Nobody was allowed to regurgitate what they’d read with mere story telling in my family. You had to make a cogent argument as to why something was good or bad.For example, my lovely dad demanded that I look at Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights less as a love story (which teenage girl isn’t swept away by such passion as displayed by Heathcliff and Catherine?) and more about class. My heroine Catherine’s desire to climb up the social ladder when she rejects working class Heathcliff for naff Edgar Linton was despicable. Yet again, my dad would say, money wins and reinforces the justification of class. My parents even vetted our reading lists to ensure what my dad liked to call a balance of points of view. So I was an individual in the pack, ostracised for being different: fat when most of the girls were thin; more Coloured than Indian...
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