The orange bicycle of shame: A psycho-logical song of signs

The piano piece was in an orange book and I am sure it was called 'The Bicycle Song', or 'On my Bicycle'. Something like that anyway.

I had an orange bicycle. It had been given me while my family and I were still living in Germany and it had been loaded with the rest of our household onto a passenger liner, the Galileo Galilei, and shipped all the way to South Africa, where my folks were heading for a couple of years. (The couple of years turned into the rest of their lives, but that's another story.)

The first time I cycled to school on my, by South African standards in those days unusually brightly coloured bicycle, and rolled through the open gate, my peers starting jeering and calling, "Nazi! Nazi!" Back home, I asked my mother, "What is a Nazi?" I was all of 9 years old and that ignorant. I soon discovered that it was de rigueur for my English-speaking peers to use exclamations, such as "Jawohl!" and "Schweinehund", whenever I was present. It was tiresome and inescapable, nor has it, in 50 years, ceased in all quarters. One close family member, who worked for some years, up until 2011, for British Waterways in London, also suffered the daily "harmless fun" of this widely accepted racial harassment.

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When South Africa, in 1994, finally moved from being an oppressive racist state to becoming a fledgling democracy, my black-skinned compatriots could triumph in their collective achievement of having resisted abusive denigration and having successfully taken a step forward in honour of their human dignity and rights. To follow the example of anti-racist activism, during the 1970s and on, as a solitary German-mother-tongue child in an Anglophone context, would have meant standing up for myself alone to face my classmates. As was the case with the family member at British Waterways - there was no collective to help or sympathise with us. We learned to endure the mockery, as our innocent tormentors mimicked figures from movies I, for one, had never seen, and we took the insults as we knew we had no choice, because we'd been born in a shamed country, with a divided capital, containing the deliberately forever unrepaired Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church.

Photo by Gregor Samimi on Unsplash

Sometime in the first decade of the new millenium I did, however, finally challenge one dear friend in the Cape Town poetry circles. I asked him whether he was aware of how enervating his mockery was. He was genuinely shocked and said that he had grown up learning that it was obligatory to make fun of Germans, to the extent that it had become completely automatic. He suddenly realised the mindlessness of it, and the one-sidedness, never having thought to imagine being on the receiving end of this ingrained custom, and he was glad to be able to apologise and stop the habit. The shame of the Germans after their hideous transgressions under Hitler has a very long tail indeed.

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It was the same orange bicycle upon which I pedalled every week, in the company of my sister, to our piano teacher in Voortrekkerhoogte, taking the shortcut on the dust track beneath bluegums past the military camp. The teacher decided to host a performance evening, giving her pupils the opportunity to play in front of each other and their parents. I was her star pupil and one of the oldest, so she chose me to start the evening off. I got up and seated myself at the piano, opened the slim, orange book and faced the notes of 'On my Bicycle'. I lifted my hands up to the keyboard, but before my fingers made any sound, I burst into a tragedy of tears, leaped from the stool and straight into my mother's lap. 

My mother was mortified. The evening proceeded, I suppose, with everyone performing, but I cannot remember whether I played my piece or not. What I do remember is that my mother asked me to pass her a record sleeve of some music, which the teacher had put on after the children had played. It was lying on the table in front of us and for some reason I tried to indicate to her that it was not permissible for us to move this record sleeve from its position. My mother thereupon asked my sister to bring it to her, but my sister followed my example and refused. Another mother, seeing our strange reluctance, instructed her daughter to take the record sleeve to my mother and the child obliged without a murmur. My mother was now triply mortified. Back home, it was her turn to burst into tears. She lamented how ashamed she was of us and how painfully we had embarrassed her, me with my collapse from stage fright and both of us with our inexplicable refusal to do her a simple favour, such that another mother's daughter had had to step in.

My poor mother. She had her own loads of shame and insecurity to carry. She had not mastered the English language by a long shot, her Afrikaans was non-existent, and she lived in virtual isolation, cooking and cleaning for us in her European hippie gear, in a suburb that was dominated by the crimplene wives of permanent force members. In her own youth, she'd been her rather famous piano teacher's best pupil. Now, here she was, in a strange country among strangers, trying to enjoy a rare social event, only to be humiliated by a cowardly, obstreperous daughter and her incomprehensible sister.

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Notwithstanding these ignoble beginnings, I have sort of kept up, more off than on, with the piano playing, for the last 50 years and was approached last year by retired professional soprano and singing teacher, Gwyneth Lloyd of Starways Arts Centre, whether I'd be willing to accompany her newly-formed ensemble. I agreed and found myself learning "popular" and "well-known" songs, which I have somehow been shielded from all my life. In other words, much to the disbelief of the singers, many of these songs are not at all well-known to me and I have painstakingly to learn them, thus slowly repairing my cultural ignorance. We have performed a few times to sympathetic and grateful audiences and I have been humbled, losing perfectionism and uptightness.

For the most recent performance, last weekend, the dress rehearsal went very well, which, as anybody involved in theatre knows, is not a good sign. True as bob, the next day, as we gathered half an hour before the performance, the plug for the keyboard was suddenly dead. We were each of us required discreetly to subdue rising consternation and, indeed, in my case, panic. Fortunately, the organiser of the event found a replacement plug and the keyboard could once more produce sound.

The performance began with a couple of exquisitely rendered A capella numbers with five voices, then it was my turn to introduce 'It Don't Mean a Thing' by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills. For no reason at all, I missed the notes in the last chord of this introduction, my fingers simply landed on keys beside the correct ones. This can happen. It is called nerves. I tried my best to keep going and made my way through the pieces, despite the fact that my heart was jackhammering in my chest, my fingers played imprecisely over and again, and I kept seeing an orange bicycle like a mirage in the distance of the rather hot venue. At one point I actually played a musical introduction over, telling the audience that I was doing so, as I kept on missing the right notes. Mostly, this was thankfully not noticeable either to the singers or to the audience, but in the middle of 'Poor Wand'ring One', when a gust of wind blew the score from the music stand, I was certain that I would collapse from sheer stress. Dear Norma, who was singing tenor, but whose voice was not part of that song, rushed to my side to rescue the situation, and Gwyneth, Estie and Stephanie held their parts bravely, while I miraculously stayed seated upright and, don't ask me how, picked up the thread of the music to resume my accompaniment, as the mirage of the orange bicycle slowly receded.

After the show, warm words of gratitude and gentle praise were poured over the singers from the audience. To me, Gwyneth said matter-of-factly, "We all made mistakes," and Norma joined in, "Nobody focused on the mistakes. They just flowed away." Her husband, who had come for support, declared, "The most important thing is that the audience enjoyed it - and they did!" When I told another friend, who'd not been able to attend, what happened, she said, "You did your best, carrying on while you were going through all that inner stress!" And my companion, Ed, messaged in response to my sobering report-back, "mistakes make it more real (human)." Indeed! But the light-heartedness, and the loving words of comfort all round, brought what continues to feel like lasting medicine to my soul.

When I returned home the next day, I remembered and felt urged to find a particular poem - a poem, which Ed had uttered casually, more by way of a self-ironic joke, two years back - which I'd enjoyed so much that I'd written it down. We'd had pizzas at Café Mario in Knysna at the time and Ed had seen an orange bicycle leaning against the fence outside the window. He thought that it made a very beautiful composition and had run outside to capture it. It had been raining and he slipped and by the time he gathered his balance, the bicycle was gone. Here is his poem as I captured it.

Slipping on mud

while chasing the lady

with the orange bicycle 

- all my camera caught

were the black-eyed Susans

opening their hearts to me,

while she disappeared 

around a corner.

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The web of these incidents and memories, the strands of colour, the bicycle, the feelings of shame both personal and collective, mistakes both great and trivial, the open hearts of friends and fellows, the living witnesses of flowers - all of these aspects thread together a crazy coherence, a zigzag psycho-logic of signs and signals through the decades.  

One of my late husband's favourite English idioms was: "I've turned a corner". I would like to think that this applies to me at this point. And I am, hopefully, again "on my bicycle" - only this time I'm no longer a target of shaming. Orange can once more be the beautiful colour of creativity and black-eyed Susans can laugh out loud in continuing abundance.

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