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Appendix A

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa. Her

mother was from England, and her father was from Latvia; both

were Jewish immigrants. Gordimer started writing when she was

nine years old, and her first piece was published when she was

only fifteen. Her international breakthrough came from her 1974

novel, The Conservationist. Early on, Gordimer was active in the

anti-apartheid movement, and the apartheid government banned a

number of her publications. Since 1948, Gordimer has resided and

worked in Johannesburg, South Africa (“The Nobel Prize in

Literature 1991,” n.d.-b). Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"

is a layered and ironic story that critiques social fears,

systemic inequalities, and the obsession with security. The

narrative begins with a metafictional frame, where the narrator,

reflecting on being asked to write a children's story, insists

she does not write such tales. This denial leads to the telling

of a "bedtime story" set in a suburban family’s life.

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 Appendix B

Once Upon A Time

By: Nadine Gordimer

Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I

reply that I don't write children's stories; and he writes back that at a recent
congress/bookfair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for
children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don't accept that I 'ought' to write anything. And
then last night I woke up - or rather was wakened without knowing what had roused me.

A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious? A sound.

A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a
wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the
creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to
room, coming up the passage to my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow. But I
have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as
rime, could shatter like a wine glass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad
daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower
and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual labourer he
had dismissed without pay.

I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay
quite still a victim already but the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking his way and that
against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen
intently as that in the distractions of the day; I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and
classifying its possible threat.

But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight
pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicentre of stress. I was in it. The house
that surrounds me while I sleep is built on under-mined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor,
the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when
some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts
slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and
glass that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last
muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant
miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where
the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now
be interred there in the most profound of tombs.

I couldn't find a position in which my body would let go of my mind - release me to sleep
again. So I began to tell myself a story; a bedtime story.

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 In a house, in a suburb, in a city, there were a man and his wife who loved each other
very much and were living happily ever after. They had a little boy, and they loved him very
much. They had a cat and a dog that the little boy loved very much. They had a car and a caravan
trailer for holidays, and a swimming pool which was fenced so that the little boy and his
playmates would not fall in and drown. They had a housemaid who was absolutely trustworthy
and an itinerant gardener who was highly recommended by the neighbours. For when they began
to live happily ever after they were warned, by that wise old witch, the husband's mother, not to
take on anyone off the street. They were inscribed in a medical benefit society, their pet dog was
licensed, they were insured against fire, flood damage and theft, and subscribed to the local
Neighbourhood Watch, which supplied them with a plaque for their gates lettered YOU HAVE
BEEN WARNED over the silhouette of a would-be intruder. He was masked; it could not be
said if he was black or white, and therefore proved the property owner was no racist.

It was possible to insure the house, the swimming pool or the car against riot damage.
There were riots, but these were outside the city, where people of another colour were quartered.
These people were not allowed into the suburb except as reliable housemaids and gardeners, so
there was nothing to fear, the husband told the wife. Yet she was afraid that someday such
people might come up the street and tear off the plaque YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and open
the gates and stream in… Nonsense, my dear, said the husband, there are police and soldiers and
tear-gas and guns to keep them away. But to please her-for he loved her very much and buses
were being burned, cars stoned, and schoolchildren shot by the police in those quarters out of
sight and hearing of the suburb-he had electronically-controlled gates fitted. Anyone who pulled
off the sign YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED and tried to open the gates would have to announce
his intentions by pressing a button ad speaking into a receiver relayed to the house. The little boy
was fascinated by the device and used it as a walkie-talkie in cops and robbers play with his
small friends.

The riots were suppressed. But there were many burglaries in the suburb and d
somebody's trusted housemaid was tied up and shut in a cupboard by thieves while she was in
charge of her employers' house. The trusted housemaid of the man and wife and little boy was so
upset by this misfortune befalling a friend left as she herself often was with responsibility for the
possessions of the man and his wife and the little boy, that she implored her employers to have
burglar bars attached to the doors and windows of the house, and an alarm system installed. The
wife said, She is right, let us take heed of her advice. So from every window and door in the
house where they were living happily ever after they now saw the trees and sky through bars, and
when the little boy's pet cat tried to climb in by the fanlight to keep him company in his little bed
at night, as it customarily had done, it set off the alarm keening through the house.

The alarm was often answered-it seemed-by other burglar alarms, in other houses, that had
been triggered by pet cars or nibbling mice. The alarms called to one another across the gardens
in shrills and bleats and wails that everyone soon became accustomed to, so that the din roused
the inhabitants of the suburb no more than the croak of frogs and musical grating of cicadas’
legs. Under cover of the electronic harpies’ discourse intruders sawed the iron bars and broke
into homes, taking away hi-fi equipment, television sets, cassette players, cameras and radios,
jewelry and clothing, and sometimes were hungry enough to devour everything in the
refrigerator or paused audaciously to drink the whiskey in cabinets or patio bars. Insurance

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companies paid no compensation for single malt, a loss made keener by the property owner’s
knowledge that the thieves wouldn’t even have been able to appreciate what it was they were
drinking.

Then the time came when many of the people who were not trusted housemaids and
gardeners hung about the suburb because they were unemployed. Some importuned for a job:
weeding or painting a roof; anything, baas, madam. But the man and his wife remembered the
warning about taking on anyone off the street. Some drank liquor and fouled the street with
discarded bottles.

Some begged, waiting for the man or his wife to drive the car out of the electronically
operated gates. They sat about with their feet in the gutters, under the jacaranda trees that made a
green tunnel of the street for it was a beautiful suburb, spoilt only by their presence and
sometimes they fell asleep lying right before the gates in the midday sun. The wife could never
see anyone go hungry. She sent the trusted housemaid out with bread and tea, but the trusted
housemaid said these were loafers and tsotsis, who would come and tie her and shut her in a
cupboard. The husband said, She’s right. Take heed of her advice. You only encourage them
with your bread and tea. They are looking for their chance. .. And he brought the little boy's
tricycle from the garden into the house every night, because if the house was surely secure, once
locked and with the alarm set, someone might still be able to climb over the wall or the
electronically closed gates into the garden.

You are right, said the wife, then the wall should be higher. And the wise old witch, the
husband's mother, paid for the extra bricks as her Christmas present to her son and his wife the
little boy got a Space Man outfit and a book of fairy tales. But every week there were more
reports of intrusion: in broad daylight and the dead of night, in the early hours of the morning,
and even in the lovely summer twilight a certain family was at dinner while the bedrooms were
being ransacked upstairs. The man and his wife, talking of the latest armed robbery in the
suburb, were distracted by the sight of the little boy's pet cat effortlessly arriving over the seven-
foot wall, descending first with a rapid bracing of extended forepaws down on the sheer vertical
surface, and then a graceful launch, landing with swishing tail within the property. The
whitewashed wall was marked with the cat's comings and goings; and on the street side of the
wall there were larger red-earth smudges that could have been made by the kind of broken
running shoes, seen on the feet of unemployed loiterers, that had no innocent destination.

When the man and wife and little boy took the pet dog for its walk round the neighborhood
streets they no longer paused to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn; these were hidden
behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls and devices. The man, wife, little
boy and dog passed a remarkable choice: there was the low-cost option of pieces of broken glass
embedded in cement along the top of walls, there were iron grilles ending in lance-points, there
were attempts at reconciling the aesthetics of prison architecture with the Spanish Villa style
(spikes painted pink) and with the plaster urns of neoclassical facades (twelve-inch pikes finned
like zigzags of lightning and painted pure white). Some walls had a small board affixed, giving
the name and telephone number of the firm responsible for the installation of the devices. While
the little boy and the pet dog raced ahead, the husband and wife found themselves comparing the
possible effectiveness of each style against its appearance; and after several weeks when they

44
paused before this barricade or that without needing to speak, both came out with the conclusion
that only one was worth considering. It was the ugliest but the most honest in its suggestion of
the pure concentration-camp style, no frills, all evident efficacy. Placed the length of walls, it
consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there
would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in
its fangs.

There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and
sharper hooking and tearing of flesh. The wife shuddered to look at it. You're right, said the
husband, anyone would think twice... And they took heed of the advice on a small board fixed to
the wall: Consult DRAGON'S TEETH The People For Total Security. Next day a gang of
workmen came and stretched the razor-bladed coils all round the walls of the house where the
husband and wife and little boy and pet dog and cat were living happily ever after. The sunlight
flashed and slashed, off the serrations, the cornice of razor thorns encircled the home, shining.
The husband said, Never mind. It will weather. The wife said, You're wrong. They guarantee it's
rust-proof. And she waited until the little boy had run off to play before she said, I hope the cat
will take heed . . . The husband said, Don't worry, my dear, cats always look before they leap.
And it was true that from that day on the cat slept in the little boy's bed and kept to the garden,
never risking a try at breaching security.

One evening, the mother read the little boy to sleep with a fairy story from the book the
wise old witch had given him at Christmas. Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves
the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he
dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to
creep in, and with the first fixing of its razor-teeth in his knees and hands and head he screamed
and struggled deeper into its tangle. The trusted housemaid and the itinerant gardener, whose
"day" it was, came running, the first to see and to scream with him, and the itinerant gardener
tore his hands trying together at the little boy. Then the man and his wife burst wildly into the
garden and for some reason (the cat, probably) the alarm set up wailing against the screams
while the bleeding mass of the little boy was hacked out of the security coil with saws, wire-
cutters, choppers, and they carried it the man, the wife, the hysterical trusted housemaid and the
weeping gardener into the house.

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