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Summary ‘Childhood in Heidelberg’ (Andries Oliphant)
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‘Childhood in Heidelberg’ (Andries Oliphant)
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STUDOCUSummary Theme 'Childhood in Heidelberg' by Andries Walter
The speaker talks about the family home Oliphant is a thoughtful and multilayered
The unfairness of
where hisinfamily
Childhood have lived for generations. As
Heidelberg poem told from the perspective of a child
forced removals,
a child he did not know they were being looking back on their youth. In the first lines of
childhood innocence.
forcibly removed by the apartheid 'Childhood in Heidelberg,' the speaker begins
government, but as the adult looking back, by describing their home and how closely
he is able to interpret what happened. tied it is to their perception of history and
family.
The contrast between their warm home and Mood
the stark little house they are moved to is
Nostalgic, bitter
highlighted by strong imagery.
The use of the past tense makes the child's
experience of his home especially vivid.
The first stanza and the last ten lines are in the
past tense, which makes the reader realise
that the speaker is remembering as an adult,
with understanding and judgement, and not
as a child in the present who experiences the
move as an adventure.
Form and structure
5 stanzas, not regular rhyme or rhythm patterns.
Free verse
, Childhood in Heidelberg by Andries Walter Oliphant
I was born in a house where ancestors In the kitchen mother cries as she turns 20
were suspended from the walls. the toast on the black plates
On hot afternoons they would descend and walk silently of the Welcome Dover.
through the cool passages When father packed my pigeons into boxes,
of the dark house slowly 5 I ended up with Rover and the cats
as if strolling through a womb. on the back of a truck 25
with all the household goods.
The roof is a vantage point for birds and pigeons. I thought, if this is part of life, it’s fun.
On the stoep
in an ancient folding chair my namesake sits. At the end of the truck’s journey
there is a giant gumtree 10 through the sky, we arrived
at the gate in which the sun sets. in a toy town of match-box houses, 30
The stars are candles linked up like tombstones in a graveyard.
which my grandmother has lit. At once, I understood why my mother cried.
Every morning father wakes to find a man
with a hole in his head 15
sleeping in the driftsand
of the furrow which runs
along the creaosted split-pole fence.
I go in search of the orchestra of crickets
Vocabulary
•suspended from walls: hanging on the wall (a photograph)
•Descend: come down from
•Strolling: walking in a relaxed manner
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