Let me introduce a few characters in my book, Love Secrets Lies. First there’s Teresa, the protagonist. The story spans five years of her life. When it begins, in 1975, she’s twelve, and her storybook life has just been upended by a revolution that forces her to move to a country and a city where she feels like a foreigner. Her grandparents worry too much about her, keep her under strict supervision and allowing her little freedom …
Tag: girl
There was a girl who lived in a land of perpetual summer. She could not imagine it would come to an end sooner than she thought. Teresa lived with her family in a huge house, surrounded by a luscious garden. She, her brother and playmates capered in the shade of massive trees and played games of make-believe where princes and princesses fought dragons and wizards and saved the day and fell in love. In that garden, where her …
Many times you live next door to someone for years and you know nothing about them; when you meet in the lift you say good morning or good evening; most rarely you exchange a few trivialities about the weather, as the lift goes up or down; and little else. Everyone goes on with their lives and that’s how it should be. However, from time to time, something happens that makes you discover your neighbours’ dark secrets. The other day as …
Just the other day I was thinking about 1979 and how it was a year of major changes in my life, when I realized it was forty years ago. I simply couldn’t believe it! A decisive year First of all, it was a year of learning. I learned about love but also about disappointment and grief. New people came into my life that were very important for quite some years: I gained a new love, who would mean …
The girl sat in the backseat of the car together with her brother and Grandmother. After giving some last instructions, her Grandfather sat next to the driver and told him sharply “Let’s go””. The driver started the engine and they came down the path on the left of the house for the last time: she saw, as if in a dream, the tall araucaria tree, the green lawn where she had so often played with her brother; she glimpsed her …
She was ten. Only a girl, little more than a child, really, but she liked to say she was a “pre-teenager”. She knew she looked older; she was tall, with long legs and her brown eyes shone in her cinnamon skin, tanned by the tropical sun. She had long, straight dark hair that came to the middle of her back and a ready smile. She was full of romantic dreams; in a time without television the evenings were long …
Pygmalion is a figure from Greek mythology, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved, which then came to life. It is also the title of a play by George Bernard Shaw, first presented on the stage in 1913, that tells the story of a professor who takes upon himself the task of “carving” his own creation, by educating a Cockney working class girl and transform her in such a way that she might pass as …
I met her in high school when I was 14 and she was 16, one year and a half older than me. I believe the first thing that brought us closer together was that we were two tall girls in a world of short people, but we soon discovered we had many things in common. Such as our dislike of the 1974 revolution and the changes it had brought into our lives. It had cost me my native land Mozambique …
I was nine and it was my first day of what was called preparatory school (the fifth year of school). It was all very different from the private, small, primary school I had been to in the last four years. This was a huge state school, as schools in the years before the 1974 revolution were segregated. I had managed to find my way to my classroom and there I was, sitting quietly, waiting for the teacher to arrive. I knew …
Back in the late seventies, there was a South African band called “The Rabbitt” that I loved to listen to. They had a very nice (and somewhat cynical) song called “Everybody’s cheating”. I hadn’t heard it – or even remembered it – for a long, long time, but as I was going through some old papers the title of the song was there and when I found it on Spotify it was as if I were time travelling…and as I …