R.I.P. Daphne Rooke, South African novelist, 94 (in Januar..

Fascinating obit!

She moved to Australia in 1946 and then to Cambridge, England in 1989.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5798342.ece

Excerpt:

Rooke was born in Boksburg in the East Rand of South Africa, the
youngest of six children in a poor family, and was 12 when her mother
noticed for the first time that she hadn’t grown at all since she was
6 and moved the whole family down to the better climate of the Natal
south coast where Daphne did indeed manage to grow.

Her mother acquired and somehow ran a little sugar farm. Having no gun
with which to protect herself, she put around stories that the farm
was haunted — enough to keep malefactors at bay. For Mrs Pizzey was an
extremely tough, independent woman, not only working the farm and
rearing her children single-handedly but also writing (as Mare
Knevitt) The Children of the Veld. This was a world Rooke memorably re-
created in one of her finest novels, Ratoons. She went to school there
and in Durban. “I used to invite friends home for the weekend. We had
to walk through the firebreaks in the sugar cane. There were hundreds
of black and green mambas and other poisonous snakes lying in the sun
there. I was used to it. But none of my friends ever came back for a
second weekend.”

As a young girl she visited relatives in the Lebombo mountains of
northern Zululand and met Zulu girls who had never seen a white
before. She and they undressed to check that they really were the same
species underneath. From an early age she saw Zulu and Indian girls as
her sisters and could not understand, let alone sympathise with, the
prevailing white racism that cast them as lesser beings. But her life
was that of a young girl on an isolated sugar farm. From the age of 8
she played a canny hand of bridge.

(snip)

It says she wrote six children's books in addition to her adult books.
Five of the former are:

The South African Twins, J. Cape, 1953, published as Twins in South
Africa, Houghton, 1955.

The Australian Twins, J. Cape, 1954, published as Twins in Australia,
Houghton, 1956.

New Zealand Twins, J. Cape, 1957.

Double Ex!, Gollancz, 1971.

A Horse of His Own. Victor Gollancz (1976).


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Rooke

http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4695/Rooke-Daphne-Marie.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2TSHB_enUS333&q=daphne+rooke+...aq=f&oq
(more obits)


Lenona.