MANGANYI: One wonders how authentic the descriptions in Down Second Avenue are and whether important things have been omitted if they are authentic. Is there anything you could say about your childhood experiences?

MPHAHLELE: Every so often when I drive down [to Maupaneng] I take a look around to see what I feel about things forty-seven years later … I realise more and more how distant I was from my father. When he left us in Marabastad in 1932 and went back to the North we were children … It didn't look traumatic at that time. And then, as you grow up, you realise you miss a father, you don't have a father like other boys have, right? And then later on you settle down to that kind of situation. When I look back to it now, I realise that perhaps things might have turned out differently if we had had a father that we could look up to and … rely on.

My life could probably have been eased a bit. But throughout, things kept … coming onto me: living with my grandmother and aunt, my mother having to live out in the suburbs where she worked and seeing us on weekends, or we going up to see her. Whenever I drive around in the Pretoria suburbs my memories come back … of the sort of life that was … It was a pretty rough life and one was so exposed to so many hurts … so many impacts … pretty rough impacts, too. Whites … and also just the need, the struggle, to survive. You know, you drive up to the suburbs to collect money from somebody whom they've been doing washing for at home, and then he is not there. Then you have to go back again and he is not there … that kind of casual attitude they had towards my people who were doing their washing.

And … I remember now quite vividly how the people my mother worked for were just so impersonal when they looked at me … I just didn't seem to exist. I was just her son and there was no interest whatever. In fact, I hardly saw their faces … Their faces were always a blur and I never could recognise them as people myself.