ABSTRACT
Every Christmas, under the shadow of Mount Currie in Kokstad, the strains of Harry Lauder, a Scottish vaudeville performer, singing his 1911 hit song, 'Roamin' in the Gloamin' rose from an old, windup gramophone player in my grandmother's living room. She was one of those 'women of old Kokstad-Scots pedigree' whom David Dirkse meets in the local library. Several scholars have already explored the elusively 'Coloured' identity set forth in David's Story and Wicomb has herself commented at some length on 'colouredness' in several places. Scotland proves to be quite literally a death sentence for David Dirkse; he returns from Glasgow to South Africa as a marked man. Leaving its several other literary precursors aside, David's Story replays, or re-sites, a Saxo-Celtic geography of the imagination or 'Fancy' that once umpired the boundaries between England and its putatively primitive Celtic peripheries, a geography in which the Scottish Highlands featured prominently as the last refuge of 'Faery' while the Enlightenment advanced.
