Imagining her wealthy family friend being plucked from his privilege and deposited in the “barefoot” stomping grounds of her childhood inspired author Gillian D’achada to write the young adult adventure novel Marked.

“It was a combination of a young friend that I know in Joburg and he had a very privileged life up there. He had his own fussball table in his bedroom and I imagined how it would be if he was yanked out of that — ordering Uber Eats and collecting it at the school gate — to just the good old walking around here barefoot in the bay,” said D’achada.

This contrast sparked the story idea which then just grew.

“And then it just develops you know, on its own. Suddenly you have this character that has a life of his own and you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t even know who you are anymore’.”

The novel tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, James, who rediscovers his hidden heritage after his mother suddenly returns to her childhood home, a fishing village in Kalk Bay. Devastated and missing his father in Johannesburg, James decides to despise everything about Kalk Bay. Instead, he makes friends, rescues a beached whale, chases poachers and competes for a scholarship to a conservation-centric school.

Marked is D’achada’s second novel. Her first, Sharkey’s Son, won the Gold Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature in 2007 and has been reprinted as a school edition in the senior phase curriculum.

“When I first wrote Sharkey’s Son, which was a long time ago now, I wanted to write a classic book that would have a timeless appeal, that would be easy enough for kids to read but also literary enough to be a good book. I think Sharkey’s Son was that and Marked is that. It is appealing to teachers because it is a little more literary, it’s a bit more classic.”

Currently she is working on book about the Nama people of the Northern Cape, whom she says have an “incredibly complicated” history.

“I realise I just keep writing the same book over and over again,” she says laughing. “When I finished Marked I thought, this is a lot like Sharkey’s Son, and as I’m doing this next one, I’m like, this is a lot like Marked. I guess these different elements just collide.

“I’m a Capetonian and I have this passion for the people of the Cape. I want to showcase the cultures but it seems to be coming out a very similar story — a young child who has a passion for conservation who then fights the baddies and wins.”

Although, she calls herself Capetonian, D’achada and her family currently live in Johannesburg. The coastal themes of her books are however rooted in her own experiences of living on the far south shores and some of her memories are lived out by the characters in the Marked.

“The whales are what inspired it first of all,” she said. “Coming here and seeing those whales and there’s one incident in the book that I actually did experience myself which is where the baby whale gets beached. It was a whole hubbub a couple of years back when a baby whale was caught in this crevasse under the sea next to the Dalebrook pool.”

D’achada did not have a hand in the rescue as James did and this exaggeration of real events is something that occurs frequently in the novel.

“I did take some poetic licence with some of the places. Even the granny that he comes to stay with, Aunty Baby, her house is up a super steep hill and there’s no super steep hill here,” she said, explaining that the hill was based on others in the area which have long steep flights of stairs.

Another embellishment in the book was the Shark Education Centre.

“It’s very much based on the real place but it’s more for research and school groups, I just made it much bigger, grander and more fantastic — more like the aquarium. I’m sure that they were reading it like, ‘What? That’s not the shark centre we know’,” she said laughing.

One unembellished part of the story is the poorer community of fisherfolk who live in the flats above the harbour. The story lightly touches on the community’s fascinating history. In the book, the flats are home to Faried, who leads the story into darker corners.

“The history of the people from this area is real. This fishing village has a history that is very unique and it fascinates me.”

D’achada says that some of the history was destroyed but most of it lives on in the people.

“Apartheid destroyed how it used to be. There were a lot of mosques here. It was a very mixed area. It was one of those areas which Apartheid didn’t quite succeed in destroying because local people stood up against it but it was a lot more mixed back in the day. It has this fascinating history, this mixture of the descendants of a Filipino shipwreck and the emancipated slaves.”

Heritage is something D’achada is passionate about.

“What annoys me, and I didn’t bring it up much in the book, is that this is a traditional village and traditional people have been fishing here for generations and now licences have been taken away, livelihoods have been taken away. This should be a cultural heritage site and the people and their livelihoods should be protected because this is how they have lived for generations.

“If you used to go to that harbour 20 or 30 years ago, you would see all local people and everyone knew each other by name. There are still a few of them there but now there are all kinds of people there and there is hardly anything to fish anyway because of all the poaching and that is not the little groups of people here and there who poach, it’s massive criminal syndicates.”

James comes up against such a syndicate in the story.

“It’s a metaphor for conservation because when I was a kid we would catch perlemoen and crayfish and cook it on the braai because there were plenty but now it’s the most expensive dish, if you can even get it. It’s sad.”

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