Lump in the Throat

Every evening, without fail, my playmate Pule would tell me he would like to play longer with me, but had to go home before his father came back from work.

He would rush home and stand waiting for his father at the gate, sometimes for an hour or more, even in winter or on rainy days. His face would light up as his father rode into the yard on his bicycle. He would run up to him and clasp him tightly around his waist. His father would pat him on his head, lean his bicycle against the wall of the house and remove from the back carrier of his bike a parcel wrapped up in brown paper and tied with string and give it to him. Pule would grab the parcel with both hands, hug it tightly to his chest and dash into the house with it.

For a long time I wondered what was in the parcel that Pule waited for so eagerly every evening.

I knew he had to wait for his father to come back from work before he and his sister and mother could eat supper, the one and only meal they had for the day. That was a standing rule of their household.

I was curious to know what they had for supper that Pule so eagerly looked forward to. That chance soon came.

I used to share my Saturday lunch with him sometimes. This comprised boerewors and pap which the rest of my family had on Friday but which was put away for me in the oven to eat the following day as I was Catholic and could not eat meat on Fridays. My parents, staunch AME church folk, had taken me to a Catholic school when Bantu education was introduced, as Catholic schools had not opted for it. To attend a Catholic school you had to join the church and eat fish on Fridays and stand still wherever you found yourself at midday and pray the prayer called the Angelus.

One day Pule invited me to have supper with him to reciprocate the ubuntu I showed him on Saturdays. I was thrilled because at last my curiosity would be satisfied, but at the same time horrified by the prospect of my mother finding out I had accepted food from strangers or had eaten food given to me by neighbours, especially those who stayed in the house to the right of us, Pule’s family, as his grandmother was reputed to be one of the most dangerous witches in our street.

I weighed the pros and cons of the situation for a long time.
In the end my curiosity prevailed and I accepted the invitation.

Pule’s family was happy to have me over for supper. I sat down with them to share their evening meal. At last I came to know what was in the parcel wrapped up in brown paper. It was not a nice juicy steak or succulent thick rolls of well spiced boerewors. No.

It was a loaf of brown bread.

Every evening Pule and his family sat down at table to eat two thin slices of dry brown bread each, which they washed down with black coffee without sugar before going to bed.

I sat in their candle lit kitchen and chewed on the dry piece of bread. I struggled to swallow it even after a mouthful of the steaming bitter moer-koffie. I could not figure out why.

Only years later when I was older, could I understand why the food would not go down easily. That was when I went to watch the movie Oliver Twist and the popcorn I was eating turned into parchment in my mouth when the movie came to the scene where hungry street kids and orphans where looking through a window into the evil Beadle’s house and seeing him and his wife and their spoiled brats gobbling down the food laid out on the table which was buckling under the weight of the mouth watering dishes.

The same constriction comes to my throat when I remember the story Auntie Miena told me about when she relocated to a coloured township after her husband, a mine-worker from Lesotho, had died. Her new neighbours had sent their child to knock on her door, barely a day after she had moved into her new house, to come and “borrow a slice of bread”.

“Ma se ek moet a stukkie brood kom leen, sy sal dit weer teruggee.” the little girl in a tattered dress and black ribbon in her hair had said when Auntie Miena had opened the door.

“Kante hoe is die mense van hierdie plek?” Auntie Miena had asked herself.

“I have hardly unpacked my bags and here they are already bothering me. I wonder whether I made the right decision to have
left the Native Location. At least ek was happy daar met my man, tussen mense wat ons ken”. She had said to herself.

She nevertheless took the bread she had bought that morning and gave it to the child.

“Tell your mother it is not necessary to return it.”

Instead of welcoming me with a basket of fruit as a new neighbour like in the past, they instead ask me for bread. Auntie Miena had said to herself, shaking her head as she closed the door.

Then there was the Englishman who fled the UK during the miners strike. He wrote a letter to the newspaper three months after his arrival in South Africa:

“I am very happy here. I have a new job and for the first time in my life I can afford to have a piece of steak in my lunchbox”.

I felt like crying when I read that.