Shopping in the wind (better than at Morrisons!)

...a FREE chapter from the novella, TWO FEET, by MARK ROPER. In it he explains, briefly, what is was to go shopping in Swaziland in the late 1960's. Some of Mark's earlier Blogs reflect his attitude toward modern day shopping!!! (There's a salad on my head, Brain Decay etc etc). TWO FEET will soon be available as a FULL audio book read by the well known stage and screen actor, Miles Anderson.  Please free free to comment and, needless to say, TWO FEET is available to purchase on +Amazon.com 

SHOPPING IN THE WIND

But they did come and repossess the car. It was a red Mini-Imp, and the men that came were from a large, prosperous city across the border, and they didn't even stay for coffee. They just drove it off down the thin, corrugated and eroded dirt road that led down the hill onto the main road.

We stood and watched it go. “Shit,” is what my mother said.

We were left with a black bicycle, and on this bicycle I would pedal on the tarmac road to the local General Dealer every day. It was a long road bordered by pineapple fields, and the labourers working in those fields wore old, plastic fertilizer bags tied to their legs to avoid the sharpness of the pineapple leaves. They were like human scarecrows.

This was a good road. It had a few hills and a few potholes, but pedalling was easy especially on the way to the Store. I’d park the bike outside the Store where the hulking overhead diesel drum was positioned, and then walk across the dry patch of red earth where the chickens fed, and climb the few concrete steps onto the porch of the building. Here, a Cobbler and a tailor worked. The tailor had a milky eye and his left leg would furiously pump the plate on the floor to make the sewing machine rattle. He looked as though he was riding a bicycle to nowhere.  The Cobbler, who wore a white shirt and a tie, had a tiny anvil and a mouthful of little black tacks that protruded from his lips like snakes’ tongues. Beside him were heaps of shoes that I thought would never cover a person’s feet or tread on a road again. But they did.

There is always a group of people gathered on the porch. A mother feeding her baby on her bosom, her head bent low over the infant to keep away the flies, an old man leaning on his cane peering from beneath the brim of his recently purchased hat, and another woman tying up her cash in a piece of cloth that she would thrust down her blouse for safe keeping.

The business of shopping was a muted, respected affair by customers in the Store. An aisle was approached with caution, almost in awe, bare feet scuffing on the concrete floor. Canned goods were held carefully in both hands, and the picture on the label was studied with the intensity of an art scholar. A bar of wrapped, Lux soap was sniffed and smiled at, and the bulky bag of Hullett’s refined, white sugar, stroked and prodded.

At the rear of the store, alongside gardening implements and paraffin lamps, shoes for men and women, made in Taiwan, beckoned. The shoes were never tried on for size but measured against the foot, the brightness of the shoe’s plastic alluring. The appearance of high heeled shoes would cause much stifled giggling.

The weighing of maize meal, sugar or flour by the Store’s owner was a solemn affair, the customer having ordered it, not by weight, but by what he or she could afford. As the grocer’s scale shifted on its fulcrum, so would the head of the customer, as if mentally trying to balance the brass contraption by telepathy. When the scale righted itself, the customer would do likewise with his or her head. Then the maize or flour would be poured into a paper bag and fastened with cello-tape. Whatever money the customer had was offered to the store-owner as payment. It was accepted that the store-owner would count out what was needed, and the balance be returned. A sticky sweet or two always concluded the transaction.

If a can of paraffin was listed on my mother’s shopping list, the road and the ride home was a challenge. Paraffin was an essential fuel. It kept the deep freeze and the fridge cold and the hurricane lamps alight when there was a power failure. The bag of meagre groceries I could hang on the handlebars, but a five-gallon metal container filled with paraffin was heavy and cumbersome, and the only place for it was between my legs on the hard saddle so I’d peddle off with knees and elbows wide like a frog in mid-flight and my backside almost touching the rear tyre.

The road I travelled was often shared with one or two eighteen-wheeler railway trucks.  Red, monstrous and loud, they travelled across the country transporting cattle, timber and sugar cane. Long before they came into sight the tarmac beneath the bicycle’s front wheel would vibrate, and as fate would have it, we’d meet on the downhill, so there was no time or place for stopping. Feet would start pumping wildly on the pedals and my backside would take to the air and the paraffin would begin sloshing left and right as the grocery bag began to scream and tear against the spokes of the front tyre.

To this day I don’t have a clue why I thought going faster would save me from the metallic beast that was coming up behind me. It is what boys do.

The driver of the monster would purposefully sound his foghorn as he neared. The sound of the tyres and the metal was ferocious as the vehicle passed, like a freight train coming out of a tunnel and crossing a steel bridge. It felt endless. It was a red blur out of the corner of your eye. The handlebars of the bicycle shuddered like a jack hammer in your hands. The tarmac was a dark blur, and the yellow grass on the verge becomes a spray of colour without shape.

Then the wind, the gale, the blizzard, the hurricane hit.

It came off the passing vehicle and slammed into you as you quickly tensed your flailing knees, and sphincter muscle, around the five-gallon paraffin can. You try to turn the bicycle’s juddering wheel into the wind with no success. You bend your head so low you are just short of chewing the metal of the handlebars.

Then you are in the ditch, and you are being watched by a group of labourers that work in a pineapple field dressed like human scarecrows. The bag of sugar you bought has exploded on the hot tarmac, and the bar of Lifebuoy soap has disintegrated against the fence-pole, and the bicycle has curled up some twenty feet away shaped like a modern sculpture.

But you are still holding the five-gallons of paraffin to your chest as if it were liquid gold.

Which it was.

 *****

Mabuza once told me that when travelling on any road and there is a fear of being struck from behind by an ill wind, get off the road.

*****