This week, we are practicing dialogue. We had to use the same character as last week, and we had to create a scene, where the character meets someone for the first time…Here goes Tatiana again…

June 1976. The winter’s morning on the Highveld is freezing cold. Frost like glazed doughnut icing is thick on the withered lawn. Tatiana’s mother is urgently whispering in the kitchen to her father. She can only hear snippets from her bedroom, “Should we send her to school?” her father’s reply “Soweto riots… not so safe.” Tatiana crosses the freezing parquetry floors on her bare feet half dressed in her winter school uniform. “Why am I not going to school?” she asks loudly.

“Go and get dressed,” her mum says over her shoulder. Tatiana hides in the passage and overhears the whole debate about whether it is safe to go to school. The people in the townships are rioting. She feels her stomach knot around the Jungle Oats, she has just eaten.

Sister Clare stands at the front of the classroom.
“Girls (she pronounces it ‘Curls”)” Tatiana giggles, practicing the accent in her head. “Curls, vee haf a new Curl joining us today.” Tatiana looks up from the nail she has been biting and picking, intrigued. “She veel be vis us shortly. You must make her feel velcome. Tatiana, she vil sit next to you. Curls, remember we are Christians und treat her kindly.”

The classroom door opens, the principal, Sister Sylvia enters followed by a girl in exactly the same blue school uniform Tatiana is wearing, she looks like everyone else, except she is clearly a Zulu. The girls all stand as they have been taught to do, when the principal enters, but their mouths are open in surprise. Tatiana is wide eyed as Sister Sylvia walks the new girl over.

Sister Sylvia says “Bongiwe, this is Tatiana, Tatiana this is Bongiwe.”
“Hello” each girl whispers as they each stare at their shoes. Tatiana is in shock, she is twelve years old, was born in South Africa, has lived in there all her life and it is the first time she has spoken to a black child her own age.

The class starts.
Tatiana sits very still in the shared bench. She is scared to move, she is scared to frighten her new friend. Fascinated, she stares out of the corner of her eyes. Finally, she gathers the courage to whisper:

“…where you from?…”
“…Soweto…”
“…Wow…”
“…Why you here?…” she asks gingerly, holding her breath, the chalk scratching on the board.
“…Big trouble…tanks and guns…”
“…Really…” Tatiana frowns, there is no reality of this in her peaceful, white suburb.
Silence
“…How did you get here?…”
“…My father drove me here…”
Tatiana nods
“…You like it here?…”
Bongiwe looks around the classroom. She seems wide eyed as she takes in the unreality of the situation. The only dark skinned student in a sea of blonde and brown heads. She nods, slowly.
“…You got lunch?…”
Head shakes.
“…My mother always makes too much. You can have some of mine…”
Tatiana’s hand slides across the desk and touches Bongiwe’s, she is mildly surprised to find it is as warm as hers.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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Last week’s writing assignment…to create a character who is about aged 12. The task is to write about her “autobiography” as homework for school. She will have to read it to her class. Meet Tatiana…and if you recognise any characters or events, just like in the movies, all characters and events are fictional…

Assignment 2:

My name is Tatiana. Tatiana Valente. I am twelve years old. I have a younger sister Katja. She really is a pain. She is five years younger than me and she gets away with MURDER. She has long curly, brown hair that everyone says looks like “Shirley Temple Curls.” Who is Shirley Temple? I mean, like, der? Just because her hair is curly does not mean she is the best thing in the world! She is forever messing up my room while I am at school and then I have to come home and clean it all up and get into trouble for being untidy. I also have a dog Schnoekie. He is fluffy and brown. I live in a tiny town in South Africa and I hate writing English assignments. The End.

I should have written better, I know I can, but last time I got creative with a story was in Standard 1 and grumpy Mrs Lincoln wrote in red pen “What rubbish.” We had to write about “My Horse.” I wrote about my horse that was abducted by Communists and was caught in a fire and he kicked the barn door down to escape and he was awesome. He bolted down the road and left those communists in the dust. He hid on a boat and came all the way from Russia, back home just to be with me. Mrs Lincoln says horses don’t have communist adventures and I should have written about riding my horse in a paddock. Well, I don’t have a horse. We live in a small house in the suburbs of Springs and it is 1977, no one has horses in the suburbs. My dad loves Communists, he talks about them all the time, but everyone says he should not. He is Italian and came to Africa when he was 29. It is from him that my sister gets her curly hair. Everyone says “Oooooh, you look just like your dad.” when they see her. I have straight blonde hair, just like my mum’s she is from Holland. Our hair is not thick. My friends laugh at it because my one ponytail is as thick as my pinky. I like my hair though it is as straight as my nose. My friend Amy, says my nose is the straightest she has ever seen, she even put a ruler against it in Maths the other day and I made squinty eyes that made her laugh but she is right. It is very straight. We laughed so much, because a ruler can’t go straight against her nose, she has a bump and Sister Clare turned around said “I don’t vont zeez behaviour of bebies” in her German accent and now we shriek that on the top of our lungs whenever someone is rowdy on the bus home. We really laugh a lot. I love doing accents and acting. My mum is really funny too. She never just sweeps the house like a normal mum. She sweeps it and then does a Zulu warrior dance with the broom. I guess that’s me.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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I am doing an online writing course. Here is a piece I wrote in response to recalling your first childhood memory…

She takes down the box of memories stored in the seldom accessed part of her brain; they are not categorised, but stored in a shoe box of Clarke’s Jack and Jill shoes that her mother favoured for her little feet. She sifts through to find her earliest memory. Is it the red tricycle, with its white seat and its steel “Triang” badge that said “Made in England,” with its smell of oil and rubber and its strong, white painted spokes? She puts that aside. Is it the blue swimming pool, the plastic square, with its poles and legs that folded to contain the water and joined the hose-pipe to create a summer of fun? The smell of grass and mud and the intrigue of the earthworms that somehow always ended up in the pool after a deluge on a summer afternoon. She decides it is not the tricycle and not the pool. She flips through the box, the dust motes of memories floating in the sunshine.

She lands on the dark blue dressing gown, thick winter dressing gown, that has little bumpy balls from being washed, that she rubs her fingers on when she is anxious. The large embroidered cat on its pocket, with its permanent smile, holds no vague consciousness of her anxiety as it smiles mutely at the world. She has worn the dressing gown a lot, she has had tonsillitis repeatedly and although she is only two, the doctors have said that they should remove them. Her parents mirror her anxiety, but smile like the cat on her pocket, to make sure that she does not see their worry. But she knows. She may only be two, but she feels as old as the sun and while she may struggle to articulate it, she knows. Her parents buy her a plastic “Doctor’s Set” to help her assimilate the hospital visit and procedure. She makes them read the packaging to her, even the part that says “Made in Taiwan.” The plastic stethoscope, the kidney bowl, the tweezers, scalpel and blunt nosed scissors join her in removing bear’s tonsils. “See Bear, its not so bad”. Her mother smiles the anxious smile and twirls her long brown hair as she always does when she is unsettled.

The hospital smells of disinfectant, sterile cleanliness. No mud and earthworms would survive in the huge, scrubbed building. She looks down at her slippers, with their silver thread that form patterns of tiny flowers, they are peaking out from beneath the blue dressing gown as she climbs the concrete steps into the hospital. “Why must I wear my pyjamas out?” she asks crossly. “Mmmh,” her mother answers “it will be alright.” She frowns, that is not the answer to the question. She likes the proper answers like “Made in Taiwan” answers that have stories behind them. But she has no time to tug her mother’s sleeve and ask for more as she is now standing looking into a desk. Just a blank piece of melamine, her mother leaning over the counter top, talking in whispers to a nurse and filling in forms. She is irritated. She wants to be picked up to see what is going on at the desk. Not be left to wonder.

The operating theatre is cold, it smells like a scientist’s chemistry experiment. There is a steel kidney bowl. A steel stethoscope. She says “Look, kidney bowl.” The nurse laughs. “How does she know?” she asks her mother. Her mother shrugs and smiles. They tell her to count to ten, that the needle wont hurt her. She screams hysterically, kicking and flaying in anger against the nurse and the doctor. Three people and her mother hold her down. She puts up a strong fight for such a little girl. The needle hits her vein. One, two…she is gone. She wakes up with her tonsils staring at her from a tiny glass bottle next to her bed, she wonders what the writing on the bottle says.

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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