Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
We were never really going to be able to have dinner in peace that day. It was too exciting. The police were in the streets from lunch time, even though the real action wasn’t until after 6pm. That was the time the curfew started. We saw a lot of police on the streets on our way home from school. They were dressed in green and they wore those funny hats. I remember the hats because they were the only thing that made them look different to the army. The army wore helmets. They were also on the streets. They were in big water tanks at street corners, as if waiting for crowds to build so they could disperse them with the water cannons. People said that the water they used was sewerage but I always thought it smelt more like bleach than farts.
That evening we had dinner early. I can’t remember what we ate. My sister and I were so excited we couldn’t really sit still. Mum washed the dishes as soon as she could because we were going to bang the pots and pans after dinner and we didn’t have many.
Once the curfew started it always took a little while for people to start making noise. It was like no-one wanted to be the first because no-one wanted the police to be able to tell where the sound was coming from. We were never first. Mum didn’t let us start until almost everyone else in the neighbourhood was already in their yard banging their pots and pans. When we did join in it was the funnest ever! We were allowed to be as loud as we wanted, and my sister and I would laugh and sing along to popular songs. Sometimes people chanted between the banging and we would join in that too.
I often wondered what it would be like to be on the street when there was a curfew. To hear the whole neighbourhood banging pots and pans, chanting loudly, but not be able to tell who was joining in and who wasn’t. I imagined what it would look like to a bird, seeing yard after yard filled with families banging pots and pans, separate but together. Chanting “the people united will never be defeated”. United, yet separated by fences.
We were never allowed to stay up until the end – we always had to go to bed before the silence came. I remember being in bed, tired and sleepy, listening to the pots and pans. It didn’t keep me awake really, it kind of soothed me. I felt safe.
In retrospect I don’t think it was safe. There were police and military on the streets, just outside our door. Occasionally we’d hear the sound of someone being arrested, or trying to avoid arrest. They’d say they had a legitimate reason to be on the street. They were going to work, or home, or hospital. Sometimes crowds would gather, in protest against the curfew, against the government, against the poverty. And we’d hear the water tanks, and people running, and tear gas. Occasionally there would be distant gunshots.
So yeah, it probably wasn’t safe. But on those nights, when I was warm in bed, in a room I shared with my sister, listening to the pots and pans and the chants of the neighbours; on those nights I felt safe.