What a Bakermat morning looks like
06:40 and the gate at the Motherwell centre comes off the latch. The first children are already on the pavement with an older sister who has to be at school by seven, so the aunties open early and nobody makes a thing of it. By 07:15 there are ninety-one children inside and the pots are on. Soft maize porridge with milk powder and a spoon of peanut butter stirred through, and a boiled egg on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most of them eat two bowls. For eleven children on that register it is the only food before the afternoon. 08:00 to 10:00 is the part people do not picture when they hear the word crèche. Counting in Xhosa and English, songs with actions, a story on the mat, scissors and puzzles, then forty minutes outside on the tyres. It comes off the national curriculum for four- and five-year-olds, and every aunty has been trained to run it. Ten o'clock is the vegetable beds behind the hall — spinach, carrots, onions and a granadilla vine that has taken the fence. The children water and weed, and whatever comes out of the beds is in the pot the same week. Fruit at eleven, mats down at half past twelve, and by one they have been fetched or walked home in a group with an aunty at the front. Then the pots get scrubbed and it starts again tomorrow.
