The scene opens up in the present time that July, their servant, their host, binging two pink glass cups of tea and small tin of condense milk. (p1) And the Smales are apparently in the hut that July offered them as a place of refuge. Then Gordimer brings up the voice of Maureen--- a former middle-class white woman, now took refuge in a squalid condition, a hut, as she recollected the flashes in childhood, had its different level of meaning now. At first what fell into place was what was vanished, the past. (p3) A tribal hut the equilibrium she regained was that of the room in the shift boss's house on mine property she had had to herself once her elder sister went to boarding school. (p3) As for now, she had to pack objects of her collections and saw the hut as a critical place for survival. Gordimer breaks up the rule of time movement and uses collage effects to pour the past (back there) within the present time (here), to make a extreme contrast and combination between the present and the past, to create an aura of cruel reality that took Bam and Maureen a long time to accept and even adjust. They had stayed; and told each other and everyone else that this and nowhere else was home, while knowing, as time left went by, the reason had become they couldn't get their money out.(p8) Where was home? Who was this place to belong? The systemized past had collapsed and yet the memories of those good old days played vividly in the jukebox of mind state, to them, as a kind of comfort, and more likely, a kind of contradiction to their now-ness of circumstances. Submission to the elements was something of forgotten, back there.(p57) Now they had to learn what submission was like, for that they re-examining things they took for granted ,back there, had become unreachable. impossible to imagine what was happening in those suburban malls nowexhibitions whose favored subject was black township life.