Nadine Gordimer uses the narrator's explanation of why her house settles and makes creaking noises even when no intruder is present as a symbol and foreshadowing. Symbolically, the house sitting atop the gold mine represents the white culture that was built on the work and labor of the black servant class in South Africa. The Dutch settlers (Afrikaners), who began to rise to political power in 1914, promoted their own economic interests over the interests of other ethnic groups. In 1948, the Afrikaners' Nationalist Party became the ruling party and instituted apartheid, a vigorous system of legal discrimination against non-whites. Thus, the "uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance" described between the gold mine and the house represents the imbalance of the apartheid social system. The narrator describes the hardships of the miners, who are invisible and whose struggles are not even apparent to those on the surface. The miners' plight represents non-white people's struggles, which are ignored by or not even evident to white people during apartheid.
The description of the mine also foreshadows the fear and prejudice the bedtime story deals with. Just as the narrator fears the unknown and speculates about what terrors are occurring in the subterranean mine, so too does the family in the bedtime story imagine all kinds of horrors that will come to them if their culture crosses paths with the "people of another color." The bedtime story ends with the little white boy enmeshed in the Dragon's Teeth fence, which was foreshadowed by the description of the miners who "might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs."
What seems a simple explanation of why the narrator hears creaking in her home becomes a meaningful symbol and means of foreshadowing the plot and theme of the bedtime story that follows.
The description of the mine shows that white people in South Africa are afraid of people of color because they don't understand their lives and struggles and because they know that the people of color have been taken advantage of. The white culture has been built on top of the backs of people of color, and such an unstable system is sure to crack and eventually crumble. At the time of the story's writing, white people feared not only the loss of their own fortunes but also the vengeance of those they had exploited. Eventually the apartheid regime ended in 1994 after much social unrest, and currently laws are in place to favor those who were once discriminated against.
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