Grade 4 English reading comprehension: The Day the Windmill Stopped

Anele lived with his gogo on a sheep farm in the Karoo. It had not rained for eight months. The veld was the colour of old bread, and the dam behind the house was a bowl of cracked mud.

Every morning before school, Anele walked up the koppie with his dog, Biscuit, to check the windmill. Biscuit ran ahead, sniffing for lizards among the rocks. The windmill pumped water from deep under the ground into a big tank. That water was all the farm had. Gogo said it was worth more than gold.

One Saturday, Anele stopped halfway up the koppie. Something was wrong. The windmill’s long blades were spinning in the wind, but no water was splashing into the tank. The only sound was a loud clank, clank, clank.

His heart began to thump. Without the windmill, the sheep would have nothing to drink. Anele climbed closer and saw the problem. A long metal rod had snapped and was dangling like a broken arm.

Anele knew he could not fix it himself. He was only nine, and the tower was very high. He thought of the thirsty sheep waiting in the kraal. “Come, Biscuit!” he cried, and he ran all the way home, his school shoes slapping against the stones.

Gogo listened carefully. Then she picked up the phone and called Mr Mokoena, the neighbour who mended windmills. “Well done for noticing, my child,” she said. “If you had waited until Monday, the tank would have been empty.”

Mr Mokoena arrived in his dusty bakkie before lunch. Anele held the ladder steady while he climbed the tower with a new rod over his shoulder. “Hold tight, young man!” he called. Anele gripped the ladder with both hands and felt very important. By the afternoon, the new rod was in place. The windmill creaked and clanked, and then water gurgled into the tank.

That night, thunder rumbled far away. Anele pressed his nose against the window while Biscuit barked at the first fat drops of rain. “Gogo,” he whispered, “maybe the windmill brought the rain.” Gogo laughed softly. “Maybe it did,” she said.