“For us Afrikaans was a deed of rescue. You wanted to use it as well as you could to rescue yourself and other Afrikaners from poverty and misery. Teachers saw to it that we mastered scientific and classical Afrikaans. We had to learn Afrikaans poems and Bible verses off by heart, and so pure sentence structure and vocabulary were bedded in us. Anglicisms were like cursing. You delighted in storytellers who could play with language. They were heard again and again and their stories retold so often that the unique expressions were extended to everybody.”

One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.

You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.

Poets are the last heretics of the world. We flung our country, our trodden, deeply divided land, open like a delightful carpet at our feet. The many colours shot out across the floor and a newborn land slipped from its membrane of languages. And it lay down. Our country lay down among us, translated into parables palpable with light.

“I don’t want to shower. I want to smell the whole day of river mud and my youth with your father.”

But she kept on prodding, clearly fishing for an unsavoury story, so I told her straight: “Juffrou, she is a precious child for me. Our politics have nothing to do with each other. If you write something that makes us clash, I will pray you dead!” Afterwards Pa put his hand on my shoulder: Well said! And you know how undemonstrative he was.