DAMBUDZO THRIVED IN THE RESPITE of his new surroundings. He revelled in being off the streets, having a proper bed, clean sheets, clean clothes, a shower, regular meals and space to write. He also loved being part of our family.

Victor was very welcoming. He could relate to our guest's mindset. Dambudzo was one of the few Zimbabwean writers who appealed to his own literary sensitivity and he also liked him as a person. He found conversations with him stimulating. Likewise, Dambudzo liked and respected his host, his generosity, and his worldliness, something that was rare among colonials.

The first few days stimulated Dambudzo's creativity. He would sit at his desk in the cottage or at a table in the garden, typing away.

One of the first texts he wrote was a play about ‘couple watching’. Two watchmen, who turn out to be ghosts and who are in love with each other, have to watch couples at a cemetery.

‘I am sick of couples,’ says one of them, ‘I am sick of watching people living out the illusion that their feelings and emotions are permanent.’

‘Look at those two,’ the watchman continues, ‘dying of love – grieving for each other. [Puzzled] It's their little boy who has died isn't it?’

‘Such an idiotic churl of a child. [Thoughtfully] I never did like children. I consider them the inescapable permanent nightmare, a secret steel trap awaiting all who believe in the illusion of love.’

Was it an allusion to my own marriage? The husband in the play is called ‘Man’; the wife has the German name Helga.

I liked the play. I was touched by the tender, slightly surrealist meditation about love and about dying. That love and dying was also a theme binding me to Dambudzo I did not yet know; nor that it would fall to me to publish the play after its author had become a kind of ‘watchful ghost’ himself.

My children, Max especially, to whom Dambudzo related so easily and fondly, seemed to revert the ‘inescapable permanent nightmare’, making our home even more, for Dambudzo, the unattainable ideal of a beautiful life. Photos taken during those first days at our house show him and the two boys sitting together at the workbench in the playroom, painting. Max, very attentive and engaged, with the older friend, Franz, dreamily trying out red paint.