BRAM: These blessed candles of the night … [Pause] Stars … Something else they took away from me … Stars … can you believe it? That I would miss something like that? When I was hiding on the farm in the Magaliesberg I sometimes went walking in the night to calm my thoughts. Just me and the sound of my own breath. And my shadow … When there was a moon. Sometimes I could hear the sounds of small animals scurrying away in the bush … It made me feel less alone. I wasn't used to loneliness yet … After all these years I'm still not used to it. More often than not, walking would calm my thoughts. And then I would imagine that I was on commando 65 years before. Alone in the veld with a bag of biltong and dried rusks. Looking for British soldiers. [He laughs and sings, to the tune of ‘Sarie Marais']: ‘Ek was so bang dat die Kakies my sou vang en ver oor die see gaan wegstuur.’

Sometimes I felt so lonely that I would start talking to the stars … O blessed candles of the night … Portia in Merchant of Venice, if I remember correctly. If I was at home I could have looked it up … Or asked Molly.

Molly Fischer, née Krige, whom I had to court for seven years before she agreed to marry me … Would I have fled if she was still alive? There was water in the Sand River the night she drowned. The same river where, 50 years before, the British signed the convention that restored independence to the Transvaal. Fifty years later they were back and this time they colonised the Orange Free State as well. My mother was at the window when Lord Roberts and his army entered Bloemfontein. The khaki-clad soldiers looked like marching locusts.

The lances they used to spike the Boers like bush pigs at Elandslaagte and Paardeberg glistened in the sun. My mother fainted. That night her brother-inlaw, Hugh Bidwell, removed the last Free State flag remaining in Bloemfontein; the one hanging in front of the Vierde Raadsaal …