The old farmhouse was crumbling. Generations of Jameses had lived at Melrose. Stripped of her whitewash by decades of Eastern Cape storms, she stood bare. The tin roof rattled in the wind, unpainted, rusted. Varnish peeled in strips from the heavy front door. A creaky yellowwood passage led deep inside. On the passage wall hung an old black phone in a wooden box, with a handle that no longer turned. There were gaping holes in the ceiling boards. At the end of the passage was a hall stand, laden with felt hats, tweed caps, knitted wool jackets and handmade walking sticks, vestiges of the elders who had come and gone. Dark framed photographs of women in stuffy frocks and men in black suits adorned the passage walls. Formal brooding lines of relatives, standing stoically, staring straight ahead, unsmiling.

The rooms of the farmhouse were large. Elegant English furniture filled these airy spaces. The delicately carved dining room sideboard had come by ship in 1857, the year of the amaXhosa cattle-killing. NguNongqawuse! White bones littering the rolling hills, burnt-out granaries, famine. Nonetheless, the ancestors had failed to answer. As prophesised, the sun had risen red on the given day, but the cattle were not reborn and there was no grain. The ancestors did not arise from their graves. Ancestors. This morning's sun glinted on silverware with the James family crest. Yet a darkness governed in the kitchen, walls blackened with smoke from the wood-fired Aga stove, the plates now cracked, but still in use.

A scrawny, red, bare-necked rooster pecked about for scraps outside the front door, as ill-tempered as if he were master of the farm. An aged sheep-dog with knotted fur lay on the step, his job long done. It was years since the red stoep had been polished.

‘Why did our forefathers have to come here? Why?’ Dunford asks this question on a daily basis. The place is unforgiving; so inviting, yet so unforgiving - ready to spit one out at any time.

‘Come on then, drink your tea, dear, before it gets cold,’ Priscilla responds impatiently.