Thinking back now, in this luxury hotel with its plush and velvet, blue-grey and gold, its Victorian prints on the walls and – I swear to God – Sir Joshua’s Age of Innocence above my bed, it appears to me, however distant in this setting, that all my life I’ve been surrounded by violence. Not in the way any of my quite long line of pioneer forefathers experienced it, leaving their velskoen tracks through history – the uprising of Graaff Reinet, Border Wars, Great Trek, Boer War, Rebellion, or the Ossewa-Brandwag underground movement of the Second World War. Without exception they were themselves the agents, the doers, and often the victims: men who landed in the Dark Hole of the Castle, who were killed by the spears of Kaffirs or the bullets of Englishmen, or who found their farms raided and their houses burnt, so that every time they had to start again from scratch (which, somehow or other, with the Bible on their hearts, they managed to do). My experience is different. I am surrounded by violence, yet untouched by it myself. Unlike my ancestors on their via dolorosa as Dad liked to call it, I realise only too well that I have always gone scot-free. (With the exception of that one afternoon with Bea.)