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life, it is that I acted according to my conscience on all counts. I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.’
    They heard him out: the words of the condemned man, and the last judgment on those who had condemned him, the judge learnedly and scrupulously impartial within the white man’s laws, the secret police and the uniformed police who enforced them, the white people, his own people, who made the laws. The sentence was what her father knew was coming to him; and she, and the lawyers and everyone around them throughout the trial knew was coming. The newspapers reported a ‘gasp through the court’ when the judge pronounced sentence of imprisonment for life. She did not hear any gasp. There was a split second when everything stopped; no breath, no heartbeat, no saliva, no flow of blood except her father’s. Everything rushed away from him, drew back, eclipsed. He alone, in his short big-headed body and his neat grey best suit, gave off the heat of life. He held them all at bay, blinded, possessed. Then his eyes lowered, she distinctly noticed his eyelids drop in an almost feminine gesture of selfconscious acknowledgment.
    She looked straight ahead because she was afraid someone would speak to her or lay a hand on her.
    At the back of the court where the blacks were crushed in, standing, so that when the seated whites turned to look up, they were overhung, the shouts flung out: Amandhla!
    And the burst of response: Awethu!
    Amandhla! Awethu! Amandhla! Awethu!
    They fell upon her father: his flowers, laurels, embraces. He grinned blazingly and raised his white fist to theirs.
    Then it was over. A thin back went down to the cells between many policemen. It was finished. The groupings dropped apart, lawyers, police, clerks moving across each other. The plump, desperately calm face of her father’s counsel, prematurely aged by jowls of tension round his gentle, rosy mouth, looked for her and she struggled to get to him. He kissed her and she sank for a moment into the cushion of that cheek, smelled something he put on when he shaved. A foreigner’s British voice was saying past her ear—And here life means life.
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    I know those hours afterwards. After someone has been taken away.
    After my brother drowned. After arrests. After my mother died at ten past five in the afternoon at the hospital and when we got home the sprinkler was on in the garden and the washwoman’s baby was trying to catch the spray in his hands.
    I think that while my mother was alive and my brother was a baby my parents arranged their activities so that one of them was in the clear, always, one would always have a good chance of being left behind to carry on the household if the other were arrested. Of course they also calculated on the Special Branch preferring to leave one of them apparently at large, in the hope of being led to others who were working underground. Nobody told me this, nobody discussed it at home—I just knew, as children know about things their mothers and fathers discuss in bed at night. Then when my brother and mother were gone, there was me. If my father were to be arrested, there would always be me.
    Afterwards, there are toys, there are cupboards full of clothes, there are bills and circulars from people who don’t know the addressee won’t receive them. Although there are no documents or letters because people like my father and mother cannot preserve anything that establishes names or connections, there are boxes (an old round leather box with a buckle fastening, I am told people—perhaps Lionel’s grandfather—used to put stiff collars in) containing broken things you don’t know why have been kept. The furniture in rooms is arranged in accordance with a logic of movement, of currents of life about it that are no longer there.
    Theo had wanted to take me home with him but I said I would go back to the house first and