My husband stepped forward. He held out a bowl. The milk filled it. He took the first sip, passed it to me, then to the children. The others came out of the school rooms cautiously. Milk for the children and for the old. They held out bowls, empty jam bottles, mugs. And then when these were full, went back silently to their rooms.

We could not turn our backs on any tentative offering of peace.

Dreams of Fear and Terror

Dreams were continual. They happened every night.

I stood on the edge of the balcony, peering over. The staircase was no longer there. I was about to take a step. A yawning gap of darkness lay before me. I was in a ruined house. Everything around me was gutted, the wood still smouldering. Doors torn off their hinges leaned crazily awry. Splintered glass was strewn everywhere. I wanted to climb down from that upper storey. To escape. To that end I had walked alone, rapidly and stealthily, to reach the stairway but the landing was shrouded in darkness and till I tried to take the first step I had not seen the emptiness before me. I looked up and shuddered. The roof had caved in. The windows were black holes. Only the walls still remained …

Startled out of sleep, I sat up suddenly in bed, then half fell to a side. I felt suffocated, drowning in darkness. Someone clutched my arm and pulled me up. Uttered my name. It struck my ears like a bullet.

‘Am I safe?’ I mumbled incoherently.

Dreams of fear and terror have never left me.

The year is 1977. Six years ago. I am in another room, in another house. I prepare to sleep. Stretch out my limbs. Stones clatter on the roof. I spring up from the bed, look wildly around me. The darkness spins round and round. I am caught up in its vortex. I fall into a vacuum of darkness shot with prisms of pointillist colour. Falling into space. Plummeting down into the Icarean sea.

There is no staircase.

The doors are locked and barred in a different house. The walls are charred. The fire has eaten into the wood. I look down into the pit. I almost step into its darkness. I try to push aside its dense mass, searching for a door through which I can escape.

The dream is constantly with me.

‘Why am I alone?’

I am always alone in these dreams. Have the others escaped? Is it only at night that the fear trickles like chill sweat in my armpits? The nape of my neck is drenched with sweat. I lift the hair off it. Wet strands.

I am walking on splinters of glittering glass. The moon is up. It is the house of a neighbour. Giant hands have slammed the walls together. The doors are jammed. Broken furniture is shoved about. I pick up a book from the floor. It is a birthday present we have given the man, the householder. All his books are flung about on the floor. I turn the pages over. Images of a country through the eyes of strangers from another continent. Experiences of missionaries, poets, sailors, priests …