Just like me, Hannah thought. Poor, helpless mouse, hoisted from its home without warning, and swallowed up. How could Pa have done this? Taken them here to this godforsaken place, without asking her, ignoring her frantic pleading to be allowed to stay with Piet. He had been like a stone during those last days at home, standing in the office or the living room at Langani, staring out of the windows, not speaking. Pouring yet another whisky from the bottle, drinking it down in great swallows, as though he was not even tasting it. How could Ma have let him do this to them? It had broken her mother’s heart. Hannah knew that. She remembered the day they were leaving, how sick she had felt, caught between impotent rage and misery. How she had gone out at sunrise to walk in the garden, to look at the mountain, to touch the wood of the verandah rail and feel its rough, kindly roundness, to absorb every memory of the childhood that was being torn from her. And then she had seen Lottie, kneeling in the flower bed, stroking the plants with trembling fingers, whispering something to them that Hannah could not hear, tears coursing down her cheeks unchecked. She had crept away, unable to watch her mother’s grief. And when the time came to leave, she had looked into her father’s eyes, making one last desperate appeal, and seen only a sick despair. Then she had turned in panic and run away from the car, tried to hide in her old room, so that Piet had come and pulled her from her bed.

‘You must be brave,’ he had said. ‘It’s just as hard for them – harder maybe. They need you to help them do it.’

And she had wanted to scream at him, to say that it was fine for him. He was staying. He did not have to say goodbye to everything he had always loved. He did not have to go away with Pa and Ma, who were clearly in a pit of misery themselves. Why was she the one who had to uproot herself and go with them?

She still could not understand why they had to come to this dreadful place. She hated it! Hated it for herself, and for what it was doing to her parents. And she loathed the feeling of envy and resentment that stifled her whenever she heard from the others. Sarah wrote often – long, newsy ramblings about university life in Dublin. And Piet sent pithy, ‘little sisterish’ notes that drove her mad with fury and longing. Worst of all was Camilla, who sent breezy postcards that told her nothing at all, except to illustrate a life of excitement and sophistication.