‘If this black list is something to do with the emergency, why can’t we talk about it?’ she had asked. ‘Plenty of people fought the Mau Mau. The British brought in soldiers from England to fight them. That woman is a spiteful bitch. She was jealous of us, that’s all! Pa should go back to Langani and forget what she said, or take it up with the government. Something. Anything. He hates this place, Ma. We all do. You should be in your garden at home, not in this shenzi, no-hoper of a place. Look at this house – soon it will collapse around us. It leaks. It’s mean and rotting. We can’t get rid of the cockroaches. I’m sick of being stuck out here in the bundu every weekend with nothing to do. And he’s so angry all the time. Ma, are you listening to me?’

Lottie had risen then, gripped her daughter, and shaken her none too gently.

‘You listen to me, my girl. The truth is unpalatable at times, but you have to accept it. It’s no good fooling yourself. Things happen – people sometimes make decisions that they bitterly regret. Your pa did something at a time when everyone was a little crazy, when your uncle had been murdered, hacked to pieces in front of poor Katja and the children. He wasn’t the only one, and he has tried to make amends, although it hasn’t been easy.’

‘But what did he do that was so terrible? What?’

‘You don’t need to know the details, Hannah.’ Lottie sounded tired, defeated. ‘But if there was a blacklist in George Broughton-Smith’s file, then it was a serious threat to Langani. It would have affected the decision about whether we could keep the farm or not. Black politicians don’t like to remember that their own people were killed by the Mau Mau. Far more of their own, in fact. There were very few white people murdered. But they don’t want to think about what one Kikuyu did to another, how they massacred their brothers and cousins who wouldn’t take the oath, how they raped and tortured and killed their own women if they refused to bring food into the forests for the gangs hiding up there. They only remember what a white man did to a black man.’

‘So she was talking about the Mau Mau, then,’ Hannah said.

‘Yes. She was. So we can’t just forget what she said, Hannah, and go on as if it never happened. Your father left Langani so that Piet could keep the farm and make a life there for himself, like the generations before him. It means everything to him. Pa knew that and he gave up his own future there, to protect your brother.’