I was excited by the note of conspiracy and wondered if she was going to tell me that her son-in-law’s allure was less obvious than I thought it was.

Louise turned out to be a meticulous keeper of personal and local records, and showed us photographs of the various natural disasters which yearly shook Camballin: the floods, the cyclones, the electrical storms, the plagues of snakes and locusts. She was especially fond of a group showing the very house we were in, just its roof visible above the waters, taken from a helicopter. She had a drawer full of blackened electric plugs, the victims of lightning strikes, and albums of videos, meticulously kept and dated, a complete moving pictorial record of her extraordinary decision to come and live in so remote and harsh a place. It was both a vindication and a justification, this library of hers; not just a story of the past, but a spur for the present, a reminder to herself of just what she was here for.

‘It doesn’t worry you, all this?’ I asked, meaning the whole catalogue of catastrophe and uncertainty.

She laughed – a clatter of sheet-metal, not unlike a lightning strike itself. ‘Nah, we don’t think about it.’

They kept photographing it though.

‘This is Arch holding a baby crocodile,’ she said.

He was too. Holding it up, with a pleased expression on his face, like a Scottish fisherman showing off a salmon. ‘The croc looks docile enough,’ I said.

‘Look closer,’ Louise said, ‘and you’ll see why.’

Looking closer I saw that Arch had it firmly by its windpipe. There’s a trick to everything.

I sneaked a glance at Humpy, sitting quietly in an armchair, and wondered if he too resorted to cheating when subjecting the eighteen-footers to a half nelson.

‘And now,’ Louise said, just when I thought I’d been through all her photographs, ‘I suppose you’d like to see some of the Israelis.’

Apparently, a man named Gud Ravah had purchased Liveringa Station some time ago and had brought in a group of Israeli boys – all ex-army officers – to help him develop it. Three of them in particular had become close friends of the Archers. Two called Yuron – as in ‘Yuron your own’, and one called Yurone – as in ‘you’re on Yurone’. To make it easier, there was black Yuron and white Yuron.