She remembered how he had always been too tired to do the things that came naturally to other fathers. They’d go to the park but he would just go through the motions. Lindi – ever attuned to his moods – would try to compensate. She’d contrive to make those prosaic outings far jollier than they could ever or should be. In her early teens she had already accepted this mantle of responsibility, this requirement to be something more than her years warranted. The more listless Harry had been, the more energy Lindi would find. She had tried to keep up with Ralph, trying to match his boundless demands. As she’d grown older, she’d begun to resent her father’s lacklustre, enervating presence.

‘Dad’s so boring,’ was how she’d put it to Helen one day, the closest she ever got to protest. ‘He never wants to do anything.’

Helen couldn’t bear the thought of her children thinking of their father in that way. But her attempts to get Harry to talk about it always ended in a row. It was like a cold undercurrent that ran beneath the surface of what was otherwise a warm relationship of deep affection and occasional passion. Helen would point to the threats and the precariousness of their lives, once Harry’s paper had been banned by the South African government. He, in turn, would say that so many others had found a way to stay and that he had cut and run just as the edifice of apartheid was beginning to shake and shudder.

It had been different for Helen. Having decided not to work while they settled into London life, she found new purpose as she immersed herself in running the house. She would creep out of bed early, sometimes only a couple of hours after Harry had returned from another night-shift on the Daily Telegraph, get showered, dressed and have breakfast ready by the time she had to wake up the children. In short, she tried to do all the chores Maude had once done for them, including, much to the amusement of the other mothers on the school run, pressing the family’s laundry.

‘You iron their knickers!’ they shrieked in unison.

In the collective challenge of motherhood they offered an intimacy that helped Helen to make the transition from who she had been to the person she had to become.