So that’s how you spell it, she thought. Bunnichows – soft white loaves with their centres hollowed out and filled with curried meat – had been a treat in the Seaton household, a special reward for a good week at school or comfort food on a particularly gloomy winter’s day. As children, half the fun had been derived from pushing their little fists into the loaf and pulling out handfuls of airy white bread, which they would stuff into their mouths. Harry was the bunnichow expert and he’d help them ladle his ‘special’ curry into the hand-made cavity. Eating bunnichow was always accompanied by a lot of shrieking as the filling inevitably oozed out of the bread and trickled down their faces and hands.

In later years they had switched to vegetarian fillings because Ralph had become convinced that the filling was in fact made of bunny-rabbit meat. Nothing Harry or Helen said could assuage his fear that a fluffy little mammal with a white bobble tail had ended up in the saucepan. The memory brought a smile to Lindi’s face. It gave her a connection with this frenzied place, which was all the more welcome because it had been unexpected. It was the first inkling that this city, this country, was, in fact, an integral part of her family’s story – her story. She remembered, again, with a twinge of regret, the way she had sometimes berated her parents for being so hung up on their past, on being South African. What had seemed to her an imaginary and exaggerated connection with this nation might have been, after all, exactly what they said it was – a visceral, umbilical link with the place in which they had been born and raised.

Lindi pulled up the handle on her bag and headed towards the building the driver had shown her. Once inside she saw that the BBC office was on the third floor and waited for the lift, along with a dozen or so other people. When the doors slid open she expected the kind of Darwinian rush that sorted out the men from the boys back in London. One or two did stride into the compartment, like their life depended on it, but many more stood back to allow her into it. The lift was filled with a smell that combined takeaway breakfasts with the over-generous application of aftershave lotion. On the third floor Lindi saw the BBC’s logo on one side of the lobby and headed towards the glass doors next to it, mentally reminding herself of the office manager’s name. The receptionist, a young woman with perfectly manicured nails, was talking into a phone held awkwardly between her neck and shoulder while signing a receipt note for a delivery.

‘I’m looking for Comfort Ramphele,’ Lindi said, when the receptionist finally put down the phone.