I never truly understood my father’s feelings for Ginie, but I understood the effect they had all too clearly. I didn’t understand the passion one person can experience for another, but Dad showed me, and he paid for it with the destruction of our family. After that, I decided passion and love weren’t for me. I live alone in a small seaside town and teach maths to primary school children. I like numbers; they are transparent, predictable. My life is quiet and that is how I like it.

Sometimes, a nameless feeling comes over me, a feeling that is like hunger. But I have learnt to wait it out. I know that it will pass, in the end.

After Ginie recovered from the shooting, the locals let the Courtaulds be. They never took them into their hearts, but there was an understanding that they had been through enough. They were made Umtali’s first Freemen in acknowledgement of their philanthropy and residents turned out in their hundreds for the ceremony.

There were many other organisations that benefited from their generosity, including the Queen’s Hall and the multiracial Rhodes Club in Umtali, the Bulawayo Theatre, St Michael’s Church in Salisbury, the University College of Rhodesia and the National Museum.

I never did find out what happened to Mary, whether she survived or not. She simply disappeared into the prison system.

Stephen passed away first, aged eighty-three. He had to have a leg amputated above the knee because of blood circulation problems, stemming from untreated diabetes – a dreadful fate for a man who had loved to climb mountains. Not long afterwards, the other leg went and he lost the will to live, his heart simply stopped.

His death left Ginie unmoored. She had a slight stroke, which destroyed her memory and the family moved her to Jersey, where she spent her remaining years. Her final request was to give La Rochelle to the National Trust of Rhodesia. By the early seventies, when Ginie had left Rhodesia, the Africans had realised that they wouldn’t achieve autonomy through peaceful negotiation with an unjust government. This led to the Liberation War in which thousands died.

Farmhouses became forts, with sandbags piled up around the bedrooms, doors and windows bolted, high security fencing, alarm systems, guard dogs and a loaded gun always at hand. La Rochelle was left unscathed. The guerrillas coming over the border knew that it had belonged to sympathizers. They attacked farms in the area and Kukwanisa was burned to the ground.

I heard that Jessica’s ghost was sighted on the property more than once during the war. It’s my belief that because the poor soul had been torn so violently from this earth, her spirit stayed behind. She was trapped at La Rochelle, tethered to it but not part of it. Whenever there were vibrations of fear and horror, she sensed them and they called her from her uneasy resting place.