In this particular location there was a soup kitchen run by a big local charity; and it was this that Esther was to visit, partly as a publicity excursion, partly because Mrs Bannister had been genuinely surprised to learn that such an institution existed anywhere in South Africa. “By God, there are human beings here!” she had exclaimed to Esther, when she had heard about it: relying on South Africa’s newspaper reputation abroad, she had imagined that no single white human being in the entire country would ever raise a finger to help a black man. “We’d better have a look at it, honey – it’ll be something to tell the folks.”

So it had been arranged. But what Mrs Bannister had not taken into account was the effect, upon Esther’s compassionate and youthful heart, of what she was to see that morning.

It was a bright day: the hot sun, shining out of a pale blue, cloudless sky, only served to point the gulf between the purity of nature and the gross contamination of man. Latterly, Dr Worthington’s special lenses had been hurting Esther’s eyes, and she was not wearing them on this occasion; she was thus able to observe, closely and accurately, the squalid horror that was this township. The two of them arrived about noon, when the mobile soup kitchen was making its first distribution of the day: the queue of negro children – half-naked, ill-fed, rickety, clutching every kind of utensil, from tin cup to metal cooking pot, beneath faces turned towards the kitchen as if towards God – the queue stretched for fifty pitiful yards, winding through the crowded shacks of wood and corrugated iron and sacking, that were the only shelter the children and their parents were ever likely to know.

Mrs Bannister, for form’s sake, described the scene to Esther, and was photographed doing so: the girl could hardly maintain her pose of blindness, so degraded and yet so heartening was the scene around her, so moving the patient line of small black faces, and the wretched pots and cups, and the pennies clutched in the free hands … Then Esther came nearer to the distribution point, and was photographed patting a child – a preoccupied and ravenous child intent only on its ration of soup. The onlookers, black men and women, chattered among themselves as they watched this. Then they fell silent, as they saw that Esther was crying.

Her tears were explicable: Mrs Bannister had been ‘talking’ to her about their surroundings. But Esther’s next action was not.

The small, ragged child whose head she had patted – a girl of not more than four – secured its helping of soup, in a china bowl that looked like an old-fashioned soap dish, darted aside for a few paces, and began to wolf the meal. Esther seemed to be watching it, with her face working, and her tears now flowing freely. The child seemed unbelievably hungry. She was, in fact, too hungry altogether; for after a minute’s swift, gulping activity, the little girl turned aside and vomited what she had eaten on to the sunbaked ground.