THAT AFTERNOON when I got home, I didn’t rest. I went down into my studio. I pulled out old canvases, small works I had done over the years. The watercolours I put to one side. I didn’t like them. I felt them to be transient, that they could melt away. I’ve said before: I’d stopped working in watercolour. They wouldn’t work in Howard’s office either, Howard’s office which had an air of solidity and permanence, of age, even. (But Howard, Howard was young! He was only in his thirties then.)

I came upon, then, a group of works I had done after visiting my parents in Villiers one weekend. They were abstracts, but you could see, could feel, the Vaal River within them. Or I could see it, feel it.

A heavy, a great river. That river was filled with brown silt, I knew it so well, from swimming in it as a child. A deep sandy bottom, I remember the feel of it as my toes, my feet, sank into it. I’d almost drowned in that river once. This is true.

IT WAS MY UNCLE BERNARD who took me swimming in the river. Bernard was my father’s brother, and his business partner, they ran the shop, the business, in Villiers. Bernard was much younger than my father, not yet married, then.

It must have been a Sunday afternoon, he said he’d take me down to the river in his car, he’d take me swimming. How vividly I remember the towel on my lap, as I sat in the front seat next to him. I liked him, he joked a lot, and he was more carefree than my father. I think he loved me dearly.

We drove, drove the quiet grey streets of Villiers, down the hill towards the river, which we could see then, visible through the willow trees that bowed over the banks. The river, seen like that, was a ribbon of brown, it glinted here and there in the sun. But when you got down to the river, after my uncle had parked the car and we’d got out, you saw that the river was large, and very wide. So wide. It had a current too, it wasn’t peaceful. It was on its way somewhere; this sojourn in Villiers, our town, was a small stop for the river. I knew this: I’d seen its brownness — its wideness — moving across the landscape as we followed it, when my father drove us to Vrede, or Frankfort, neighbouring towns, on weekends. The river wound in a slow, large way.

I’d also seen maps of the river, at school. Die Groot Vaal, my teacher called it, the Great Vaal. It was woven into the history of our country, it marked the boundary between the Orange Free State and what became the Transvaal, the two provinces. It had been impassable in distant years, crossing it was hazardous and had surely killed people: Indigenous people, Black people, as well as Boers in ox wagons, oxen themselves, and, later, the English, English soldiers, wagons pulled under, guns and weapons swept away.