Writing fiction is something I originally stumbled upon rather than consciously chose. Much the same can be said of my career as student and university teacher. Brought up in London in a lower working-class family, I certainly harboured no intellectual or literary ambitions. Like the rest of my family, I looked forward only to escaping from school as soon as possible and settling down to a steady job. What challenged that way of thinking was my parents’ unexpected decision to go to Northern Rhodesia (as it was then) when I was fifteen. Central Africa, where I was to spend a good portion of the next twenty years, did more to alter my attitudes and prospects than anything before or since. Still under British rule, it showed me the last and perhaps the ugliest face of colonialism; and in so doing destroyed any smug sense I may have had of my own Englishness. Equally, the politics of an emerging Zambia taught me some painful and abrupt lessons about both myself and the twentieth century preoccupation with violence.

As an indirect result of those lessons, I took what in my family was the unprecedented step of attending university. At the time, I wasn’t motivated by any love of learning. I was simply on the run from what I’d come to regard as a white man’s army. Having decided early on that under no conditions would I do my compulsory military service, I had already spent some years evading the call-up – going ‘bush’, disappearing on protracted hitchhiking trips, changing jobs, even moving from country to country. When all else failed, I turned to university as a last resort!

In my circumstances (limited money, etc.) that meant heading south, to the University of Natal. Oddly enough, to flee from a British to a South African administration was not as contradictory as it may sound. English-speaking South African universities were and still are fairly radical places: and the University of Natal added to my education in more than just a formal sense. Not last, it put me in the company of young people who were as appalled as I was by racism and current white attitudes; and also convinced me that there were other options apart from running.