Fear, loneliness and nostalgia: a return to Johannesburg

Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class snacks. They are bulging out of their uniforms. They cannot pass each other in the aisles without difficulty. This is the sort of thing you notice during a long flight; at least the sort of thing I notice. I arrive in the morning at Johannesburg after an 11-hour flight from Heathrow, to promote my new book, Up Against the Night. I am met by a minder who turns out to be the wife of an admiral in the South African navy. He is stationed in Pretoria. I point out that there is no naval base within a thousand miles of Pretoria. She says her husband has noticed this.

The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book, and even to justify it. I know from experience that many of the people who come to hear me will think of themselves as being under siege; their children have long ago gone to Australia and New Zealand and Canada. In Johannesburg I don’t meet a single African journalist. I am driven to a very luxurious hotel in Houghton, not far from where Nelson Mandela lived after his release. He was often lonely, and Nadine Gordimer, who lived not far away, told me he invited himself for dinner. This landscape is familiar to me; we lived nearby. Not many people like Johannesburg, but I love the place. I look at the barbed wire threaded along the garden walls of every house. I recognise the bird song and feel the morning cold and I am caught up in nostalgia.

The hotel is staggeringly luxurious. It was once a huge private house. There are shortbreads in every room and jars of biltong and hillocks of white towels, flowers everywhere, and the breakfasts are Homeric.