HOW I MET MY Mother

my first home was a small wooden incubator. I was born eight weeks premature, on 27 October 1952 in Johannesburg General hospital, briefly shown to my mother, then taken away. In those days there was no awareness of the need to hold premature infants, so I was separated from all life except for four-hourly feeds, according to Dr Spock’s popular feeding regimen. My mother was told, with some exasperation on the part of the nursing staff, that I wouldn’t stop screaming. After eight weeks, I was sent home to an adoptive mother who was ill with chicken pox. A stern nurse was employed and my screaming continued.

It was a tough start, but in fact the real start was well before my birth. Beginnings are never easy to pin down, but my sense of a convenient one has my biological mother coming to Johannesburg one summer’s day from a farm