The altar boys of Father Lynch were Theodore Blanchaille, Tony Ferreira, Trevor Van Vuuren, Roberto Giuseppe Zandrotti, Ronald Kipsel and little Michael Yates, afterwards Mickey the Poet. And I saw in my dream how in the old days they would occupy this very garden while Father Lynch sat beneath the Tree of Heaven; beside him on the picnic blanket two black boys, Gabriel and his brother Looksmart, the children of Grace Dladla, his housekeeper. I saw how Father Lynch reclined on an elbow and sipped a drink from a flask while he and the two black boys watched the white boys slaving in the sun, pulling up weeds, cutting back the bushes, raking, watering and desnailing Father Lynch’s impossible parish garden. Gabriel and Looksmart Dladla were given bottles of fizzy orange to drink while Father Lynch leaned at his leisure, sipping iced cocktails from an aquamarine thermos flask. It did black boys good to sit in the shade and watch white boys work. It did white boys good to be watched. The mutual educational advantages of the experience should not be underestimated. This was among the many principles enunciated at Father Lynch’s famous picnics.

Another was that it was given to each of us to discover the secrets of our own particular universe — but we should expect to be punished for it.

Another, that President Paul Kruger when he fled into exile at the end of the Boer War had taken large amounts of money with him — the missing Kruger millions. A glimpse of the purpose to which he had put these millions would be like a view of paradise — or at least as close to it as we were ever likely to get.

Another, that the Regime was corrupt, weak and dying from within — this at a time when our country was regarded as being as powerful as either Israel or Taiwan, had invaded almost every country along our border and even a number across the sea, some several times, always with crushing military victories.

Another, that destruction threatened everyone — this at a time when President Adolph Gerhardus Bubé had just returned from his extensive foreign tour of European capitals and initiated a new diplomatic policy of open relations with foreign countries which was said to have gained us many friends abroad and continued support in the world at large.

Father Ignatius Lynch, transplanted Irish hothead who never understood Africa, or perhaps understood it too well, had been sent into this wilderness, he would say, indicating with a gesture of his small shapely hand the entire southern sub-continent of Africa, by error, misdirected by his boneheaded supervisors in Eire. A man with his gifts for the analysis of power, and the disguises which it took on, should have been retained at home as one who would recognise and appreciate the close bonds between clergy and rulers in his own country, or should have been posted to some superior European Catholic parish in Spain, or Portugal, or even to Rome, where his gifts might have been acknowledged. Being deprived of an adult, mature European culture where even babes and sucklings understood that the desirability of morality could never replace the necessities of power, and despite the realisation that Africa was not going to live up to his expectations, he worked hard at giving his boys a lively political sense.

Then, too, Father Lynch had alarming gifts for prophecy; he prophesied often, with tremendous conviction, of the future which lay ahead for his boys; prophecies truly imaginative, but magnificently inaccurate.

There was, too, this strange addiction to South African history, or at least to one of its distant and probably mythical sub-themes, the question of the missing Kruger millions, the great pile of gold which according to some legends Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic and leader of the Boer nation in the great war of freedom against the British imperialists at the turn of the century, had taken with him when he fled into exile as the victorious English Rooineks marched into the capital. This must have begun as a faint interest, a hobby perhaps, back in the mists of time, but what had been once a gentle historical investigation into a legend, which was very widely discounted by authorities, academic and political, became a passionate investigation into something which would supply the answer to the mystery of ‘life as we know it’, and was absolutely vital to their salvation, he told his boys — ‘at least in so far as salvation could be defined or hoped for in this God-forsaken Calvinist African wilderness’. Father Lynch would express his belief with great finality, reclining on his elbow and sipping from his iced thermos beneath the Tree of Heaven as he watched his boys dragging at the leathery weeds.

I saw in my dream how Blanchaille sat in an empty room, with its bare parquet flooring and a few bad pieces of orange Rhodesian copper hanging on the walls, kudu drinking at a waterhole, and similar trifles, weeping as he read of the death of Ferreira, shaking his head and muttering. From somewhere outside the house, perhaps in the garden, I could hear angry voices raised, baying as if demanding to be let in and in my dream I saw who these angry ones were — they were Blanchaille’s parishioners demonstrating against their priest.

Clearly unable to contain himself any longer, Blanchaille burst out with a choked cry: ‘What shall I do? What the hell shall I do?’

And I saw in my dream four lines in small smudgy newsprint from the Press Association which reported that Dr Anthony Ferreira had been found dead in his ranch-style home in the Northern Suburbs. Police were investigating. Dr Ferreira had been his country’s representative with various international monetary organisations abroad. Certain messages had been found written on the wall near the body.

It was possible to date this newspaper to the final days before the Onslaught because on the opposite page was a huge photograph of a darkened car window in which could be glimpsed the white blur of a man’s face, and I knew at once that this was the picture of our President (our ex-President as he became), Adolph Gerhardus Bubé, on his celebrated foreign tour, the one which opened a new chapter in our international relations with the outside world. Ten countries in six days. It had been hailed at the time as a diplomatic triumph as well as a speed record. Photographs had appeared in the press: a man shielding his face outside the Louvre; an elderly gentleman in a hat on a bridge in Berne, a shadowy figure, back turned, feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; a dim white face peering from the darkened windows of a black limousine speeding past the Colosseum… proofs of a triumph. It was the first time a president had been abroad since President Kruger fled to Switzerland in 1902. But Bubé’s tour, alas, did not open the new chapter in foreign relations which the Government promised. He came home and we began digging in for the long siege. The Total Onslaught had begun.

Blanchaille had heard from Ferreira very shortly before his death. Of course his line had been tapped. The call had come out of the blue, but he knew instantly the familiar flat vowels and the unemotional voice: ‘I’m sending you some money, Blanchie.’

‘I don’t need your money.’

‘Oh, come on, of course you need money. I don’t care what you use it for. Say some masses for my soul if you like, but I’m off. I’m through. Lynch was right, Blanchie. Something has been going on all these years. I’ve seen the books.’

Blanchaille did not wish to talk to Ferreira. He didn’t like Ferreira. Ferreira had gone to work for the other side. He’d represented the country at the International Monetary Fund, he’d been co-opted into the office of the Auditor General. His speciality was currency movements, exchange control and foreign banking.

‘You’ll need this money, you’ll need it to get where you’re going. Don’t be stubborn, Blanchie.’