Intricacy contains roughly 100 black and white images from from family albums, from the internet, from Lesley's sketches, artworks and diaries, from photographs I have taken, and other diverse sources. Below is a selection from the book, each picture with some of the accompanying text.

A photograph from near the start of the oldest album shows a group of people lounging around a campsite, having posed themselves for the invisible and nameless photographer. One of the men, although I cannot say which one, is Raymond Cope, older brother of my grandfather Carol. The woman on the right with the white collar is presumably Jeannie Cope, née Jeannie Roberts. If this is the case, then the man with a pipe and hat who places one hand on the back of her chair is probably her husband. On his right (our left) a young woman stands holding a rifle. She is, I think, my grandmother Vere. Family legend has it that Raymond Cope, after whom my brother was named, was a transport rider who worked the route between the new gold town of Johannesburg and the port of Lorenço Marques. The route was a difficult one and involved braving the dangers posed by the wildlife, the inhabitants of the region and tropical disease. It was none of these dangers which was to prove to be the older Raymond Cope’s downfall. Rather, the family story goes, it was a liking for booze and the wild life that did him in.  

Granny’s father, E.B.J. Knox, was an architect and engineer and came out to the Cape to do architectural work for Rhodes. He lived in one of the houses on Groote Schuur estate and must have done some of the restoration on the old Cape-Dutch houses bought by Rhodes. He met Lena Czerny when she was on a health trip from Germany to Africa and they were married in the old Lutheran Church in Cape Town. Granny used to say her father never put his own boots on in his life and always had a valet to do it for him. That’s blue blood all right! Of course in the Cape he had a coloured valet and a coachman who drove his carriage. After the discovery of Gold on the Rand E.B.J. arrived on the diggings with his coachman and valet in a Cape Cart. For a short while he was the Town Engineer of Johannesburg, being called in when the first Town Engineer turned out to be a crook who bolted with the cashbox. As an engineer he was much in demand and he bought and lived on the farm Booysens which is probably worth hundreds of millions today. E.B.J. is said to have made and lost two fortunes. At the outbreak of the Boer war he and other British were evacuated from Johannesburg to Lorenço Marques in open cattle trucks and he fell ill and died there.  

Anton, an only child, was a muscular man of six foot two who was handsome in the way that Clark Gable or Omar Sharif were handsome. He was capable and intelligent and embodied in every way what at the time were thought to be the manly virtues: he held the high school javelin-throwing record from 1948 up to the time that the Transvaal was dissolved into its current configuration of provinces; he had attained the summit of Boy Scouting and could demonstrate every one of those curious skills which boy scouts seek to attain; he dressed well when not in farmer’s khakis, could dance ballroom and sing opera which, it seems, he had done briefly in Johannesburg before we ever met him; he could sail, drive any vehicle, and do complex cabinet-making; he was a natural linguist and could, it seemed, absorb any language simply by soaking himself in its atmosphere, so that by the last time I heard of him, he was fluent in all the major languages spoken on the European continent, from Portuguese to Russian, as well as English (which he spoke flawlessly and without trace of accent), SiSwati, Zulu and Afrikaans – his mother tongue; he was fearless, especially when angry; he could shoot accurately; he read classics, collected classical music and knew the lives of the musicians; he could build a house.  

Luitingh’s Guest Farm closed around the time of Lesley’s marriage to Anton. The old ladies either died or moved on, and Anton demolished some of the rondavels, while others fell into ruin. The farm, now run as yet another small subtropical fruit and produce farm in the area, took on the appearance of desolation. The gardens and lawns, without the attentions of the gardeners, merged with and became indistinguishable from the surrounding ecology, but many of the magnificent flowering trees that Hopper had planted remained, now mature and stately above the vestiges of the rondavels, signified perhaps by a circular cement floor or just a level area on the slope below the koppie.  

The killing of a snake was a charged affair, carrying as it did the real possibility of sudden and painful death. When Anton went out with his weapons to dispatch a snake, I was expected to stay out of the way, and gladly did so, but would traipse along behind at what I considered to be a safe distance. The rustling grass, the thrashing coils, the raised head spitting venom, the flailing sjambok or the loud crack of the rifle echoing in the valley, the smell of cordite (if that is what it was), the floods of fear transformed into excitement: Anton was St George.  

My mother’s best friend when she lived at Clifton was Terry Strauss, a woman whom I remember mostly for the lasting effect that her presence had on my psyche. I can say without doubt that I am still attracted to women who resemble her, both because she was, by conventional standards, a beautiful woman, and because such women evoke, for me, her erotic presence, however faintly.  

At exactly the time in 1955 when my mother was writing her diary entries, the Americans produced the first of their range of nuclear-armed cruise missiles, the Regulus. This fearsome instrument of American rule enabled them to deploy missiles from warships and especially from submarines. For the first time, that year, a nuclear explosion could be delivered to any point on the surface of the globe. This crucial moment in the history of the planet was not noted in the diary.

I do have a memory of the time, two years later, on the 4th of October 1957, when the Sputnik was launched. Humanity’s first extrusion beyond the atmosphere was a small metal ball with aerials sticking out of it, and it circled the earth in a frightening ninety-four minutes. We went outside in the early evening and stood on the roof of the pump-house, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of this football-sized marvel as it passed overhead. It seemed, to me, to be a vindication of Communism, of my parents and their friends, and of the world of freedom and equality for which, as I understood it, they yearned and strove. The satellite sent a signal to the world below. ‘Beep beep,’ it said: ‘beep beep beep.’  

The Atlantic ocean, churned by the north-west wind which came in winter in the form of cold wet low-pressure systems, threw up breakers which beat against the rocks, washed the sand from the beaches and out into the bay, and churned the water into a yellowish-white foam, which coated the surface for hundreds and hundreds of yards, like an ice floe, and which, when deposited on the rocks and the remaining sand, covered them with a wobbling, gleaming mass of tenacious bubbles that smelled of the sea and of the many tiny dying creatures who had given of their substance to make the foam. It dried and left streaks the colour of mustard on the white sand.  

Lives cannot be chopped up into manageable bits. They are analogue rather than digital structures, changing smoothly from one state to the succeeding one. This smooth change which we call ‘time’ and represent as a fourth dimension, the Radhasoami teachers call Kal, also meaning time, but often personified as a ravening monster, taking away what we have and giving what we do not desire. Seen this way, Anton’s involvement with S was brought by Kal, each of its phases, attitudes, feelings, postures and gestures was the work of Kal, and when the embroilment ended, it was Kal who packed it up into the non-existent basket of the past, in a smooth transition.  

Among the photographs in my desk drawer are several sketches, water-colours and gouaches, executed by the woman who was to be Jack’s grandmother and Lesley’s great-grandmother, Francis Harriet Stocker, in the early years of her life, the late 1840s and early 1850s. They show that Francis was a talented person in the manner of young Victorian women from families of substance – she could draw and paint, do botanical watercolours and pastoral scenes in pencil, and had enjoyed the wide education which allowed these skills. The pencil sketch I have chosen for reproduction here is no doubt copied from an engraving from that era. She has signed and dated it, and the date, December 1848, reveals that she was fifteen at the time. The confident line and flawless execution of this sentimental pastoral scene are arresting, especially in the light of the expectations we hold for fifteen-year-old girls these days.  

As long as I can remember, Lesley collected paper – cartridge, watercolour paper, papers with light textures for drawing – and these had accumulated in folders and drawers. At last she had found a use for them – paper now yellowed or blotched with age, slightly frayed at the edges from being moved, suitable for recording the old and infirm. There were ninety-six drawings and two reproductions of drawings when I assembled them all. They were made at an outdoor eye clinic at the Dera Baba Jaimal Singh, and are mostly of patients, the elderly blind who had come to the clinic in large numbers for cataract removal operations.