But it wasn't only jaundice. One morning a doctor came to see me. He was obese and was wearing a Jewish skull-cap. I remember my messengers over the years very clearly, all the people who have passed on to me vital information.

I did not know his name, but I remember there was sweat on his forehead as he told me, without beating about the bush, that they had found a patch in one of my lungs. It could be ominous. It would take several days for all the test results to come through. Then he went away. I don't think he had looked me in the eye once during the brief time he was in my room.

I remember the feeling of paralysis that gripped me. Panic was a sharp hook stabbing into my consciousness and immediately sending signals to all parts of my body. Fear makes itself felt in the stomach as well as in the brain. It was like a frantic telegram being rattled out by a machine inside me.

Lung cancer. I hadn't avoided it.

I smoked my first cigarette at Spencer's cafe in Borås, in Allégatan. It must have been one of the last days in August, 1963. I had just started secondary school. One of my classmates, a girl called Hedelin I think it was, offered me a cigarette. A Prince. I had never smoked before, apart from a couple of furtive puffs on stumps of cigars in Sveg. But now I felt obliged to accept the cigarette. From then on I was a smoker. Although I had long since stopped smoking by the time that Jewish doctor came into my room, all those packets of cigarettes had caught up with me. Followed me all the way down to southern Africa. I had stopped smoking too late. Lung cancer was going to kill me. I could envisage my lungs covered in lumps of tar. In desperation, trying as far as possible to keep the panic under control, I tried to convince myself that I might be able to live for a few more years. Not more than a few, probably, but long enough to have a chance of completing some of the things I had planned. Not ten books, but maybe two. And a play, if I really worked hard.