There followed a few days of extreme panic. I lay in my sickroom, sometimes listening to the sound of gunfire in the unsettled Johannesburg night; the fear came and went in waves. I don't recall ever starting to cry, though. I stopped short of that. It would be a defeat already if I went to pieces. In that case the illness would be let loose and finish me off immediately. I tried to imagine the number of days in which I would be able to lead a normal life in spite of everything. I tried to convince myself that the cancer had been discovered very early and hence I would have a considerable way to go before my last journey.

I lay awake at night, hoping the whole thing might be a mistake. A technical fault in the X-ray machine, a piece of dust on the plate.

One morning the obese doctor with the skull-cap came back. I gripped the bed frame tightly and prepared to listen to my death sentence. But he informed me that it was an accumulation of fluid in one of my lungs. Nothing dangerous, not cancer, nothing to worry about. Then he was gone.

I wonder what he knew about people's fear. Perhaps it was beneath his dignity to worry about such lowly human emotional reactions? I thought afterwards and I still feel that I hate that man for his inability to recognise my fear. But what about me? Do I see the fear of others when it ought to be obvious?

Both my other two moments of well-founded terror are associated with incidents in Africa. Late one night in Lusaka I was attacked as I parked the car outside the house where I lived. I was dragged out of the car by a man with blood-shot, drug-crazed eyes. He held a pistol to my head. I still don't know how long it was there. I have tried to reconstruct how long it would have taken the bandits to pull me from the car. Thirty seconds? More? Less? I don't know. But I was quite certain that I was about to die. Most often in Zambia in the 1980s the car hijackers did shoot.