They had nothing to lose. If anyone used a gun in the course of a robbery, it was a hanging offence. And hanged they were. Absurdly enough, the hangman in Zambia was called White, as I recall it. Anyway, it was usual practice for the hijackers to shoot. I remember the cold terror, as if somebody was slowly filling my veins with liquid ice. I was sure that I was about to die, and that I didn't want to die in this stupid, barbaric way. Then the revolver was taken away, I was kicked to the ground, and as the car drove off with a racing start it came to me that I was still alive.

The third moment was the worst. It might seem exotic, almost comical, but it was the most dangerous thing to have happened to me in my life. (Nobody knows, of course, how close one might have been to a plane crash or a road accident.)

It was on one of the little tributaries of the River Kabompo in Zambia, still in the 1980s. There were several of us on a fishing trip. We cruised up the river, switched off the engine and started fishing as we drifted. We knew that there was a colony of hippos just past a point where the river split into two branches, some way downstream in the direction we were drifting towards. In good time before we reached there, we would start the engine again and turn off along the other branch. Hippos are extremely dangerous if they think their calves are under threat. And these hippos had young. Some distance before we reached the colony, one of us pulled at the cord to start the outboard motor. Nothing happened. At first there was no panic. The man in the stern kept pulling, adjusted the choke, tried again. No ignition. By now we could see the heads of the hippos. We didn't need to say anything, but we all knew that if the engine didn't start, we wouldn't stand a chance. The hippos would attack the boat, overturn it and then hack us to pieces with their enormous jaws. There would be no point in diving into the river and swimming for it. Not one of us would reach the bank – the river was teeming with crocodiles.