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This is a photograph of a twenty-first birthday party in the late winter of 1962. The parents of one of the young men in the photograph have taken him, his girlfriend, and seven other young people to dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Two – including the birthday boy – are wearing dinner jackets; the other men are in suits (I am fairly sure two of them are even wearing waistcoats, though only one is visible). Three of the young women are wearing evening dresses of the kind usually worn to dances in those days; the other – who is holding a wine glass – is so well wrapped up against the cold that she won't relinquish her overcoat to a waiter. It was surprisingly often useful to own an overcoat, even in Cape Town.

Yes, it is South Africa; and, yes, there are no blacks visible in the photograph. Some of us in the photograph did have black friends; but in those days there were perhaps only two restaurants in Cape Town to which blacks and whites could go together, and this wasn't one of them. Yet, of the nine (white) youngsters, two were to serve prison sentences for their active opposition to apartheid, and one to do a short spell in solitary confinement under the Ninety Day Detention legislation before leaving the country and becoming, for more than twenty years, a prohibited immigrant. Another of the young men would be assassinated, shot through his own front door by someone who has never been brought to justice, but who was almost certainly either in, or employed by, the South African security police. Most of those others in the photograph have since then lived much of their lives outside South Africa – though, paradoxically, the two who served prison sentences have spent much time in recent years back in southern Africa, and one of them is living there permanently. Those who have chosen to continue in exile have, in general, had very successful working lives. One, at least, might be described as a star of some magnitude. Almost none of us sees much of each other any more, to an extent that one might suppose us to have fallen out; yet I don't think we have done so actively: it is simply the way things have worked out.

Let me begin to attach names to the faces. On the far left is Alan Brooks, the man in the group to whom I was, in those days, closest. He was the son of a doctor in what was then Salisbury (now Harare), who had come down from what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to the University of Cape Town in the same year as me. He had taken an Arts degree, and was beginning to specialize in Law. We had both for three years been rebellious members of the same deeply right-wing university residence, Smuts Hall. Very much the intellectual – he played the violin, he taught the rest of us more advanced forms of bridge than Culbertson advocated, he had no interest in other games at all – and in those days still heavily Methodist in religion and attitude, he could at times be rather forbidding. I still remember two 'put-down' remarks he made to me: 'The trouble with you, Jonty, is that you think your father is God – and you know what that means you think of yourself,' and (after I had confessed that I didn't much like Brahms) 'You'll know better by the time you're forty.' The second remark was wholly true. We were both passionately anti-apartheid, and our opposition was already not merely verbal: we were active in campus politics, particularly in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), and had worked off-campus for the Liberal Party. Alan Brooks was however already more radical in his politics than I was, though I am not yet sure if he had begun the shifts of direction which were to lead him, first, into the ranks of the African Resistance Movement (the ARM) – the first organization, though it was mainly white and (in the Cape at least) almost entirely liberal, to use sabotage against the apartheid state–and (very soon afterwards) away from liberalism into socialism, and from socialism into the South African Communist Party (in those days, deeply Stalinist).

It was for his work in the ARM (blowing up railway lines and electrical pylons) that Alan was sent, a few years later, to jail for two years. Ironically, by the time he was arrested, he was struggling to extricate himself from the ARM because of his commitment to communism. Ironically, too, although he had moved further, faster and harder to the Left than any of us, it turned out that he was entirely unknown to the security police. When Alan was betrayed by the person who had recruited him, Adrian Leftwich – as were most of his companions in the ARM – it turned out that the security police had no record of Alan at all, no photographs, no secret recordings, no copies of letters; they went back to Leftwich for more information on this mysteriously unknown person of whom they could find no trace. By then, Alan had gone underground and was living under an assumed name. 'Oh, he's easily recognizable,' Leftwich is supposed to have said. 'He has a habit of pushing back into place a strand of hair that flops over his forehead.' Raiding some unconnected premises in search of someone entirely different, the security police failed to pick Alan out from among the others there until, just as they were leaving, he made that most characteristic gesture, and one of the more vigilant policemen remembered.

In detention, Alan was as stalwart as the most committed of the members of the ARM, even though he was savagely beaten up. (After his release from jail, he had a settlement from the Minister of Justice in recompense of the injuries caused – though the police tried to pretend he had 'fallen down some stairs'). Immediately deported from South Africa on his release, he went to England, where he took a degree from the University of Sussex, worked for the Defence and Aid Fund (which looked after the legal costs and families of political prisoners in South Africa), became a committed member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and – one assumes – continued to be a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP). Though he came to my wedding in 1967, and I went to his, a little time later, our different attitudes to communism had already begun to separate us; I remember hardly believing my ears when he sang the praises of an Eastern European country he had gone to for his summer holiday – was it Romania?

Occasionally since the weddings, I have heard something about Alan: that his marriage produced two daughters, of whom Alan is both proud and protective, though the marriage failed; that he went to work in Mozambique after its liberation from the Portuguese; that he is still committed to communism. Once, by chance, we bumped into each other on Hampstead Heath, and exchanged a few desultory words before walking on. There are other friends of our generation with whom I fell out politically, but with whom I am still friends – South Africa was (probably still is) such a politically divided society that, to have friends at all, one had to learn to ignore some of what they seemed to believe in; one came to judge people by the way they acted, not by what they said they thought. Alan was always a person who tended to follow his line of reasoning to a logical conclusion, even when the conclusion was uncomfortable; moreover, he had the kind of intellectual rigour which likes to pretend head comes before heart, even though everyone who knows him knows too that his particular heart is as deep as his passions are narrow.

Sitting next to Alan in the photograph is John Clare's father, the host, who died in 1976; I propose to leave him – and John's mother, just visible at the opposite end of the table – out of my reckoning. They were generous parents, and made much of their son's friendships; if it hadn't been for them, we shouldn't have been dining out to celebrate a birthday, but would have been holding a cheap and noisy 'bop' in someone's flat, with each guest bringing what drink he could afford. Going out to a restaurant was a real treat.

Sitting next to his father is John Clare, boyish in his dinner jacket. He is now the Education Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the man who first applied to schools the principle of league tables based on success in public examinations. People in England are sometimes surprised when I tell them that John is – was – a South African. (Actually, he was born in China and spent three of his earliest years in a Japanese prison camp outside Shanghai.) Physically, he has worn very well and is still recognizable from the photograph. I suppose many would typify him as 'right wing', though actually he is much more in the mould of the radical reformer, happiest when he is pointing out that the emperor is quite naked. When he was a journalist on The Times, John Clare upset Alan Paton by asserting that Paton's support of Chief Buthelezi of the Zulus made it seem that he was supporting the Bantustans and thus apologizing for apartheid – Alan Paton was as bad as most of us are with anything which looks like criticism. John is still capable of giving offence, because, in pursuit of the unpalatable truth – or perhaps even a good story – he can be singularly awkward. It amuses me that, once upon a time, when I was editor of Varsity, the weekly newspaper of the University of Cape Town, John was 'my' news editor – and, if I taught him nothing else, I did teach him something about punctuation. Nowadays, I write occasional articles for him and he cuts them down to an appropriate length.

Next to John Clare in the photograph is Stephanie Kemp, his girlfriend at the time – or is it more proper to say that John was Stephanie's boyfriend, because she was a very lively girl? I remember once talking to Steph about 'being wild'; 'If you think I'm wild,' she said to me, 'you should meet my sister, the air hostess. If half the things she says the aircrews get up to are true, you'd know wild.' I never met the sister, and Steph always seemed a few steps ahead of me. She is the subject of a book, Albie Sachs's second volume of autobiography, Stephanie on Trial, published in 1968. While it is not as brilliant as Sachs's Jail Diary (still one of the most lucid and vivid accounts of what happens to someone who is locked up in solitary confinement), it too bears rereading, more than thirty years after the events it describes–and even though the author was so obviously in love with his subject it should surprise no reader that, by the end of the book, Stephanie Kemp has become Mrs Albie Sachs. At one stage of her detention, Steph was beaten up by a security policeman called 'Spyker' van Wyk (Spyker means nail), who held her hair and beat her head on the floor until she was unconscious – bruising her so much that, in her own words to me, her blackened eyes extended to her chin. She was another of those who, despite being convicted – she was sentenced to five years, three of them suspended, though she served only a year before release – later got a settlement from the Minister of Justice for her injuries in custody. She was a tough person, Steph, as well as very attractive.

I haven't seen Stephanie for years, though I know that, after she and Albie parted, she and John Clare were for a time together again. I have been told that she disapproves of me as much as I do of her irrational attachment to 'dialectical materialism'. I don't know when she became the lover of Joe Slovo (the white Èminence grise of the ANC and the SACP), though I know she had a child by him. After the end of apartheid she chose to go back to South Africa and lives there now, first practising physiotherapy in a clinic in Alexandria township in Johannesburg and then teaching it in the University of Natal. Joe's untimely death from cancer deprived South Africa of one of its most able cabinet ministers, and Stephanie has written in newspapers of her disillusionment that, after years of what she would see as commitment and self-sacrifice, she is apparently cold-shouldered by those now in power. Albie Sachs was working in Maputo when he was badly injured by a car bomb put in place by the South African security police; he lost an arm and an eye as a result. He is now one of the eleven judges of that remarkably liberal institution, the South African Constitutional Court.

On Stephanie's left in the photograph is Roger Jowell. I've always been rather surprised that we have hardly seen each other since we both came to live in England. I see his elder brother sometimes (Jeffrey Jowell, sometime president of the Oxford Union and now a celebrated academic lawyer) and I send affectionate messages to Roger, but nothing happens–no doubt this is as much my fault as his, though I have wondered if I did something somewhere along the line which offended him. We (and one other in the photograph) shared a house in Cape Town for most of a year, and I was a regular visitor to his parents' wealthy and hospitable Jewish home. Roger's sardonic humour made him an entertaining companion, though perhaps it was only his relative wealth which made me think he was sophisticated, too. He has made a name for himself in England as the head of a research institute concerned with public policy – and he gave his name to someone better known than himself: Tessa Jowell, now a minister in the latest Labour government, though no longer married to the man whose name she still carries. In one of the Honours lists of 2001, Roger was made a CBE.

Next to Roger Jowell in the photograph is Sally Frankel; I have to confess that I didn't remember even her first name, and so asked John Clare if he remembered. John said he thought it was someone called Naomi, but it wasn't. Of Sally Frankel all I know is that, after leaving the university, she – like many of our contemporaries – emigrated to Australia. (The 'Naomi' John Clare thought he remembered must have been Saone Barron, who was Roger Jowell's girlfriend both before and after the time of this photograph. I mention this mainly because Saone is now married to the celebrated American politician, Chester Crocker – yet another thread in this peculiar web.)

Half hidden behind Sally Frankel is John Clare's mother, still alive, but now in a nursing home in England and very forgetful.

On her left, on the edge of the photograph, is me, hair brushed back slickly, and the other one in a dinner jacket. It surprised me to remember that I owned a dinner jacket in those days, because I was poor by the standards of white English-speaking South Africa. In fact, I had worked all through one summer holiday in a miserable wholesale warehouse in the Eastern Transvaal to make the money to get the suit made for me – for most of my life I have been too tall and too oddly shaped to buy suits, jackets or even trousers off the peg; and, because I knew the dinner jacket would have to do long service, I went to a good tailor who found me a very expensive and lightweight Italian cloth. It was a good buy, and in due course served both my sons, slightly adapted to their more usual shapes. I hope my happiness shows: after a rather frustrating career at school where I had never seemed to achieve quite as much as I wanted – or felt able – to do, I was having a blissful time at the University of Cape Town: acting, debating, editing the student newspaper, committed to student politics, writing occasionally for Patrick Duncan's liberal newspaper, Contact, editing the official university literary magazine, co-founder of another literary magazine called The Lion and the Impala, and in between times doing enough work to have taken one degree and to have started on two more. Sometimes, looking back, I feel almost guilty – and then I reprimand myself for silly liberalism. Why shouldn't I have been happy? Just because I was surrounded with so much cruelty and injustice? How fortunate I was to enjoy such privilege.

One of the main causes of my happiness was the person sitting next to me. Her name was Jann Parry, and I had fallen totally in love with her soon after her arrival at the University of Cape Town, when I was in my third year. Her father was the director of broadcasting in Rhodesia, though Jann had been sent to boarding school in Johannesburg. Very unusually, she had then spent a year in a finishing school in Switzerland; she was thought to be pretentious by some of the other girls in Fuller Hall, the women's residence opposite Smuts Hall, because when she first arrived she was supposed to be putting on a French accent; I couldn't hear it myself, but she made herself unpopular with some of the other students by emphatically refusing to have anything to do with the very childish forms of initiation first-year students were then expected to undergo. She was a ballet dancer, though she was technically too tall; I don't suppose one would have called her beautiful, but she was the most intensely alive person I had ever come across, graceful as a gazelle, short-sighted and clever – most dancers are too bound up in their bodies to pay much attention to their intellects. She was also extraordinarily unpunctual: I would wait for (literally) hours in the porch of Fuller Hall or outside the ballet school for her to emerge. She fell in love with me too, for the time being at least, and we were as inseparable as university rules permitted – in those days, people 'went out' with each other; they didn't 'live together' nor even 'go to bed together'. We did however work together on literary magazines and the newspaper, and we were asked to act opposite each other in Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet, she as the Russian sea-captain, me as the American baseball-player, Freddie; a review in Varsity said that 'Jann Parry and Jonty Driver played Jann Parry and Jonty Driver'. When I went to stay with Jann's family in Rhodesia, her father gave us both parts in a radio production of one of Dorothy Sayers's versions of the Christmas story. Jann had a big role (the Virgin Mary, I think); mine was as a porter or soldier or something, but, as John Parry savaged in rehearsal my lack of competence, I began to realize that he didn't much approve of me as suitor. Jann had been invited to a dance at the Governor General's residence; I hadn't. Her parents insisted she went. I drove her there in her little car, and waited outside for the dance to end; there were young men with sports cars at the dance, and I thought one of them might have tried to take her home.

A fter three years at Cape Town, Jann took her degree, with distinction. She had won a Commonwealth Scholarship from Rhodesia to Girton College, Cambridge, and I had failed to emulate my father by winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, despite having been shortlisted twice. Our plan to go to England together was further complicated by the fact that I was now deeply involved in the national affairs of the National Union of South African Students. I had been elected vice president in July 1962; within a few months, the president elect, who was training to be a Methodist minister, had been forced by his church elders to step down, and I took over as president in January 1963. My parents supported me loyally, though I knew my father felt I should be making a start on a career as a schoolteacher, which I was now qualified to do. I was by no means sure I wanted that – I wanted to be a writer, a poet in particular, though clearly I couldn't also be a husband (and a father) on what a poet would earn, even in England. To be sure, I was paid to be president of NUSAS, but it was scarcely enough to live on, and – whether I was travelling or not – I relied on friends for housing. Jann and I wrote to each other every week, or more frequently, though there were other women, in Cape Town and elsewhere, and I tried not to think that there might be other men in Cambridge.

Then, in the English summer – South African winter – of 1964, when I was in my second year as president (and in trouble with most of white South Africa, including most of the members of NUSAS, because I had made a speech, now described in histories of the time as 'prescient' but then as 'inverted racialist', saying – among many other things – that, though we were hardly likely to become 'the student wing of the liberation movement', which some of our wilder members wanted, we still needed to look to black students for leadership), Jann came back to South Africa with a troupe of actors from Cambridge. The tour happened by chance to coincide with the national congress of NUSAS at the university of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. I had seen Jann briefly and rather unhappily in Johannesburg soon after the Cambridge troupe had arrived; when we met in Pietermaritzburg a week or two later she announced to me that she had fallen in love with one of her fellow actors.

Life was desperate enough already for me without that. The year before, my father had had two heart attacks, and had been told he must give up being headmaster of Uplands Prep School (he was also the unpaid vicar of two parishes in the area). The warning had come too late and, in January, just as my parents, brothers and sister completed the move to Bloemfontein, where my father had been appointed temporarily a curate in the Anglican cathedral, he died, aged only fifty-one. Although one brother was working, my sister was still at university, and another brother was at school. The last letter my father wrote before his death was to Jann in Cambridge, as if to a daughter-in-law. It was clear, too, that NUSAS itself was in the deepest possible trouble, even without the trouble I had made for it with my outspokenness; my immediate predecessor as president, Adrian Leftwich, had been arrested in a police raid, and there had been other arrests, including that of David ('Spike') de Keller from the NUSAS congress itself. I, and a few others, guessed that we knew the reason for the arrests; Adrian, Spike and others had been running the organization called first the National Committee of Liberation and then the African Resistance Movement, and we supposed all the arrests to be associated. There was also a strong rumour that Adrian Leftwich himself, a central figure in the ARM, had cracked very quickly under police questioning, and had told the police everything they wanted to know. Although he had made an effort to recruit me to the ARM, I had refused, in anger at his lack of judgement in asking someone who was already too much in the public eye – and therefore much too much in the eye of the security police. I had already learned to distrust Leftwich – we had shared a house for six miserable months, and I had discovered a great deal about his psychological frailties – having previously admired many of his qualities, including his brilliance in political debate and his skills as an organizer. Still, even I was surprised at the speed of his capitulation in solitary confinement. I was also sure that, tactically, the project was premature. It was true that I had several times carried messages (the content of which I didn't know) between Adrian and other members of the ARM; and, more than a year before, Jann and I had been persuaded to open a post office box in a Cape Town suburb under false names, for what we knew were clandestine purposes. We knew that now we had somehow to keep NUSAS clear of the ARM, despite the obvious overlap of membership; for instance, those who wanted the NUSAS congress to take to the streets to demonstrate against the arrest of an ex-president and other members had to be headed off. It was obvious, too, that I needed to extricate myself from South Africa swiftly, partly because NUSAS would be safer without my presence, partly because I thought that if I could get to England I might still be able to persuade Jann to marry me.

We were fortunate in having as an ally Robert Birley, formerly headmaster of Eton, who had come out to the University of the Witwatersrand as visiting professor of education. Maeder Osler, the vice president of NUSAS – and more than that to me, because he is still my closest friend – talked to Robert on my behalf, and he said he would find me a teaching job in England from September. Maeder – who had already been elected as the next president of NUSAS – would take over at once, rather than in December. Almost immediately, I was offered not one but two jobs in England: one at Marlborough College, one at Sevenoaks School. Which should I take? I telephoned to ask Professor Birley. Sevenoaks, he said. I accepted the job by telegram, booked myself on a Union Castle liner leaving Cape Town in early August, alerted the various affiliated centres of NUSAS, prepared a press statement – and, the night before I was due to sail, with my trunk already on board the liner, the security police arrested me under the terms of the Ninety Day Detention legislation, which allowed for suspects to be held in solitary confinement, without access to lawyers, for as long as the police chose (if one were released after ninety days, one could be immediately rearrested to be held for another ninety days).

Five weeks later, I was released. It would probably have been sooner, but until I knew who had given my name to the police I had no idea how much they knew about my activities: were they interested only in the ARM, or were they trying to connect NUSAS to the ARM specifically? Eventually, a fellow detainee told me who had given my name; it wasn't Adrian Leftwich, though I had little compunction in telling the security police that he had tried to recruit me to something which sounded very dodgy, and that I had turned him down. The person who had named me knew nothing about anything I had done which was remotely illegal – we had known each other since prep school days, and my fondness for him didn't extend to trusting his judgement. I gave the police a couple of bits of information about people I knew were safely out of the country and, despite a few anxious days before my release – the police did say they were considering a charge under the Suppression of Communism Act, though I was known to be anti-communist, and that carried the possibility of up to five years in jail – I was released. Two days later I was on a flight to London, and within a week I was in a classroom, teaching English, Latin and History. I'm told I went into my first class scowling and then growling, 'I take it you are aware that I have just been released from jail. I'm not going to have any trouble with you lot, am I?' I have little memory of any of that time, now. One does not do even five weeks in solitary confinement without some damage – and I was lucky, because I was not beaten up or tortured; the worst I went through was to stand for ten hours while a team of policemen questioned me. One of my Sevenoaks friends told me, a year or two later, that I had been quite mad that first year in England; and a long poem, 'Through Tall Fires', published in the London Magazine in 1965, seems to me to confirm that view.

The break-up of Jann's relationship with her Cambridge actor did not restore her to me. For the next two years (at least), I went on hoping that she might change her mind back again, and I saw her whenever she would agree to meet me. In the end, a girlfriend of hers told me that I was wasting Jann's time, my time, and her own time. Only then did I accept that persistence would not succeed. Though I went on seeing Jann, it was only very occasionally and it was many years before I could see her walking towards me without my heart lurching.

Some years later, when Jann was living with the journalist and broadcaster Richard Kershaw, she was on her way to work at the BBC African Service when she was knocked off her motorbike by an articulated truck, and fell under a back wheel. The wheel ran over her pelvis, crushing it. That she did not die was the result of various chance circumstances. First, the accident happened not far from a London hospital. Secondly, there was a junior doctors' strike in progress. No regular operations meant that there was plenty of blood available (Jann needed ninety-eight pints) and that the surgeons and consultants were free to devote themselves to saving her. Thirdly, because she had never stopped dancing, she had an unusually powerful heart, and lungs to match. The doctors patiently rebuilt her innards. I was not brave enough to visit her in hospital, though Richard Kershaw had taken the trouble to telephone to tell me of the accident; a photograph of her, when she was out of danger but still in hospital, shows her as thin as a prisoner coming out of a concentration camp. She told me in a letter, many months later, that she had been taught to walk again by a physiotherapist who was an RAF sergeant – and that she therefore walked like an RAF sergeant. She used to sit in a deckchair at cricket matches, watching not the cricket, but women walking past – and then, later, in front of a dancer's mirror, she would imitate the way women walked. She stayed on with the BBC, though in due course took early retirement and devoted herself to writing about ballet, particularly as the dance critic of the Observer. She and Richard Kershaw are now married.

I turn again to the photograph. Next to Jann, head turned to smile at the photographer, is Rick Turner. The photograph doesn't show his red hair, of course. He was the third of those in the photograph who shared the White House in Claremont; we rented it for relatively little because it was due to be demolished to make way for a block of flats. Rick had the nicest room, although there was a penalty for that: because it was the tidiest too, we always used it for our public entertaining. We had some uproarious parties there. In those days, Rick didn't seem particularly political, at least not in any active sense, though he was very interested in political philosophy, and always ready to talk about it. In the end, however, he became the most involved in politics of any of those in the photograph. After his return from the Sorbonne, where he had written a thesis on Sartre and absorbed some of the radical excitement of the 1960s student movement, he taught politics in various universities and finally at the University of Natal, the Durban section. At a time when police repression was at its most savage – a speech in opposition to apartheid was enough to earn a banning order, and even the South African Congress of Trade Unions was lying as low as it could – Rick Turner argued that African workers could and should be organized into effective unions. Views like these were possibly one reason for his murder, though there were other rumours: that he had seduced the wife of a policeman; that his influence on the young was pernicious; that he had uncovered 'dirty tricks' either in the sugar industry or in the police force. Whatever the reason, late one night early in 1978 someone called him to his front door and shot him. He died in front of his children. No one was ever tried for his murder, though the most persistent rumour of all was that he had been killed by a police assassin. This is one of the many tributes to him, from a poem by Peter Sacks, 'For Richard Turner', in his collection In These Mountains (1986):

You sat among us on the floor,
Translating Althusser,
Barefoot, jeans, a pale blue shirt,
Your black-rimmed lenses doubling
The light, the red shock of your hair.
At some slight turn of argument
Your freckled hands followed
The actual phrasing in the air.
'I know it's difficult in this country,
but we've got to think more clearly
than the State allows.'

When I showed John Clare the photograph of his own twenty-first birthday party, he called the young woman next to Rick Turner the 'star of the show' – and I suppose she is: she is now Barbara Follett, MP for Stevenage since 1997, a specialist in management training, 'style consultant' to New Labour, and often credited with having helped make the Labour Party more attractive to the urban middle classes, to women, and to the young. She was one of the founders of 'Emily's List', which promotes the election of Labour women to Parliament. Her present husband is the thriller writer, Ken Follett, and they own homes in Stevenage, Chelsea, Antigua and Tuscany. Gossip had it that they were among the closer friends of Tony Blair and his wife, though there was a public falling-out in 2000. At the time of the photograph, Barbara was Rick Turner's girlfriend, pretty, bright, at once young and sophisticated. Born in the West Indies, she had lived in England and in Ethiopia before coming with her family to South Africa in 1957. A few years after this photograph was taken, she and Rick married – the ceremony was in the garden of John Clare's Cape Town flat, and it is a nice touch that twenty-two years later John was called to be a witness of what Barbara said was to be her 'last marriage'. Barbara and Rick had parted and divorced some years before he was murdered, but she has written movingly of having been called to help by their distraught children after the murder.

Were we wrong to leave South Africa, those of us who did? Are those who have gone back right to have done so, even if they now find themselves sidelined? Some of those in the photograph didn't have much choice. Alan Brooks, for instance, was deported from South Africa when he had served his jail sentence. Rick Turner, on the other hand – who could easily have chosen to stay abroad after his years of study in France – chose to return; apparently he never even considered the alternative. After Rick's murder in 1978, Barbara Turner chose to leave – and who would blame her for that? John Clare's then wife, Sheila Robertson, had been briefly a member of the ARM, though she had baulked at the sight of actual explosives; betrayed to the police by Adrian Leftwich, she was arrested just after the birth of her daughter and told she would have to give evidence for the State; she left on the next Union Castle liner out of Cape Town, managing to do so without her name appearing on a passenger list. John Clare, who had a British passport, followed a few months afterwards. When he applied for a visa to visit his dying father a few years later he was refused.

When I left, after my detention in 1964, I intended to return to South Africa. My plan was to teach at Sevenoaks for a year, then go to Oxford (probably to Trinity, my father's old college) for two years, and then back to South Africa. In the event a decision was forced on me sooner than I had planned. Halfway through my time at Oxford, my South African passport expired (I had managed to hide it away from the security police when they arrested me, by leaving it in a jacket which I changed and put back in a wardrobe after they had finished searching; sometimes, meticulous efficiency may be its own downfall). I applied to the South African Embassy in London for the renewal of my passport. The request was referred to Pretoria. Months later, there came a refusal. I took the letters and went to the South African Embassy. The clerk at the passport counter seemed mystified by the correspondence I showed him, but he was friendly and helpful. He would find out what was going on, he said, and disappeared with my papers. A few minutes later, a man whom I recognized as a security policeman arrived in the office and stared hard at me. He went away, and shortly afterwards the clerk reappeared, no longer friendly. I could, he said, apply for a re-entry permit to South Africa; no, he didn't know how long that would take to come through. He would answer no more questions.

Perhaps I could have tried to go back without a passport, though I'm not sure an airline would have accepted me on board; but it would have meant abandoning Oxford, halfway through my MPhil, and who knows what welcome would have been awaiting me? I was, I realized, effectively stateless.

Once that decision was made, I used to object when people said I had been 'forced into exile'. 'No,' I would answer. 'I wasn't “;forced”; I chose.' I remember a protracted disagreement in London with Alan Paton on this subject; always competitive in argument, he was determined to win his point. My definition of 'forced' was too narrow, he maintained; there was more than one kind of force. Detentions, banning, loss of passport, warnings that I would be unemployable, particularly if I chose to be a schoolteacher (for which, I was beginning to realize, both nature and heredity had designed me, and for which I was certainly trained), all these were a kind of force. The argument was made more awkward because my insistence that I had chosen exile was meant as a compliment to people like Alan Paton himself, to whom considerable force – in his sense – had been applied, but who refused to leave South Africa permanently, even though he would have been f'ted abroad, wherever he had gone. More than that, too many of my friends never had any choice in the matter. Some of my black friends – Templeton Mdlalana, for instance, who had been the NUSAS representative at the University College of Fort Hare and then our so-called 'literacy officer' in the Transkei – didn't have the means; there was no wealthy friend to pay for an air ticket out of the country, as I had been fortunate enough to have, no mentor to find a post abroad, no place at Oxford nor scholarship money to fund that place. Others were in jail, for a few years or even longer: Stephen Gawe, Spike de Keller, Hugh Lewin. One could say that they were being forced to stay, though actually most of them had made an earlier choice. If one had served a jail sentence, and had then been released only to be banned – often in terms which precluded one's earning a living – one could perhaps be said to have been forced out. People like me had chosen.

There was also the fact that, just as my ancestor, Edward Driver, had managed to settle – aged twenty-two or -three – very successfully in the Eastern Cape in 1820, so too I – aged twenty-five – was young enough to settle somewhere else – probably in England, though other South Africans were going to Canada, Australia, the USA. I can't remember quite why now, but I had a romantic hankering for the West Indies; was it because the South African writer, Peter Abrahams, had settled there? Was it because it seemed a society in which all races lived together in apparent harmony? (Isn't it odd to recall that, in the 1950s and 1960s, when apologists for apartheid used to ask us to cite any example in the world where people of different colours, backgrounds, religions and classes, lived together in amity, we used to talk about – of all places – Lebanon?) I know that, early in 1967, I was still talking about going to live in the West Indies. However, the reality was that I would probably settle in England, though I liked to think of myself as one of the 'new internationals' – stateless in fact, stateless by nature.

Is 'diaspora' too grand a term for the dispersal of white South Africans from the country we were born in? Most white South Africans didn't 'go into exile'; very few 'escaped from oppression'; nearly all emigrated to resettle in countries where they thought their future would be more secure. A common reason was that they did not want their sons to have to serve in the South African armed forces. Sometimes the ÈmigrÈs found they didn't settle where they had landed and they went back again, or tried another place. More often, they settled perfectly well: in Australia, in Canada, in the USA, in England – and went back only for family weddings and, in due course, funerals until, eventually, they (and their children more especially) became part of the new culture, except for the oddly ineradicable accent. The end of apartheid hasn't meant the end of that process. If it was hard to get money out before, now, with the collapse of the exchange rate, what money may be got out doesn't convert to many dollars or pounds.

Do I still think of South Africa as 'home'? Well, not consciously: it is where I grew up – and where my mother and brother (and, until very recently, my sister too) still live, and some of my dearest friends. Home is England now, and in England; when I have been abroad, and the ferry docks or the aeroplane lands, I feel I am back where I belong – whereas I know that, when I land in South Africa, and take out my British passport to join the queue of foreigners, there is still a degree of resentment in me, even though I know the country is utterly unlike the one which locked me up and turned me away.

There is therefore in me a sense of something lost – though I know too, in actual terms, what good fortune I have had since I chose to leave South Africa. When apartheid came to an end, and the restrictions on my return were lifted (in the topsy-turvy language of the bureaucrats, 'your visa exemption is restored'), I flirted with the idea that I might return permanently to live and work in South Africa, either as a schoolteacher or as a writer (even an attenuated English pension would go a long way in the new South Africa). I mentioned this to my mother, and drew an immediate and typically cross response: 'Don't be so silly,' she wrote. 'You're out now, and you must stay out. By all means come to visit as much as you like; but you're English now.' Well, she's right: I have an English wife, three English children, an English cottage, my portraits on the walls of two English schools, an entry in Who's Who, my birthday noted annually in the Daily Telegraph and The Times, a nodding acquaintance with some of the great and the good, and several friends in high places; and only occasionally will someone say to me, 'Of course, you were born in South Africa, weren't you? One still hears the accent a little.'

And so I turn back to that photograph of forty years ago, to try to remember our innocence and our excitement – because they were exciting times, and we were quite certain we were prepared to risk everything. Perhaps it is true that no one should be judged until he or she is dead, because the possibility of choice remains open, and the last choice may change everything which has happened until then, though every choice along the way has its consequences. So, when I look at those nine lively faces, it is Rick Turner's I see most clearly, and I imagine again the moment the doorbell rang, and he got up from the sofa where he had been sitting to walk to the front door, behind which stood a shadowy figure carrying a gun. Did he realize, I wonder? Did he hesitate? No answer is possible; neither is one necessary.

– C J Driver retired as Master of Wellington College in 2000. He has published four novels, five books of poetry and a biography of Patrick Duncan, and has recently finished a new novel, Love and Death, and a memoir, My Father's Son.

Reproduced, with permission, from Granta 80: The Group, January 2003; ISBN: 192900110X; 256 pages. Visit the Granta web site.