On a Sunday recently I travelled with my mother to her hometown in the Boland, the winelands northeast of Cape Town where her migrant father and his father established a cooperage at the turn of a century. We went in her old metallic-blue Valiant sedan she’d traded in decades ago. ‘Seat belt on?’ I said from my place 10,000 kilometres away. ‘Buckle up.’

And so we went, the grande dame and her greybeard laaitie. Starting on the N9 national road to Johannesburg. Past the Koeberg interchange, up the slopes of Tygerberg past Bellville, Klapmuts, said to take its name from a sailor’s cap, looking out at the blue expanse of the Hottentots Holland range. Finally we reached Paarl, where Ma grew up beneath a glistening pearl-like mountain in a whitewashed two-storey with a sturdy loquat tree, corner of Nantes and Louis streets. ‘Polly ons gaan Perel toe,’ we’d sing a traditional song on family trips here when I was a boy. ‘Ek en jy alleen.’ (Polly, we’re going to Paarl. You and I alone.’)