Nadine Gordimer: I knew many activist families. And I began to see — I was still fairly young myself, my children were small — that if you were the child of such families, and I can think at once of two or three, you were brought up in an atmosphere where the struggle came first, and you as a child — a young boy or girl — you came second. And indeed you were groomed, so to speak, politically groomed into the struggle. And I wondered and wondered, knowing many of them, how they felt about it. So how shall I put it? I put myself into that position to see, and that’s how it came about. I also waited a long time to do it, because I thought, I am not in this. I’m neither a parent nor a child. I’m waiting for somebody to write it who would know more about it than I did. Nobody did, so I did. And it’s only later that some of those children who were part of that grew up and wrote it. But I did it in the way I’ve described.