Caltrop's Desire

The scene is Johannesburg. It is election week, 1948 - the week in which South Africa slid out of the British colonial age into Afrikaner apartheid. In a fury, making his last stand from a hospital bed, the aged Caltrop - a war correspondent, eye-witness to every campaign that has rocked the subcontinent, from before the Anglo-Boer War and on - pours out his memoirs, relives the fractured battles that have led to his last moments in time. It is the life of an English-speaking South African, a colonial renegade, born to suffer, born also to laugh at the gruesome dilemmas of the world he has known. His desire - for peace, goodwill, accord - comes up against the rush of events that shape the land he leaves behind.