[Tape recorded on 18 September 1974.]

Fell Street on a Sunday evening somewhere towards the end of 1965. It is Sunday evening. I sit in the kitchen at my home in [Port Elizabeth]. I am recently out of prison. The house still seems strange to me: the kitchen crowded and uncomfortable with nothing visually pleasing, much of it grimy. The furniture too large and projecting awkward corners and edges that make me uncomfortable. Down the passage in the front room the radio is playing. I sit gloomily at a table, my mind taut and prickly with a sense of confinement. A long weekend of house arrest, with only the short morning break I have taken, presses in on me with the knowledge that it is illegal for me to go out by the back door into the small concrete yard or onto the stoop by the front door. All this makes me irritable, the kind of brooding, pent-up anger. The children are playing somewhere, perhaps in the yard, perhaps out in the street in front of the house. They too are not allowed to have visitors because I am under house arrest, so that they may go to their friends but they may not be visited by their friends.

There is a knock at the front door and May goes down the passage to let someone in. They come a short way down the passage, and she ushers someone into the front room and then comes to tell me in an urgent whisper it's a Special Branch.