This is a manuscript, anecdote, lyrical description, humour and pathos. It gives a very vivid impression of growing up in a poor farming family in Namaqualand round about the Second World War, and is also a tragic story of a family struggling to keep hold of their land in the face of official persecution. The author writes very movingly of the theft of land from the indigenous population of Namaqualand, and specifically from the narrator's family. This amounts to a continuous process of unfair appropriation and trickery by the authorities, dating from the 1850s and continuing through to the present day.