34 

We flew back to England in January: alone this time, as unaccompanied minors. I cried at the airport, of course. I had allowed myself to imagine that once our father was free I wouldn't be going back to High Trees any more: I dreamed of going to school in Freetown, of wearing a blue check uniform and becoming an Annie Walsh girl. On the last night we all went out for a farewell family dinner at the Armenian restaurant on the bay next to Cape Club, where the wrecked fishing boat used to lie, and we sat eating our favourite kebbe. My father was relaxed, telling jokes – one about a man asked to recount the milestones in his life, who was pestered by his wife to include her name on the list. Eventually, when he had had enough, the husband turned to his wife with the words: ‘I've been asked about the milestones in my life, not the millstones, my dear.’ I tried to tell a joke of my own, about what I can no longer remember, but I stumbled at the punchline.

Our holiday ended on a high, and it was back to the routine of the Lent term. Memuna and I spent the exeat weekends and half term running along the empty school corridors, eating with the other overseas children among the empty trestle tables of the dining room. In a way I quite enjoyed staying at school when the other children were away: the teachers were more relaxed and we caught a glimpse of the personality beneath their brisk exteriors. As the weeks spun by we began rehearsals for the Passiontide Service at the end of term.

The next time I saw my father he was standing in the front hall of the school wearing a pair of white shoes. It was a Saturday morning at break. Memuna and I ran down to find him, dragging our friend Beverley, who giggled nervously when he shook her hand. We had no idea he was coming to visit; he travelled the short distance direct from Gatwick Airport to collect us from High Trees. He met the headmaster and some of our teachers and then took us for a day out in Brighton, collecting Sheka from his boarding school in Horsham along the way. All day long we teased him about his unfashionable shoes and we would not rest until he went into a shoe shop and bought a new pair in a more conservative shade. We had lunch in an empty hotel, and trudged alone along the pebble beach, head down to the wind, our school macs flapping behind us. Late in the afternoon we waited for him outside a small, terraced house while he consulted a fortune teller. The woman showed him to the door and greeted us; she was middle-aged with sparse, flame-coloured hair. As we walked away I pestered him to tell me what she had said. ‘She told me I had three children,’ he volunteered eventually, and I was impressed.

We went back with him to the airport, where he unearthed presents for us in his baggage in the left-luggage locker. In a passport photo booth he had his photograph taken and afterwards we all piled in on top of each other and posed, four times over, for each flash of the unseen camera.

Since his release our father had been denied permission to leave the country. Then, in mid March, he was re-arrested and accused of being in contact with a US embassy official, who was supposedly involved – according to the government – in dealing diamonds. Our father spent the night in custody at the CID headquarters, until it was proved the car seen parked outside the American's house did not belong to him – he had part-exchanged it for another several months earlier. After his overnight detention, quite unexpectedly, his request to travel to Europe was granted. He stopped by Lami Sidique to say goodbye. ‘Take my advice and don't come back,’ his old friend told him.

When I came to the task of assembling the fragments of my father's life in the period after he was released from prison, I spent many hours reconstructing his trip in the spring of 1974 using old letters, tape-recording conversations with some of the people with whom he visited or stayed, retrieving my own memories of the weeks we spent together with family friends in Ireland.

That September of 1974 Sheka was due to leave his prep school, and my father was determined to secure him a place at an academically prestigious school in Elstree. My brother had recently sat his entrance exams and the headmaster of the school, who was minded to give him a place, had requested an interview with his father before they made their final decision. Among the many questions he was asked were several about the whereabouts of our mother – the school was nervous of being caught up in the middle of a custody fight, they were seeking reassurance. After the cards that arrived while my father was in detention we had not heard from our mother again. Of all the events that swirled around our lives, his life, the challenges he had seen and met, the one time my father confessed to feeling apprehensive was before that interview.

He stayed in St Albans with Brian Quinn and his wife Mary. Quinn now worked as an economist at the Bank of England and he had agreed to act as our guardian in Britain. A long-time confidant of our father, he warned him that letters from Freetown routinely arrived evidently opened and then clumsily resealed, and he added his voice to the many: he feared for his friend's safety if he continued to live in Sierra Leone under Siaka Stevens. But my father reassured him, as he reassured everyone, adding that he had spoken to Stevens to tell him he no longer harboured any political ambitions; he planned to devote himself instead to building up his new business. At that time, just free from prison, he was given to joking with people he knew well: it amused him to refer to himself as an ‘unemployed, ex-detainee, ex-MP, ex-minister’. Quinn listened and nodded, but his disquiet remained all the same.

School broke up for the term and we all flew to Ireland, to family friends called the Rekabs in the Dublin suburbs. Our father left us there briefly while he visited the United States. In New York he saw the civil rights era stage play A Raisin in the Sun.

Despite the play's renown and the fame of its author, Lorraine Hansberry – the first black woman to have a play staged on Broadway, who died when she was just thirty-four – I had never heard of A Raisin in the Sun. In June of 2001, for the first time in a decade and a half, the play was mounted at the Young Vic in London.

In the dark of the small auditorium I watched, mesmerised by the character of Asagai, a young African student dating Beneatha, the daughter of an African-American family. While Beneatha's family aspire to a life outside the ghetto, Asagai dreams of his country's independence. When the family's hopes of buying a new home – in a white neighbourhood – appear to be thwarted, Beneatha turns on Asagai:

‘Independence!’ But then what? What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before – only now they will do it in the name of the new Independence – what about them?

To Beneatha, in her despair, progress has become an illusion and the human race is locked in an endless cycle of destruction. Asagai gives his reply:

It isn't a circle – it is simply a long line – as in geometry, you know, one that reaches infinity. And because we cannot see the end – we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd but those who see the changes, who dream, are called ‘idealists’ – and those who see only the circle we call them ‘realists’.

Walter, Beneatha's brother, is unimpressed and when Asagai is gone it is he who has the last word: ‘You know what's going to happen to that boy someday – he'll find himself sitting in a dungeon, locked in for ever – and the takers will have the key!’

Did my father see himself in Asagai? Did the playwright's words strike him in the same way they struck me, straight to the core? Did he wonder then, after all the warnings, whether he should return to Sierra Leone? Or was there simply no question but that he would?

In America my father looked up a series of old friends from the weeks he had spent there while he was in office, and he paid a visit to John Karefa Smart, who welcomed him warmly. In the three years since the arrests, contact between the former members of the UDP had eroded, the members were scattered or behind bars. There were a few meetings in the early days between those who had made it to the west, but by 1974 the party effectively no longer existed. Karefa Smart had no intention of leaving his post as a professor of public health at Harvard to step back into the fray of African politics. He later remembered that their conversation had turned to business: my father asked his advice on contacting pharmaceutical and medical supply companies.

In Ireland I awaited my father's return with mixed feelings. I had pinched a packet of cigarettes from the lady whose house we were staying in, and lit them one by one in the garden, holding them between my fingers while they burned down to the filter, occasionally putting them to my lips and pretending to puff. One afternoon old Mrs Rekab looked out of the window and caught me, threatening to tell my father, though in the event she kept my misdemeanour between the two of us. I bought a book on the countryside and the four of us went walking in the hills, where I laid down bait to attract badgers in the bushes, planning to climb up there and wait for them after dark one night with a torch. With our father we planned a holiday in France at the end of the coming summer, so we could practise our French and our father could learn it. ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was top of the charts – it was our favourite song and we knew all the words by heart. At the end of April we flew back to London, where we went shopping for Sheka's school wardrobe for the coming year and bought new shoes for my ever-growing feet. We watched a movie, Where Eagles Dare, in a cinema where it played on a loop. Fleeing the rain we mis-timed our arrival so that we saw the ending first and then sat through the film again from the start. Our father gave us each a Timex, my very first wristwatch, and we finished the holiday eating together in a second-rate Chinese restaurant close to Victoria Station before we caught the train to Horley.

I later learned that in London our father also called on Sir Banja Tejan Sie at the house in Cricklewood where the former governor-general lived exiled from his country. Sir Banja dreamed of his lost position and of being, once again, at the centre of politics in Sierra Leone. Years later I trod the path to the same house myself. By then Sir Banja was almost ninety. He sat in a high-backed chair at one end of the front room of a 1930s semi. The rest of the chairs in the room lined the walls in a deferential semicircle. The former governor-general had telephoned my office after catching a political report I filed for the BBC and asked me to visit him at his home. At the time I had no idea who he was, but out of curiosity I accepted. I told Memuna and Sheka about his call and suggested they come along too. Sir Banja dominated the conversation, alternating between long-winded speeches and bouts of flattery. He complimented me on my abilities as a reporter and had even memorised sections of the report's commentary; he seemed to be trying to discover whether I had any political ambitions. But the moment he laid eyes on Sheka, who arrived a few minutes late – the image of our father and his eldest son – he appeared to lose interest in our conversation and turned his attention to my brother instead. A few weeks later he sent me a set of gilded invitations to Westminster Abbey to watch him receiving his latest set of honours from the queen.

Six years later I called on Sir Banja with the purpose of discovering what the two men had discussed during my father's visit long ago. Sir Banja told me an extraordinary story. He claimed to have had contact, back in the early 1970s, with Yasser Arafat, as well as Mad Mike Hoare, the infamous South African mercenary whose name has for ever been dishonourably linked with the Congo and the war that culminated in the murder of Lumumba. Arafat, he said, had offered to train forty fighters in Palestine to depose Stevens. Sir Banja had been working on a plan during the time my father was in prison. When the two men met he confided all to my father, urging him – if he was interested in playing a role – to come back and discuss the plan with him before he returned to Sierra Leone.

From London our father went on to visit pharmaceutical firms in Frankfurt and outside Copenhagen. There he observed the plight of the Greenlanders, and later commented to a friend about Denmark's ‘forgotten empire'; he was lonely, a loneliness he described as clinging to him the whole time he was away from Sierra Leone, dispelled only by the presence of us, his children.

On his way back home he stopped over in London again, to wait for his flight to Freetown. News that the former finance minister and ex-UDP leader was in town had reached the student groups in London, and several of the young activists who had supported the UDP raced to meet his flight at the airport, but he avoided them, hurrying on past and out of the terminal building. In Cricklewood Sir Banja waited for him to return, but in the four days he was in London our father never went back to the former governor-general's house.

Sir Banja struck me as someone anxious to persuade other people of his own importance: after our first meeting he called me at home several times, sometimes late in the evening or very early in the morning, demanding to know why I hadn't been back to see him. I wasn't entirely sure who it was Sir Banja was more determined to persuade that he remained a player – himself or me. Sir Banja's story did not resonate with anything else I had so far learned, though by the time we spoke, after years of anarchy and banditry, the pale glow of Sierra Leone's diamonds had attracted foreign mercenaries to the country by the score. So I made call after call trying to find somebody who might verify what Sir Banja had told me, but not one other person, even those most closely connected with the events of the era, had ever heard rumours of a plot involving Yasser Arafat and Mad Mike Hoare in 1974.

As things turned out I never had the chance to question Sir Banja again. Just three days after our interview he collapsed and died on the pavement outside his home.