The condemned MK activist arrived at Pretoria Central prison on Tuesday at nine o'clock in the morning.

A number of white warders at the prison immediately sprung into action, hurling abuse at him and beating him.

" It's already mid-morning," he recounts. "They are hitting me with their hands, not fists. It's more like humiliation, with the clothes they've taken off. I'm standing there naked. 'Jy het die meisies doodgemaak. Praat!' ('You killed the girls. Talk!). I'm just keeping quiet. I'm depressed. They are hitting me, so I say, 'ja, ek het die meisies doogemaak'. ('Yes, I killed the girls'); so they hit more. 'Jy se dit nog so? As jy praat met die mense jy moet 'baas' se. Hoekom het hy jet die meisies doogemaak?' ('You're owning up to it? When you address us you must say 'master'. Why did you kill the girls?'). 'Omdat ek moet baas vir jou se'. ('So that I can call you master'). I made them very angry. For the whole day I had no clothes on. They took me in front of all the prisoners. They cut my hair off, bald."

His hair was forcibly cut by one of the warders, Malan.

Malan and his brother-in-law, Arlow, were particularly brutal towards the in-mates.

"Arlow used to have a handle-bar mouthstache - very fit looking guy, shiny shoes," Robert recalls. "Like a real soldier. He was about 40. He must have been an idiot because he'd be the cruellest guy, low rank. He used to beat up guys on the way to the gallows. Malan and Arlow were real devils."

Every in-mate on death row was allocated a number with the prefix "V", which stood for "veroordeelde" - "condemned".

A card with the number was placed on the door of each inmate.

Robert's number was "V3727".

On his first day on death row, the white warders instructed one of their black colleagues, sergeant Mathebaku, to make sure that none of the prisoners on death row speaks to him.

Though he still had an appeal against his death sentence coming and was certainly not about to be executed, McBride was taken to a section called "The Pot".

"The Pot" was where condemned prisoners who had received their notices of execution were kept.

A notice of execution meant one was due be hanged within the next seven days.

The attempt to starve the new arrival on death row of conversation actually had the opposite effect.

"I think that's the mistake they made," Robert continues. "They put me in a cell which is in 'The Pot'; with glasses all over. You are in effect in a glass box, so you cannot speak to other people. They cannot hear you. I think Mathebaku also told other people that you must not talk to this guy and he can't talk to you. In a sense that go me respect; the opposite of what they had intended."

At the time, he was the only MK prisoner on death row.

Later that evening, he was given prison clothes to wear.

There were radio speakers tied high up in the roof of the cells in death row, churning music into that section of the prison.

Throughout the day, over the radio, news about him had been piped into the cells, informing the prisoners about their new colleague.

During his first night on death row, Robert was very downhearted.

He was cheered up when he suddenly heard his favourite music come through the speakers tied to the roof.

"They were playing 'Radio Lebowa' (North Sotho public station). They played reggae. On Tuesdays, there was a half hour reggae programme. I listened to the music and felt myself dancing in the cell."

He had been dancing for a while, lost in his thoughts, when he looked up.

"All the other prisoners are looking. It was small windows - from a view of one side you can get about three; you can see three of the slabs. They are all looking. I could not hear them, but they are like banging on the glass slabs, and they are all looking at me dancing and showing their fists like this (shows a black power salute). That made me feel a little better."

The first inmate Robert spoke to was a Coloured man who was about to be executed, Edward Heynes, who was about thirty two years old.

"Heynes has a big head, small legs, and a big upper body. But he's a very short guy. He had many tattoos all over his face, I remember. And a rosary around his neck."

Robert's new friend was member of the "27" gang in prison.

He was on death row because of a murder he had committed while in prison.

Silence was an important rule to observe on death row.

Even while in the shower, inmates were prohibited from talking to one another.

In the cells, the inmates were allowed to talk between certain times.

They only got the freedom to talk as loud and as much as they wanted once they were in "The Pot".

Besides the freedom to talk as long one wanted, there was another "perk" to being in "The Pot";

Condemned prisoners who had been given their notices of execution were given a better meal on the last day.

"The day you're put in 'The Pot' you're given money. I think it's R4. Not really money as in hard cash, you are able to buy for R4 some things. Usually people buy sweets and cigarettes. Sometimes they'd send sweet to you as their friend. They'd send sweets to you to say 'thank you for being my friend'. Or a packet of peanuts."

The prospect of dying very soon drove many inmates on death row to religion, especially Christianity.

"The worse guys who read the Bible are those who raped, committed sodomies, killed people in prison; they would read the Bible. The guy who wouldn't think twice about slitting your throat - the 'baddest' kind of guy."

But Robert lost his already fickle faith when he was at "Beverly Hills".

He had begun questioning the existence of God from the age of ten.

His developing agnosticism notwithstanding, he was one of the regulars at the church in prison on Wednesdays.

He would go to church so that he could at least be away from his cell for while.

Another reason was to engage in debates on religion with the an affable Anglican priest.

His relationship with the priest, Father Mabena, grew out of his attendance of priest's services and their intellectual exchanges on death row.

Mabena was opposed to the death penalty on spiritual and philosophical grounds.

"My own position about the death penalty is that it's better if it's not there because from my experience with these people, some of those who died did not commit any crimes," the priest explains. "Death penalty is irreversible - you can't bring a person back and say we made a mistake."

A week or so after her son was taken to Pretoria Central prison's death row, Doris McBride received a letter from him.

His spirit was still high.

Prisoner No. 3737

Maximum Security Prison

Private Bag X45

PRETORIA

23 March, 1987

Comrade Mummy,

I've been here just over a week now. I'm OK, fit and healthy. I am allowed as many letters as possible - to receive and to send. I am also allowed visits throughout the week. Times for visits are between 9 and 11, and between 2 and 3.

I saw Roshan today. It was good to see somebody from home after what seems like a long time. There are so many people here on Death Row. There are...There are so many it's unbelievable. This thing of Capital punishment must end as soon as possible.

A government that has to hang so many people to maintain "law and order" should be ashamed of itself. The fact that there are so many people here is an indictment on the social and political structure of the South African society.

This alone is evidence of there being something drastically wrong with South African society. I think we must be one of the countries with the highest no. of annual executions.

The time of my trial was not in vain - regardless of the outcome. I have come to understand the oppressor very well. I have had sufficient time to study him and think about him. Strangely, I don't think the oppressor knows himself; or understands himself.

He creates a system where we have 4 distinct societies. Each society develops its own social and moral norms. These sets of moral values differ from society to society. But here is the problem: All 4 societies are judged in a court of law which aspires to and judges on a system based on White moral values of a privileged minority. What an indictment on a judicial system! How dare they judge us Black people! The White judge lives in his White powder-puff, lily-white, privileged society. How can he ever imagine the social and pyschological make-up of a person like myself - a product of a ghetto. I am a product of a ghetto, but not because of choice - because of the colour of my skin! Can he ever appreciate this fact? All these things play a part in how a person behaves or will behave. It is the same system that the judge upholds that is responsible for me developing differently from him (the white judge)! But does he take these things into account when he sentences me? My sentence is not what all of South Africa wants or expects, it is what the White, minority, privileged South Africa wants. But does White S.A. live in a ghetto, is White S.A. discriminated against (by law) because of the colour of their skins, is White S.A. voteless, oppressed......????

Regardless of the outcome of this tribulation, there must be no tears. Tears lead to fears, especially for the mothers of other prospective guerrillas. There is no time to fear. There is a Battle to be won. Male, Female, Young & Old all are needed on all fronts, political activists and armed combatants. It is a time of sacrifice.

Nevertheless, I am confident that Robert-Derrick's generation will be free. Their generation will not tread the road of oppression. Their generation will be free! This thing is crumbling. This Babylonian apartheid monster is giving its last kicks. But we must be careful: a wounded animal is desperate and most dangerous. But now we have to deliver the final blow to the philosophy of Racialism and Racial Supremacy. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown of white supremacy.

Your loving son

Robert

"Quite frankly, I was surprised at the charm of the letter because I read it," says Doris. "But my heart was heavy. Because it was the first time we heard from him since he was taken to Pretoria. It was about a week after he had gone. When I read the letter I thought to myself, 'well, at least he's not giving up'. I could see the wording and all that. He was fighting. He was talking against the government and all that. He gave me encouragement that if he goes, he won't be going like just by giving up and being tired of living. He'd still be fighting."

Robert had not been on death row for more than two weeks when he experienced the mood which engulfs the place when some of the inmates are about to be executed.

Edward Heynes, the Coloured man who had been the first to talk to him when he arrived, was one of the seven men who were hanged at that time.

"I was still talking to Heynes when the first guys were put in 'The Pot'. They were next to me. One was on the left and the two on the right hand side. One of the guys was Pieter Botha, a Coloured guy. Most of the guys are from George, Knysna area, in the Cape. There was another guy, I can't remember his name. He's a brave guy; one of the typical Coloured surnames. He's a guy I remember talking to. And he talked nicely. The others wouldn't talk - they talked with tears. He was ready to go. He wasn't scared. He spoke very clearly."

Though the men in "The Pot" were free to talk at any time, the other inmates were not.

Robert, however, chose to defy the regulation.

He spoke to his first friend on death row, Edward Heynes, as he was about to meet his Maker.

"He was saying, 'ja McBride, ek het jou gese hulle gaan my hang. Ek het jou mos gese. Ja my bra, my ma se kind. Moenie worry nie, ek sal jou sien daarso' ('Yes McBride, I told you they're going to hang me. I told you, buddy. Don't worry, I'll meet up with you on the other side'). I'm first quiet, I don't know what to say, and I'm just feeling somehow this thing, this hanging thing is not the right thing. I've never thought much about capital punishment before until I come there - the moral issue and the pros and cons -, but I had a strong feeling that this is a wrong thing. So I started talking to him. I spoke to him."

During the night before Edward Heynes's execution, he stayed up in his cell, smoking.

"Then there was singing; towards the morning. Singing hymns like 'noya na phezulu' (a Methodist Xhosa hymn). Usually, the people in 'The Pot' talk till other people start sleeping. Then they are in their own thoughts for three to four hours. Then four o'clock, they'd come out with powerful singing. The whole place is red-hot, and you'd feel the hair standing up your neck. They are like moving spirits when they start singing."

Once the prisoners in "The Pot" started singing, their fellow inmates in the other sections joined in.

"The miracle is that they are far apart and it takes time for sound to travel and yet there's complete harmony. It would be wrong to say it's beautiful, but it is. It's horrible beauty. It's almost paranormal the way things are. I used to just sit on my table with my feet on my bed, listening, smoking. It was very funny business. Even when a guy had been crying, he'd stop crying and sing."

At about six o'clock in the morning, the prison warders came to fetch the men in "The Pot" to take them to the gallows.

"You can't see them. You hear the door, and you hear the guy stamping in the passage, saluting the guy and stamping the feet. It was like Nazi style. You hear the door open. You hear that sound. Everyone is like a rabbit by the door. They don't even talk to each other; they just look at each other like spies. Then they go into the church and pray for about fifteen to twenty minutes."

There were fifty two steps leading up to the floor where the gallows were located; steps condemned men had to negotiate, some with heavy hearts and leaden feet.

Derrick and Robert McBride were incarcerated miles apart from each other.

The son was in Pretoria, the father on the famous prison island off Cape Town.

"Fortunately, with Robert we could go every day, any time," Doris reports. "With Derrick we had to apply and be given a reply to the application when we come. So we could only go there at a stipulated time to Derrick. It was very difficult; it wasn't easy to find accommodation in Cape Town. Fortunately, there was town-house where families of prisoners there were we could stay."

When she went to visit Robert on death row, she stayed at the house of her husband's niece in Eldorado Park.

The niece, Noreen Earnest, was daughter to one of Derrick's brothers, Bassie.

Gwyneth, the McBrides' youngest daughter was profoundly affected by her brother's death sentence.

Her first visits to her father on Robben Island and her brother on death row evoked different emotions.

She visited Derrick twice when he was in jail.

The first visit took place towards the end of 1987.

"I went alone because the two days before that, Bonnie and my mother had been there," Gwyneth recounts. "The only space for me was about two days after that. We were in Cape Town for about a week, staying at Cowley House."

The three ladies and young Derrick-Robert had driven down to Cape Town in their new car.

"The police had taken the bakkie and left it out. It had rusted to a point where you couldn't even use it anymore. So my mother had to buy a (Ford) Escort. I remember so clearly; that car had an overheating problem, but it was our only means of transport. So wherever we went, we had gallons of water just to make sure this car doesn't overheat."

Gwyneth's mother had told her about a big, ugly black gate which had disturbed her when she first visited Robert on death row.

"It looks like cast iron, but it was a heavy black gate. I remember my mother, when she first went, the gate upset her terribly. By the time she got to seeing Robert she was bursting with tears. One of the warders said to her, 'once they go into this gate, they don't come out'. I think that's what irritated her."

When her turn came to visit her brother, she realised that that might be the last time she saw him alive.

"It was that kind of attitude, and it was trying to squeeze all the months that you haven't seen him into these forty five minutes. And then he'd ask you, 'how's auntie Girly?'; 'How's so-and-so?'; 'How's school?' And he'd ask me about Biology; because he knew I liked Biology. When I was in standard 9, he'd ask me about the reproductive system, and I would say I'm not interested. And he'd say, 'you sure you're not interested?' He was teasing and that kind of thing. It was like, 'why are you asking me this?' Only afterwards it struck me: okay, he wanted to know that nothing happens, But things happen."

Her first visit to Robert was with her mother and her elder sister.

"I remember when we walked in - it's also a glass and intercom kind of thing -, you'd be able to kiss him 'hello' through the window. It was like, I'm not kissing him because I'm kissing the glass. It's empty, nothing! I remember once when I was there; I cried, because there was something that irritates me, and he couldn't touch me or hold me. He put out hands on the glass and it was, 'he is here on death row'. When you walked in you were frisked. They fiddle with you all and I said to my mother, 'I hate this!'. When you walk in they fiddle with you. They'll even scan you with those frisking gadgets. Then you walk up and you wait. And you hear the gates 'clink-clink' and phew, what takes place in here?! Then you hear Robert's footsteps coming down the passage. Then he's in."

There was no privacy when the friends and relatives of the inmates on death row visited them.

There were warders who listened in on their conversation.

Robert was often directed to meet his visitors in a specific glass cubicle.

A number of times, some of the sympathetic warders had gestured to him that he must watch what he says because they were being recorded.

Her second visit to her father on Robben Island was on "Boxing Day" at the end of 1987 - on 26 December.

This time she also got to meet Derrick's co-Accused during his trial, Antonio du Preez.

Gwyneth and her brother's comrade were growing very fond of each other.

"It just happened that it fell on his birthday - his birthday is on 'Boxing Day'," she recalls. "It was more of a happier prison visit. This time I went with Bonnie, my mother and little Derrick, and it was like teasing and all that kind of thing - 'you've gone fat'. There was a lot of instructions being given - 'don't forget, if you're arrested, this is what you must do'. I think at the back of his mind he was trying to alert us that it's not over yet - 'You people are still going to be harassed and irritated by these SBs, so just keep that spirit there'."

She did not know it at the time, but there was a reason why Derrick was now different to the 'grumpy' prisoner she had seen on her last previous visit.

McBride senior had been exercising vigorously, preparing himself for his escape from Robben Island during the coming winter season.

He was as fit as a fiddle and upbeat about the prospects of success..

Robert later got to know of the extent of his father's physical preparation for his escape.

"Apparently, when he came to the Island he could not walk and within three months he was running. All the guys I spoke to said that it was amazing how he recovered through his determination. He would run, and was playing soccer with the youngsters on the Island within six months. He had a dedicated objective of getting fit."

Before his imprisonment, Derrick had done research on the Island prison and established that one could escape using the sea current.

"There's current that hits against the Island - when I was on Robben Island I used to verity all these things that I read before. There's a current that hits onto the main land, and then, because of obstruction, it hits on the Island, and then back onto the main land. You can actually see it. From the first day I was there, I charted winds. From the 'Cape Times'. They've got a weather chart - anticipated winds and thing like that. I had a whole big chart from the day I arrived. I marked the direction of the wind - summer time you can't escape because the wind is so powerful - 40 to 80 kilometres fro the main land to the Island; it would blow you out to sea."

One of the few political prisoners whom Robert found when he arrived on death row was Reid Mokoena.

Mokoena was a member of the "Sharpeville Six'. The half a dozen activists were found guilty on the so-called common purpose doctrine - they were at the scene of the crime when an enraged mob in Sharpeville tore into a community councillor and killed him for collaborating with the Nationalist party government.

It was Reid who really initiated Robert on death row since the first friend he made, Edward Heynes, was executed soon after they had met.

He also got him hooked on nicotine.

"I remember he gave me a couple cigarettes. I started smoking through him because I never smoked before. He gave me a couple of Peter Stuyvesant (cigarettes). When these guys (Heynes and other inmates who had received notices of execution) were moved to opposite him. Then I got the cigarettes."

Reid also helped him cope with being close to death.

"He was a strange guy; very nice, good friend. Used to make me laugh and stuff. He could tease people. He was a guy who basically kept to himself; mainly talked to me only. He was a guy who would regard all other prisoners as scum; he was political prisoner, he's not talking to crooks. That's how he was."

Menzi Thafeni, an activist from the Eastern Cape, found Robert on death row.

He too got close to McBride.

"Menzi was a youngster; about 18 or 19. The warders used to take advantage of him. They would try and terrorise him verbally. He would just say, 'sorry, no problem'. So I jumped in and took his part and said to him, 'you mustn't be scared of these people'. I used to tell them, 'los die man. Hy maak niks aan jou. Doen jou werk. Ons gaan dood hierso, dis nie nodig jy moet kak praat met ons' - 'leave the man alone. He's done nothing wrong to you. Just do your work. We're dying here, we don't need you to come and talk shit to us'."

1987, the year when Robert McBride got to death row, was one of the highest number of executions ever - 164.

Twenty prisoners on death row were reprieved during that year.

The year before - in 1986 -, 121 inmates were hanged and 22 reprieved.

The figure for 1987 was markedly increased by the so-called "Christmas rush" as the year tapered.

Then, as Christmas approached, the number of executions increased significantly.

Inmates on death row were being herded to the slaughterhouse like turkeys.

Outside, life was getting harder for Doris and her daughters.

Her youngest, Gwyneth, suffered a nervous breakdown, and had to be taken out of school.

When Doris was visiting Robert at Pretoria Central prison, she stayed at the house of a daughter to one of Derrick's brothers in Eldorado Park.

The daughter, Noreen Earnest, was a child to Bassie McBride.

One day, around August 1987, Noreen informed Doris that a number of local activists were interested in meeting her.

They wished to find out how they could support her in her campaign to save her son's life.

Mali Fakir, a feisty, fortysomething member of the Federation of South African Women (Fedsaw) and a number other organisation aligned to the United Democratic Front (UDF), was one these activists.

Mali had got her name when, as a child, she often used to ask for "mali" - money.

Her husband, Ali Fakir, a school teacher, stayed in the background as Mali and her comrades took on the Nationalist party government.

He was the vice-rector at Rand College of education in Johannesburg.

Another Eldorado Park activist who met Doris at the house of her husband's niece was Keith Bingle.

Keith, then in his early thirties, was working as an administrative clerk for "Field Industries" in Malgam, Johannesburg.

"We used to sell garage equipment, tools, nuts and bolts and stuff like that. I was doing tele-sales and administration. After work I was involved in community activities - civic, youth."

He was a member of the Eldorado Park East Congress, which was an affiliated of the Soweto Civic Association.

Paula Leyden, a slim, blonde white teacher at the local Silver Oak primary school was another member of the delegation.

The Fakirs' two daughters were pupils at the twenty nine year old teacher's school.

Their elder child, Natasha, was also politically active.

"She was going to take the direction the mother was taking," says Ali. "But also, because they (the children) are very intelligent; they could see the injustice and so on. It was short-lived because pretty soon they were arrested."

Robert's first meeting with Paula took place around August-September, 1987.

"The weather was hot," Robert remembers. "Then it started raining all of a sudden. All of them were wet - the hair was wet. It was before the 'Christmas rush'. How I know is because I was not on the other side of the prison; I was in 'A1 section.' I was in 'The Pot' section.

"Everyone was talking. It was as if they were coming to see a pop star or something. It was embarrassing because they all had smiles on their faces. I was very cautious and wary. They sort of stood aside when Paula came, and then we started talking very easily."

He asked her about herself.

"I asked her where she's teaching now and what she's doing. We were not in the small cubicle (where he usually met visitors); we were in the big section, and got talking about political philosophy and all that. I wanted to hear what are these people. The conversation was jumping a lot because the one sat for five minutes, and the next one would come and sit for five minutes and so on. Afterwards only Mali, Paula and Keith Bingle came back. The others never came again."

Paula Leyden is not quite sure whether it was love at first sight.

"I don't know because it is difficult to think back because it's so long ago. Obviously something happened because I went back to see him; a few days later. And then after that I went back again. And then I just thought of going everyday. And I was teaching at the time. It meant I had to race from school."

She had a feeling of utmost disdain for the people who were keeping him and his fellow inmates on death row so that they should wait for their death.

"It's quite strange because I had a very small impression of him. He looked small in the visiting room. He was like - he is sitting down, and he was like thin. His face was small. He looked very young. I just remember thinking that he is behind this glass and these bars and he is within the powers of the people who were looking after him then. And that they wanted to kill him. That's why he was there. He was wanting to be killed, and it was such a horrible thing . It's horrible to see this person who actually other people are wanting to kill, and seeing him and seeing how it was."

Robert seemed diffident.

"He was quite different on the first visit. He was kind of like, he was just talking, his head on the side. We would talk about things. Quite shy. He came across as quiet. They are just waiting around; they are just waiting for their time. It was very disturbing.

"I think what was striking - apart from him in that situation - was that this whole building had been designed to kill people, and all the people working there had a purpose in their work. It was strange to me that here is this situation, and this is what it was doing day in, day out. And yet people outside of it were living very normal lives - outside of the prison gates. I can't say that on that day I decided I was going to do something. It really shook me up."

The teacher was struck by baby bunnies which were blissfully playing in one section of the prison.

"You can't miss them. You walk in sort of through the main security gate, and there's a setting where there's this concrete. It's all concrete leading up to the next entrance to the prison building. There's one little section on your left hand side full of greenery and trees and this little pond. And that's where there were these animals. I noticed them the first time, and I was struck by it. What was more striking was when I asked one of the warders why are these animals here - what are they here for. He said there was one particular senior warder who just loves animals, and so he keeps his animals here. What really struck me was that it was such a contradiction: he loved animals but he was there to kill people."

When Robert got to death row, he thought emotional attachments would be ill-advised.

This included his love affair with Greta.

"I didn't want to push the relationship because she told me the last time we spoke to each other before I was sentenced to death that I shouldn't expect her to wait for me. I said I understood. I made a joke, 'I will come afterwards and take you away from your husband'. She was looking at twenty years - she believed I won't die, but will get about twenty years. I worked in my mind that I was 23 and after 30 years I'd be 53 - not exactly ready for the morgue. 30 years I'd still be okay; probably study a lot in prison."

At the same time, he knew that that was "unbridled fantasy".

"We would make jokes like that when we write letters. As I suspected, the letters got less and less. There was a time when I never wrote letters to anybody. My letters would be regarding the campaign (to save his life), nothing less. I could not even have a son-mother conversation with my mother. That is how my relationship with people was. I had come to that level."

Then he stopped writing letters to Greta.

Paula came in to fill the hiatus.

She started travelling regularly from her school in Eldorado Park to visit him in Pretoria.

Though it was Doris herself who had brought Paula along to meet her son, she had some suspicions about the white teacher's motives.

"In those days we were very cautious of white people, but then I agreed that she came come along," says Robert's mother. "I said to myself, 'what can she do? He's already inside'. So we went. I introduced him to her when she went with me, and from then on she decides to go and see him everyday. When I used to go in the afternoon I was told 'that girl was here today, this morning'. So I said to her, 'when do you go and teach? When do you go to school 'cause when I go in the afternoon you've been there in the morning. If I go in the morning you go in the afternoon, so when is it that you are at school?' She just laughed. That's how Paula met Robert - 'cause she followed me."

Paula was largely drawn to the ANC guerrilla on death row because she felt driven to defend him against people who kept him there "to kill him".

Her realisation that they both shared a lack of belief in the existence of God cemented their relationship.

They started writing letters to each other.

"The letters was just kind of feeling out," says Robert. "Testing things about certain issues. We'd ask special questions on personal feelings."

She asked him if he believed in God.

"I said 'no'. I didn't know she doesn't believe in God, but then she's asking me questions as if she's a believer. She is using the normal creationist argument - the world is round and someone must have made it."

Later on, she came out and informed him that she too, was an atheist.

"She was advocating her own position and how she sees this religion. There is something she said - if there is a God, then the God must be a very selfish one; that he can allow all the funny things to go on. I remember us agreeing that maybe there is some kind of power."

In losing his faith on death row, Robert was going against general the trend.

"People kind of like, major gangsters who committed prison murders - who are hardened -, you must hear them on death row," says Paula. "They are praying. It's a big thing. I think Robert must have been the only one there who wasn't."

Though, once she got immersed in the campaign to save Robert's life, Paula sometimes sought material help from the South African Council of Churches (SACC) on the inmates' behalf, she had a dim view of many religious people who frequented death row.

"The SACC and SACBC (South African Catholic Bishops' Conference) helped practically by supplying money to prisoners and doing whatever they did, but the bulk of people in organised religion, all they wanted to do was save souls. It was like, revolting. It was like their best place. They've got a captive audience and you've got guaranteed successes. They've got limited time on this earth. It was sickening."

Later, when Robert was joined by other MK cadres on death row, his relationship with the daughter to one of the directors of Anglo-American Corporation and De Beer became a sore point.

He understands that it was "silly" to fall in love on death row, especially when the affair was between an ANC guerrilla who white South Africa loved to hate and the daughter to a wealthy white businessman.

But then, he did not have any doubts about his lover.

"For me, the most important thing was that I knew I could trust Paula. I could read her mind, and you could never explain that to comrades. There was no question. The comrades work on what they are taught. Basically, I worked on my own initiative - my own ability to read people. I'm usually very good at that. I just knew that she was all right. After I discovered that, the rest just came easy."

His confidence in Paula was strengthened when Doris told him her reading of the girl tallied with his.

"My mother used to be very suspicious of white people. What I noticed was that there was no suspicion , and she made it clear to me that Paula is all right; she's genuine. My mother has the same ability to judge people. I can meet a person for the first person and I can tell straight away if the person is good or not. My mother is also like that. She's almost infallible to judge a person. Even if she doesn't like a person she'd be honest to say 'I don't like the guy, but I don't think he's bad'."

Paula, he states, gave him hope.

"Everything in the history of this country, and my experiences, was against me having a relationship with her. And most particularly, it was the position I was in. Yet I was able to somehow read and be able to know that she's a genuine person, and that there's a future for us. Somehow that also became firm knowledge in my mind, and it's difficult because I had already accepted I'm going to die. Even in the darkest days, I allowed myself to dream, which I had not done before.

"Mainly, I never wanted to see myself broken down; even to the last day of hanging. 'I'm going to be defiant, I'm not going to be a coward, I'll make it very difficult for them to kill me. And also, if I must die, I'm not going to go screaming; crying and all that'. The only way was to cut myself off from people so that you don't have sentimental attachments - because you are on your own and different rules apply there."

Paula made him change his mind about wanting to cut himself off - severing "sentimental attachments".

She and Robert used to write each other letters.

In one of them, she told him the effect of his letters on her.

"I said to him how much it meant - I enjoyed reading his letters. It was like going into the sea. That's the feeling I got - that exhilarating feeling. He said to me it's a nice thought to think about. It was kind of sexual in some ways. That was probably the first time that it was overtly acknowledging the mutual feelings."

* Peter Leyden, Paula's father, was a high-powered executive with Anglo-American Corporation.

She could easily afford a luxurious lifestyle, but she seemed to gravitate towards disadvantaged areas whenever she sought a teaching post.

Peter had first come to Africa in 1956.

At the time he took up a post as a district commissioner in Kenya.

He and his new wife Annette, were originally from North Wales.

Paula was born two years later, on 25 July 1958, in the small town of Nyeri.

She does not remember much of Kenya because the family relocated to Zambia when she was still young.

Her elder sister, Karen, was also born in Kenya.

Then the Leydens were stationed in Kisumu.

She was eighteen months younger than Karen.

Growing up, she was close to both her father and mother.

Even after her family had moved to Zambia, they used to return to East Africa for holidays.

"We used to go back to Kenya for holidays from Zambia. We would drive up to Tanzania. We were very lucky to have a childhood like that in those days because it was a lot of dirt road and stuff. It would take about three days to drive up from Lusaka, and we would stop overnight. I just remember the holidays. Very magical times! Very idyllic childhood on every level."

John, Paula's younger brother, was born when their parents were staying in Zambia.

He is the composer and leader of the pop group "Mango Groove".

"I was born in Zambia, in Kitwe in 1964," says the tall, care-free musician-cum-philosopher. "My first ten years were in Lusaka - my first two years were in a convent. We were about three boys in the whole convent."

He is passionately atheist.

He says his time at the convent school has something to do with that.

"It's definitely where I developed some of my views on religion. Similarly with Paula, in fact. My first two years at school, I was taught by nuns. If you ever want to turn your child into a heretic, send him to a Catholic school. I went there, then went to a little private school in Lusaka called 'Inkwazi'. "

He credits his parents for the non-racial outlook of the Leyden siblings.

"We got very strong, very amazing parents. If there was a God, I'd thank him for my parents. They were expatriates; they came from Kenya. That colonial history. He was a district commissioner. He worked through all that. You'd often find a particular sort of British settlers in ex-colonies who wouldn't assimilate into the thing. I'm grateful to my parents that the first ten years of my life outside were truly non-racial. It was just nice."

When the Leydens were in Zamiba, Paula and Karen were sent overseas to study.

"What happened was, the company would pay for you to be educated in Britain if that's where you were from," Paula explains. "And it was not so much not feeling happy with the school we were at, but it was more a traditional thing. It was like my mother and father went to school in Britain, and they wanted us to school therePaula and Karen Leyden's new school in Britain, Our Lady of Sion, was a Catholic convent on the borders of Shropshire."

The school was a "crumbling old castle".

Though Our Lady of Sion was not very far from where both her mother and father were born, the eleven year old girl felt alien.

For her, home was back in Africa.

It was not easy for her to adjust.

"It was difficult. Particularly, I think, it being a convent. The weather was so different; it makes you miserable. The children, I never had a problem with children; I related well to the children in both schools there."

When Our Lady of Sion had to close down because of funding to religious schools in Britain was being cut, Paula and Karen enrolled with a new school, New Hall.

It was near Chelmsford in Essex.

New Hall was also was a Catholic institution, run by the Community of the Holy Sepulchre.

The headmistress of the new school was a nun in her early fifties, Sister Mary Francis.

"A horrible woman," says Paula. "Very horrible. I was told when I first arrived there that 'we know you have caused trouble at the other school and you mustn't think you can come and behave the same way here because we won't tolerate it'."

Paula was sometimes mocked for what was perceived to be "African" behaviour.

At one stage, during a school outing to Hampton Court, she cut her leg on a rose bush as the girls explored the maze.

One of her teachers, Sister Mary Dismus, was outraged the young girl removed her stockings in public to attend to the injury.

Paula had had previous encounters with the history teacher.

"She used to raise her eyebrow - one eyebrow -; she used to do that. That was like being critical. She was like a very hard, critical woman. And she'd look at you like that - she'd raise her one eyebrow. Everyone would be, 'oh God, Sister Mary Dizzy' - we used to call her 'Dizzy'. When Dizzy raised her eyebrow, you knew that she is really angry. You must be careful. She was probably about forty. So then I could raise my eyebrow. I used to do it in class - I would raise my eyebrow back at her, and she got so angry."

When the young girl removed her stockings in public at Hampton Court, Sister Mary Dismus more than just raised her eyebrow.

She intimated that the her behaviour had a lot to do with the fact that she was Zambian.

"That's what happens with nuns; they have such a small world, but they get power out of it. That other one went on about how we behave in Zambia - we are savages. 'You just take your stockings off and virtually get undressed in public'. My emotion at the time was like, 'how can a grown person get such pleasure out of reprimanding and humiliating a child?' Because you feel quite a patriot - I felt quite patriotic about Zambia. I felt like, that's my country."

There were little prospects of Paula Leyden staying at New Hall for a long time.

Her last confrontation was with a nun who scolded her because her room was disorganised.

Sister Mary Francis had had enough of her.

At the time, Paula was in standard eight.

"It was in December; it was already when we were going to leave. I was going to leave, anyway. We had that last incident where I wasn't doing what I should have done in class, and they tried to take things away from me. She just called me in. She said that they can't be asked to put up with me any longer."

Because she and Karen would only be flying home in a week's time, it was arranged that she stay outside the school premises with a lay teacher, Mrs Dutton.

Her elder sister was allowed to continue staying in her dormitory.

When she met Karen at the airport on their back to Africa, she was relieved that she would not be returning to the school to do her standard nine the following year.

However, in 1973, while she was overseas studying, her father had been transferred further south by Anglo-American.

Home was now South Africa.

What the young girl had heard about the country gave her mixed feelings.

"We'd heard a lot about it. We'd heard all the political stuff. The expectations were kind of, we knew what we were coming into. My feelings were, I didn't want to come back. I hated coming back, but I had to compensate by coming back. It was like a deal for me. We knew that we'd go to different people. That we'd be split up (racially), which was a horrible thing to us. It was just funny to have that. That's what happened."

* In South Africa, Paula enrolled with an Anglican school for girls, St Mary's.

The school was in the Johannesburg suburb of Waverley.

Her home was in Bryanston, an upmarket residential area suburb in Johannesburg.

She stayed at home with her two siblings; John and the last born, Julia.

At St Mary's, Paula got close to the headmistress's daughter, Bridgette.

She was not impressed with her other fellow pupils.

"I found the level of development of the school children much lower here than it was in Britain. I just found the children who I was in standard 9 with were much less - they had a narrower view of the world in every sense. I formed friendship with Bridgette because I found the others childish. I could get on with them in a very superficial way, but I just never formed attachments with them."

She was impatient with some of the questions she asked by the pupils when they learned that she was from Zambia.

In Zambia, unlike in South Africa then, schools were racially segregated.

In Britain she had had to deal with questions about wild animals roaming the streets in Africa and what kind of houses the natives lived in.

At the end of 1975, after she had passed her Matric exams, she went down to university of Natal in Durban for her tertiary education.

Though she later took up teaching, her mind then was not set on that as a profession.

"I was going to do law, so my BA degree is mainly law subjects. Natal I chose - I just thought I'd be away from Jo'burg, and Cape Town was quite far. I just felt like it would be good to go somewhere else. I decided on Natal. I had never been there before I went to university."

She was staying at Mabel Palmer residence.

Her close friend was Angela Balard, a social science student.

Paula ran for the SRC during her first year at varsity.

"In fact Angie (Angela Balard) drew my poster. She's quite a good drawer, but she drew a funny one. They told us we had to shoot for photos. I said no, I don't want photos because I thought that was a silly way to go. I went in on women's issues kind of ticket. Also on issues of education, because education was obviously a major issue."

Her poster had a women's sign.

"Also, it was taking the piss out of the thing. I just remember we drew a picture of a farmer with a straw hanging out, saying 'Paula Leyden is running for elections as the last straw'. It's interesting because I'd been so publicly associated with the women's movement. There was a lot of antagonism from men because one of the things the things I'd done, I distributed on campus an article called 'the phallacy of our sexual mores', which was about how sexuality is so centred around the penis."

Another extra-curricular activity which she got involved in during her varsity days was to initiate an educational project which helped high school pupils at the Coloured township of Wentworth.

This she did when she was a member of the SRC.

"I was involved in co-ordination with the schools in Wentworth. They were short of teachers. The motivation for it was that there was skills available that students had. And there was certainly time available. And resources available to the SRC and through fund-raising. That could be put to use in a community that needed that."

The students from the university of Natal assisted the teachers in the township by offering lessons in subjects like Biology, Physical Science, Mathematics and English.

At the time, Robert was a pupil at Fairvale high school.

Though it is not improbable that he and Paula met during this time, neither recalls such an encounter.

However, when they later fell in love when he was on death row, they decided to date their association back to her time at the university of Natal.

To Robert's comrades in the ANC, it would have seemed even more improbable that people who had not known each other before could fall in love when the other is awaiting his appointment with the hangman.

At the beginning of 1979, after finishing her studies at the university of Natal the previous year, Paula returned to Johannesburg.

She started teaching in the inner city, in Ponte City.

In all of her subsequent teaching engagements, Paula would work in disadvantaged areas.

This was a conscious decision she had taken on graduating from university.

"I wanted to work where I felt that I could be useful," she explains. "Where there was a need - and there was definitely a need. And I mean, one of the things I do well is teach. The standards of teaching in those schools, and the level of indoctrination was so high, particularly in History and English. People went into teaching because it was a reasonable job - they could get a reasonable income -; not for reasons of teaching."

She felt she could not stay in South Africa if she was not going to play an active part in getting rid of the system of racial oppression.

"I had to take a decision from as early as when I was at university to either leave and not have anything to do with this country, or else work here in a way that I thought could change things. Teaching was one of the vehicles whereby you could get involved in grassroots work with children, with teachers. At the schools that I was in the Cape, where the political protests were happening, it was saying that something I want to do is teach. And also, that is an area where there is a fight for change. I would want to get involved in that instead of academia. That never appealed to me. I didn't want to become someone who would write about the struggle."

At the beginning of 1980, she left Johannesburg for the Cape.

She had got interested in the area when she had gone down for a holiday.

"That's when I started teaching at a school called St Owen's, which, strangely enough, was a Catholic school in Retreat. And then I went on to the Lotus River. Lotus River was like flat land - that one was particularly in a very impoverished area. There I taught different things all along. I taught Maths at one stage, physical education and English."

* Paula's first battles with Coloured headmasters started when she showed her solidarity with the school children.

"I've had conflicts with every single Coloured principal that I ever worked with," she says. "As a group, during that period they were generally very conservative; towed the line to the extreme. Labour party supporters. My conflicts have arisen in teaching when the children have asserted themselves because of how I would teach. Because of the things I would say to them. Particularly when you spend a long time with children, their natural assertiveness and their natural resistance to stupid authority would come to the fore."

In 1982, when she was staying at Woodstock, she got involved with the Cape Action League (CAL), a radical Marxist grouping.

"It was working in a civic organisation mainly. Some of it was door to door work. Also, mainly my functions was with the youth in that area. In trying to get them involved in activities through things like keep fit classes or whatever. And getting them on to other fund-raising organisations. It was interesting."

The activists in the CAL were well-known as voracious readers of political works by Marxist intellectuals.

They would also get engaged in profound debates on political theory.

Paula was not cut out for this sort of political activism.

"I can say, in my political life I'd never been so much of a theorist. I've always gone with my gut reaction to something. And I am a very practical person. The only time that I really spent any time reading sort of political theory was when was with the Cape Action League. I found it irritating."

During her work for the CAL, she met a Coloured man whom she fell in love with, Clyde Johnson.

Clyde stayed down the road from Paula in Woodstock.

In 1985 Paula enrolled with the university of Cape Town (UCT) for a teacher's diploma.

She stayed with Julia, her youngest sister, and other friends.

Julia had gone down to study at UCT in 1983.

At UCT, she met another activist, Caroline Cullinan.

Caroline was in her second stint at UCT after studying fine art at the same institution from 1976 to 1979.

Then, following a two years' stay in London, she came back to South Africa and co-founded an art outfit called "Graphic Equaliser".

"It (Graphic Equaliser) was the first design set-up in this country to deal specifically with the needs of the trade unions," says Caroline. "We were working with the unions then."

Though Caroline and Paula were different in a number of respects, they clicked when they met at UCT.

"We had mutual friends," Caroline explains. "We just became firm friends. Paula is different from me in a sense that she is very single-minded about thing. I am not single-minded. In those days, it was the beginning of the feminist movement, and she was much more extreme feminist than me. She's much more extreme than I ever am; so that's our difference. For instance, during my political career - during the 70s right through to the 80s -; I was working much more with unions. I wasn't actively involved in the UDF, but I was doing work for the UDF. That was the route I was going. Paula was going a completely different route, politically."

However, the two activists' difference did not affect their friendship.

In fact, Caroline says, in one respect, they felt like soul mates.

"I have very deep respect for her. And I think, politically, where we do have common ground - it's okay now, but in those days for whites, any white who didn't support the regime was someone who's different to the other whites -; I suppose in that case we knew we were like-minded."

Clyde Johnson was also a student at UCT when Paula was there.

In 1986, hea scholarship to study America.

When he came back, Paula had completed her diploma and was now back in Johannesburg.

"But I kept contact with him. (In Johannesburg) I worked for a publishing company and for a chemical workers' union - six months at chemical and industrial workers' union."

In 1987, she started teaching again.

Someone had told her that there was a vacant post at a school in the Coloured township of Eldorado Park, in Johannesburg.

The principal of Silver Oak primary was one Mister Plessie, a Coloured man in his fifties.

"He was an incredibly aggressive man," she says. "He had a very violent temper. He didn't take kindly to conflict. He just wanted to run the school as he wanted to run it and that was the end of the story."

When at Silver Oak, Paula got involved with a local youth organisation which was affiliated to the UDF.

"Because of my involvement with the youth, I would kind of help in the distribution of pamphlets. So I was around Eldorado Park. I had a little yellow Renault. It came to the attention of the headmaster - apparently a security policeman told him that he saw my car driving at eleven o'clock at night with youngster and we stopped -; I drove while the pamphlets were dropped off."

Natasha Fakir, the daughter to Mali and Ali Fakir, was one of the young activists who got involved with their new teacher in political activities.

When Paula met Doris McBride for the first time in Eldorado Park, Doris was accompanied by Gwyneth.

Paula was with Mali Fakir, Keith Bingle and other activists from the township.

"I met her and we asked her what should we do," Paula recalls. "She basically said she needed the people here to go and visit Robert. She would want to think the people were visiting him when she was down in Durban. Everyone was excited."

* Robert plunged into a relationship with Paula at a time when his affair with Greta Apelgren was lukewarm.

"It started to die after the 'Magoo's' thing, when we went into hiding," says Greta. "Then him and I were drifting apart very fast."

After her sentence, she spent three months at Pietermaritzburg prison.

Then she was transferred to Klerksdorp female prison, in the then province of Transvaal (now part of North-West province).

Life in Klerksdorp was hard.

"It was horrible; really horrible. First three months - it was summer -, when I was still with my other fellow comrades, it was wonderful because we tried to get out of solitary confinement. We were arrested on 17th of June 1986, and I was in solitary confinement from June '86 up until I was taken to Klerksdorp, which was the following year."

She was later separated from her comrades and kept in solitary confinement.

This was after the women had got involved in a fight.

Her cell mates were a number of African women, including a big activist who, she says, became a pain in the neck for her.

Greta's conflict with the activist started when the latter reportedly made sexual advances at her.

Initially, she did not understand what her cell mate was getting at when she asked her to give her "sweets".

The hefty activist intensified her approaches.

"She would just do a certain action in front of me, and she would lift up her dress, and she would put her leg in the air and ask me certain things. She already had the other ones, and I was the only one. She tried to seduce me initially. I didn't know what she was doing because I saw I've got comrades and looked up to them. I was very confused."

Apelgren was the only Coloured in the cell.

When she would not engage a homosexual relationship with the activst when the other prisoners were having the same gender liaisons, she was in effect marginalising herself.

"There was such stupid racism that went on there," she says. "They all decided that this one is in love with that one and that one is in love with that one; lesbian relationships. They would go and do everything and I must not be there.

"One day I said, 'I can't take it anymore'. The warders were there - I don't know why she called them first -; then she attacked me and carried on. She kept coming towards me to attack me. I just made up my mind and said, 'I'm enough with this thing'. Maybe in her mind I was just a weak person, and it's only because I'd been respecting her authority and her position in the struggle."

She was "in a murderous state".

"She was torturing me so much, and I wanted to finish her. I said, 'hey wena ('you'), listen here, I am sick of you treating me and harassing me. If you catch me I'm gonna break every bone in your body!'. I just wanted her to touch me first. You should have seen how they rushed towards me and grabbed me to take me somewhere else. I said to them, 'why are you taking me away? Why don't you take her away and why haven't you stopped her?'."

Greta was segregated from her comrades and held in solitary confinement for seven months - "though prison regulations say that no prisoner should be isolated for so long whatsoever".

She was starved of people to talk to.

"A couple of times they had to bring and remove plates of food and, once a month, I'm allowed a visit by my parents. That's the only time I spoke to people. The only time I spoke to people was for two hours a month, when my parents visited. They wouldn't allow me to go church."

* Robert soon realised that his new partner's main mission was to save his life.

It extended to saving the lives of all inmates on death row.

Paula's association with the Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) facilitated this assault on capital punishment.

She became the driving force behind LHR's campaigns and policies on the death penalty.

John Leyden confesses to having been apprehensive when he was about to meet his sister's lover for the first time.

"I suppose I was slightly nervous to meet Robert because it's strange; it's a pretty bizarre experience to have to go through. Going into this place, you get sort of led in. The guards stand there; you know everything is being recorded - everything is going through a microphone. You got partition there. The guard stands behind you to sort of caution - 'you can't say that', 'you can't sat that' -, so I think the first meeting I had with him, I just went in and battled. It was like a nervous thing. I told him about lots of things - I thought I was gonna put him at ease by talking a lot."

He even told Robert about the thesis he was working on at Wits, which was on "Irrational beliefs".

Also, his views on music.

"I knew enough of Robert because Paula would talk about him and what they've said and what they've spoken about. It wasn't like I was coming in cold. (But) I battled a lot; I'm sure he actually thought 'what's this guy going on about?'. It was like strange."

Peter and Annette Leyden did not poke their noses into their daughter's affair with the ANC guerrilla on death row.

"Obviously we had a protective thing to Paula," says John, their only son. "Paula's involved in something that is gonna hurt her. That was our most protective instinct. My parents had the response of parents. It wasn't a racial or political response. It's a difficult thing; it's something you learn as a parent. I'm not a parent yet, but it's the notion of knowing that you have to let certain people go through things, and all you can do is be supportive and know that they'll come to their own conclusions on the situation."

Even before she got involved with Robert on death row, Paula's relationship with her principal as Silver Oak primary school was strained.

When she started campaigning to save her lover's life, Miss Leyden was then, in the eyes of Mr Plessie, skating on thin eyes.

She was teaching English to the standard 9s.

Plessie was not too amused when the English teacher then took some of her pupils to visit Robert on death row.

"I actually think only two went," says Paula. "That got back to him (Plessie), and he was very angry about that because he thought they were being misled. He never said anything directly to me. He always attacked me on the basis of my misleading the children and using my influence over them to get what I want."

At some stage, Paula had a picture of Robert up on the classroom wall.

"There wasn't much he could say," she laughs. "I had a lot of stuff in the classroom. I'd had an argument with him once before about stuff up on the walls. We did a contract, me and the children. A written contract about how we would behave to one another at the beginning of the year, and I put that up on the wall. He didn't like that. They signed and I signed. It was just to have mutual respect for one another. That was the essence. There were sort of different clauses in it."

Though the principal disagreed with Paula's relationship with her pupils, he could not have find her committment to her work wanting.

"I used to start at that school at 5.30 in the morning because I used to take the girls for keep-fit classes," Paula recalls. "I used to go there early and take them for classes and then allow them to clean up and change before school started. And I was very involved in the PTSA (Parents-Teachers-Students-Association). In my classroom I got a very good inspector's report. My record books and all that crap that goes into teaching were just fine. He never had anything that he could say - he couldn't say you got a bad inspector's report. It was quite obviously a very personal thing. He didn't like me, or disagreed with me."

At the end of 1987, Plessie informed her that there would be no teaching post available for her during the following year.

As fate would have it, Paula herself was then contemplating resigning from teaching.

"He wouldn't take me back at the school. I had gone to see Robert in the end of July/August - he'd been on death row about a month when I went there. I stayed at that school for the rest of the year. The conflict had deepened and he got to know of my involvement with Robert. We just had different conflicts. I also was finding it that it was difficult - that a formal job would restrict me in doing what needed to be done. That is why I decided to resign. I could have looked for another teaching job, but I decided not to. So I went full-time (into campaigning to save Robert's life)."

Though she was no longer having a paying job, Paula lived by her wits.

She would not ask her family to support her materially.

Caroline Cullinan re-connected with her in Johannesburg in 1987.

Among other things Caroline was busy with was designing the popular annual calendar for the Weekly Mail; the "alternative", anti-apartheid newspaper.

The two women met at about the time Paula was seeing Robert.

"I think it happened at the same time we re-made contact," says Caroline. "In my mind, it must have happened at the same time. She was teaching, and we saw each other on and off. But again, our social lives didn't actually converge - we don't have sort of social life together, it's more like a common respect; a mutual sort of deep friendship that survived all sorts of things as in the past. In fact I would say we're very different in our natures; in the way we approach the work. But we have a common thread - a common bond."

Paula confided in her friend her affection for Robert.

"That time I saw Paula, during that time, for me personally as a friend, it was a time of extreme stress and distress. She started seeing Robert and she told me that they had fallen in love at some point. I remember feeling absolutely horrified because I knew this man was on death row and I had no idea that she would ever be able to save his life.

"Then began Paula's long and lonely path; very very lonely path to get this man off death row. And that's during that time that we saw a lot more of each other than we normally did. I think in a sense, for me the agony - just watching her through the agony - first of all, falling in love, going there everyday to that place, and then at some point she said to me, 'I'm getting him out of there'. I looked at her and thought, 'what is she going to do now?'."

Caroline thinks that though Paula's parents supported her all the way, her love for Robert probably bothered them.

"I must tell you that during that time of the campaign - the time when she was seeing Robert -, very few people knew about it. I knew about it. Her mother knew about it. For her mother, it must have been very hard. I imagine for her parents to cope with the fact that their daughter was seeing Robert McBride - and at some point they knew about it and they stood by her. I think that must have been very very hard for them. Frankly, it's not quite what they would have had in mind for their daughter."

During the early stages of their affair, Robert's appeal against his three death sentences was about to be heard at the Appellate Court in Bloemfontein.

Paula sought to strengthen her partner's case by undertaking an unprecedented step - she was planning to pay the judge who passed the sentences a visit.

* Doris took her son's girlfriend to the Judge Douglas Shearer's house in Durban.

She waited in the car as Paula entered the colonial mansion on a cul-de-sac.

" It was quite emotional," Paula says of her meeting with Douglas Shearer. "I got quite upset talking to him; I found it quite upsetting."

In sentencing Robert to death, Shearer had stated that he was doing that "with sadness".

She challenged him, pointing out that one of he assessors had found extenuating circumstances.

Surely that suggested some other bench might have come to a different judgement, she argued.

She wanted him to write a letter to the judges at the Appellate Court urging them to spare Robert's life.

"I was quite personal in my approach in a sense I was saying to him, when he goes to bed at night, what does he think? Does he think about where Robert is and what he is going through and that he's just waiting to be hanged and that, if he hadn't passed the sentence that wouldn't have happened."

Shearer explained that the judgement had been a difficult decision and that he had come to the finding that there were no extenuating circumstances because the law decreed that.

However, he had written to the Appellate division motivating that Robert's sentence be reviewed.

"I came into the house and went in and I spoke to him in the house. I basically said what I wanted to say to him. I wanted to see what he had written and he wouldn't let me and said it was confidential. Anyway, we spoke for quite a long time and then we went outside and he showed me his rose garden."

Judge Shearer was a well-known rose grower in the Natal province.

He cherished his pink blossom, "Bride's Dream".

Paula acknowledges that there was an element of opportunism in her decision to meet Shearer face-to-face.

"The only thing I felt was that it is very difficult once he gets to know someone on a human level. He saw me; he had to speak to me; he had to look at my face; he had to somehow to relate to me and also, interestingly, I think that with his experience in society - someone like me who's white, who's reasonably educated, who's ex-British whatever; that he can relate to. You also think that is how someone like him works.

"He has a daughter my age. It would make it much more difficult for him not to do something. It wasn't a conscious strategy that, but I often had to utilise that fact about myself in dealing with people because that's the way the world works. He could relate. If I'd gone there and I'd been someone from a different community who had no experience like mine, I couldn't talk to him the way he liked to talk. I think it would have been different because that's what racism and class have done."

Before she got into the picture, Roshan had organised for Doris to go overseas to galvanise support for the campaign to save Robert's life.

Because Derrick and Robert's trial had taken their tolls on her health, he arranged that Bonnie accompany her.

"We went to London, and London it was like the base," Doris recalls. "We stayed in a hotel for about a week. Of course we were travelling from London to Germany, then back. And from London to the Netherlands and back. Governmental organisations and different parties, we would meet them. We went there to talk about Robert, we were going to tell the story of why he was in prison; what he did, what drove them to do such thins. Some had been hanged already, and then it was for me to show them why I felt they were in prison and they were being hanged. Wrongfully. I had to show them exactly what the government was doing to the people; that's why we came so far. I would put that in my talks."

Most of her talks were in the form of person-to-person interviews.

"Some places like in London, it was like talk - a speech in the hall amongst other speakers. Also other South Africans talking. They would sort of back me up when I say what the government did and how people were being treated. In Germany they were very keen to help. And also in Netherlands. Then I had to go to Wales also. I should have gone to Scotland, but I was held up in Germany."

Doris drew strength from her son.

"Strange enough, I was a bit nervous in the beginning, but when I knew what I was doing it for, I didn't worry. I just spoke what I had to say. At the back of my mind always I knew I was doing it for Robert."

In the London hall where she spoke, a large picture of her son was put on the wall.

This was the same picture the police had taken after Robert's arrest.

"His picture with his nose broken. You know, his nose was broken in prison. So just looking at it, I was no more scared. Bonnie couldn't talk. She couldn't talk at all, it was strangers."

* In Zambia, Gordon Webster was also working on a plan to stop his bosom friend from the hangman's noose.

Though most high officials in the ANC were not too helpful, Chris Hani, the chief of staff of MK, gave him all the support he could provide.

When he attended the hearing into the Edendale mission in London, he had obtained the home address of Justice Douglas Shearer.

He thought he could hold the judge hostage, demanding his friend's release from prison.

Hani suggested that Gordon go to the camps to get guerrillas who might help him carry this out the operation.

"We went to three camps, got a couple of guys, went back to Zambia, then they said we should go to Mozambique to facilitate movement from there to South Africa. There was a chap called Bongani, he was a recruit from Transkei."

Because of harassment of ANC activists by the police in Botswana and the threat of cross-border raids, it was felt Special Ops should move its operations from there to Mozambique and Swaziland.

"I stayed in Mozambique for two months. Underground. Tried and spoke to Chris Hani and said, 'I will have to go there (to South Africa)'. Then he agreed. Took another six months.

By then, Gordon had got married to his girlfriend Anne Mjikwa.

She helped him cope with the anguish of hitting against a brick wall most of the times when he wanted to implement the plan to rescue his friend.

Other ANC leaders got somehow enthusiastic when he suggested that the plan be extended to include other ANC cadres on death row.

"What we said eventually, we said, 'look, it's not for the benefit of Robert only. Get hold of the other guys who are on death row'. In that sense, get these guys, get them to the border, and that's the end of it."

The eventual plan was that Gordon be accompanied by only one activist when he cross the border back to South Africa to attempt to carry out the mission.

The activist, Tony Ntshangase, was originally from Natal province.

Gordon had personally picked him up at one of the ANC's camps.

"The good basis was, he's from Natal - he's quite versed in the area, and he had been in exile for about three to four months. Most guys I had been interviewing had been away about a year or two. Therefore, he was relatively fresh."

Anne, who was then five to six months pregnant, left before him for Durban, where she was to book a flat.

The flat would be used as a safe house once they had a hostage.

She was also to arrange the transport which would come to fetch Gordon and Tony at the border after they had crossed on foot.

When Anne reached Durban, she found a female friend who was to accompany her to the border when she went to fetch the two men.

At the time, she was heavily pregnant.

But Gordon did not have any doubts about involving her in the operation.

"I wouldn't trust anybody; I trusted her. So she came in, got this (female) person and, to hire the car, she got this man Madikizela - who is related to Winnie (Mandela-Madikizela, former wife to Nelson Mandela). So this chap says 'now here is the car here, I can't go with two females. Get a male go to with you'."

Eventually, Madikizela relented and left with the two ladies for the scheduled rendezvous with Gordon and Tony.

But further hitches developed in front.

"I don't know what the problem was, and they had to come back again. Because they were at the border and this guy was giving problems - he wanted to leave them behind. They said 'look, we are coming to pick them up. This car was hired for that'."

Gordon and Tony were to cross the border illegally; on foot.

Unfortunately, the two parties missed each other.

"We went back to Gaborone," Gordon continues. "It's a long distance. Very long. Very uncomfortable; it took two days. The roads are very bad. We missed each other because they came on the next day, and we were not there. So what happened was they kept on moving around the border, and then the (South African) soldiers asked, 'what are you doing here? We've been watching you going up and down'. And they came back (to Durban)."

In Botswana, Chris and Oupa worked hard to arrange an alternative transport to pick up the two guerrillas once they had crossed the border into South Africa.

They found a respectable looking man in a large, old saloon car to act as their courier.

The African man would be travelling with his wife and children to provide a good cover.

They crossed into South Africa at a village called Mabaalstad.

"This village is unique; it's part of South Africa, part of Botswana," says Gordon. "So we travelled with this guy and his wife."

Somewhere along the way, as they were about to reach another village, the driver informed them that there was a police roadblock in front.

"What was strange was, to us it was a roadblock," says Gordon. "He says 'there's a roadblock', but it was quite far - it's not close to where we are going. So, it wasn't a roadblock as such. You see the trucks were coming towards the village, and they stopped there. They were not at the roadblock anymore, they were coming towards this village. We had hardly stopped for two minutes, and suddenly, the (soldiers') trucks came."

The five or so trucks belonged to members of the BophuthaTswana Defence Force; the (then) so-called independent homeland.

"So, they stopped. They found nothing (on them). I don't know what happened, you know, this guy (Tony) was trying to take out his hand - he was doing something very funny, and then the soldiers went to him and said, 'what's this?' They found a grenade on him. They stood us naked. We were taken to Mmabatho."

The members of the BophuthaTswana Defence Force called in their counterparts from the South Africa.

Then the white policemen and soldiers took over.

"They just told them, 'look, you don't handle this chap'," Gordon says, shaking his head. "'Hello Webster!'"

They had finally landed the big fish.

Gordon's captors found a Makarov pistol, a hand-grenade and some money on his person.

As they searched him, he was silently praying that they do not come upon an incriminating note in his underpants.

This was the hand-written home address of judge Douglas Shearer, written on a photocopy of a page from "Hortor's Diary"; a legal handbook.

"I still had it on me. You get so used to doing things that you know that you wouldn't find a problem once you get to Durban. You become more vigilant once you're in the country. But the mere process of you getting into the country is different because you are in control, and you think everything will go fine."

The note on a page from the diary landed even Roshan Dehal in a sticky situation.

"The security police arrested me from my home in Verulum at about four o'clock one morning on the allegation that Gordon Webster was re-arrested and found in possession of a photocopy of a document taken from me from that room in the 'Park Lane hotel', with the name of the judge," he says. "The charge against me was that I had instructed Gordon Webster and others in the ANC to execute the so-called hanging judges (judges with a propensity to pass death sentences).

"That being the case, I knew I was over and done with. I remember sitting in the security police rooms (at CR. Swart square) then and looking at this office from there and knowing that I'm gone. That suddenly it's like your soul has left your body and you're sitting in hell and you're looking down at what has happened."

Luckily for him, the SBs failed to get someone to testify that he was in conspirary with Gordon Webster.

Doris and daughters were also suspected of being in cahoots with Webster.

They were arrested at Durban's Louis Botha airport as they returned from visiting Robert on death row.

The McBrides were taken to the C.R. Swart square, where they were interrogated in different rooms.

"They cross-questioned me about handing out literature and I said, 'I know nothing, I know nothing," Gwyneth relates. "The only literature I've got is my set-works books. I've got nothing else'. They showed me ugly photos of people - people who have been killed, and now they're supposed to make you so scared. And Bonnie was shouting on the one side and they had my mother on the side. Bonnie said, 'you don't touch my sister!'"

At the time, Gwyneth was about fourteen.

Bonnie's shouting echoed across the corridor, emanating from the room where the police were interrogating her.

"I've got the child," she says. "Each one moved in to her room - on the thirteenth floor of C.R. Swart is where it all takes place. All the funny things. As I got nearer, I could hear there's my mother talking; there's my sister talking, and I've got the baby. They now start to question me about 'they know that I'm involved and I'm keeping information from them'. About all of Robert's bombings. At that stage they didn't tell me that Gordon Webster was detained and that my telephone number and name were found in his book. I did speak to Gordon once, and I knew that he's coming through."

* Towards the end of 1987, as the appeal against his three death sentences was to be heard at the Appellate Court in Bloemfontein, Robert grew anxious.

The appeal hearing was scheduled for the beginning of the following year; 1988.

"I was very tense and worried," he remembers. "They could decide any way. I could be out again, or I could be wading in deep shit any time. That kind of situation."

It was no source of comfort for him as the number of executions increased markedly during the so-called Christmas rush.

"They were meaning business definitely. At that time we had a belief that these guys were taking revenge for the soldiers dying at the border (in skirmishes with guerrillas); because guys started dying like flies along the border. They put people in the 'The Pot' for a car bomb or something in Johannesburg. I think it was a coincidence, but then we thought they were related. We'd hear something on the news or someone would tell you - some people would exaggerate - 'the Boers are dying outside'. Then you would say to yourself, 'they are gonna start hanging us'."

Doris found it stressful both physically and financially to travel from Durban to visit her son in Pretoria and her husband in Cape Town.

In December 1987, she decided to relocate to Johannesburg.

She left Wentworth house under the care of Eric Apelgren; Greta's younger brother.

Keith Bingle took her to Father Smangaliso Mkatswha of the South African Catholic Bishops' Conference (now South Africa's deputy minister of education).

Mkatshwa who gave her R4000, 00 to deposit a house in the Johannesburg Coloured township of Eldorado Park.

Paula travelled to the hearing of the appeal in Bloemfontein with Doris, Bonnie and Keith Bingle.

The quartet went in Robert's big Ford van.

Keith was disappointed with the speed with which the judges reviewed the appeal.

"I accept the fact that these guys get the documents before, they scrutinise the documents and things like that, but I was flabbergasted because in five minutes' time, the court was over. The court was adjourned. The question I asked myself was, 'does it take five minutes to decide on a person's life? Was the lives of black people at stage so cheap?'"

They drove back to Johannesburg on the same day.

At the end of March 1988, the court publicised its finding that Robert's appeal had been rejected.

Now McBride could receive his notice of execution any day and be transferred to "The Pot".

Though, at the back of her mind Paula had suspected that the appeal would be rejected, she was heartbroken when she got the news.

She could not even drive herself to go and inform Doris in her new house in Eldorado Park.

Annette Leyden, her mother, drove her.

"I could see something was wrong with Paula," says Doris. "Then she sat down, and she was crying. The first time I saw her crying. I comforted her. Told her, 'he's not dead yet, don't give up'."

* Gordon Webster's trial started at about the same time as the hearing of McBride's appeal against his three death sentences at the Bloemfontein Appellate Court.

He did not really care what his fate would be.

Like Robert before him, he was just happy that the ordeal of detention was ending.

"Interrogation was so hard. I was chained, naked. There's a ring there - they tie your leg-irons on a ring in the room; on the drain; and then you are naked and you sleep on the floor. For the whole interrogation part - it was for three months -, they beat you up."

He chose to be represented by in court by his second eldest brother, George.

"I don't think there was going to be another lawyer who would be more sympathetic to me than my own brother. Who else could have done it? He was just an ordinary attorney. I don't know if he was involved in political trials before that."

At the time, George Webster was a member of a legal partnership.

Selby Baqwa, now South Africa's public protector, was one of his partners.

"Selby went to see him and then he informed us that he wanted me to take over," George recounts. "So there was nothing we could do about that. I had to resign from the partnership because the sponsors - there was something very strange going on, and I think the special branch had even infiltrated the sponsors; the ones in London in particular. They gave a directive that our partnership was not to defend Gordon.

"I got in touch with the sponsors and they said, 'no ways'. Actually, I had to go to Zambia to speak to the ANC. Time was of the essence because of the attitude of these forces. And also, knowing that during the course of that trial I was not gonna be able to generate any income. So that's why I had to resign as a partner."

George Webster reckoned the late Chief Justice Ismail Mahomed (then an advocate) would be the best "silk" to lead the fight to save his brother's life.

"Ismail Mohamed was one of he most respected advocates in the country," says the attorney. "In fact, beyond the borders. When it came to extenuation and mitigation, no one would stand up to him. Because he was such an extraordinary lawyer, he actually made law in these cases. When Mohamed came to town, any right thinking attorney or lawyer who was involved in mitigation or in criminal matters made it a point to go there because there was always a lesson to learn from Mohamed."

Mahomed, however, only came much later during Gordon's trial.

In the beginning, the senior counsel for defence was Nigel Willis.

"It was felt that it would not make sense to have Mohamed coming to defend on merits because on merits, there was no chance," George explains. "There was no way Gordon could have been acquitted; on all the charges."

The strategy was to let the state "show its hand".

Then Gordon would plead guilty and take the stand when a plea of mitigation of sentence was being entered.

The trial was held in Pietermaritzburg High Court - the same place where Robert's trial had previously been held.

Security was even tighter than when the McBrides were on trial.

There were fears that an attempt might be made to snatch the accused away.

Unlike Robert, Gordon escaped the gallows.

He was given a long prison sentence.

"I added up those sentences and came up with 105 or 107 years, and then he said they would run concurrently," says Trevor. "That was a sigh of relief for me; at least his life was spared. But it was sad that his friend was sentenced to death and he was given 25 years."

When he being taken to Robben Island on a boat, Gordon wondered what Robert would make of his failed attempt to save him.

"I was saying 'maybe I tried, I didn't succeed'. I felt maybe he will appreciate it, maybe he won't. But I tried to do something. If there were more comrades on the outside, it would have saved a lot of people."