Marita van der Vyver regularly visits her family’s peaceful place in South Africa

Author Marita van der Vyver has lived in the French countryside for a long time, but she regularly returns to her family’s peaceful place in South Africa.

It’s funny how the allure of a place can catch you unawares, isn’t it? You might think you’re safe, you’re not really one for wide open spaces, you’re a girl from the suburbs and the sea. And then you realise you’ve lost your heart.

Aurora, a village hidden in a dale halfway between Piketberg and Velddrif, became my family’s place almost by accident. It’s not as if we descend from people of the West Coast or Sandveld. We always used to holiday on the Southern Cape coast with its warmer waters. Franskraal, Stilbaai, Skipskop – that’s where I spent the summers of my youth. But the Southern Cape started to burst at the seams and my dad, who has always loved cowboy movies, decided: Go West, young man.

Well, he wasn’t a young man any more when he retired to the West Coast. And old enough to know that even this coast would eventually get “developed”. So he made one of the smartest moves of his life: he turned his back on the sea and bought an old house with a high stoep in Aurora. That’s how Aurora became “our place”. When we sit on that stoep and gaze across the plains, we don’t miss a sea view. This view is wider than the sea.

Here, it feels as if you can see into eternity.