During the course of her research into lung disease among retired black mineworkers, she travels extensively through impoverished rural areas and, everywhere she went, she found beautiful things made out of old rubbish; papier mache bowls made by communities of HIV positive women, beaten tin picture frames and mobiles that look like Mexican silverwork, wire sculpture, bottle top jewellery decorated with tiny still life paintings – miniature rotundas painted within the scolloped frames of Fanta caps – bathmats made out of purple and gold sweet papers; school lunch boxes made from misprinted sheet metal; ornamental poppies made from old Coke tins and, best of all, Lucy’s dazzling carpet bags.When they met, Lucy fell eagerly upon a purple Liberty bag that Anna happened to be carrying It was the classiest plastic bag she had ever seen. My son Joseph, who had spent time in the Ecuadorean Andes had noted the creative skill and ingenuity of people who have almost nothing and he wanted to set up an exhibition of artefacts made of recycled materials at his art school in England. He enlisted the help of his older sister Anna, who works in epidemiology in Johannesburg. (A while back, they were known as “Zola Budds” on account of their dizzy speed.) Although her arthritis and her perfectionism mean that Lucy works slowly, she worries that not enough people will want to buy her bags.I became aware of the bags through my children. These are 12-seater vehicles, often in dubious condition, that habitually carry 20 passengers each. A community self-help project had taught her how to weave flat mats from plastic waste and, by varying this basic flat-weave technique, she hit upon her own way of producing a thick nap and turning her cloth into strong, durable bags.These days, one of Lucy’s two sons helps her to sell her bags in Johannesburg by peddling them to the black commuters who wait in queues for the combie taxis that have replaced buses as the means of getting people into work.

Lucy herself began to make something beautiful out of the ugliness of the vision that had landed her there. Nothing grew in this place except the occasional plastic bag, blown for miles on the wind, that clung to the barbs of the wire fencing. Supermarket plastic bags, with their vivid, acid colours, have become the 20th century’s desert flowers.Joe Lelyveld, in his wonderful book Move your Shadow, has written about how, incredibly, these already dirt-poor groups of discarded people managed, over time, to make their grisly contexts viable. Declared a “black spot” within a “white” area of the western Transvaal near the border with Botswana, they were despatched to a piece of land within the “homeland” of Bophutuswana; they and their meagre possessions thrown on to the backs of trucks. Barbed wire and open graves met the new inhabitants on arrival.Lucy’s community was one of these groups.

It heaved out these groups of defenceless people to remote hell-holes in no man’s land where the life expectancy was such that the authorities often dug rows of graves before the people were resettled there. Her results are like Kandinski paintings or those brilliant patterns that visit the back of the eye if you stare at the sun on a bright day.During the decades of apartheid, the South African government, having first used the Group Areas Act to expel large urban black populations from their homes in city centres, then turned its attention to those pockets of rural black communities which had been scratching a living from what the government had by then designated as “white” land. They do not come in a kit from the homecraft section of a department store. She says she dreams each pattern after staring hard at the colours of her hoard of plastic, so each bag is unique. The bag is just big enough to hold my pyjamas, my going out clothes, travelling toiletries and race gear, walking shoes and two paperback novels. It was made in South Africa by an elderly lady called Lucy.

She makes her bags out of used supermarket carrier bags which she cuts up into one- centimetre strips. Using the best coloured bags she can scavenge, she weaves the strips on to a backcloth of what is locally known as a “mielie sack” – a “mielie” being a corn cob. The sacks are made of that plastic hessian which, in Britain, is used to bag up builders’ sand. It is no guarantee that she will not develop the cancer for other reasons, such as long- term exposure to oestrogenic hormones.