In 1983, my girlfriend and I left Cape Town to travel to London. I had made the decision to leave South Africa a year previously, when I graduated from university and received yet another set of call-up papers to the army. In 1983 there was a sense of things moving. The subsequent clampdown had not yet happened. The state of emergency had not been declared. Troops were not yet, by and large, occupying the townships. When the former prime minister John Vorster died, we had a Vossie's gevrek! (Vorster's dead!) party on Llandudno Beach outside Cape Town. Anything seemed possible.

It seemed perfectly possible, for example, to discard the life I had and to hitchhike to England, to be someone else. I gave away everything I owned except for my rucksack, sleeping bag, tent and stove, and a wad of travellers' cheques. Ostensibly I was leaving for "political" reasons, to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid army. But the truth was that I wanted to go - I had a sense of a bigger world out there. And so we did.

New Year's Day 1990. My girlfriend and I have taken the first steps towards creating a home in London by buying part of a house near Arsenal Football Club. She is attempting to teach me the basics of crosswords.

"Take 'Pretty girl in crimson rose'," she says. "Eight letters. What does it mean?"

"It means," she continues, "that we have a pretty girl and she is wearing something red, or pink. She is wearing something that suits her prettiness. Prettiness, girls, roses - they all go together."

I nod. "Got it," I say.

"It means," says my girlfriend, "nothing of the sort."

I nod again and smile encouragingly. I am keeping up.

"That,"she says, "is what they want you to think it means. What it actually means is either the first word or the last word. What it actually means is 'rose'."

Outside in the street, Arsenal fans are shuffling by after a game. It is already dark but I can tell from the suppressed hum of satisfaction that Arsenal won.

"So give me another word for crimson."

"Red?"

"Very good."

She writes down R E - - - - - D on a piece of paper. She looks at me expectantly.

"And pretty girl?"

"You?"

"I'm not a girl."

Outside the window a football crowd thins.

"Belle. Belle is another word for 'pretty girl'. And then we put belle, which means pretty girl, inside red, which means crimson, and we get R E B E L L E D, Rebelled. Et voilà."

"Rebelled means rose?"

"It does."

In reading a crossword clue it is sometimes necessary to take a different approach. I recently, for example, spent long hours looking at "Hormone red in Lana Turner (9)". I even went so far as to look up some of the things that Lana Turner is purported to have said, including, "A successful man is one who makes more money than a wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man."

"Yeah, right," snorted my girlfriend, who was with me at the time, and is not a fan of the philosophical musings of Hollywood stars from the 1940s and 1950s. It was only when I took another approach that I got it. The other approach was to think of "Turner" as the anagram indicator: the anagram was of "red in Lana", and the answer was that well-known hormone, adrenalin.

At this time anagrams seem to me the poor cousins of the crossword world, although in fact they need not be. I am beginning to realise that the art of the anagram is not the process of finding the "other words", but the process of telling the story that encapsulates the words. "Girlfriend", for example, is an anagram of "direr fling", or "fling rider", or "rifling red", or a whole host of other seemingly unconnected words. The art of the setter is to take those unconnected words and bind them with his wit.

My next lesson in crosswords takes place in Chad in the summer of 1991. The person who teaches me more about crosswords here works for a British NGO. She has a copy of the Guardian, and is telling me that it is the crossword that defines the character of the newspaper. This is a new idea to me.

"The Guardian crossword is not," she says, "like the Telegraph. This is not only a matter of taste. It's a question of style and of personality. It is a matter of attitude, and of how you understand the world."

Many years later a managing editor of the Times told me the old newspaper maxim: "They come for the news; they stay for the features." And in particular they stay for the obituaries and the crossword.

I am not yet ready to form allegiances on the basis of obituaries, but I am interested to know more about crosswords. My friend says, "It makes such a difference if you know who the setter is. If you know that, you're halfway there."

The setter in this case is Rufus. Sitting in Chad it does not seem possible to me to know someone called Rufus, but my teacher seems to think she does.

"He's one of the easiest," she says. "That's why I like him. That's not his real name," she adds.

That night I look again at Rufus. I am armed with two things: one is the knowledge that he is one of "the easiest"; the other is that, if you know the setter, you are halfway there. A clue catches my eye. "Émigré beaten up by the authorities (6)". By now I know enough to recognise an anagram. "Regime," I say to myself, as I fall asleep.

This is where I date my beginning.

In the spring of 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections. Many years later I learned that the Guardian setter, Araucaria, composed a puzzle to mark the occasion. It was puzzle number 20014, and according to the preamble it was, "A tribute on election day to the fighters for democracy, especially martyrs such as 6, 16 and 3." 6, 16, and 3 were Ruth First, Steve Biko and Chris Hani, all great leaders murdered in the course of the struggle for national liberation. Other heroes of this particular struggle who found their way into the puzzle were Alan Paton, and Helen Joseph and Joe Slovo (who, touchingly I thought, shared a clue). Then there was the triumvirate who more than any others transformed the African National Congress from the voice of plaintive nationalism to the mass movement it became, and the party of government it now is: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the late Oliver Tambo. There was also space for Cyril Ramaphosa, who led the negotiations that resulted in the new democracy.

The idea for the puzzle came to Araucaria late, and he had to telephone John Perkin, the editor, and ask him, as it were, to hold the back page for a "special". Perkin remembered the moment vividly, and was able to tell me both the puzzle number (20014) and that Araucaria had used Guardian grid number 40. Recently I asked Araucaria why he did it, and his answer was typically direct. "These were people I thought Guardian readers should know," he said.

He said this with strength and conviction, with the moral force of his life as a priest, and with a hint of anger, and it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that "should" in this context can have more than one meaning.

Crosswords tell stories. But who is telling the story? Is it the solver, or is it the setter? A good clue will send the solver shooting off into a variety of orbits, but he will always come back to the same point. In the end, all that is required is that he think of a synonym for the definition. How hard can that be?

For some years I imagined I might move to the US, where the crossword and the hard-boiled thriller were invented, but American crosswords didn't do it for me. The New York Times puzzle lacks the narrative quality of British puzzles. Its clues are too literal, its meanings too obvious. They lack also a common vocabulary, the difference between cricket, perhaps, and baseball.

In January 1998, the New York Times crossword editor, Will Shortz, allowed a young man to propose to his girlfriend by putting a message into the crossword. Shortz was a little suspicious when Bill Gottlieb called him. "At first," Shortz told me, "I thought I couldn't do this. I couldn't let the Times be used for something so personal. But then I called him up, and he seemed to me to be an earnest and sincere young man, and completely in love with Emily. I agreed."

"So anyway," Gottlieb told me, "Emily's doing the puzzle and I'm reading the rest of the paper and pretending not to know anything, and watching as she becomes suspicious. She fills in her name, and then my name. And then one answer is 'Will you marry me?' and she gets that. And then we had 'Yes' as an answer. And the clue for 'Yes' was 'Hoped for answer to "Will you marry me?" '

"And by then," Gottlieb continued, "she knew something was up, and that's when I asked her, properly, to marry me.

"And I said 'yes'," said Emily.

As an art form, the cryptic puzzle has been appropriated by the British; they have written the rules in their own image. What appealed to me was not only the general idea of British crosswords, but the particular form they take in British broadsheets, the Guardian in particular.

I am not, for example, a Telegraph person. I do like, though, the story of how the long-time editor of its crossword got into trouble for this clue: "Outcry at Tory assassination (4,6)". The answer is BLUE MURDER. It is not, on the face of it, an objectionable clue. But it appeared in the Telegraph on July 30 1990, the day that Ian Gow, a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's government, was blown up in the driveway of his home by the Provisional IRA. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that some people took offence, although the editor's defence - that the clue had been prepared weeks before, and she had no foreknowledge of it - is not unreasonable.

How much greater, one wonders, would have been the offence, had the same clue been phrased as it appeared in the Guardian recently. "Clamour for Tory assassination (4, 6)" has a much more sinister edge, and leaves one in no doubt as to the political sympathies of the setter, and his presumed readership. (Actually that should be "their" readership. Gemini, the setter, is not one, but two people.)

Since it was crosswords that offered me a grip on the seemingly blank cliff face of Britain, I started teaching myself about them and the people who create and solve them. I was curious about how they worked, and I was curious to ask the question that had been bothering me since Chad. Can a crossword have a personality? Who are the setters? Who is Rufus?

I meet Rufus in a London pub. He comes complete with notes and anecdotes, and is very helpful. He was born in Wolverhampton in 1932, and left school at 15 to join the navy. When he resigned, he became an entertainment officer, a redcoat at Butlin's. For the past 40-odd years he has been making his living as a comedy-magician, which is, he says, "as good a definition of a crossword compiler as any".

Rufus is famous in the crossword world for the sheer volume of his output. He has had more than 57,000 puzzles published, at an average output of 38 puzzles each week. He has been cataloguing, first on cards and now on a computer, all his clues since 1963. I ask him about "émigré" and he is able to look it up and tell me when and where it was published (the Guardian, 1991). Similarly, I ask about "Pretty girl in crimson rose (8)", and he is able to tell me that it is not one of his. "But I did use 'Pretty girl in red and rose (8)' in the early 1980s," he says, "and 'Rose, a lovely girl in crimson (8)' in 1997. They are all pretty much the same thing."

Like other setters, Rufus has several other pseudonyms: Hodge in the Independent and Dante in the FT. He shows me a letter (subtitled "my favourite!") to the Guardian dating from March 1992. It reads: "For me, Araucaria is the Beethoven of setters - immensely impressive, but laboured and heavy footed at times. Too many of his clues are tortuous and meaningless. The incomparable Rufus, on the other hand, is Mozart -- concise, elegant, witty, sparkling..."

Like all professional entertainers, Rufus takes the business of self-promotion seriously. He gives me a list of favourites, some by himself, some by others, and then tells me one that is not on the list, which he credits to the author, Ian Polley.

"Wrinkled old retainer," he says, "seven letters."

I am some way off the mark.

"Scrotum," says Rufus, with a chuckle.

I arranged to meet the Guardian setter, Pasquale, in a pub near Waterloo station. Pasquale is a friendly, gentle man who works for Oxford University Press. Like Rufus he is known for his prodigious output, and claims to "set a clue every three hours or so" (including sleeping hours). I am eager to meet him because of his puzzles, but also because he is one of the few people to have criticised Araucaria in print. Pasquale's particular criticism is that Araucaria strays too far from the rules, and is sometimes guilty of grammatical unsoundness. He is, the accusation goes, prone to creating clues that could only be clues, clues in which the surface meaning is too far removed from everyday usage. That said, like everyone else he enjoys doing Araucaria's puzzles.

Pasquale is a setter on several national papers, but he also edits the puzzles of the Church Times, for which Araucaria sets. "I don't do it much any more," Araucaria tells me. "He keeps changing my clues, which I don't much like. Of course," he adds, "we have had a long-standing war over this."

Pasquale and I eventually meet for supper in a pub south of the Thames. I ask him about his criticism of Araucaria, and his face lights up. "I've got the prize puzzle," he says, "on Saturday. Have a look at it. It's my comment on some of Araucaria's clues."

The prize puzzle in the Guardian is mostly set by Araucaria, but sometimes others get a look-in. Bunthorne may have one a month. Enigmatist from time to time. Occasionally Paul. And now Pasquale.

"Do the puzzle," he says. And then, as all setters do from time to time, he has a moment of doubt about the clue. "It's a quotation," he adds, "a bit obscure. But it is in the dictionary. I think people will get it. I think it will be all right." ("All right" is an expression setters use frequently, as a euphemism for "fair".)

And so I get the paper and look eagerly for the clue, which is: "See cluer's use of rare, silly pseudo-lingo - absurd nonsense from 4 (10, 5, 5, 5, 9)". I can see the reprimand. Silly pseudo-lingo and all that. But the quote? I have a moment of doubt. If this is to be a good clue, then both the solution and the surface meaning must feed each other. It will not do for the answer to have nothing to do with "cluers" and their (alleged) silly pseudo-lingo. It must somehow complete the story.

And when I get it, of course, it does.

The answer to 4 down in this puzzle is Chomsky. So we can put that into the clue: "See cluer's use of rare, silly pseudo-lingo - absurd nonsense from Chomsky (10, 5, 5, 5, 9)". Something Chomsky said, then, and an anagram indicated by "absurd".

The answer is COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY, an anagram of "See cluer's use of rare, silly pseudo-lingo". This, many Guardian solvers will know, is the sentence with which Noam Chomsky announced his arrival as a force to be reckoned with in the field of linguistics, the example he chose to demonstrate that sentence might be grammatical without being meaningful. The reprimand is complete. "Good grief," says Araucaria when I ask him. "Was that about me? I did solve the puzzle - I don't always - but it passed me by completely."

Araucaria is now an old man, but he continues his prodigious output of 15 crosswords each month, as he has for 45 years. He is a stylist, and his reputation for fiendish complexity is matched only by his reputation for fairness, which is to say he will not knowingly cut corners in a clue.

Araucaria wrote the clue that Nick Smith in a letter to the Guardian on January 21 2001 claimed to be "the best crossword clue ever". Consider two pieces of information that would have been readily available to Guardian readers such as Nick at the time. The first is that in 2000, 13 years after he told it, Jeffrey Archer's lie about Monica Coghlan came back to haunt him. The second is that, before his subsequent trial and conviction, Archer retired from the public eye and took refuge in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

And so to the clue: "Poetical scene has surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)". The answer is The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, a "surprising" anagram of "chaste Lord Archer vegetating", or as Nick Smith put it to me, "the most perfect clue, probably the best ever".

Why? Those who don't do crosswords may think this a small point. But those who do will know that legitimate 26-letter anagrams are few and far between. They will know that clues calling on such a range of knowledge for their solution come along only now and then. They will have experienced the tedium of simple anagrams. And they will know that, somewhere in this clue - and in the puzzle that surrounded it, for the theme of the day was English verse - a particular kind of genius is at work.

I asked Araucaria to re-create for me the process of creating this clue. Although he has now acquired a computer and may on occasion use it, he prefers to do his anagrams with an old Scrabble set. He spills the pieces on to the table in the sitting room of his small house, and spells out The Old Vicarage Grantchester before scraping the rest of the pieces back into their box. As he does so, I detect a change in him. From being a shy and quietly-spoken man, he takes on a mantle of authority. The set of his mouth changes. His fingers caress the Scrabble pieces and I notice that some of them are so worn that he has had to ink in the letters again.

"Lord Archer came first," he told me with a twinkle, and he removes from the jumble of letters the ones that make up the two words. "And he had been in the news a lot. I think they call it a flair for publicity." He pauses and moves the letters around on the rosewood coffee table. "And I thought it would be interesting to do something with Lord Archer."

But I can see that he is not really thinking about me, or about Archer. His mind is calculating other anagrams, his fingers dancing from one to another like a jazz pianist groping for a song.

"But it didn't leave me much," he says, a little affronted that he should be left with so few letters. Those that remain are T, H, E, V, I, C, A, G, E, G, A, N, T, E, S, T. "Not very much at all."

Again he casts his hands across them, mixing times and keys, playing snatches from forgotten clues. "At first I got the word 'teach' and I was trying to think what to do with 'teach'. And of course I had 'ing'. But 'teach' or 'teaching' didn't lead anywhere. What have they to do with Archer? So the clue only came when I worked out that I could have 'chaste'. And I knew immediately that 'chaste' and 'Lord Archer' could make something interesting. And so I took 'chaste' out" - which he does as he speaks -"and I was left with this lot." And he looks down at these letters and again I notice the twinkle in his eye: T, E, V, I, G, E, G, A, N, T. "And then I had it."

Araucaria and I look at each other, and I see that the look in his eye is not just a twinkle. There is something else there, a suggestion of sterner stuff, and a knowledge that he is straying into territory where only the braver setters go. He is making a political statement. He is delivering a reprimand to Archer and all his vain, dishonest ilk, and he is doing it in the most delicate, most imaginative manner possible. And in doing so he is giving rein to a notion of romance and of patriotism to which I do not believe Lord Archer can begin to aspire.

Some months later, after Archer had been convicted, a Guardian reader in the Netherlands remembered the Araucaria clue and proposed a new clue."Now that [Archer] has changed addresses" he wrote, "may I suggest an update: Where shaken Archer's 'I'm noble!' palls (1,8,6,4)". The answer, of course, is: A Belmarsh prison cell.

In the early winter of 2001, I decided that I wanted a puzzle about me to appear in the Guardian for my 40th birthday, and I wanted Araucaria to set it.

As a theme I chose "thrillers". I gave Araucaria a list of words. He got most of them in, but there were some he left out. He didn't find a place for "English". Nor did he fit in "previously undiscovered meanings", although of course the puzzle, like all crossword puzzles, is about just such meanings. But he did get in "hero" and "Sandy", "thriller" and "autobiography". I asked for Guardian grid 40, but Araucaria was of the view that this is a lousy grid and did not offer enough variety of word length. Instead, he used grid 28.

When Araucaria sends me the puzzle, it arrives in a form I have not previously seen. The clues are on the left-hand side of the page. The solutions are on the right, together with various forms of crossword annotation to explain each answer. "I hope you think it's all right," he says. "I think it is. I think it should be OK." Along with crosswords, Araucaria has long since mastered the art of the understatement.

My puzzle appears in the Guardian on February 16 2002, puzzle number 22445. I rise early and hurry to the newsagent, where I buy up the entire stock of Guardians. I take them home and spread one out on the kitchen table. To forestall a lurking panic attack and to make sure there are no typing errors, I quickly fill in the grid. It all looks fine. I am a little nervous, though. Now that I see it in print, I am not sure whether it will stand the scrutiny of thousands of solvers. Will they spot some glaring error that neither Araucaria, nor I, nor the Guardian editor have seen?

I am still gazing at it, with a grin on my face and a certain melancholy in my heart, when the children come down to have their breakfast.

"Happy birthday, Daddy."

"Look," I say, "I'm in the paper."

"Are you? Where?"

They cluster round me, and I show them the grid, complete with my name.

They look disappointed.

"That's not you, Daddy," says my younger daughter. "That's a crossword puzzle."

Children have a way of seeing through things.

My girlfriend was more understanding.

"Nice one," she said, and it was.

Nine days after the puzzle appeared in the Guardian, a list of the winners appeared. I called them all, to see what they thought. Three couldn't remember the puzzle. They send in 10 or 15 entries a week, and a puzzle is forgotten as soon as it is finished. Two thought it was great, but both immediately made self-deprecating jokes.

"I think that of everything by Araucaria," said one. "He seems to be head and shoulders above the rest."

"Isn't he lovely?" asked the other. "Everything he does is so witty."

The former is 22 and studying mathematics. The latter is 76, and has been doing crosswords for more than half a century. It seemed to me entirely appropriate that this puzzle should have brought pleasure to people so different in age.

Talking to these setters and solvers, however, I realise that I still have some way to go before my range of reference points equals theirs. I look forward to the journey

· This is an edited extract from Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose (8): A Memoir Of Love, Exile And Crosswords, by Sandy Balfour, published by Atlantic Books on February 13 at £12.99. To order a copy for the special price of £10.99, plus UK p&p, call 0870 066 7979.

· Answer to crossword clue: Wit and wisdom