Free Gweilo by Martin Booth Page B

was the fact that one could be hit by a chicken bone or other detritus from a completed meal. This I found curiously incongruous. The Chinese were a fastidious race and yet here they were throwing their garbage out of the window and into the street. Without looking first. From some way up. When I passed my thoughts on to Ching, he explained that it was habit: in China, one threw waste food into the street and the local pigs or dogs ate it. That there were no pigs wandering the streets of Kowloon seemed immaterial to the residents. At least there were pi-dogs – stray mongrels – although none of them looked porcinely overfed.
    In Soares Avenue, there was a line of shops. I crossed the road and started to inspect them. They did not have front windows, being more like square caves giving directly on to the pavement. One sold everyday kitchen utensils, but even some of these were alien to me. Shallow, cast-iron cooking pots, which I subsequently learnt were called woks, hung from hooks overhead, a shelf bore what I was to discover were rice steamers and there were sets of woven baskets, one inside the other. Packets of chopsticks, rice bowls, serving dishes, quaint porcelain spoons tied together with string, minute bowls, soy sauce dispensers, teapots decorated with red and gold dragons and handle-less tea cups and bowls with lids stood or lay in profusion on a table board balanced on trestles. Near by were displayed wooden cutting blocks bound by steel hoops, meat choppers and knives of medieval ferocity.
    Moving on, I came to a fruit seller whose stock, spread out under bright lights, was even more unusual. He sold oranges, lemons, bananas and apples, but the remainder of his offerings might well have been picked on another planet – waxy-looking star-shaped fruit reminiscent in texture of my grandmother's hat flowers only not as dusty; huge grapefruit-like fruits, split open to show pale citruslike segments within; knobbly custard apples; deep sea-green watermelons bigger than footballs; spiky ovals I discovered to be durians; and what appeared to me to be short lengths of leafless tree branch.
    The shopkeeper, seeing me standing admiring his stock, came round the front and spoke to me, picking up the grapefruit-like pomelo and holding it out. By now, I had picked up more than a smattering of Cantonese and said, ' M'ho cheen. ' To emphasize my impecuniosity, I patted my pockets. He laughed, stroked my blond hair, took out a sharp knife, sliced open the pomelo and offered me a segment. It was time to keep my promise.
    I accepted it, said, ' Dor jei ,' and put it in my mouth. It was sweet and tart at the same time, the cells of the segment erupting upon my tongue. 'Ho!' I said and I meant it. It was very good.
    The fruit seller smiled and picked up one of the lengths of branch. It was pale silvery-green and about an inch thick. He shaved the bark from all of its length but a few inches at one end, with which he handed it to me like a truncheon. I had no idea what to do with it. Seeing this he prepared another length, bit some off the end and chewed it. I followed suit. It was sugar cane, saturated with syrupy sap. When he had sucked the stringy cane dry, he spat it out on the pavement. I copied him. Then a fish head hit me on the shoulder. I was, I considered, now at one with the streets, duly initiated and baptized.

    I made friends at school but rarely visited my friends' homes or spent time with them away from the classroom or playground. My life was centred on the Fourseas and the adjacent streets and alleyways.
    In one fetid passageway, I came across a family of four who lived in a large crate that had been used to ship a Heidelberg printing press from Germany. They had improved their abode by nailing a sheet of tin to it to protect against the elements, putting a plank across the entrance to stop any rubbish drifting in and standing the crate on four short blocks to keep it clear of the ground and rainwater that