Free Terroir by Graham Mort Page B

woven mats, baskets, tools, tapes of Congolese music, leather belts and cheap shoes. There were cheap shoes everywhere. Clever imitations of Reebok trainers and Italian style shoes with pointed toes and plastic soles. In Owino the light was so bright it was like walking into polished blades. There wasn’t a stitched or welted shoe anywhere, not even above the markets in the commercial district around the Crane Bank, where our office was. Where men in smart suits mingled with the crowds and street hawkers. Where the same man lay asleep every day on the pavement – barefoot, drunk, drugged or dying from Aids – his skin gleaming like oiled wood.
    All the time I was in Nakasero I thought about the mill town of my childhood. The factories were still there but King Cotton had died, as all dictators do in the end. The mills were mostly empty hulks staring into algae - infested lodges. The cradle of industry. That was the cliché they’d fed us at school. Now the factories were rented out to engineering outfits or catalogue sales companies that went bankrupt after a couple of years. Or they lay empty, giant nurseries for the rats that took to the town’s sewers and culverts at night.
    All through my childhood the chimneys came down, one by one. A red brick forest became a clearing. It was strange to think of that in the centre of Kampala. Well, maybe not so strange, here in the old empire where the Nile rose a few miles away and flowed north to water the plains of Egypt. I remembered old Mrs Stead, our next - door neighbour, speaking lovingly of the Sea Island and Egyptian staples that she’d spun with my grandfather. Purple veins stood out on her crippled hands.
    It was only a brief flare of synapses, a blush of memory in the chemical brain, to connect Nakasero or Owino market in Kampala to Tommyfield market in Oldham, or the little market behind the swimming baths in Chadderton, or the famous market in Bury where you could buy black puddings and yards of worsted or cotton cloth.
    After their retirement my parents had loved to take a day - trip to Skipton or Halifax, wandering through the markets in search of bargains, buying a nice piece of rolled brisket and having fish and chips for lunch. Every so often my father would return home with a pair of shoes, a bargain from the Age Concern or Oxfam shop. Those shoes had the scent of death and decay about them, a coolness to the touch as if body heat had just evaporated. Once he bought a mobile phone, a year or two after my mother had died in Crumpsall hospital, but he’d never learned to use it. Another gadget – like the TV remote – he never got the hang of. A problem he attributed to things that were fucking rubbish , rather than to himself.
    Now here I was in Owino, a sweaty mzungu among thousands of Africans, wandering towards Nakasero in my bush hat and cargo pants, thinking about the dark little cobbler’s shop I’d visited as a child.
    Where I grew up there were four spinning mills, built at the turn of the century when cotton really was king, and money was still spewing from the frames and looms for the mill owners. My grandfather had been employed in King’s Mill as a mule spinner until he’d lost three fingers from one hand and worked out his days on the roads for the Corporation. He died six months before retirement, leaving a sweet - jar full of sixpences he’d saved. He didn’t even live long enough to see his son buy his first car – a Morris Seven with a second - hand prop - shaft and differential. We had some old photographs of my dad with his mother on the front in Morecambe – a stout woman in a beret leaning on the bonnet and licking an ice cream in the wind.
    The cobbler’s shop was below the mills. Below the fishmonger’s and the corner - shop butcher’s and the Co - op where we bought ammunition for our peashooters, where my father had begun work just before his fourteenth birthday.