Remember Nancy Sinatra’s classic song, These Boots are Made for Walking? There I am at eleven in our back yard in Zimbabwe. I press ‘play’ on my portable tape recorder and Nancy’s sassy voice rings out incongruously amongst the guava and paw paw trees. Unfazed that the gum pole I am about to tightrope up is slimy from the rain the evening before, I nevertheless set my sights some metres up and away, where the top of the telephone pole lies nestled like a black mamba in the crook of the avocado tree. Minutes later my arm is snake-shaped and requires a cast that will soon be scribbled over by my classmates and jabbed at underneath with a broken fishing rod that is just bendy and pokey enough to relieve the interminable itching of my withered arm. The song however, whilst not remaining the same, remained the anthem of my youth and then some. The boots I wore when I left home at 17 to get on a plane to the UK never to return, were more glam rock than the white sixties ones that Nancy Sinatra wore as she belted out Lee Hazlewood’s song, but the sentiment was the same. Nancy sang of a chick that was not going to stand for any more nonsense from her cheatin’ man and I’d had enough of the parochial mindset that characterised 80s South-Africa, to say nothing of the apartheid laws that got me into trouble time and again. My boots were also made for walking out of a life and a country that made no sense to me. Being teargassed and threatened by police with big guns and small minds was no joke, but it set me up for a life of living outside of questionable systems. The song is all about female empowerment, about having had it ‘up to here,’ putting on your sassy boots and just heading on out of town. Hitching a ride to Zimbabwe in my case, where electrical goods were scarce and I could get quite a sum for my ghetto blaster that would blast me straight out of Africa and into the UK. Which it did. Once there it was cowgirl boots that I wore. It was 1986. In the 80s there were still actual punk rockers on the Kings Road and Camden Market. It amazed me that I could walk down Camden High Street in a belted bin bag with my hair a surprise shock and black kohl scribbled all over my eyelids and no one would bat a lid. My proverbial boots were to take me upstairs and downstairs and into all sorts of unlikely places. One of my first jobs was working in the canteen of Elida Gibbs where the kitchen was steamy and the uniforms were not. I then looked after the child of a countess in Belgravia. I was to feed the child quails eggs and take him to and from school and say nothing about who I found with the countess in the morning. A succession of jobs followed, some improbable, some mundane, until they all became grist for a barefoot writer’s mill.