I don't know that I thought that at the time, of course, or that it was so well formulated. But I doubtless realised that there was something funny about it. She was holding me as if I were a burden she would like to put down as swiftly as possible.

In Kampala that night I thought about her and my father, both of them now long since dead. I had difficulty in conjuring up their faces in the darkness. That was a shocking moment. I had forgotten what my parents looked like. It had been a long time since I had seen them, of course: my father died in April 1972 and my mother a couple of years later. There was a no-man's-land of thirty years between the faces I had seen and those I could no longer remember.

On the other hand I could quite distinctly recall the smell of my father's hair and his suits. My mother's face was blurred, but I could remember the sound of her voice, the way she spoke, the unmistakable traces of the Örebro dialect that she had spoken as a child.

In my mind I wrote a few memory books about my parents. And of course it was possible to do that. The memories of a smell and a voice meant that the faces came slowly out of the darkness. Now I could see my parents again. The memories behind those smells and sounds opened up many other avenues of memory. I recalled events, conversations, images, both in close-up and long shots.

It is true that neither words nor photographic images are necessary for memories. That is precisely why the examples of memory books that I saw in Uganda were so remarkable. I thumbed through the little exercise books. They contained pressed flowers, insects, one including a butterfly whose wings gleamed in an unusual shade of blue. Somebody had Sellotaped in grains of sand. There were also drawings: matchstick men, landscapes, animals, as if the pages were ancient cave paintings.

I saw stories without words, without pictures.