This is a series of stories under the title “My Storied Childhood“. It is recommended to read them in order, starting with the Prelude.
The English novelist L.P. Hartley memorably wrote, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” This, in my case, is doubly true. I am going to take the reader to a very different time in a distant foreign country, to see it through a child’s eyes, but before I do so, I must mention that my first home, of which I have no memory, was on Ebury Street, in London’s Pimlico district near Victoria Station, and it is of my second home, in Acacia Close, a cul-de-sac in a suburb of London, where my first real memory is rooted. A gang of boys on bicycles there came swooping down on me on my tricycle, and I pedalled for dear life to get away from them. I must have escaped, but then there is a gap. How I got to South America I cannot recall– I am told it was by sea– but my childhood after that incident remains vivid to this day. My family and I lived in Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, in the 1950s. It was then a wonderful place to live for foreign professionals, but is so no longer. We lived there like privileged diplomats, but unlike them, we were answerable to a vast corporation rather than to a foreign government. Like them, however, as with those in the military, we went where we were sent.
The city of Caracas was named for the indigenous tribe that had occupied the area in which it was founded in 1567 by Spanish colonists. At the time we lived there, Venezuela’s President, the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, encouraged overseas expertise in the development of the nation’s economy, and a host of international businesses flooded into the country to exploit its bountiful natural resources, particularly its oil and iron ore. Their mostly American and European employees were well-paid, the cost of living was manageable, crime rates low, the tropical climate welcoming at a steady and reliable year-round 70-80 degrees due to the foresight of its founders, who had built it at an elevation of 3,000 feet above the heat and humidity at sea level. The beauty of the city was breathtaking, with the Avila mountains soaring above us, palm trees and tropical flowers everywhere, and parks, country clubs, museums, and pedestrian plazas in well-maintained abundance. This was a world of plenty and prosperity. With a million dollars a day flowing into his own pocket in personal offshore accounts, Perez Jimenez (‘PJ’) built superhighways and skyscrapers and improved infrastructure with the mountains of oil revenue at his disposal, clamouring for yet more foreign investment to fuel the country’s breakneck pace of development. I went to Escuela Britanica in Altamira, an independent international school, with the children of other foreign employees. The curriculum was unabashedly British. My American friend Tim Lloyd’s dad worked for General Electric; my own father, an oil economist, worked for Shell Oil, which paid our school fees. The classmates I remember were Dutch, Swiss, German, Norwegian, English, Scottish, Italian, and American. Venezuelans were not permitted to attend. Our headmistress was Canadian, from Vancouver; our female teachers were all English, Welsh, or Scottish, young, attractive, and unmarried, on short-term contracts, and I had childish crushes on several. It was possible in those days for many foreign-born residents in the more affluent areas of the city to live their lives sheltered from everyday contact with native Venezuelans, apart from those one met downtown, at the grocery store, or employed as servants, and even many of these were Europeans, like Francisco, our gardener, and Maria, his wife and our maid, who came from Spain.
