When I read Harper Lee’s lyrical description of the town of Maycomb in her masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird, I was instantly reminded of Maracaibo: the same small-town familiarity, oppressively soporific heat, slow, indolent pace of life, and a neighbourliness due to the proximity of other children, all English speakers, that we knew from school. Behind us was the home of Gerhard and his sister Angela, but Boo Radley did not live next door, and no tree had a knot-hole for him to fill with gifts, only enormous belligerent iguanas, one of which had bitten off the thumb of a visiting salesman, or so he claimed, showing us its stub. Angela even told my brother Desmond that the bats who came out at dusk from trees on the other side of the street would fly into your hair as you passed if you were not careful, and you could never disentangle them from your hair. Desmond believed her. One early evening, I climbed the encircling wall of our front yard to watch a bicycle race down the middle of the empty street. One of the cyclists was an older boy from school who was gaining on two rivals. I jumped up and down in excitement, only to lose my balance and plunge to the ground, breaking my left arm as I did so. The nuns at the nearby hospital were gentle and kind, but I had to wear a heavy cast for weeks, and could not scratch persistent sweaty itches from my imprisoned writing wrist, perhaps penitence for my carelessness. My handwriting was barely legible until I was free of the cast.
The school was Escuela Las Delicias, and here, as in Caracas, the curriculum was British: pounds, shillings and pence in arithmetic, and history exclusively English. To my gratified surprise, I recently discovered photos of it taken in the 50s, and posted on the internet by a former pupil. It is smaller than I remember, but then so was I. As of 1988 it was still in operation, but doubtless no longer a ‘Shell’ school, as it was then. My brother and I travelled by distinctive red-and-black school bus there and back twice daily, as in Caracas, but Desmond was allotted a separate playground for younger pupils. Classrooms were single-story and open on one side to ease the heat of confinement. I remember nothing of my classmates, but do recall a geography text we used, which, instead of a tedious listing of the primary exports of various countries (copra, hemp, rubber, etc.) and showing maps of “isotherms,” whatever they were, showed line drawings of Carlos’ family in Mexico or Vikram’s in India, in all their intriguing variety. For my favourite subject, English, I recall hating to do countless dictionary exercises on the verandah back home, yet having to admit that for all the effort expended in looking up words I did not know at the time, there was a payoff: I did learn to use new words, and recognize them with the shock of re-discovery upon encountering them in English school stories and American westerns and mysteries. It was in the garage that I came upon a cache of children’s books left behind by a previous tenant: Joanna Spyri’s Heidi, which I loved as a convincing study of childish jealousy, and which persuaded me for the first time to eat cheese, on account of the lyrical descriptions of Heidi’s grandfather’s cheese-making skills; Black Beauty, even though I did not like horses, and a number of others now long forgotten. I have often wondered who abandoned them, and why. At school I picked up and read with disagreeable discomfort the grotesque stories of Struwwelpeter, a book of heavy-handed ‘moral’ tales about what happens to children who are willfully disobedient. One of these deals with the punishment of a boy who either sucks his thumb or bites his nails, or both: he gets his fingers cut off. The stories are accompanied by sadistic illustrations. I now know this was a German book of 19th century ‘cautionary’ tales, but from an early age, I disliked overt horror and unsubtle sermonizing, and am convinced that it was then that I formed a preference for the sentimental and subtle over the sensational, romance rather than realism, fantasy over science fiction, and sympathetic characterization over clever plotting. I loved word play (‘Why did the butter fly? Because it saw the kitchen sink’; ‘For her, Britannia waived the rules’), language, poetry, history, and song, and actively disliked arithmetic with an animus that, to my cost, only intensified as the years passed.
