As Maracaibo’s heat was often unendurable, we sought the swimming pool at the club to which we were entitled to belong. I remember a swimming instructor encouraging me to dive deeply from the side of the pool, and her shocked expression on being told that I had chipped my front tooth on the bottom of the pool in my effort to oblige. She was probably relieved I did not tell my parents. They never referred to it. Speaking of them, while I knew little of my father’s attitude to his place of work, my mother longed to exchange Maracaibo’s parochialism for the sophistication of the capital, though she realized that there were worse places for oil company employees, like the “camps” and isolated company compounds we could have been sent to, although these were usually the workplaces of oilfield technicians or geologists. Soon her wish was granted, and we drove back to Caracas with two extra passengers, Toby and Teddy, two terrapins in their bowl of water, given to us by our friends Gerhard and Angela.
The house to which we returned was, sadly, not Quinta Tecka, but for my youngest brother Nigel, then only two, it was bliss, as it faced the heavy traffic of the autopista, an east-west superhighway, its balcony providing a panoramic view of the military airport of La Carlota beyond the highway. As very young boys usually are, Nigel was fascinated by machines. In his case, it was helicopters and aircraft that he would patiently watch and then attempt to draw for hours on end. In my grandsons’ case, it is currently excavation equipment and garbage trucks. The houses in Santa Cecilia, as the modern subdivision was called, were row houses with tiny gardens and compact rooms, but graced with varieties of individual architectural design. My mother disliked her new home. Next door lived a childless American lady and her husband who owned a giant Plymouth with ‘aero’ wings typical of that era of American automotive manufacturing. It dwarfed our Vauxhall, which had to accommodate five of us, but for me, the great joy of living so far from school was the compensation that we were now ferried to school occasionally by a three-seat camioneta, a Chevrolet station wagon, and as Desmond and I were the first passengers on the run, we could claim the third seat before anyone else. The school bus no longer bore the school’s name on it: the lettering had been removed as a precaution after the Revolution. A foreigner was soon to be persona non grata.
While the writing was now ominously on the wall, and literally so, as “YANQUI NO, CUBA SI !” and “VIVA FIDEL” graffiti began to appear in the wake of Comrade Castro’s victory over the dictator Batista in Cuba in January 1959, everyday life for us remained very much as it had been. Our next home was to be Quinta Lufy, in the desirable residential district of Altamira, on the lower slopes of the Avila mountains, much closer to the school, but it was to be in the upper level of a duplex inhabited below by an American family, their dachshund Charlie, and the maid, who ruled the roost.
