It was from this rear balcony that we once saw a fire raging on the mountainside, started by a careless vagrant, apparently, and eerily alarming at night. Fortunately the firebreaks already in place prevented it from any serious damage to the city below. Nothing, however, could stop the attempted invasion of the chicharras. These flying insects, larger relations of cicadas, launched themselves like lemmings at the house one summer night, whole battalions of them, from the mass of foliage behind Quinta Lufy, buzzing frantically at the mosquito screens in a kamikaze attack on the house, motivated by some quirk of nature that attracted them that particular night, and only then, to the house lights. The next morning, their desiccated corpses, inches deep, lay strewn over the sofa bed on the balcony.
Quinta Lufy was surprisingly spacious, despite having only two bedrooms and a single bathroom with bidet. It nevertheless had a maid’s bedroom and bathroom as well as a reading-cum-music room as a ‘sitting-room’ large enough for our baby grand piano and a sofa and easy chair. I loved this room for its encouragement of quiet contemplation. You could close the door, keep noises out, and escape with a good book, which I did when the piano keys were not being pounded, as they were in the afternoons with piano practice, and lessons, for Desmond and Mum. My school diary tells me that I regularly read a book a night there. It was bliss to do so.
It was about this time that our family joined the Instituto Cultural Venezolano-Britanico, and I thought I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. The institute was housed in a grand old mansion apparently willed to its keepers by an anglophile Venezuelan, and contained the first library I had ever seen with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder to reach them. Its staff gave talks on literature, history, and other matters of cultural interest to English and Spanish speakers alike, and I longed to work there as a cultural diplomat or librarian, although I was only ten years old, and only adults could borrow its books. My parents became friends with staff members, and I still have the blue enamel ICV-B badge once issued to members.
