This is a series of stories under the title “My Storied Childhood“. It is recommended to read them in order, starting with the Prelude, and then Part I.
When I was a child, I thought as a child. Most children do. I was born in London, to English parents, in St. George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. I attended St. George’s School in Mayfair briefly. St. George is England’s patron saint. How, then, could I ever be anything but English? The thought occurred to me as Colonel Hall-Poole towered over me, moustache bristling, face purple with righteous indignation. Bored with the math class he was attempting to teach, I had been staring out of the window at a mournfully wet English summer’s day, and this had infuriated him. Colonel Holroyd Hall-Poole, a retired World War I veteran, had just slapped me hard on the exposed flesh of my bare leg above my knee for my inattentiveness. His handprint was still there days later. I glared at him, outraged by the abusive liberty he had taken.
“That will teach you to pay attention, Fosdyke! You’re not in America now!” For some peculiar reason known only to his addled mind, Colonel Allfool could not distinguish between North and South America, and was, God knows how, familiar with a tiresome American comic strip about a detective called ‘Fearless Fosdyke,’ which I had read, but disliked, in The Caracas Journal years before. He thought my disdain for math showed disrespect for him, and he had just had the chance to even the score. Americans, he believed, were not really “fearless,” just stupid: they were, like me, full of dumb insolence. My leg throbbed painfully. This was the last straw. I determined to show contempt for him, and for his subject. This, of course, was a mistake…
Returning to my birthplace, and that of my brothers and parents, from our Venezuelan sojourn was an education for me. It was April 1961, and I was eleven. From the airport Dad had driven our rental car directly into the sunken lanes of deepest Surrey, into the hamlet of Peaslake, to stay at a Trust House inn, as he had hoped to start house-hunting in this county with its direct access to main line railway service to London, where he was to work once again. The hotel was quaint, its clientele snobbishly aloof, the bedrooms bitterly cold, and there were no screens on the windows. How did they keep bugs out? We tried to impress the innkeeper’s son by telling him we had been to the top of Pico Espejo. He replied, defensively, “I’ve been up Leith Hill. Is that higher?” Yet we, for all our empty boasting, weren’t sure. Mutual ignorance. But there was one compensation: across the road was a sweet shop with English chocolate that made up for much of this. I had never forgotten the fourpenny Crunchie bar my grandmother had given me on our Suffolk visit five years earlier: it was smoother, creamier, and much sweeter than Venezuelan La India chocolate, and the shop had it, it and its cousins Bounty, Maltesers, KitKat, Smarties, Milky Bar, and Rolo. Peaslake had TWO such shops! Oh to be in England, in April, too!
