I must have been six or seven years old then, surely no older, yet I remember that day vividly, now decades in the past. The essayist Richard Church once wrote that childhood memories recur unexpectedly and suddenly, ‘like a door suddenly slammed by the wind in the distant wing of an old house’. I was on the playing-field of the sports club to which we then belonged in Canaima. It was located in a shallow valley below a rambling clubhouse set with bougainvillea, hibiscus and other tropical foliage, and perched on a low rise reached by the gentle incline of an access road that encircled it like a girdle. This low plateau, on the other side of which lay beneath it an expanse of tennis courts, a huge swimming pool and a children’s paddling pool, with changing rooms below them and a refreshment kiosk beyond, was the social centre of the club’s community, but it was itself dwarfed by a rocky escarpment that all but encircled the entire valley, running around three sides of the playing-field, and conveying heavy truck traffic on the rough road that ran along its back to its summit and beyond. Trucks carrying concrete pipes from an industrial development on the other side of the escarpment would each descend the slope by downshifting noisily, using the engine to slow their progress. When one of the drivers, perhaps always the same one, glimpsed a game of futbol or beisbol , but never cricket or field hockey, in progress on the playing-field below, he would often sound his airhorns apparently in approval, and we would hear the opening bars of La Cucaracha. That day was a Saturday and there was no traffic on the road. A hush lay upon the little valley.
But for the three of us, and a groundskeeper busy pottering about in the field-house nearby, the club was deserted. The parking lot at such an early hour in the morning was empty except for the vehicle that had brought us there. It was a blue Triumph TR-3, a two-seater sports car into whose cramped parcel compartment behind the seats I had enthusiastically clambered for the thrilling open-air ride there along twisty back roads. Its driver was a handsome, cheerful young Englishman my father had befriended; the two of them played field hockey for the club, and had recently returned from a tournament in Curacao, where they had played an assortment of Dutch and English teams from an informal Caribbean hockey league. The islands were in those days mostly European colonies. The Englishman, whose name I may never have known, was reportedly the most eligible bachelor on the club register, and turned heads among female members, but was never seen with a girl-friend. He and my father had come to the club for some purpose unfathomable to my young mind, perhaps for some ‘man talk’ away from prying female eyes. I got to go along for the ride. I was one of the boys.
