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.
‘Childhood memories recur’, said the essayist Richard Church, ‘like a door suddenly slammed by the wind in the distant wing of an old house.’ It is an appropriate figure of speech for my own childhood, as we lived in so many houses, and opened and shut so many doors in those distant years, so vividly and yet so soundlessly recalled so many years later.
Quinta Chabela was the last of our Caracas homes. It was also in Altamira, not far from where President Romulo Betancourt had his residence, it was also too close to school for the bus to come for us, so my mother worked out a car-pooling arrangement with the mother of Suzy and Desmond’s friend Peter, whose English father drove a white Jaguar Mk. II 3.8 litre saloon to my delight, but alas, we never rode in it. His wife, from Martinique, had a cream Morris Isis, which was almost as good, and this, together with our modest Vauxhall, became our school transport. The family lived less than a block from the walled and secluded private home of President Betancourt, who was the party leader for Accion Democratica, which ruled the country from Perez Jimenez’s overthrow in 1958 until the nineties, in coalition with the centre-left party COPEI. Outside his house was often stationed a Jeep full of bored soldiers cradling machine guns. When a presidential cavalcade left the grounds, it was always accompanied by soldiers and officials in black Cadillacs, travelling at speed, sirens shrieking, to demand traffic yield to them. At least once an attempt was made on Betancourt’s life: I saw the evidence in a front-page photo in El Universal of a targeted Cadillac on a city street. The assassins had killed and injured one or two of its passengers, but they had hit the wrong Cadillac in the motorcade.
Quinta Chabela was owned by a lady recently widowed and grieving: she was happy to let my father hug her in sympathy. I assume she had grown children, or none, as the front and rear yards were unusually well-cared for, and small boys, as she might have expected, soon made a mess of it, although we tried to keep bats and balls away from flower beds and rock gardens.
We played an improvised game of ‘plungerball’ using a beach ball and toilet plungers as sticks. This house, a bungalow, also had an unused maid’s quarters at the back, and three bedrooms, one of which was our playroom. The windows were barred, as were those of many Altamira homes; walls were topped with razor wire or broken glass. As the street we lived on was sloped, we played a dangerous game by riding down the sidewalk, all three of us, in our wagon. It is a miracle that no car ever backed out of its driveway as we sped merrily downhill: no driver would have been able to see us coming, and we always travelled too fast to take evasive action.
