Eric’s passion for Latin America had been ongoing for about twenty years, so when he was offered a six-month sabbatical in 1971, he jumped at it. Firstly, it was a chance to improve his Spanish and secondly, it gave him the opportunity to continue his deeper research into peasants, their rebellions and above all, agrarian reform. Since Fidel Castro in Cuba had apparently shown the way for social revolution in the region, Eric was feeling politically upbeat. And of course he (and all of us) were elated over the failed 1961 American military invasion of the Bay of Pigs. Latin America was, as Eric described in his memoir, a continent ‘bubbling with the lava of social revolutions’. But I regret to say that now, in the twenty-first century, we can see this didn’t happen the way he had hoped. Though improvements there have been plenty.
Quite soon after moving into Nassington Road, we were preparing to travel. I was kept busy liaising with the teachers at Gospel Oak School, where the children had just nicely settled in. The head teacher, Ron Lendon, was very accommodating. Not only did he give permission for the children to go away, and held their places open in the school, he went above and beyond to keep the classmates in touch. Possibly too much – while in the La Sierra in Peru, Andy received thirty letters all saying exactly the same thing: ‘We went to Camden Lock and took boats on the canal.’
Departure day arrived. We would travel to four countries: Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. At all passport controls we held our breath. Not because of communism or visas this time, but at some point Julia had drawn a blue ship in my passport and it was too late to get a new one. Reactions were unpredictable – they veered from, ‘Which child drew this?’ in a friendly manner or disappearing with the passport to check with a higher official. A defaced passport is actually invalid, so very much was at stake.
Our trip began in Mexico City, but our luggage unfortunately did not. We had to travel via Lisbon, where it remained. It turned into a rather undignified April Fool’s day arrival, extremely hot, and various academics were summoned to help us buy underwear and other essentials. When this situation lasted over a week, Eric lost his patience and announced that if our suitcases didn’t arrive within two days, we were going straight back home. Then in the Latin American way, a VIP, presumably the ambassador, was contacted and, abracadabra, all our suitcases arrived the next morning.
We stayed with a charming French couple, Jacques and Lucero, who had a big house with grounds, and the children liked it very much. There were two dogs – a Dalmatian named Joreck and an Afghan hound named Bingada, as well as two kittens. It was not all play for the children; every day they had some lessons with me, and Andy had to keep a daily diary-cum-scrapbook, which he did very well. I am using it now to write this. Lucero also gave each of them a daily painting lesson.
Ralph Miliband, who was also working in Mexico City, lived in the house with us. We were already friends with him and his wife Marion from London, but it was good to get to know him better in our new exotic surroundings. A warm and interesting man, and we were very glad to have his company.
He fitted so well with us – his children, David and Ed, were of similar ages to ours, and he was a sociologist and Marxist author.
We enjoyed exploring around the nearby Chapultepec Park with the children and we also went on many excursions including the Pyramid of the Sun (which according to Andy’s diary had 750 steps, in case you wanted to know), the canals of Xochimilco, with their marvellous coloured gondolas, the city of Cuatla, and Lago de Patzcuaro, to name a few. We were within walking distance of the house where Trotsky had lived and was assassinated (now a museum).
We also went further afield to Cuernavaca, a beautiful city where Eric’s friend Ivan Illich lived. We spent the day at his house as the children played and swam in his pool. Originally from Vienna, Ivan was a philosopher as well as a Roman Catholic priest, who wrote many books about ‘deschooling’, believing all education systems ruined our lives. He also wrote books including The Powerless Church and Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, among many others. All of them were ultra-controversial and people spoke of him as either a genius or a crackpot. Eric stood on the fence and referred to him as a European ideologue.
Downtown Mexico City there was also the marvellous and world-famous National Museum of Anthropology, which we were all crazy about. For the children it was so engaging and educational, with many replicas of the interiors of ancient indigenous (also referred to as ‘Indian’) homes. They were like big dolls’ houses you could walk into. However, it was in the centre of the city, so it was difficult just to pop in with the children. The area we lived in, Chapultepec, was about fifty minutes away by a bus packed to the brim.
Lectures in Mexico were noisier than those I was used to. Young boys selling chewing gum from trays on straps round their necks loudly shouted, ‘Chicklets! Chicklets!’ throughout the talks. Eric was nervous at the beginning as his Spanish was rusty, but he mostly managed to cobble together something good. I remember seeing his name on a flyer in a lift, advertising a lecture of his in a vast auditorium the following evening, an event he knew absolutely nothing about. But Eric had learned to wear his flexible hat in Latin America. He was quite a little celebrity there. At this time in England, Eric was not well known and certainly not the intellectual public figure he would become, but in Latin America it was quite different – partly it was his interest in them and their lives.
Everything Eric wrote was translated into Spanish and Portuguese by his fantastic publishers, Critica, in Barcelona, Paz e Terra in Rio de Janeiro, and, later, the larger Companhia das Letras in São Paolo, Brazil.
We were fêted and invited for dinner often by the many people Eric knew (friends, colleagues, pupils and ex-pupils). In Mexico, supper is indeed a night affair for the adults, and a lot of the talk revolved around politics. We were especially good friends with Carlos Fuentes, the well-known Mexican writer, and his wife Sylvia, who was a journalist. Leaping ahead in time, Eric reminisced in his last speech to friends on his ninety-fifth birthday in London about ‘waiting for something to eat until almost midnight in Carlos Fuentes’ house’. Our time here was soon up, and making our farewells to the warm and exuberant Mexicans was not an easy thing to do.
Two thousand miles and four hours on a plane later (according to Andy – our new trip adviser), we arrived in Bogotá, Colombia. Eric’s friend Orlando collected us in a jeep. Eric had been commissioned to write a substantial piece for Bob Silvers in the New York Review of Books on the FARC. These were the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who were supported by the Colombian Communist Party, which had managed to survive the fierce internal conflicts of the 1960s. Eric was able to meet many of its leaders and supporters. With the World Wide Web several decades off, he had to surround himself with all the local newspapers he could seize.
We stayed in a very pleasant hotel in the centre of Bogotá, but I was worried about the children playing in the lifts and being mistaken for Americans – gringos. Much kidnapping was going on and I was on edge about it. Also, I wasn’t quite sure how best to keep the children occupied. But as usual, Eric had contacts galore – luckily all his academic friends had maids in their households and help was always offered.
Bogotá’s climate is usually rain or cloud, but to my amazement I learned that a one-hour car or train ride would take you to a sunny climate with blue skies and a marvellous swimming pool. Sometimes I was lent a maid to accompany us, or alternatively one of the wives who could speak English came, making a real holiday of it. In fact, all of Colombia was a holiday for me; plenty of time to daydream and think, as well as look around. I should have brought my copy of García Márquez’s book One Hundred Years of Solitude to read again.
Apart from many prettily painted, colourful churches with friendly façades, the big attraction in Bogotá was the Gold Museum, which was astonishing. Andy was most taken by being inside the golden strongroom with the golden safe – he was already interested in big money. The museum had corridors paved with gold, like Dick Whittington’s imaginary London streets. On the walls, glass cabinets displayed intriguing, mainly pre-Columbian objects, ornaments and jewellery – some primitive, some that one would love to wear today.
After my cushy weeks in Colombia, it was time for a more simple and rustic life in Peru. I expect Eric had not finished enough research for the Bob Silvers piece, but we had to fly off to Lima. I hope my readers are ready for a headful of agrarian reform, because this is the reason we went.
Here it was all about land: who owned it, who cultivated it and who was being exploited since the Spanish conquerors stole it way back in the sixteenth century. From the 1920s onwards, peasant revolts were brewing in Peru and getting stronger towards the late sixties. While we were there, a progressive military government (which sounds implausible, but really existed) under General Velasco Alvarado was in power. He predicted the peasant unrest intensifying and so his strategy was to hand back the large estate farms to the original indigenous owners, but under strict state control. Naturally there were conflicting opinions on this. I think in Eric’s mind it was probably the best hope for Peru’s impoverished peasants; he wrote in 1970, ‘If ever a country needed, and needs, a revolution, it was this.’
These issues of expropriation inspired a group of brilliant young historians to form a research team. This included Joan Martinez Alier (a Spanish man’s name, by the way, pronounced ‘Huan’), who was then a research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, José Matos Mar, who was director of the Institute of Peruvian Studies, and the Peruvian historian Heraclio Bonilla, who came up with the idea that the papers from all the expropriated haciendas (farms) ought to be collected to form an agrarian archive at the University of San Marcos in Lima.
Pablo Macera, a distinguished historian at San Marcos and long-time friend of Eric’s, was very much in favour of this scheme and he must have roped Eric in. With Eric’s participation, the team got the blessing from the crucial Agrarian Tribunal.
The research team deliberated over the best place to go, and considered the sugar-cane plantations on the coast. But in the end they plumped for the more interesting pastoral and agricultural haciendas in La Sierra, the mountainous area that includes the Andes. So it was to be sheep. Well, we knew about those. But unlike Wales, it was not at all a serene pastoral scene. The Peruvian sheep could not safely graze. They were called chuscas in Spanish and wakcha (meaning orphan or poor) in the indigenous language of Quechua. The hacendados (estate owners) wanted to get rid of the poor-quality sheep belonging to the indigenous shepherds, leading to continuous animosity and sometimes violence between them.
The plan was to start at Huancayo, the capital of the central highlands, where Joan discovered boxes of confidential letters dated from 1920 to the 1950s, before the telephone reached there – a prize for the archives, I should think. We travelled there by train, together with Joan, where the first-class passengers received a supply of oxygen if they needed it at the highest point – the Ticlio Pass, around nearly 5,000 metres (16,000 feet). Eric and Andy did suffer some soroche (altitude sickness), but it didn’t affect Julia or me. However, I had my share of mosquito bites, which were huge, including one on my nipple, but they never touched Eric, always right next to me. (I ask you, is that fair?)
Huancayo is a lovely little commercial town surrounded by mountains. But we only stayed one night, as it was more convenient to be in La Sierra with everyone else. We stayed in a cottage. We met the British anthropologist Norman Long from Manchester University, who was living in another part of La Sierra called Matahuasi with his wife Ann, also an anthropologist, and their children Alison and Andrew. Visiting them entailed a fifty-mile journey on a bus with chickens, but my time with them was so special, I didn’t mind. Ann and I would work on the children’s lessons together, with even a bit of recorder tootling. At ‘Sierra playtime’ the children all fell on each other with joy; Andy wrote in his diary ‘it was super playing with English children’. I felt he was sighing with huge relief. At some point the Longs very kindly looked after Andy and Julia for a whole day, allowing Joan, Eric and me to travel by taxi up to about 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) to look around a new, totally modernised hacienda called Laive.
The taxi driver drove like a demon and we couldn’t stop him doing so – he thought it was funny. I was scared out of my wits for the sake of the children if we died. I couldn’t breathe with the high altitude and anxiety. I gave Eric a look that embodied: ‘Why are we here? Why did I marry you? This is too much.’ I was having a wobbly. Thank goodness Joan always stayed calm and kind, because Eric did not.
We did in fact arrive safely. In the main building, there were important papers of value for the archives. We looked around the other buildings, where we saw into the white, pristine future – it was like being at a luxurious high-tech dairy farm. At Laive, the expropriation had been extreme. Much like the eighteenth-century Highland Clearances of the croft people from the Scottish Highlands and Islands, the cruelty was atrocious. The indigenous shepherds and their stock, such as lamas, were pushed out of their grounds. The new hacendados really needed more free land for their contemporary farming practices and above all wanted no contamination between the species. It was terribly cruel but necessary. Joan and his wife Verena went back to Laive at a later date to collect those papers, which they managed to pack and ship to Lima’s Agrarian Archive. Joan later went to Cerro Antapongo on his own, among many other places in Peru, collecting papers for the archive.
Back in Lima, Eric’s friend Pablo Macera seemed to take charge of our recreation at weekends. He was a man who didn’t fit into any pigeonhole – very original, exuberant and domesticated. He was a great cook, but that meant enslaving everybody in the household to this purpose. You can imagine the meals in huge casserole dishes, to which everybody could come – this was his way. Pablo became our leader, always taking charge of making our stay memorable. He was so delighted we had come and I think he temporarily ‘expropriated’ the university bus for our convenience at weekends. He then invited his family and friends, some servants and even some pets to travel around on the bus with us. We all sang songs together, including a Peruvian vowel song. I found this an ideal way to travel. This is how we saw the Peruvian countryside, stopping where and when we wanted along the way, sometimes chatting with strangers in restaurants or cafés. We didn’t go especially to hear music, but there was so much of it around – at parties, in the open air, in the streets. And of course wooden flute music was prominent.
As a family we had already made our expedition to the old Inca capital Cusco and to Machu Picchu; Andy probably gained more out of these historical trips than six-year-old Julia. Like me as a child, I think she was very happy just spending so much time with her family. Here in Peru’s Sierra, Eric was in his element. He was doing very much what he wanted. Surprised at feeling so at home in this faraway place, Eric was charmed that on the slopes of Machu Picchu he could find little wild strawberries (berry-picking is an obsession for anyone with a Mitteleuropean background). This is precisely the magic of Latin America, mixing touching European familiarity, with exciting foreign exotica.
Pablo arranged to take us all to a bullfight. I was interested and excited, but didn’t enjoy it – I have never liked black humour and this seemed like black sport – however, I wasn’t as upset as Pablo’s four-year-old daughter, who for the entire time softly cried, ‘Papa, por qué están matando a los toros?’ [Papa, why are they killing the bulls?] Papa took absolutely no notice of this repeated little plaint. It all lasted for what seemed ages. Nevertheless, Andy and Julia, as well as Pablo’s son, were totally thrilled and mesmerised. Later Andy wrote about all the rules of this dangerous sporting ceremony in detail.
After a farewell dinner for all of us, it was our last time to say goodbye, and now we had to make our way home. We again had to fly via Lisbon, as the best connection was from Quito – the exquisite little capital of Ecuador. I think we only stayed three days. This was mainly to reconnect with people Eric knew – old students and friends – but also many new people who were apparently keen to meet us. Eric liked nothing better than getting information straight from the horse’s mouth. We never did sightseeing alone like tourists, but were always accompanied by local people who showed us the best and knew what to miss out.
Ten miles to the north of Quito is the small town of Otavalo, inhabited by indigenous locals. We went there on a day visit and along the way we crossed the Equator, where the children had photos taken – Julia in the northern hemisphere, Andy in the southern. The ‘Indians’ all wore short, loose trousers, a black hat and a poncho. They each had one long black plait hanging down their back. They are famous for their handcrafted textiles – weaving, ponchos, tablecloths – and sell these goods around the world, where you can see them in Manhattan, Paris and so on. We were told it was cheaper to buy in the market in Quito, which you had to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to visit – which we actually did (I bought hand-embroidered tablecloths for Mum and Gretl). One was expected to bargain, which Eric loved, but I loathed. This is always my problem in developing countries. I bought a poncho and later saw the same one on Hampstead High Street.