An Argentinian childhood
Euan Cameron
The year of 1950 for a schoolboy in Argentina was a special one, for it marked the one hundredth anniversary of the death of the liberator and national hero, Jose de San Martin. It was to be known as the Ano del Libertador San Martin throughout the country and there was a sense of expectancy and great excitement in the prospect of that year for me. At school we were prepared weeks in advance by the Spanish-speaking for the special ceremonies that were to greet the new and heroic year, with songs and hymns in honour of the vic- tor of Maipii and Chacabuco; in remem- brance of the triumphant crossing of the Andes; in thanksgiving for deliverance from the Spanish colonists. We learnt by heart the soul-stirring story of how the young soldier, Cabral, had placed himself in the passage of musket fire at the battle of San Lorenzo and saved San Martin's life;
we sang to the white and celestial blue of his flag; we wrote essays on the great deeds of the liberator and his compatriots, Alvar and Belgrano; and by the time the new year dawned we were prepared for a miracle, for a transfiguration on the heights of the Andes, for a reincarnation in the streets of Buenos Aires — for at the time I certainly believed San Martin to be a canonised saint, at least the equal of some of those in the heavenly pantheon.
My school was run by a Mr Rule, a sur- vivor from a day when the British had sup- plied the railways, commerce, and most of the business acumen to the capital. It lay in a somewhat exclusive suburb called Olivos and its purpose was to serve the various Anglo-Argentine families of the area with a suitable education for their sons in `la manera ingles'. None of them could have realised how out-dated or quaint the school was, yet it was typical of a number of establishments around Buenos Aires that survived then and may still exist today. By law lessons had to be taught in Spanish for half of each day but for most of the rest of it our thoughts were directed towards Kip- ling, P. C. Wren, Jim Fawcett's man-eating leopards and tigers and stories of imperial India, and, occasionally, readings from a book that was more appropriate, W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago. These classes were taken by the headmaster's wife, Mrs Rule, a strong-minded woman with true missionary teaching zeal who ran the school with blithe disdain for all around her and with a lack of concern for the natives that cannot have endeared her to the educa- tional authorities. She kept Alsatian dogs, I remember, no less than twelve of them, in a country where rabies was a very real menace.
Once Mr Rule was savaged by one of the dogs and had to be rushed to hospital to be injected in the stomach. There was great alarm among the parents, naturally, and notes of complaint were sent to the school in case any of the pupils should suffer similarly. Mrs Rule was also responsible for the house system that existed purely for sporting purposes. The houses bore the names of the King's far-flung dominions: India, Mrs Rule's own favourite, Australia, Canada and South Africa, and their emblems were represented on the school blazer, stitched in gold thread above the school motto, 'Second to None'.
The rest of the English teaching staff consisted of Mr Robinson and MISS Lawrence. Mr Robinson was a frail and dignified septuagenarian whose remaining dream was to return to Sittingbourne, Kent, a town he recalled with fading memories of his boyhood. He taught History and Nature Study and could wield a sharp ruler on the knuckles when provoked. Miss Lawrence was Scottish, the daughter of emigrant parents who had pioneered Patagonia like so many of their countrymen (including mY own grandfather) and were among the first of the sheep-farming communities in the south of the country. Amazingly, she spoke with a Lowlands burr although she had never left Argentina; and being responsible for elocution, she would spend whole lessons trying to produce correct English vowel sounds from her pupils. Like Miss Jean Brodie she had definite political views and she had no time for the school inspec- tors and their decrees: the Falkland Islands were British, she taught us, and would never be called the 'Malvinas'. Then, as now, and throughout their history, the islands, every Argentine schoolboy knew, were considered to have been 'stolen' by the British and would one day be restored to the nation. After the winter holidays 01 1950 Miss Lawrence disappeared without a word to the rest of the staff and rumour was strong that she had to leave the capital for speaking too strongly at a party against Eva Peron, who was then exercising her full influence on the President; or it may have been because of the Malvinas.
The boys saw little of Mr Rule except when he appeared promptly at nine o'clock in the morning together with Senora Lopez the directora responsible for Spanish studies, for the daily ceremony before the national flag. We ranged ourselves in lines according to class and height while the flag was unfurled and slowly raised up the mast and we all sang the anthem, Azul Celeste, in praise. The process was repeated at the end of each day when the flag was taken clown and a rousing march was sung to the glorY of the nation and its heroic, if brief, past. Mr Rule remained rigid during these perfor- mances, a stern and distant look in his eyes, moustache occasionally twitching, paying more than sufficient respect to the for- malities. Each week he appointed one of the boys to raise and lower the flag, a task much coveted and directly bearing upon one's popularity at school. Once, he took my class to a performance of Worm's Eye View produced by the local British dramatic society and there were tears in his eyes at the end of the afternoon. It was the only occasion I remember him showing any emo- tion.
Our classes in Spanish were presided over by Senora Lopez, or that was the name she went by at school, for in fact her full sur- name consisted of at least four patronymics linked by either de or y. Senora Lopez was the descendant of a Spanish aristocrat who had left Spain under duress to seek a better life, or so she never ceased assuring us. She was a diminutive, plump, heavily featured woman in her forties; a strict disciplinarian devoted to her profession who took great pride in the achievements of her better pupils. In restrospect I believe she resented teaching at a British-run school, for she never missed an opportunity to spread some scandal or other about the British-born members of the staff; but, at the same time, it would have been beneath her dignity to offer her services to one of the state schools. I remember especially her classes on Argentine history and in 1950, with unashamed pride, she consecrated the greater part of her teaching time to the events in San Martin's life: stories of his early childhood in Misiones, his years in Spain, with the Spanish army in North Africa and Roussillon. He was thirty when Napoleon's armies invaded Spain and it was at this time that he met Francisco Miranda, the precursor of South American in- dependence. In 1812 he returned to the Argentine, replacing Belgrano as the com- mander of the army and, in Mendoza, he raised the legendary army of the Andes which he led over the mountains to liberate Chile at the battles of Maipii and Chacabuco . . I remember, too, learning with some pride that San Martin relied on the fleet of Lord Cochrane to invade Peru, where he later proclaimed independence in Lima. Only one other subject of Senora Lopez's lessons. appealed to me as much as the Libertador and that was Martin Fierro, the hero of Jose Hernandez's epic national poem about the life of the gaucho. These were men we should aspire to emulate, said Senora Lopez, and my ambition in life at that age of nine was set somewhere bet- ween the rugged, primitive nobility of the gaucho and the patriotism, wisdom and courage of San Martin.
The suburb of Olivos was home for a number of the British community and it lay thirty minutes by train to the north-west of Buenos Aires' fine central station, Retiro. To take the train into B.A. was a childhood thrill and a treat. Fast and noisy, the train stopped at perhaps ten stations whose names were redolent of the heroes of the school history books: Rivadavia, Belgrano, Vicente Lopez, Bartolome Mitre ... . Olivos was bound on one side by Peron's summer palace and on two of the others by the principal avenidas leading into the central city, enclosing an area of relative safety beyond which the local children were forbidden to set foot. Beyond one of these roads flowed the muddy grey waters of the Rio de la Plata, at that point some 20 miles wide. Its waters lapped the black and marshy mud-flats that seemed to extend forever and were inhabited only by migrant gypsies, mosquitoes and balefully croaking gulls. During the long summer holidays we would fish in the hot sun for catfish or small crabs, or watch the river traffic wending northwards up to the Parana. Once a body was found washed up there and another time two families of Lithuanian refugees, looking wild and half- starved, disembarked from a small boat
after two and a half months out of sight of land. They were arrested immediately by the river police.
I remember the violence of the torrential thunderstorms which transformed the streets and gutters into rivers which would dry away within hours once the hot sun reappeared. Every day street vendors would call at our house; different men — the panadero selling bread, the verdulero with vegetables — would be received at the side door by the maid. Most exciting was the street cry of the ice-cream man who pedall- ed a heavy bicycle with a boxed container in front of him on which were written the words `Race crim' for the benefit of the British and Americans of Olivos. More alarming were the dog-catchers with their cull of wretched strays netted from the pavements; if you failed to claim your pet within 24 hours, the creature was gassed.
Sport occupied an important part of the holidays or the weekends away from school and my latter-day heroes were sportsmen. River Plate, Boca Juniors, Racing (who were supported by Peron himself) were the leading and most popular football clubs and I still remember some of the names of the players and the colours of the shirts they wore. At motor racing, Fangio and Gon- zalez seemed to win any Grand Prix anywhere in the world. And, as for polo, who could touch the Argentines? Sometimes we would spend afternoons at one or other of the 'English' clubs Belgrano, San Isidro, Hurlingham — wat- ching cricket, polo or rugby. Even the shops and restaurants had English names. Does the London Grill still exist, I wonder, and Lacy's the tailors, who made born- bachos and polo clothes, or the Libreria Mackern where my mother bought the volumes of Osbert Sitwell's autobiography and novels by Graham Greene? There were two English-language daily newspapers, the Buenos Aires Herald and the Standard. And there was the English Club in Plaza 25 de Mayo where my father was severely bit- ten by mosquitoes whenever he stayed the night.
Usually the middle classes left the city during the hot summer months. I remember holidays in the province of Mendoza in the foothills of the Andes, travelling across plains so dry that an attendant had fre- quently to sponge down the leather seats which became thick with the all-pervading `Sticks are ecologically sounder than bricks.' dust. After many hours it was a relief to see the snow-capped peaks of the cordillera come into view. Mostly, we spent the sum- mer in the 'camp', on an estancia several hundred miles to the south of B.A. To reach the farm took a night's journey by train to Necochea and a seemingly endless car journey bumping over muddy roads through the pampas. Sometimes there were asados, vast barbecues that were attended by the household and by every peOn that worked on the farm. There might be itinerant peones or migrants, too, for it was the custom to provide food and shelter to any passer-by. The asados continued into the night long after the beef, or lamb, or ar- madillos, had been cooked and eaten; guitars were played, criollo songs were sung, frogs and cicadas croaked, and the fires smoked until dawn.
T t was in the estuary of the River Plate, two 1 years after the year of San Martin, that our ship remained at anchor for one hour on the voyage home to Southampton, while we were obliged to pay respect to the memory of someone else whom many con- sidered to be another great Argentine and worthy of canonisation; it was the day of the state funeral of Evita Peron. At that time the President, Juan Peron, was at the summit of his power due largely to the popularity of his ex-actress wife who held a position, as everybody now knows, of disproportionate sway in the country. Peron cumple, Evita dignifica (Peron achieves, Evita dignifies) was the slogan of the time. She was worshipped by the poor, her descamisados (the 'shirtless' ones), and when she died altars were erected in the streets and her glass coffin was displayed in the church on the Plaza de Mayo to the public who filed past for hour after hour to pay homage. Six years later, an occasion more poig' nant in its impact brought these memories back. I had been taken to Paris for a week and we were due to return by boat from Boulogne to Dover. We were delayed, miss- ed the ferry and spent the intervening hours before the next sailing wandering through Boulogne. Down one of the streets there was a house with a plaque over the door -- it was the house where Jose de San Martin had died in August, 1850. The heroic names — Sarmiento, Alvear, Alberdi, Urquiza the glorious deeds, the battles of in- dependence, the noble ideals of the new na- tion, streamed back. But the General's ghost had finally been laid; childhood had passed and this was Europe; he would not rise again. San Martin's final years were in fact sad ones. On his return from Peru, he was ac- cused of disobedience by the government. He retired, considering his mission accomplished, and spent the next 25 years of his life in exile in Europe, including two years in London living in a house in Park Road near Regent's Park. He lived with his only daughter and died in Boulogne in poverty and solitude, blind and unre- cognised.
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