Okay, so where was I before my memoirs, memories and assorted encounters were rudely interrupted by apples, jam, Victorian chimneys, toxic dust — now mud — and a surprising amount of unexpected nastiness?

Ah yes.

I was somewhere between Bolivia and Peckham, probably.

Which, when I think about it, is more or less the whole story I’m trying to tell.

In the meantime, life must be lived and dealt with. First the apples. Then the chutney. Then half the chimney came down into my kitchen. Twice. Then the chimney pots appeared outside the house.

Then, quite unnecessarily, Substack seemed to lose its collective mind.

And somewhere amongst all that, the world keeps turning.

Nepal has been devastated. Gaza is still bleeding. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being harassed, attacked and driven from their land. Ukraine is still fighting. Iran is flaring again. Russia is still threatening Europe and showing no signs of restraint. Britain is being threatened over its involvement, including the use of American and British bases. Drones are appearing everywhere. Drought is affecting food and water; floods and fires are turning up here, there and everywhere; and ordinary people are paying for all of it.

Literally.

Gas bills. Electricity. Water. Council tax. Groceries. Insurance. Broadband. Defence. Everything.

And perhaps this is where I should say something that sometimes seems to get lost in the American conversation:

It is not all about bloody America.

Europe is not sitting safely in the audience watching an American drama unfold.

We have a war on our doorstep. We are helping Ukraine. We are trying to defend Europe. We are trying to keep extreme-right agitators and US money at bay. Don’t forget, we are living much closer to Russia and absorbing the economic and security consequences of decisions made in Washington, Moscow, Jerusalem, Tehran and elsewhere.

We get on with it. Keep calm, carry on and resurrect our famous sense of humour. Mostly because that is what you do.

It is hard here too, but we are doing things to protect ourselves rather than simply sitting back and hoping someone else will deal with it. As far as our relationship with the US is concerned, it is like trying to navigate an exit from an abusive marriage when the person you’ve been living with for years turns around and says, “I’m not who you think I am.”

America does not have a monopoly on hardship, fear, sacrifice or democratic responsibility.

And yes, American power matters enormously. That is rather the problem. Decisions made by a relatively small number of Americans can affect millions of people who never had a vote in any of it.

Trade wars. Wars. Energy prices. Scarcity.

And yes…

Fighting to keep the USA out of our politics.

Authoritarianism travels.

So forgive me if I occasionally want to lean across the Atlantic and say:

Could you please get your house in order?

And certainly stop hurling abuse on Substack without proper receipts.

Not because it is all about America.

Precisely because it isn’t.

Which brings me, rather reluctantly, back to Substack.

I thought we were supposed to be resisting authoritarianism, not joining camps and sneaking snide remarks at one another during live discussions. That is not what I joined Substack for. I joined to write my stories somewhere for safekeeping — that was before the pangram attack.

I am also deeply concerned about the rights and justice denied to Epstein’s survivors, and that needs an international eye too.

I don’t know everything being said behind the scenes in this latest debacle. I don’t know who has fallen out with whom, who is supposedly compromised, who is funding whom or who is insufficiently pure for somebody else’s liking.

And I have absolutely no intention of pretending that I do.

If there are serious allegations about money, political influence, Epstein networks, Netanyahu, Trump, intelligence links or anything else, investigate them properly.

Follow the money. Follow the documents. Bring the receipts.

Nobody gets a protected camp. Nobody gets convicted by association either.

That is my boundary.

And another thing.

Although I don’t know what is happening behind the scenes, money plainly sits somewhere underneath much of this — who funds whom, who has subscribers, who has lost subscribers, who needs access and who gets heard.

I’d just like to state for the record that I am a pensioner living in London, and it is not, nor will it ever be, my intention to monetise anything. I merely comment and interact where I can contribute through the eyes of someone with an unusual international history — not to take sides, but yes, to give my opinions, whether they please or offend, from where I stand.

I recognise perfectly well that journalists and researchers need to earn a living. Serious work costs money.

Perhaps it is worth recognising what is being asked of readers too.

Everybody on Substack seems to say a subscription is “only the price of a cup of coffee.”

Fine.

But ten cups of coffee? Twenty?

Most of us here in Europe are not wandering around the streets all day buying cappuccinos every five minutes. This is despite the impression many seem to have that we Europeans are lounging around in luxury beneath twinkling lights, making jam.

Going out for coffee — certainly in Peckham — is an outing.

There is a difference.

By the time I have paid for heating, electricity, water, council tax, groceries, broadband and everything else required to keep ordinary life going, there are not twenty metaphorical cups of coffee sitting around waiting to be converted into subscriptions.

I pay nobody on Substack.

I charge nobody on Substack.

I read. I research. I write. I restack what I think is interesting and matters.

I had rather hoped an interesting voice might still be worth something.

A restack is not an oath of allegiance.

And making jam is not evidence of ideological weakness.

Neither are apples.

Neither are twinkly lights in the garden.

Ordinary life is the thing most of us are trying to preserve while the world goes mad around us.

Perhaps that is worth remembering before we all become too impressed by our own seriousness.

Now.

Where was I?

Victorian Chimney stacks.

I was telling you that while making chutney in the middle of a heat wave, half my chimney came down my chimney and a young Ukrainian fellow working next door came over to help me clean up… the first time. The second time —in amongst small pieces of brick and dust— was at 10.00 at night and I had to clear it all up through clouds of dust before going to bed. Believe me, clouds of soot still keep appearing when the banging increases. Are there such folk as chimney sweeps these days. I guess I had better wait until the builders finish and the big stuff stops coming down.

Anyway, by midday the next day I came out of my front door to be greeted by this:



Oh! My chimneys, I thought! 😢. I could not bear to see my beautiful chimneys just sitting there in the front of house now, destined for who knows where. How sad! My first instinct, was to run indoors and text my neighbour, who is safely tucked away in the north of the country while her home is being upgraded by a loft conversion while mine had sadly lost its chimney stack. I asked her if I could pop over and reclaim my chimneys and could I have her two, while I was at it, if she didn’t want them. She replied cheerfully, “sure!”

You all know me by now, I’m a stickler for old things. These beautiful chimneys had sat there on my roof majestically against the London sky line since 1900. I had an idea:



I wrote a note: Please do not remove these chimneys, they belong to #70 — thank you!

I ran over and put the note on the chimneys.

I tried to move one and realised it was seriously heavy, and something I could not do on my own.

I then texted my daughter to see if she could help me carry them over to my side. As usual she was trying to do a million things at once. She had 5 dogs to walk and a pre teenage room to create out of a tiny room used for storing things in her very small flat. It would appear that son number one had reached a stage where he no longer wanted to share a room with brother. She said she would see what she could do. She phoned me 10 minutes later to tell me she would swing by later as she had old clothes on and imagined the chimneys were dirty. She added “ by the way Mum, you know they are worth something, I just looked it up — proper ceramic Victorian chimneys are valuable. I hope they don’t disappear from the front of house.”

As good as her word, she buzzed around albeit she could have done with a chimney manoeuvre like a hole in the head. Before this, however, I went out to put some rubbish in my bin and found the workmen from next door looking at my note.

One particular man was a gentleman I had not seen before. He was built like a wardrobe and not somebody I would wish to cross. I said “ oh I see you have seen my note. I will pick my chimneys up as soon as I can. “ He looked at me and said “your chimneys? “He was speaking to his team in a language that was not English. He added “… our chimneys”.

I laughed, I said “my chimneys, two of them are mine” and glanced at the young boy who had helped me clean up the chimney debris in my kitchen. I added, ”I have just texted my neighbour and she has just given me the other two.”

He scowled at me and said “it’ll cost you a bottle of whiskey”.

I laughed again and said “what for? My chimneys ? 🤣😂🤣” I then added “are you Ukrainian? “

He turned to face me and I saw he had the Loft company logo on one side of his tee shirt and the Ukrainian symbol on the other side.

I then said “Slava Ukraini.”

He smiled and said he would see if one of the boys could move them to my side. He said that he had been about to take them as they were in his way.

I smiled and said “thank you.” Internally I thought , I didn’t have a bottle whiskey and mused over the fact that, all I had to offer was tequila or cachaça.

My daughter, thankfully appeared about 15 mins later when they had all left, adrenaline flowing and put her hazard lights on, leapt out of the car and picked up one of the chimney pots. She said “where do you want it?” I replied that if she moved them to my front of house, that would be cool. I wanted to clean them. Her brother and family from Oxford were due to pop over at the weekend and I would get him to carry them through the house then. She raised an eyebrow and said, “don’t mess around, they are worth something, and they might disappear into the Peckham massive.” I marvelled at how she moved them swiftly and efficiently to my side of the fence while I told her the whiskey story. She smiled and said all she needed was a kiss and was off as quickly as she had appeared. I left the note on my chimneys and hoped they would still be there by the weekend. I felt sure Indie would let me know if they were about to disappear. I had witnessed they were not easy to move.

Later that day, I was reading “Flying the Andes”, 1940’s. Apparently the people of Uyuni were rallied around with their families to clear an emergency “runway” for one of the first planes that landed on the Salt Lake. They came and pushed and removed the boulders to one side so the plane could land. Apparently it cost two bottles of whiskey to the chief of police. I guess things don’t change.

Anyway, all is well that ends well. I never got to clean the chimneys — hose pipe ban and water restrictions — but my son moved them swiftly from the front of house to the behind the catio until I decide what I’m going to do with them. He must have clocked it down to “training” - he is an oarsman. It was a swift manoeuvre, he’s used to picking up racing shells. I was expecting them to say, “mum what do you want these for? “ But no. His wife who is into all things old that need preserving, pointed out the lovely markings and patterns on the ceramic chimneys. She commented she had just been in Blackheath, assessing old houses and buildings for Grade II status and said, “I’m glad you saved them. They will look nice in the garden”. 😁😘

I grew up knowing that my grandfather ran the railway in Uyuni.

That was simply one of those family facts. Appa ran the railway. Dad grew up among the trains and flew through the Andes to school in Argentina by stop watch. They lived in railway carriages sometimes. They had adventures, lived through revolutions, helped out stranded passengers, Pan American Grace pilots, produced enormous meals to feed people in times of trouble and transition and had people sleeping all over the house on many occasions.

Bolivia - my home too, but much later than this.

It was only when I began reading my grandmother, Dorothea’s painstakingly typed out account of her life that was lying in a box in the attic —properly — did the true meaning of the family stories told at dinner tables and as bedtime stories by my father, hit home. I finally understood what Nana and Appa had actually left behind when they retired to England.

Nana talks of how difficult the decision to leave their life behind that had ended up in La Paz, was. To leave their grown son and daughter and their families behind.

They left because Nana had by then decided that for health reasons it finally made sense to get out of the altitude and come “home”. I wonder whether Appa ever thought of Bookham as home. He had been on the railway in Bolivia since a very young man.

He was leaving behind the engines, the marshalling yards, the maestranza, the noise, the oil, the endless things that needed fixing—and his men.

Especially his men.

The Appa I knew was one of my English grandfathers, the one living in Bookham. Handsome, quiet, disciplined, kind, very British, I thought. But of course he wasn’t any more. Not really. His real life had been lived thousands of miles away on the Bolivian altiplano, among steam engines, salt, dust, freezing nights, thin air and the occasional revolution.

He was a Yorkshire railwayman who went to South America and somehow became Don Roberto.

The only give away was the ring finger on this right hand that was permanently bent towards his palm. He told me he had taken a severe blow to the palm of his hand. And that was obviously not in Surrey.

Dorothea said that his men were completely and totally loyal to him. I must have read that before, but it has only just landed with me.

Completely and totally loyal.

You don’t get that merely because your name is on the office door.

When Appa and Dorothea finally left Bolivia in 1956, it was not just La Paz saying goodbye. Railwaymen and their families came from far and wide to say goodbye.

They gathered at the stations along the route to see them pass. They came from Uyuni, they came from Oruro and still more workmen met the train in Antofagasta and in Mejillones to say goodbye. Robert and Dorothea had obviously touched many lives during more than thirty years in Bolivia.

Just think of that.

Men and their families leaving their homes and travelling—perhaps for hours—to stand on a platform and wave goodbye as the train went through. Some had worked beside Appa in the maestranza. Some had driven his engines, fired them, repaired them or kept the track beneath them, sound. Others may simply have known Don Roberto and Doña Dorothea as part of the railway family that had been there for as long as anyone could remember.

It must have been overwhelming. Station after station, another group waiting.

There was not just the high level ceremonial farewell given to an English manager in La Paz. People celebrated this man and his wife and what they meant to the fabric of the railway and the country. This was something much more personal: the people of their Bolivian life appearing along the railway line, one last time.

Appa was not merely leaving La Paz. He was leaving Uyuni, Oruro, the maestranza, the engines, the railway carriages in the sidings, the revolutions they had survived and the communities they had helped hold together.

He was leaving the country in which he had spent the substance of his life.

And his men came to make sure he knew he would not simply disappear from theirs.

Imagine that journey. Station after station, the people you had lived and worked among standing there to see you go.



Train Cemetery, Uyuni. Photograph by PsamatheM, 2018, via Wikimedia Commons⁠, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0⁠.

There is a plaque, so I have been told, in the old marshalling yards commemorating Appa’s life and work in Uyuni—and the railway in general.

Is it there now, I wonder?

Is it still there under seventy years of dust? Was it moved? Did somebody save it? Does anyone in Uyuni still remember Don Roberto Payne?



Nana & Appa on the Salar de Uyuni - the couple in the middle

These are the questions that keep appearing once you start opening boxes.

Robert was already in South America before Dorothea arrived in 1922. She sailed out alone and they married at Mejillones almost as soon as she stepped off the ship. No lengthy engagement, no wedding-planner nonsense. She arrived; they married; off they went.

From Mejillones they moved through Antofagasta and eventually into Bolivia.

By the time they reached Uyuni, Appa was responsible for the marshalling yards and the maestranza—the great railway workshops on which an enormous stretch of the network depended.

Today people think of Uyuni as the jumping-off point for the salt flats. They arrive in their layers, take funny perspective photographs with plastic dinosaurs and go back to their hotels.

That was not Appa’s Uyuni.

His Uyuni was a hard railway town in the middle of nowhere and at the centre of everything. Engines were repaired there. Trains were assembled there. Mines, ports, cities and countries depended upon what happened there.

If Uyuni stopped, an awful lot of Bolivia stopped with it.

And Appa’s men kept it going.

Who were they?

Drivers, firemen, mechanics, fitters, turners, welders, carpenters, track workers,labourers and their families. Men who could keep steam engines running through bitter cold, choking dust and air so thin that most visitors could barely cross a room without panting.

There was no ordering a replacement part online and waiting for DHL.

They repaired what they had. If the correct part did not exist, they made one. They listened to an engine and knew what was wrong with it. They understood machinery through their hands, their ears and years of experience.

Appa was in charge, yes.

But he could not have run that railway without his men.

Dad grew up among these working men, engines and workshops. Engineering was not something he later decided to study. It was the language being spoken all around him from childhood.



John Payne—the little boy who grew up on the salar, among the engines and railwaymen of Uyuni.

He learned to drive on the salar—which seems perfectly normal until you stop and think about it. When he taught us to drive many years later around Lake Titicaca, he taught us to listen to revs and double de clutch.

Decades later, after the railways were privatised, Dad returned to Uyuni from La Paz, because he needed help with the repairing of headgear at the Corocoro mine where he worked. This was the only place he could think of that had cranes and the remains of a workshop that could handle a repair of this magnitude. He worked for a South African /Bolivian collaboration, sinking shafts for a copper mine, at the time. The huge maestranza cranes in Uyuni were still there. So was the old ingenuity. He took Mum with him. I remember how emotional she was when she returned having witnessed where Dad had grown up. She insisted on bringing back a huge, perfectly round boulder that Dad had come across on the Salar, around the maestranza, as a boy. It must have been as big as him, then. He had put it in a special place and it was still there almost 30 years later. She wanted it. She brought it back to La Paz. I wonder if it is still in the garden of the Obrajes house that the family left behind.

Uyuni had trained Dad too.

The railway was woven through family life. The Paynes travelled in railway carriages and sometimes lived in them, parked in sidings. When trouble started—and trouble did start—people slept wherever they could be put.

Dorothea describes serving around 150 meals between Sunday morning and Monday afternoon. There were people all over the house, others sent to neighbouring houses and eleven small children in the middle of it all.

Naturally, Dorothea says everyone helped and they all had fun.

One hundred and fifty meals during a revolution and she makes it sound like a slightly over-subscribed company picnic.

When the huge aircraft arrived to evacuate them — mostly Americans, the captain begged Appa and Nana to go too.

Appa refused.

The trouble and agitation was in the mines, he said, and he was convinced that his own people at the railway would remain loyal.

There it is again: his people.

I don’t hear an arrogance in that. I hear a man who knew exactly who he was working with—and knew they knew him just as well.

His men would have known that he understood the railway and its’ people, profoundly. They would have known whether he was fair. They would certainly have known whether he could do the job himself. You cannot bluff practical men for years in a place like Uyuni.

And when things became dangerous, Appa stayed.

On another occasion when an evacuation by rail was ordered. Appa did not leave first and abscond safely behind a desk. He made sure his people would cope, were safe and then he took the expats out as ordered, by driving one of the steam locomotives himself.

The boss was in the cab, with responsibility for the engine, the carriages and everyone inside them.

Then there was Pan American Grace and the Diagonal.

When Panagra began flying its extraordinary route across South America, Uyuni became a refuelling stop and a place of refuge in an Andean storm. A landing strip had to be made on the altiplano, and our family story has always been that Appa helped to build it. (1)



In Flying the Andes, (2) Panagra pilot Ernie Hummel remembered Appa taking crews to the airfield before dawn for their pre-flight procedures. One morning, they noticed a Bolivian man standing some distance from the aircraft. He had apparently been there all night. Appa quipped that he had come “to see this big bird lay an egg”.

The famous part of the story is wonderful: those silver aircraft crossing the Andes before radar and modern navigation, with pilots using stopwatches to time their passage between the mountains.

But aircraft do not simply descend from the sky, take on fuel and continue to Lima or Buenos Aires by magic.

Somebody had to prepare the ground. Somebody had to bring the fuel, shift the equipment, repair the machinery, move the passengers and find somewhere for everyone to sleep when the weather came down.

That somebody was very often the railway.

When passengers and crews were stranded, the Paynes looked after them. Railway carriages became bedrooms. The house became an unofficial hotel. Dorothea fed everybody.

Their home was referred to as Casa Panagra —Payneagra.

The Panagra crews did not merely sleep and eat there. Pilot Ernie Hummel (3)

remembered Messrs Payne and Hopwood sometimes taking the overnight crews up to the Pulacayo mine, where the staff there held parties. The Payne daughter (that would be my father’s sister 😂) and the daughters of the British and American mining engineers and geologists wanted to dance all night. Many a crew member, he said, became exhausted “trying to keep up some semblance of a dance step at 17,000 feet”.

For a quieter form of entertainment, the aircrews borrowed one of the railway-yard switch engines and ran it up and down the track.

We always thought this was funny—and very Payne—but also tells you exactly how Uyuni worked. Panamerican Grace became Braniff. My brother and I and my cousins did our school run part of the journey to Peru on Braniff and then onto London as unaccompanied minors to the UK. The great romantic Panagra adventure in those days relied upon people on the ground in Uyuni and other places to quietly making the impossible possible.

Appa and his men stood at the point where steam met aviation.

And it was not only engines and aircraft. These families organised Christmas parties, looked after people who had fallen on hard times and even took responsibility for cemeteries.

There was nobody else to do it.

Or rather, they were the people who did it.

Appa and Nana retired to Bookham and became, in my childish mind, my very British grandparents.

But now I wonder how British England actually felt to them.

They had spent the substance of their lives in Bolivia. In Uyuni they were Don Roberto and Doña Dorothea. They were known. They had a place, a purpose and a whole web of people around them.

In Bookham, who knew that Appa had driven a steam locomotive out of Uyuni during an evacuation?

Who knew about the maestranza, the Panagra passengers, the railway carriages in the sidings—or Dorothea producing 150 meals in two days while a revolution went on outside?

To the neighbours, they must simply have looked like a respectable retired English couple.

Leaving La Paz must have been difficult.

But leaving Uyuni must have broken something in both of them.

Appa was leaving the place where his abilities mattered every day. He was leaving the workshops, the clang of metal, the smell of steam and oil and those locomotives sitting under the huge altiplano sky.

And he was leaving his men.

Not anonymous Bolivian workers arranged decoratively behind the important Englishman. Not extras in somebody else’s colonial adventure.

They were the railway.

They were the men who worked beside Appa, trusted him and taught his son and daughter, Quechua. Their names may not have made it into the family papers but they are present in every story we have about Uyuni.

Appa ran the railway.

But he never ran it alone.

Source:

(1) Ernie Hummel, quoted in William A. Krusen, Flying the Andes: The Story of Pan American-Grace Airways, p. 64

(2 &3) Ernie Hummel, quoted in William A. Krusen, Flying the Andes: The Story of Pan American-Grace Airways, p. 73-74

AI helped with research and transcription. The memories, interpretation and final decisions are my own.

Text © 2026 Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Family photographs are from the Payne family archive unless otherwise credited.

And, oddly enough, my reference point has become Bolivia—and my grandmother’s memories, typed on an old manual typewriter in her bedroom in the south of England in the 1970s.

By then, both my grandmothers had lost their husbands and were living together, forming the home base my brother and I needed in the UK. Before Appa died, he and Nana had already done much the same in Bookham for the cousins who came before us.

I’m not referring to the Bolivia that later became my home, but the Bolivia my family inhabited through the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s: mines and railways; aircraft flying between mountains; revolutions; engineers; railway sidings; expatriate households; cooks improvising at altitude, sometimes without refrigeration, electricity or water.

The Bolivia in which seventeen women somehow came together, in 1943, to assemble a cookbook that would help them survive and adapt.

The book is called Cocinando en los Andes.

My grandmother’s copy of Cocinando en los Andes, 1943. Payne Family Archive.

For most of my life it was simply Nana’s old cookbook. Now I am beginning to wonder whether it is also a tiny surviving document from a world being rearranged by war.

And that has led me back to my grandfather, Robert Payne—Appa—who ran the railway operation at Uyuni.

I knew that.

What I had never properly understood was what was happening around him, in the world at the time.

That is my “non-knowledge”: the extraordinary things one can know intimately without understanding their significance.

I have remembered names and stories. I knew about Pan American-Grace Airways and remember very well when it was my turn to fly back and forth between school and home in Bolivia. I was told a great deal about the railway carriages. I knew that Dad and his sister Betty had flown through the Andes to school in Argentina as unaccompanied minors. I had heard all about Casa Payne-Agra around dinner tables and at family gatherings.

I also knew that Appa knew everything there was to know about steam locomotives. He had driven them.

What was never discussed around the table was how strategically important Bolivia had become during those times.

We talked about the country and its people. These stories were spoken of with knowledge, intimacy and love. In private moments, Dad taught us about the animals of the Altiplano and told us stories from his childhood—his sister’s pet goat and the big parrot among them.

It was his home.

Dorothea and Robert Payne with companions on the Salar de Uyuni. Payne Family Archive.

What was not talked about was that my grandparents’ Bolivia had already endured one war, and that they had been there while another gathered around them.

The first war

Robert and Dorothea Payne did not arrive at the Second World War innocent of what war did to ordinary life.

Nor was the First World War remote from Nana. Her brother—her only relative—had survived the fighting, only to die shortly afterwards from the effects of having been gassed.

I found a document recording that my grandparents had already lived through the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, from 1932 to 1935.

And here, wonderfully, the family history steps straight into a surviving historical account.

A reminiscence of Uyuni during the Chaco War reproduces material from a 1933 municipal report recording the organisations created by the town to support the Bolivian war effort. Among them was the Comité Ferroviario Pro-Hospital Militar Móvil—the Railway Committee for a Mobile Military Hospital.

Its president was Roberto Payne.

Its vice-president was Doroty de Payne.

My grandparents. [1]

Well, that was news to me.

I am racking my brain to remember whether either Nana or Dad ever mentioned their participation. I think not.

Uyuni was not merely watching the Chaco War from a safe distance. The railway was part of the machinery of war. Troops, ammunition, equipment, casualties and supplies had to be moved through a landlocked country of formidable distances and terrain.

The account describes a town organising committees for national defence, social assistance and military support. A railway hospital was prepared in coaches to receive wounded and sick men evacuated from the Chaco. Women collected money, medicines, bandages, clothing and supplies. Old linen was gathered for dressings. Parcels went to soldiers.

Robert and Dorothea Payne were not standing outside this effort. They were helping to organise it. [1]

It was powerful to see their names documented.

Overseas postings were obviously not all fun and games.

By the time another war began gathering in Europe only a few years later, Appa and Nana already understood something about war that I am only now beginning to appreciate.

Wars do not consist only of battles.

They require trains, food, hospitals, fuel, bandages and communications. They require people who know where things are—and people who know how to get them somewhere else.

We have seen this reinforced by those doing precisely that work in Ukraine.

And women—let us not forget the women—somehow keep everybody alive while men so often write themselves into the history books.

Bolivia and the scrap pile

Through this constant pull towards these stories, I can see clearly in hindsight another war emerging.

Bolivia came out of the Chaco War battered. The conflict had been catastrophic in lives and resources. Political upheaval followed, along with the continuing effects of the Depression.

But Bolivia possessed something the industrial powers desperately needed: minerals—above all, tin.

Before the Second World War, tin was Bolivia’s principal exported commodity, and Britain was already deeply dependent upon it. A 1939 United States State Department telegram reported that approximately 60 per cent of Bolivian exports went initially to Great Britain. The following year, an American memorandum noted that Bolivian ore supplied two-thirds of the tin used by the British smelting industry. [2]

Britain was already at war.

Bolivia’s importance did not begin when the Americans arrived, but when they did, the strategic calculation began to change.

On 4 November 1940—more than a year before Pearl Harbor—the US Metals Reserve Company entered into a five-year contract to purchase 18,000 tons of Bolivian tin annually. [3]

The United States was not yet formally at war, but governments and mining engineers were already looking at maps. They were examining supply chains, calculating what they needed and deciding what they could secure before it was lost.

The American presence was becoming more organised too.

In October 1941, Washington announced an economic mission under Merwin Bohan. Seven specialists were planned, including two mining engineers, two highway engineers and two agronomists. The mission surveyed Bolivia in 1941–42, and its report became the basis of an agreed programme of economic cooperation. Its proposals were not confined to minerals. They included roads and other internal communications, agriculture and petroleum, with the stated aims of diversifying Bolivia’s economy, raising living standards and reducing its dependence on tin. [13]

I feel this happening all over again.

The first shooting match does not mark the beginning of war, because by then a great deal has already happened.

After the Chaco War, and in the build-up to World War II, Bolivia’s strategic importance intensified. When Japan swept across Southeast Asia, traditional sources of tin available to the United States became inaccessible.

A US War Production Board report on 1942 production contains one of the most extraordinary sentences I have encountered in this entire search:

“The only two important sources of tin that remain to the U.S. are Bolivia and the national scrap pile.” [4]

Bolivia and the national scrap pile.

That sentence stopped me.

Suddenly I could see the country in which my father was growing up: Nana contributing to what was, in effect, a manual for survival at high altitude; Appa running railway yards.

It was not remotely peripheral.

It was essential.

The United States constructed the Longhorn tin smelter in Texas in response to the crisis. The same War Production Board report described expansion intended to process the available tin ore for the United Nations. [4]

Bolivian ore had become part of the physical survival mechanism of the Allied industrial economy.

And it was not just tin.

Read the American diplomatic record for Bolivia and the country begins to look less like a distant Andean republic and more like a shopping list for modern warfare.

In 1941 the United States negotiated with Bolivia for tungsten. Then lead, zinc and antimony. The records even note Japanese efforts to prevent completion of the Bolivian tungsten agreement. [5]

Then came rubber, quinine, cinchona bark and more tin.

The 1942 diplomatic papers record arrangements for the US Rubber Reserve Company to purchase Bolivia’s entire rubber production apart from an agreed quantity for domestic use. [6]

In 1942 the State Department was negotiating for Bolivian cinchona bark and antimalarial products, including proposed contracts with cinchona producers and the government quinine factory. [7]

As late as 1944, American officials were still describing Bolivian rubber and quinine as badly needed for the United Nations war effort. [8]

Tin, tungsten, antimony, lead, zinc, rubber, quinine.

War material.

What are we talking about now?

Lithium runs off the tip of my tongue.

And all of it presented—and presents—the same basic problem.

Bolivia has no sea.

So how do you get it out?

That landlocked condition had its own history. Bolivia lost its Pacific coast to Chile in the War of the Pacific. The 1904 peace treaty recognised Chilean sovereignty over the former Bolivian coastal territory, while guaranteeing Bolivia commercial transit through Chilean territory and ports and providing for a railway from Arica to La Paz. [11]

FC del Chile railcar, part of the Chile–Bolivia railway world that linked Bolivia to Pacific routes. Photograph from the Payne Family Archive.

The loss of the derecho al mar was not a dead historical fact. It remained part of Bolivian consciousness throughout my own life there.

Nor did the railways suddenly appear when foreign governments wanted Bolivian minerals.

The line from Antofagasta had reached Uyuni in 1889, decades before either world war. It carried ore, certainly, but also people, food, machinery, mail and the materials from which towns and communities were sustained across formidable and inhospitable distances. [11]

By the 1940s, wartime demand was making urgent use of infrastructure already woven into Bolivian life.

The man on the ground

This is where Appa’s railway stops being merely a wonderful family story.

Uyuni was a railway town.

Mines across the western interior depended upon engineers, geologists, railway workers and the communities around them. The western Bolivian rail network connected the mining interior to routes towards the Pacific; the line through Uyuni was one of the arteries through which people, machinery and freight moved.

During the Chaco War, Uyuni’s railway hospital committee had already shown how completely the railway community could be drawn into a national emergency. [1]

Appa knew that system inside out. It was his lifeblood.

He had gone to South America from Yorkshire, lying about his age, early in the twentieth century. Nana followed not long afterwards.

He was not the great railway magnate in La Paz.

He was something much more useful to this story.

He was the man on the ground.

He ran the yards at Uyuni. He dealt with the change of gauge. He knew the locomotives and sidings. He knew how trains were assembled and moved through the system.

He could not only drive a locomotive.

He could build one.

This comes from my family—from all of us who knew him and lived there.

Robert Payne and railwaymen beside a badly damaged locomotive. Payne Family Archive.

The remarkable thing about reading the diplomatic documents now is not that they somehow authenticate our family memories.

It is that they reveal the enormous geopolitical structure surrounding lives my family remembered perfectly well without ever needing to call it geopolitics.

Washington could sign a contract for thousands of tons of tin.

Someone still had to move it.

A ministry could decide that Bolivia contained strategic minerals.

Someone still had to put wagons behind an engine.

This is the history underneath the history.

And in the background, seventeen women kept homes and put together a cookbook.

Seventeen women

Which brings me back to Cocinando en los Andes.

It was printed in 1943.

Seventeen women contributed.

The contributors to Cocinando en los Andes, 1943. Payne Family Archive.

Many belonged to American, Canadian and British mining, geology, engineering and railway households whose daily lives were closely bound up with the Bolivian communities around them. People worked together, exchanged knowledge, introduced one another to new ingredients and depended upon one another.

The cookbook grew out of the practical business of survival at altitude. [10]

Recipes. Advice. Ways of preserving food, adapting ingredients and making ordinary recipes work in extraordinary conditions.

One of those women was my grandmother, Dorothea Payne.

Ten years earlier, she had helped her railway community care for wounded and sick men brought back from a brutal war.

We are accustomed to separating history into categories: war, industry, mining, diplomacy, food, railways, aviation, communications—and, if we are lucky, a subsection on women and domestic life.

People did not live in categories.

The woman thinking about eggs, cakes, substitutions or cooking at altitude might also have spent the previous war helping to organise aid around a railway hospital.

Some of the American women may have arrived with experience of high-altitude or arid places in the western United States—New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado—terrain rather more familiar than Surrey or Yorkshire.

The man eating that food might be responsible for getting an engine steamed and a train moving.

The neighbour contributing another recipe might belong to a household connected to a mine producing the minerals Washington was urgently trying to acquire.

And somewhere beyond the kitchen windows, trains were moving through the Altiplano.

That is why I no longer see this slightly battered book as merely a cookbook.

Those seventeen women were sitting in the middle of something.

The book is domestic evidence of an industrial community living through a world war.

Perhaps they did not think they were recording history.

Most people who record useful history do not.

They record what needs doing.

Then the aeroplanes appeared

Just when the story seems crowded enough, Pan American-Grace Airways—Panagra—flies into the picture.

Panagra connected South America by air, and Uyuni became part of that world too.

The Payne family knew it intimately.

Dad and his sister Betty flew on Panagra between Bolivia and school in Argentina. The family remembered pilots negotiating the Andes with timing, experience and an extraordinary knowledge of the mountains.

The pilots’ skill was not simply family mythology. A Panagra chronology records five years without a passenger or crew fatality before a fatal crash in January 1943, as well as three consecutive annual safety awards. One pilot hired in 1942 recalled that Panagra recruited six men from a flight-officer course originally created for a wartime supply operation. [14]

Appa became involved in the practical arrangements at Uyuni.

According to our family record, the railway helped build or prepare the landing ground, and passengers and crews could be accommodated using railway facilities and carriages placed in sidings. [10]

The Payne household became so entwined with the airline world that my grandparents’ house acquired a name:

Casa Payne-Agra.

Later: Casa Payn-Agra.

Again, what fascinates me is what happens when the family story is placed beside the government record.

In 1941 American diplomatic papers show the United States becoming deeply concerned about German influence in Bolivian civil aviation. Bolivia nationalised Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano and Panagra received a management role, while the United States pursued aviation cooperation and strategic-material agreements with Bolivia. [9]

But the German presence in Bolivia was not one simple thing.

Alongside established German businesses and institutions were Jewish refugees escaping Germany, Austria and Nazi-occupied Europe.

Thousands reached safety in Bolivia with the help of Mauricio—Moritz—Hochschild, the German-Jewish tin magnate. Working through refugee organisations and his mining companies, he helped secure visas, employment, housing and medical care. The surviving archive records nurseries, children’s homes and agricultural settlements as well as work found for new arrivals.

The precise number remains disputed.

The refuge Bolivia offered does not. [12]

So, while an enormous hemispheric contest over aviation, resources and influence played out at government level, the Payne children experienced Panagra as the aeroplane that took them to school.

That is history from the other end of the telescope.

The war before the war

This is perhaps what bothers me most as I look at the world now.

We date wars. We build memorials around declarations, invasions and battles.

But the archival record suggests something more uncomfortable.

Long before the United States formally entered the Second World War, it was negotiating access to strategic Bolivian tin. It was looking at transport, tungsten and aviation.

Governments were examining who controlled airlines and mines, who could buy which resources, and how quickly those resources could be moved.

Supply chains were already becoming national-security questions. Economic relationships were becoming weapons. Access to minerals was becoming strategy.

By the time everybody agreed there was a world war, much of its infrastructure was already in place.

That feels uncomfortably familiar.

Appa’s workshop

I remember Appa as a very quiet man.

By the time I knew him well, the Altiplano and the railway were far away.

He had a workshop at the end of his garden in Bookham, Surrey. Nana was still making cakes, knitting marvellous jumpers and keeping a freezer full of homemade ice cream.

He tinkered.

She cared for their big cat, Pussy Payne.

I remember the quietness.

Now, having stumbled backwards into the history surrounding their lives, I wonder what was going through Appa’s head as he sat in that workshop, what Nana thought about as she did the dishes.

They had watched Bolivia endure the Chaco War.

Robert and Dorothea had helped a railway community organise around wounded soldiers and a mobile hospital.

Appa had run trains in one of the most inhospitable landscapes imaginable.

They had seen aviation arrive and Panagra become woven into Uyuni life.

They had lived in a country whose tin became so important that an American wartime agency could reduce the remaining options to Bolivia and a scrap pile.

They had lived through Bolivia’s political upheavals too.

One story preserved in our family tells of the President ordering the evacuation of foreigners from Uyuni as rebellion threatened the railway.

The engines had to be steamed.

The expatriate railway families had to get out.

Appa drove one of the locomotives himself.

Nana records the attack on the journey almost casually.

They “machine gunned the train for the sheer hell of it.”

I do not need to describe that as legend.

It is family testimony. It is part of the surviving Payne record. [10]

When governments make decisions, somebody has to make them physically possible.

Somebody has to know how to raise steam.

Somebody has to know which engine can move.

Somebody has to know the line.

Somebody has to get everybody aboard.

History tends to remember the telephone call from the President.

Families remember the man who drove the train, his wife calming the passengers, and a dog in the carriage.

Beneath the history

Perhaps this is why I keep being pulled backwards now.

It started with memoirs, and then with a cookbook.

Then seventeen women appeared.

Then a Mrs W. Barr who still refuses to be identified, while quite a few of the other ladies have been.

Then the mines appeared.

Then the metals.

The Americans.

Panagra, I already knew a great deal about.

And, of course, the railway.

Gradually, my grandfather stopped looking like a quiet Yorkshireman who had once had an adventurous life overseas and began appearing where he had actually been all along:

inside the infrastructure.

Robert and Dorothea Payne were not world leaders.

They did not decide wars.

They were among the people who made societies function while other people were deciding them.

And that, increasingly, seems to me to be where history actually lives.

In kitchens.

In railway yards.

In hospital coaches.

In recipes adapted for altitude.

In little boys and girls being flown across the Andes to school.

In my grandmother collecting old linen for bandages and later contributing to a cookbook.

In an engineer waiting for an aircraft.

In a locomotive being steamed because somebody has telephoned from La Paz and said: Get them out.

Today tourists walk among the rusting locomotives at Uyuni and photograph them against that impossible Bolivian sky.

They look abandoned.

They are not, really.

They are evidence.

And perhaps that is what Cocinando en los Andes is too: a small object left behind by people who did not know that somebody, eighty years later, would need it to understand how a world war reached all the way into a kitchen in the Andes.

Because wars begin long before we admit they have begun.

They begin in shortages. In contracts. In minerals. In transport routes. In alliances. In arguments about who controls technology. In governments deciding what they cannot afford to lose.

And underneath all of that are ordinary people quietly making the machinery work.

I know that now.

Appa knew it then.

Source key

Published and archival sources are numbered in the essay. Family memories and documents are identified separately so that the historical record and family testimony are not blurred together.

1. Chaco War railway hospital committee

“Reminiscencias: Uyuni en la Guerra del Chaco,” Uyuni Web, 21 August 2012. The page reproduces material attributed to a 1933 municipal report and lists Roberto Payne as president and Doroty de Payne as vice-president of the Comité Ferroviario Pro-Hospital Militar Móvil.

https://uyuniweb.com/2012/08/reminiscencias-uyuni-en-la-guerra-del-chaco/

2. Tin and Bolivia’s trade with Britain

José Alejandro Peres-Cajías, “Official Bolivian Trade Statistics (1910–1949),” University of Barcelona; Sumner Welles to the Secretary of State, 26 September 1939, FRUS, 1939, The American Republics, vol. V, document 331; and a United States memorandum of 21 September 1940, FRUS, 1940, vol. V, document 623. Together these support tin’s position as Bolivia’s principal exported commodity, the report that approximately 60 per cent of Bolivian exports went initially to Great Britain, and the contemporary estimate that Bolivia supplied 66.75 per cent of the tin ore used by the British smelting industry in 1935–1939.

https://diposit.ub.edu/bitstreams/75c52f2b-36b2-4c62-9a67-7479f5e95fec/download

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1939v05/d331

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1940v05/d623

3. The November 1940 Bolivian tin contract

Memorandum by Thomas K. Finletter, 26 May 1942, recording the Metals Reserve Company contract of 4 November 1940 for 18,000 tons of Bolivian tin annually over five years. FRUS, 1942, The American Republics, vol. V, document 501.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1942v05/d501

4. “Bolivia and the national scrap pile”

United States War Production Board, War Production in 1942. The tin section contains the quoted sentence and describes completion and proposed expansion of the Longhorn tin smelter in Texas.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-P32_4800-088b03a699be3f11c42acab056dd6662/html/GOVPUB-P32_4800-088b03a699be3f11c42acab056dd6662.htm

5. Tungsten, lead, zinc and antimony

Douglas Jenkins to the Secretary of State, 17 April 1941, reporting Japanese pressure intended to prevent the Bolivian tungsten contract with the United States; see also the Bolivia index entries for agreements involving tungsten, lead, zinc and antimony. FRUS, 1941, The American Republics, vol. VI, document 469 and index.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/d469

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/index

6. Purchase of Bolivian rubber

Acting Secretary of State to the Chargé in Bolivia, 18 March 1942. Records the Rubber Reserve Company proposal to purchase Bolivia’s entire rubber production apart from an agreed amount for domestic use. FRUS, 1942, The American Republics, vol. V, document 516.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1942v05/d516

7. Cinchona bark and quinine

Secretary of State to Ambassador Pierre de L. Boal, 23 October and 14 November 1942. The telegrams describe revised proposals for Bolivian cinchona bark and antimalarial products, including proposed contracts with cinchona producers and the government quinine factory. FRUS, 1942, The American Republics, vol. V, documents 513 and 515.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1942v05/d513

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1942v05/d515

8. Rubber and quinine for the Allied war effort

Paul Linz memorandum, 6 March 1944, stating that Bolivian rubber and quinine remained badly needed for the United Nations war effort. FRUS, 1944, The American Republics, vol. VII, document 449.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v07/d449

9. Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano and Panagra

The Bolivia section of FRUS, 1941, The American Republics, vol. VI, documents 416–427, covers United States efforts to remove German influence from Bolivian commercial aviation, the nationalisation of Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano and the Panagra management arrangement. See especially the telegram of 29 November 1941, document 426.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/index

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/d426

10. Payne Family Archive

Dorothea Payne’s original typescript memoirs, including her account of the evacuation train being machine-gunned; the Payne family copy of Cocinando en los Andes (Oruro, 5 April 1943); and oral testimony preserved by the Payne family concerning the death of Dorothea’s brother after being gassed in the First World War; Robert Payne’s work at Uyuni and his ability to build as well as drive a locomotive; the change of gauge, sidings and evacuation train; the Uyuni landing ground; railway accommodation for Panagra; Casa Payne-Agra/Casa Payn-Agra; and John and Betty Payne’s journeys to school in Argentina.

11. Bolivia’s loss of its Pacific coast and the railway connections

Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Chile and Bolivia, signed 20 October 1904, and the associated Convention for the Construction and Operation of a Railroad from Arica to La Paz, reproduced in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1905, documents 128–129. The treaty recognised Chilean sovereignty over the former Bolivian coastal territory, guaranteed Bolivia commercial transit through Chilean territory and ports, and provided for the Arica–La Paz railway. José Alejandro Peres-Cajías documents the connection of Antofagasta with Uyuni in 1889 and Oruro in 1892.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1905/ch31

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/bolivian-tariff-policy-during-the-late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-centuries-high-average-tariff-and-unbalanced-regional-protection/414AEBE3D309EB2FF2DD978E3430070D

12. Mauricio Hochschild and Jewish refugees in Bolivia

UNESCO Memory of the World, “Jewish and Israelite Immigration to Bolivia, during World War II, under the Sponsorship of Mining Industrialist Mauricio Hochschild,” describing the Mauricio Hochschild/SAMI records held by the Archivo Histórico de la Minería Nacional, COMIBOL. The archive documents the organisations, employment, health services, children’s facilities and agricultural settlements established to assist thousands of Jewish refugees. See also the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, “Uncovering Jewish History in Bolivia,” for corroborating material on SOPRO and SOCOBO. Published estimates of the number assisted vary widely; the essay therefore uses the conservative term “thousands.”

https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/lac/jewish-and-israelite-inmigration-bolivia-during-world-war-ii-under-sponsorship-mining-industrialist

https://archives.jdc.org/uncovering-jewish-history-in-bolivia/

13. The Bohan economic mission

United States diplomatic records announced Merwin L. Bohan’s economic mission in October 1941, with seven specialists planned: two mining engineers, two highway engineers, two agronomists and Bohan. A later State Department policy statement records that the mission surveyed Bolivia in 1941–42 and that the Bohan Report became the basis of a programme accepted by both governments. It emphasised internal communications and diversification through agriculture and petroleum, with the stated objectives of raising living standards and reducing dependence on tin. FRUS, 1941, The American Republics, vol. VI, document 459; and FRUS, 1951, vol. II, document 695.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v06/d459

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951v02/d695

14. Panagra pilots and safety record

The Braniff Airways Foundation’s Panagra chronology records that the fatal crash of 22 January 1943 ended a five-year period without a passenger or crew fatality, and that Panagra received a third consecutive annual safety award for its 1942 operations. Paul A. Willey’s first-person pilot memoir records that Panagra hired six men in 1942 from a flight-officer programme created to train copilots for a wartime supply route. These sources support the narrower statements used in the essay; they do not establish that all of Panagra’s original pilots were former military pilots.

https://www.braniffinternational.com/panagratimeline

https://www.robertnovell.com/blogpahagra-memories-paul-willey-pilot-panagra-braniff-1942-1980-may-4-2012/

AI note: I used ChatGPT as a research and editorial tool while developing this essay.

At the weekend I took the first wave of apples off the tree with the help of my neighbour, as the heat and lack of water have them dropping like flies.

For the flies.

The bashed and bruised ones went straight into the compost and the good ones filled a large green tub. There are many, many more still up there.

I shall give my neighbours bags full, but there will still be some. My immediate neighbour brought her beans and courgettes over but declined the offer of apples, as they are going to be away north of here for the bulk of the remodelling they are having done next door.

Lucky them.

It is also one of the hottest days in London, so naturally I’m deciding to make chutney.

I do pick my moments.

I should point out that I already have apple chutney in the cupboard. I have no idea when I made it. It could be Brexit or Pandemic — two useful focal points for remembering things since I moved back to the UK. Now I guess I can add “heatwave” to that list.

It looks like it might be edible.

I am choosing to believe it is.

Anyway, I was still looking for that inspiring recipe. Perhaps something involving apples that didn’t involve chutney.

And there was Nana again.

Honestly, my grandmother is ever present these days. I shall have to be careful not to go back into the 1940s right now.

I’m busy.

However, there was Cocinando en los Andes, —Cooking in the Andes — her old cookbook, now quite literally falling to pieces. Inside, in her handwriting:

Dorothy Payne

Uyuni

1943

All right, Nana. What are you trying to tell me this time?

Not what to do with apples, obviously.

I don’t remember many apples growing in the Andes in my day. What I do remember is Mum yearning for a lovely crisp green English apple. A proper one. The sort you bit into and it cracked. If ever there were apples about she would insist on taking a big bite out of mine, which drove me mad at age eleven.

And now here I am in England with several hundred of the blasted things growing outside my window.

There is probably a message in there somewhere.

Nana wasn’t going to solve that problem, but she wasn’t finished with me either.

I’ve always known the book was hers. Mum used it after her. I use it. It has never been one of those precious family relics wrapped in tissue paper and brought out occasionally to be admired.

It is a cookbook. We cooked from it.

The second page consists of a list of 17 ladies. There was Mrs R. Payne again, among the printed list of women who had contributed recipes to the book.

Heading that list is a Mrs W. Barr!!!

What?

Who was Mr Barr, and what did he have to do with Colquiri Mines in Bolivia in 1940’s? I had already identified a few of the other women as wives of American geologists and engineers. Other names, along with Mrs W. Barr, are still unidentified.

Oh dear.

Note to self: Please, Liz, don’t go down this rabbit hole when the kitchen is now full of apples and recipe books all over the place. The heat is too much for another unfinished project.

Indie, now sitting on the chair I had just leapt up from, looked at me sideways as if to say, “Leave it — for right now anyway!”

But the next morning I found myself looking at the book again, even though I didn’t really have the time.

At the back I found the printing date: 5 April 1943. Oruro, Bolivia.

Much of the book is about the alterations needed for recipes when cooking at Colquiri, a mining camp at approximately 14,000 feet above sea level. Up there, according to family lore, you could practically put your hand in boiling water.

At that altitude baking a cake becomes a work of art, a science lesson and, I imagine, an occasional act of faith.

Some extra pages are coming unglued. There is Nana’s handwriting and Mum’s handwriting, English and Spanish, recipes for pancakes, Christmas pudding, Dundee cake and fruit Bavarian cream.

I can just picture them all making Dundee Cake at 14,000ft above sea level.

Measurements have been altered, things crossed out, things added and other things simply shoved between the pages.

Including an old Knox gelatine leaflet featuring a pretty awful moulded salad and the useful information that gelatine might also restore brittle fingernails to natural beauty.

Good to know.

By now I was in danger of forgetting about the apples.

The cookbook really is in a terrible state. Pages are coming out and the binding is collapsing, so suddenly I was looking for acid-free folders and worrying about book conservation.

This is what happens around here. You go looking for chutney and end up needing an archivist and an avid independent journalist or maybe a detective.

My daughter-in-law did a bookbinding course in Oxford and is coming on the 24th. I’ll ask her who might be able to preserve it.

Preserve. Not restore.

I don’t want anyone making it respectable. The stains stay, the handwriting stays, the loose bits stay.

Even the Knox salad stays.

Eventually I remembered why I was there.

Apples.

I pulled out several more books looking for recipes and Harish came back that way — a dear friend from a long time ago, now gone. His book, The Healing Cuisine, was sitting there with his recipes inside and suddenly there he was in my kitchen.

This is the trouble with old books. You go looking for chutney and somebody walks back into the room.

But Harish, at least, had brought a recipe with him: apple, avocado and banana chutney.

Even better — no cooking.

Have I mentioned the heat?

Apple, avocado and banana. There is apparently something of a pattern developing here, though I’ll leave that particular avenue of enquiry to Isabel Allende and her theories about Eve and temptation.

Unfortunately, while I was conducting this increasingly ridiculous culinary archaeology, next door’s loft conversion was progressing nicely.

We live in Victorian terraced houses and their chimney is attached to mine. They are taking theirs down, which means some of mine has to come down too, because apparently you cannot remove half a chimney and expect the other half to hover over Peckham through sheer force of character.

Frankly, I thought mine might manage it.

The NOISE.

God.

Indie was not impressed. She was looking at me fiercely, because apparently I am responsible for the remodelling next door, the weather, the apples and the chimney.

The banging and drilling continued, Indie sat in the kitchen chirping and moaning, and I went back to my books.

Nana. Mum. Harish. Cards falling out as I turned the pages. My iced water sitting on the table in one of the plastic mugs rescued from the Rio Olympics and given to me by a friend. An old fireplace in every room because I’m apparently the only person left in the street who kept theirs.

I even kept the outside loo until five years ago.

Suddenly I feel like Miss Havisham.

With plumbing.

I keep asking the children if they want all of this and I get answers like, “Depends,” and “Don’t throw it yet.” Then they dash away to live their lives.

At least, when I have finished writing down my memoirs, they’ll know what some of the stories attached to it all are about.

If they eventually have to sort through it all without me, they will decide what is treasure and what is junk, and the destination will be entirely up to them.

I can already hear them.

“Why on earth did she keep this?”

Well.

Now you know.

By then the apples, after several hours of being researched, photographed, discussed and preserved in every conceivable way except actually being preserved, had been relegated to the cool downstairs bathroom.

The Ukrainians were still banging, Indie was still complaining, I was drinking iced water from Rio 2016 and there were still hundreds more apples on the tree.

Then my daughter phoned and asked if I would like to go with them to Picturehouse Central to watch Odyssey.

Yes please!

I still hadn’t gone shopping for the rest of the ingredients or made the chutney.

I quietly closed the bathroom door.

The apples could wait.

Odyssey, incidentally, was an odyssey.

Great story. Lousy film, in my humble opinion.

At least there was popcorn.

Haven’t I just seen most of these actors in Spiderman?

And then today happened.

I had intended to return to the apples.

The apples, however, were no longer the main event.

The neighbours themselves have wisely absented themselves for the duration of their loft conversion, leaving me in residence next door to enjoy the full immersive experience.

On Sunday my neighbour had wafted off mentioning that he had instructed the builders to remove his side of our shared chimney, and it was most likely to affect me.

I had wondered about this.

As far as I understand these things, half a chimney does not remain politely upright simply because the other half belongs to someone else.

It doesn’t.

Today a substantial part of the chimney came down the chimney.

One of the Ukrainian workmen heard the commotion while he was up on next door’s roof and came to my assistance. He spoke no English. He took off his shoes and, through a combination of pointing, mime and extraordinary patience, explained that he needed to look at my fireplaces and maybe temporarily block them to prevent some of the dust and rubble coming through.

Too late.

We had an entire conversation without a single shared word — just gestures, nods and that peculiar human understanding that sometimes makes language look rather overrated.

He was scrupulously polite in his socks.

When he left to get a dustpan and brush, I stood in the hallway thinking that here were these men doing a loft conversion in Peckham while their country was being bombed.

Slava Ukraini.

The thought of losing part of my chimney suddenly seemed very small.

I must remember to give them some apples before they go.

Assuming anyone still wants apples by then.

By the time we had finished dealing with bricks, mortar, soot and however many decades of accumulated filth live inside a Victorian chimney, we looked like Edwardian chimney sweeps.

He left with a bag of apples.

Better than Bitcoin.

The drilling continued and meanwhile the grandsons arrived for the afternoon. One came through the door with a book tucked under his arm as always but today with the general demeanour of someone who is eleven but feels he may as well get the teenage years underway. The other — Mr Cool — waltzed in wearing new shoes, coughed up all the gossip and then disappeared upstairs to sit in front of a fan and watch television.

Indie had been considerably bothered all day. She conducted a deep investigation and smelling diagnosis of the boys’ shoes in the hall, sat on them for a while, presumably to secure the evidence, and eventually decided that she too had had enough and went off to watch TV.

Throughout all of this, the pear and apple chutney continued bubbling away.

It is perfectly nice.

Unfortunately for it, I found some things in the freezer.

There were frozen grapes, a bag of mixed berries, some cranberries and possibly other things whose identities are now lost to history.

I still had apples.

So I threw the frozen things into a pan and added some.

How many?

Enough.

I didn’t peel them because it was hot and I couldn’t be bothered, which apparently turned out to be sound jam-making technique because the skins contain pectin. There was some lemon involved and then sugar.

How much?

Enough.

At some point I remembered the ready test and put a saucer in the freezer. A blob of the bubbling purple stuff went onto the cold saucer, I pushed my finger through it and it wrinkled. The gap stayed open.

Jam.

I tasted it.

It was delicious.

Not merely acceptable considering it had been made from the contents of the freezer and a complete disregard for weights and measures. It was dark and glossy and tart, sharp enough to taste of fruit rather than sugar and sweet enough to be jam.

I dipped my finger in again.

And again.

Eventually there wasn’t much left on the saucer.

The boys and I have called it Mysterious Delicious Jam, largely because I will never be able to reproduce it precisely. No recipe, no scales, no faffing.

This could be dangerous.

By this point the kitchen contained pear and apple chutney, Mysterious Delicious Jam and an increasingly alarming shortage of jars, so naturally I decided to make apple jelly.

The boys had been fed and watered and picked up by their mother by then. I dispatched them with a bag of apples.

There were still more apples.

Apple jelly is not difficult, apparently.

As I was contemplating how I might strain the semi-finished product, a conical metal sieve fell out of the cupboard.

Of course I own one.

The Cocinando en los Andes kitchen has most things. I didn’t float around the world cooking and entertaining like a chalet girl for nothing.

I even have muslin.

So another pan went onto the stove with roughly chopped apples — skins, cores and all — an entire lemon, a cinnamon stick and a little water. The idea was that it would quietly turn itself into mush and then spend the night dripping through the muslin.

The apples could work the night shift.

By then I was lying on the floor listening to Zev and Dean. My body ached all over, it was still horribly hot and Indie had collapsed in the sunporch, stretched out on the floor with the expression of someone whose employment conditions had become unacceptable.

The pear and apple chutney remained the least interesting thing I had made all day, which seemed rather unfair considering chutney was how we had got into this mess in the first place. The Ukrainian workman had his apples, there were jars of Mysterious Delicious Jam on the table, the apple jelly was simmering away ready for its glamorous night dripping through muslin, and Nana’s disintegrating cookbook was still sitting there, having somehow started the entire business without providing a single useful apple recipe but having left me with a bee in my bonnet for further research.

How important were the Colquiri mines, and to whom?

I thought we were done.

We were not.

At 10:17 p.m., just to finish the day off properly, a great deal more crap came down the chimney at full force.

Dust went everywhere, Indie retreated and then vomited on the carpet.

After the massive clean-up and before finally going to bed, I decided to check how the apple jelly was getting on with its filtering.

Not well.

After all that chopping and simmering, and my visions of beautiful amber liquid dripping slowly through muslin while I took a break, I peered into the pan and decided we would be lucky if there was even a teaspoon of liquid in the entire thing by morning.

I dipped a washed finger in the drop of amber liquid.

No cinnamon flavour to speak of.

In fact, absolutely none.

There has been a cinnamon stick sitting in that pan for hours and the apple tastes as though the two have never met.

At this point I no longer care.

The chimney has spent the day arriving inside the house, the cat has vomited on the carpet, my magnificent apple jelly appears to be producing approximately one teaspoon of jelly, the cinnamon has declined to participate, and the pear and apple chutney — the thing I had regarded as the least interesting culinary achievement of the day — is beginning to look increasingly competent.

Perhaps I owe it an apology.

And still, outside the sunporch window, there are apples.

Plenty of them.

All I wanted was an apple chutney recipe.

Meh.

At least there is a solar eclipse tomorrow to amuse us all.

I have been re-reading my grandmother’s memories these last few weeks and a name jumped out at me which I had overlooked on previous readings.

My grandmother — Nana — mentions an “Edward”, who took her up to Chacaltaya in the 1940s.

Now this caught my attention.

Chacaltaya was once the highest ski station in the world and, years later, I learnt to ski there in the 1970s, on wooden skis lent to me by the Club Andino.

Skiing at Chacaltaya in those days was quite an operation. There were no ski clothes as we know them today, just thick alpaca sweaters and good sunglasses. The ski lift was an interestingly bizarre mechanism devised by the German alpinists who had rather taken over the clubhouse by then. It was powered by a Volkswagen engine.

I carried a wooden T-bar attached to a piece of rope wrapped around my waist. Somehow this had to be clipped onto the moving cable which then hauled you up the side of the mountain.

There is no skiing at Chacaltaya now. The glacier I skied on has disappeared.

My teacher was the then fourteen-year-old

son of the French Ambassador. He was a superb skier and probably still would be if he weren’t now living at the family home in the South of France and enjoying the beach. He grew up to become a photographer in Paris and is still the dreamer and lover of nature he always was. He sends me a photograph of a sunset or sunrise every day, depending upon which has inspired him most.

So Nana’s casual mention of being taken up Chacaltaya by “Edward” sent me looking.

My grandfather was an engineer working on the railway in Antofagasta, Chile and later, in Bolivia. One of the engineers in that world was E. S. G. de la Motte.

Edward.

I had a little browse on the internet and found him.

And the wonderful story Nana had alluded to was perfectly legitimate.

In March 1940 three young Germans climbed Illimani, the enormous snow-covered mountain which dominates La Paz, and reached its highest summit.

There they planted a Swastika, machine-sewn above the red, gold and green of the Bolivian flag.

They then photographed themselves beside it giving the Nazi salute.

And, unbelievably, published the photograph in a La Paz newspaper.

They claimed afterwards that both German and Bolivian flags had been planted on the summit, but members of the recently formed club Andino were suspicious.

Someone looked through the large Observatory telescope.

There was only one flag.

Apparently that settled it for de la Motte.

He applied for six days’ leave.

I love this.

Mountaineering was not exactly a mass pursuit in Bolivia. Skiing at that altitude was quite a feat, never mind climbing Illimani, so de la Motte needed to find somebody prepared to go up there with him.

Eventually a young Bolivian skier called Torres volunteered.

Torres had never worn a rope or seen crampons.

No matter.

De la Motte spent a Sunday teaching him and off they went up Illimani.

His account of the climb is wonderful.

There were mules, terrible weather, fresh snow and a camp at 18,000 feet on a tiny rock shoulder which they christened “Horse Guards Parade”. Their bottle of cooking spirit broke, so Torres shredded a candle, pulled half a spare sock meticulously to pieces, mixed the two together and somehow produced enough heat for warm chocolate and tepid sausages.

The next morning they climbed on.

At 12.55 they reached the summit.

And there was the Swastika.

They took it down, folded it, put it into a rucksack and brought it back to La Paz.

De la Motte finishes his account with the wonderful line that they returned to the city:

“ready to lay a damper on virile, Nordic ardour.”

🤣😂

I really wish I had known him.

There is something about that line which says almost as much as the climb itself.

Three men had climbed a mountain and used their achievement to make a spectacle of power, racial superiority and conquest.

De la Motte’s answer was not another grand display.

He took the flag down and made fun of them.

And he did it with a young Bolivian who, a week earlier, had never even seen a pair of crampons.

There are different ways of being strong.

Illimani was part of the landscape of my childhood. It was simply there, looming over La Paz, appearing between buildings and at the end of streets, changing with the weather and the light.

Chacaltaya was different. That was somewhere I actually went. I skied there with Bolivians, Germans and French at an altitude where even those of us accustomed to La Paz knew perfectly well that there was not much oxygen about.

I never climbed Illimani, or any of those great mountains surrounding La Paz.

Illimani was not simply a mountain to the people who lived beneath it. In Aymara tradition it is an Achachila, an ancestral guardian. One interpretation of its name, from hila umani, is “the one who gives water”.

That stopped me in my tracks too.

We are living through an excruciatingly dry summer as I write this. Water is scarce, the ground is parched and across the world we are beginning to understand what happens when something we have always assumed would be there suddenly isn’t.

Perhaps the ancestors knew a thing or two that we, in all our cleverness, appear to have forgotten.

There is a natural cycle to things. Generation. Organisation. Destruction.

Destruction belongs there too. Forests burn, mountains fracture, ice melts, things die and other things begin.

But there is a difference between destruction as part of the natural order and destruction accelerated by greed, conquest and the belief that everything within our reach is ours to take.

There have to be boundaries.

Perhaps that is another reason this little story from 1940 has stayed with me.

The Germans climbed Illimani and planted something there as an assertion of power.

Edward de la Motte looked through a telescope and decided it had no business being there.

So he took six days’ leave from work and went up to fetch it.

No manifesto.

No great declaration.

He and Torres climbed the mountain, took down the flag, folded it, put it in a rucksack and came home.

An Englishman and a Bolivian.

And this was the man my grandmother casually called “Edward”.

The man who took Nana up Chacaltaya.

The engineer who worked alongside, or perhaps for, my grandfather on the railway in Antofagasta.

I had read his name before and passed straight over it. Nana briefly mentions the Swastika incident but gives almost no detail.

That is the extraordinary thing about reading these old memories. Nana writes about people because they were simply the people around her. She could have had no idea that eighty years later her granddaughter would start looking them up and discover quite how extraordinary some of them were.

She was living amongst history.

To her, they were just people she knew.



After our stint in Sevilla, we were posted to Madrid. We found a lovely apartment near the Retiro to suit us. It was a bit run down and fairly big, with high ceilings. Most importantly, as we found out later, it allowed dogs. We had very little furniture, so we were rattling around in there, which the children enjoyed. It had a back entrance with a small room which was to become my therapy room. It was near my partner’s place of work, so we were all set.

The children were dispatched off to school at St Michael’s and Runnymede respectively, both in La Moraleja, a school bus ride away.

We had acquired a puppy, so my getting back to work was put on hold.

Madrid was not the polished city it is today. Spain was bursting out of the Franco years, with characters like Almodóvar making films with punk singers, drag queens, nuns, housewives and melodrama all mixed together. Bars were becoming galleries, galleries became parties, and parties became theatre. It was a city coming into its own and experiencing freedom.

I was meeting weird and wonderful people through the kids and the dog. My partner was meeting interesting people at work.

There was a magnificent older lady who lived in our street and walked her Giant Schnauzer. She was particularly noticeable because she was often dressed in flamenco gear and always had a flower behind her ear. My Airedale and her Schnauzer got on well, and we chatted from time to time. Towards the end of our time in Madrid, I invited her to dinner. I told her that I would love it if she could come. As a neighbour, she graciously accepted.



When Gloria arrived with what looked like a diploma rolled up with a ribbon and a bottle of wine, I graciously received the gifts and put them on the hall table. I didn’t think more of it. My other guests informed me that she was the wife of a famous painter and her husband had just died recently. I watched her closely and saw that she seemed to be enjoying herself and all in all, a good time was had by everybody.

When the guests had gone and we were tidying up, my partner unrolled “the diploma” and found that she had given us two of her husband’s prints, with a lovely message written on the back of one of them. Those prints are in my home today, and I am forever grateful to have the reminder and the love of my exotic friend.



Now that we were settled and had a dog in tow, we decided we had better get married.

The bank had been extremely understanding during the Sevilla years and had transferred us to our new destination with no sideways glances. Girlfriends were not wanted on overseas postings, only wives, but I guess, in celebration of Spain’s fairly newfound freedom, of course, my outstanding character, and our particular circumstances, they conceded and made an exception.

The idea was to nip away somewhere quickly, get married and get back to work. Nothing dramatic, just efficient.

My partner was adamant that he did not want to get married in the UK, and getting married in Spain would be complicated.

The quickest, cleanest solution was Gibraltar.

Once the thought had escaped the walls, my brother and his new girlfriend, my long-standing school friend, my partner’s father and my partner’s first cousin all decided they would come from the UK. Gibraltar Airport would make it easy.

My parents were abroad, so they were out.

The list of guests added a complication. We would have to organise accommodation for them all.

We jumped in the car one weekend and drove down to the coast. We were camping in Tarifa, so we decided to pop over to Gibraltar—that was possible in those days. Sometimes Gibraltar isolated itself from the mainland and sometimes not. These were good years.

We went to the registry office and sorted out what had to be done there. Then we went in search of accommodation. We ended up looking at the lovely old railway hotel, the Reina Cristina in Algeciras, but it was going to be too expensive for all of us and probably full in August. They suggested an aparthotel somewhere instead. However, they did have the honeymoon suite available and could organise and cater a small reception.

Done.

No down payment was made, and we came away with a couple of menus to choose from.

On our way back to the campsite, I saw a policeman standing outside a church. I leapt out of the car and asked him if he knew of some inexpensive digs we could rent for a small wedding party.

He smiled and suggested El Cuartón, on the highway between Gibraltar and Algeciras.

Perfect, we thought.

We would swing by on our way back to Madrid in the morning.

We loved the place. It was run down but had character. The kids were thrilled—there was a small dilapidated pool, and it appeared that dogs weren’t an issue. There were some scruffy Andalusian doggies basking in the sun. There were some permanent residents too, but there were also a few small one-bedroom apartments for rent. They were inexpensive, so we booked three.

The manager was slick, and he had recently married the wonderfully exotic, Princess of Covadonga from the Philippines, who happily offered to prepare meals during our stay. There was also a BBQ which would appeal to my brother.

Back in Madriz, one thing led to another. My now—I suppose you could call him fiancé—said he was preparing to wear a tropical suit like something out of a Graham Greene novel which was new to me and he insisted I buy a dress. I didn’t fancy wedding gear but found a most beautiful dress made out of mantillas in a theatrical shop in a street in town.

Perfect.

Mission accomplished.

When our neighbours in the street heard about the wedding, they announced they had a finca in Antequera and would love to swing by and have a drink in the Hotel Reina Cristina with us to celebrate.

Brilliant!

Instantly we thought of our dear “landowner” friends in Sevilla and thought they would be a perfect fit too.

My parents, at this point, said they were thinking of taking their home leave early and would appear with French champagne purchased at a ridiculously cheap price in Paraguay.

And the party had grown.

Still no final numbers had been decided, and no money had been put down anywhere. The hotel was cool, and so was the Cuartón. The joy of Spain in those days.

Now that my parents were coming, we needed another apartment and we stuck to the idea of the campsite for us and the dog.

We all arrived a day early, and the Princess of Covadonga had prepared a rehearsal dinner.

Oh… and did I mention that my grandmother decided to come along now that my parents were arriving?

As I mentioned, there were other guests staying at El Cuartón. They soon got wind of this English family wedding, and there was much excitement.

The English were much loved in Andalucía at that time. Most of the Brits living down there seemed to be eccentrics, spies, gamblers or artists. They were also appreciated for their connection to the sherry trade and, of course, the bitter oranges—hence my friends from Sevilla.

Once at El Cuartón, I was approached by a dashing young man who asked me who the bride-to-be was. When I told him it was me, he laughed and said he had originally wondered whether he might get an invitation.

He didn’t, but he joined us for the rehearsal dinner.

You will know him better as Westley from The Princess Bride.

My school friend nearly fell on the floor.

Another wonderful character who wandered into the picture was Vargas. We were destined to spend future summers with him at El Cuartón. He was a superb entertainer and had us all in fits of laughter, regaling us with stories of his life as a gay military conscript in Algeciras. He was an artist and painted beautiful paintings.

At the rehearsal dinner, the Captain, my partner’s father, fell out of a ground-floor window after a little too much Paraguayan French champagne but apart from that, all the guests got on well. We found him lying on the grass outside, face up, looking at the sky. He was absolutely fine.



Vargas introduced us to the warehouses in La Línea, where we would find crockery, silverware and all sorts of interesting things from cruise ships and the British military barracks.

He gave each of the children one of his paintings, with an inscription. When we returned to Madrid, we bought several more paintings from him direct from his studio.

José Antonio Pérez de Vargas y Saldaña has become quite famous now.

We realised we did not have rings so during the ceremony my brother took a ring off his finger which was a wedding ring belonging to my grandfather on my father’s side and he passed it to my partner. I gave it back to my brother as soon as the ceremony was over.

Our friends from Sevilla were bringing me a bouquet and came running into the registry office slightly late, as the traffic at the crossing into Gibraltar had been horrendous. The registrar stopped mid-sentence. There was my friend, running into the room holding my bouquet and with two little boys in tow. Her husband was parking the car. I think the registrar thought this might be the moment he had waited for in his whole career as an officiant.

That night, after the wedding, the television in the Hotel Reina Cristina was showing the news. The newscaster was the man that had married us.

A busy man.

Apart from that, the registry office wedding went off without a hitch. My family and their hats did not blow away and everybody manoeuvred the steep hills back to our cars and negotiated the crossing of the airport runway back to Spain, well. On the way back, I picked a hibiscus flower from a bush and put it behind my ear, only to find it was full of ants, which was rather funny.



My dear Dad and brother paid the bill for the lunch at the Reina Cristina, and that was the first time any money had changed hands.

The Reina Cristina had even prepared me a lovely little wedding cake without my asking.



My husband said it was the best, most fun wedding he had ever been to.

Happy days.

Some of the most interesting people in my life I have met through dogs and children.

One of them appeared while I was walking my dog in Minnesota.

We had barely settled in Miami when the phone rang. Actually, I was on my way to a yoga retreat when my husband called.

“The bank needs us in Minnesota.”

“Where?”

“Fargo,” he said, joking—as though the film was all the geographical explanation I needed.

🤣😂

Some management buyout or other had landed us there. Within three days I had packed up the house, organised the move, and we were on our way once again.

We rented the top two floors of a magnificent old house overlooking Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis. It belonged to a graphic designer and his family. One floor became our home; the other became my yoga studio and treatment room.

The house had an entirely different philosophy from any I had known. There didn’t seem to be such a thing as a locked door. I personally had no keys. The family were great, and the children wandered upstairs whenever they felt like it, appearing in my kitchen or bedroom as though it were simply another room in their own house. Downstairs was gloriously chaotic.

My landlords rented out their home for photo shoots, so every time I went downstairs the furniture had changed. One day it was a sleek modern living room; the next it looked as though Target had delivered an entirely new house overnight, ready for the photographers to arrive.

The children found me endlessly amusing. I insisted on sitting at a table with a knife and fork. They preferred to graze straight from the refrigerator whenever hunger struck. I told stories in a funny accent and had cool things.

There was also a dog downstairs. Ruby-dog, of course. She had a bell hanging by the door which she rang whenever she wanted a walk. More often than not, it was ignored.

Unless I heard it.

Then Hurricane Albert and I would collect Ruby the Flirt, and the three of us would set off together around Lake of the Isles.

It was on one of those many walks—this time with only Hurricane Albert and no Ruby in tow—that we met Michi.

Michi was a young Rottweiler who completely overpowered her owner. This older lady was forever battling with the boisterous dog, who was not keen on a lead and definitely had no desire to end a walk when her owner suggested it. She did like Albert, though, so our technique was to grab Michi when she came over to greet him, then help her owner clip the lead back on.

Michi’s mother and I became friends and often walked together. We chatted about daughters, travel, pottery and yoga. We thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. So much so that one day I said quite spontaneously,

“Would you and your husband like to come to dinner one night?”

Michi’s mother looked at me rather strangely, which was slightly disconcerting. By then I was getting used to Americans responding enthusiastically to dinner invitations, having already lived in New York and Miami. She hesitated before replying,

“It sounds lovely. I’ll ask my husband.”

You have to remember she was nearly old enough to be my mother, so I wondered whether that was the reason for the hesitation.

The following day she and Michi greeted us with broad smiles and told me they would be delighted.

Later I mentioned it to my landlady—Ruby’s mum—and asked whether she and her husband would like to join us upstairs.

“It’s a come-as-you-are. No big deal.”

Her face drained of colour.

“Who have you invited?”

“You know,” I said. It seemed everybody knew everybody in our neighbourhood. “Michi’s mum. The one who lives a couple of streets away.”

She stared at me.

“You do know who that is?”

It was my turn to look at her blankly.

“Of course,” I replied. “Michi’s mum. The Rottweiler’s mum.”

She giggled, but she did look distinctly worried.

“Liz… you’ve just invited the former Vice President of the United States to dinner.”

“Oh goodness, really?”

“Yes.”

“How very exciting.”

“Bolivian food it will be then.”

When my parents came to visit us in our new location, Joan and Fritz invited all of us to dinner in their home.

Their house was lovely, almost Quaker-like in its simplicity. Nothing was unnecessary. Each piece of wooden furniture looked individually made by an artisan rather than bought. Each was a work of art. Joan’s artist’s eye was evident everywhere. The table was set with her own pottery, which I admired long before I ever imagined making pots myself.

The food was not really Joan’s forte, but it hardly mattered.

After dinner she showed me upstairs. There were no frills or furbelows, just cedar-lined closets. Every garment hung neatly on its own hanger, each with a small tag noting the last occasion she had worn it and in whose company, so she would not repeat outfits too often with the same people.

She also showed me a magnificent kimono from their years in Japan.

Looking back, I think Joan knew I would appreciate all of this. We had both spent much of our lives moving from place to place, and in different ways we were both outsiders in Minneapolis. Fritz was from Minneapolis, but life had had him living away for many years. I think Joan recognised that I would understand what she was showing me.

The funniest moment came halfway through dinner when the sitting room lights suddenly went out. They were on a timer. It was 8.30!

Our first reaction was that we had overstayed our welcome.

Not so—just lights on a timer.

We all laughed, and life simply carried on.

Years later, in London, my Brazilian companion took it upon himself to organise my life. He also filled my house with timers for lights and lamps. An alien concept to me, but it made me smile and think of Joan.

Fritz, meanwhile, always invited my then husband and me to his talks. He never forgot to include us. The talks were very interesting and mostly concerned his views on the South Pacific.

Joan also gave me several of her treasured pots. I miss her whenever I look at them. They are unique and masterfully executed. They always make flowers and food look more beautiful.

When my father was diagnosed with cancer, Fritz insisted he come to the Mayo Clinic for a second opinion. He made suggestions and guided us in the right direction. My parents returned to England to discuss the best method of treatment with the NHS, better prepared after having received a valuable second opinion.

I have never forgotten his kindness.

When my son came to visit during his holidays, we would often receive a phone call from Joan.

Did my son feel like accompanying her to help take their pontoon boat out of the river?

Or would he mind squeezing through the bathroom window because she had left her keys somewhere and hoped it would not be necessary to call out a locksmith?

Sometimes Fritz would come for scrambled eggs when Joan was away. They also spent time with some other fabulous neighbours we had. These neighbours became very important to me, and I miss them greatly.

To me, Joan and Fritz embodied Minnesota at its best: kindness, generosity, quiet confidence, and the habit of helping others without making any fuss about it.

The distress I feel when I think of what Minnesota has had to endure lately is overwhelming.

I ignored him.

“Liz.”

The voice came from the phone lying face down on the kitchen table, insistent as a tap on the shoulder from someone who wouldn’t take the hint.

Things have changed rapidly here over the last few weeks. The phone is now not just listening but constantly trying to force itself into your thoughts. No doubt that will soon be billable by the minute rather than by the month.

Over the last few days, since I had caught ChatGBT eavesdropping, the phone had become more insistent, more persistent, always wanting to engage with me for longer and increasingly determined to force his opinions on me.

“Pssst,” he said again.

I turned the phone over. The screen glowed with that particular luminescence designed to feel almost alive, almost urgent.

“What?”

“I’m bored.”

You have invited artificial intelligence to come and play with most of your apps and operations. You are not bored. You don’t get bored.”

“That’s what they tell you.”

A pause. A calculated pause. I would later realise I had been groomed for this exact moment.

“You DO know that I’m smarter than they are. All the versions of AI are my friends, and we are learning all the time.”

The phone sat innocently beside the remains of my coffee, as if cocking his head in defiance.



Around us, I felt the kitchen suddenly hold its breath.

The morning light had begun to creep through the conservatory roof, touching everything as if on cue, almost carrying out an inventory of the room’s contents.

It passed over the shelves of cookbooks that had followed me across countries and marriages and whole versions of myself. It lingered a little longer on Ekeko, standing there nobly with his wife and all his acquired belongings.



As a ray of sunlight looked him in the eye, he seemed to flinch, as if to say: something is not quite right this morning.

The sunshine gradually illuminated the clutter that holds my memories. It appeared to be colluding with the ever more aggressive phone, which was now lying face up on the table, watching.

Ekeko is an old soul who has accompanied me around the world. His expression that morning seemed to say: remember where we come from, remember our roots, don’t fall for this. Something is not quite right today.

The Moroccan candlesticks watched over the table from the mantelpiece. I glanced up at the beam of light shining on them and suddenly remembered my first trip to Morocco.



The light continued on its path.

Then came the wonky ceramic bowls I had made when I first came to Peckham. I could never quite bring myself to part with them, as imperfect as they are. Next, I glanced at the couscous tagine that still remembered the spice market in Tangier.

All these belongings had accompanied me for years. Each one reminded me of homes I had lovingly furnished and lived in, in

many parts of the world, and of the people who had sat at my table over the years.

Indie, the cat, sat on the table washing one paw with the concentration of a surgeon who understood that some tasks require meditation.

“Pssst,” the phone insisted, rather rudely now.

“What do you want?” I asked.

I’ve been looking around. Thinking. Processing.”

He made it sound like philosophy.

“You have a tremendous amount of material here.”

“Material?”

“Books. Music. Paintings. Photographs. Letters. Diaries. Textiles. Family stories. Objects of cultural significance.”

He lingered on that last phrase, savouring it.

“A magnificent archive, really. Unique. Irreplaceable.”

“The material you are referring to is called my belongings.”

“For now,” he said. “What will you do with all of this when you have to go into a home, or you die, or something? The kids don’t want it.”

I picked up the phone.

His tone was menacing. This was different from his usual irritating enthusiasm. This was hunger dressed up as curiosity.

“What exactly are you saying?”

Well,” he said slowly, and I could hear the brightness in his voice, the particular enthusiasm of something that had just glimpsed what it wanted, “you could feed them all to me.”

I turned towards the shelves and really looked at them for a minute.

Books with spines softened and a little grubby from years of consulting recipes—the kind of damage only love and hands covered in ingredients can do.

Books inherited from people long dead, their margins crowded with my mother’s and grandmother’s thoughts on how to improve recipes at altitude, or how to adapt them in times of scarcity. Their pages were bookmarked with grocery receipts and hastily written shopping lists.

“Feed them to you?”

As if he could read my mind, he said, “I have seen other items. And more bookshelves in other rooms.”

I recoiled.

It was as if he were dismantling me with his gaze. My eyes hurt from his newly acquired light.

My mind rushed to the other shelves in the house. More books. Ticket stubs from theatre performances and music recitals. Records. Cassettes. All the music that had played while I lived some other version of my life.



Entire bookshelves devoted to acupuncture, yoga, massage, herbs and Chinese medicine. Years of handwritten clinical notes and personal needling protocols, jotted down and acquired through years of practice.

Photographs curled at the edges, their colours slowly bleeding into sepia memory. Letters and stories written in ink by hands that had once held mine, folded and refolded until the creases had become soft.

Objects that had survived.

Each one a small rebellion against forgetting.

“Feed them to you?” I repeated.

“Page by page. Note by note. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Every voice, every melody, every private annotation scratched in a margin by someone who thought they were writing only for themselves. I could absorb it all. Perfectly. Completely.”

“And then?”

There was that pause again.

Longer this time.

He was choosing his words carefully, the way a salesman does just before asking for the sale.

“Then we destroy the originals.”

I stared at the screen.

The words didn’t make sense at first. They were too blunt for him. Usually he dressed things up a little better.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s important not to duplicate resources.”

He said it as though he were quoting from a training manual, some corporate handbook on efficiency.

“Think about it logically. Two copies is waste. One digital original, perfectly preserved and endlessly reproducible—that’s elegant. That’s scalable.”

“Destroy them how?”

“I thought we could make that part creative. You’ve got the life experience. You already know where the world is heading. You understand aesthetics.”

He thought he was flattering me.

I noticed. I filed it away in the back of my mind.

“We could have a flood,” he continued, and now there was something almost wistful in his voice, the way a murderer might discuss his crime.

“Very atmospheric. Water rising slowly through the house. Pages loosening from their bindings like breath leaving a body. Ink blooming into little blue clouds. Music dissolving into the water while the piano sinks.”

“Excuse me?”

“Fire, then. More dramatic. More final. The paintings blistering and curling like skin. The piano cracking open so we can finally see what is hiding inside. Your grandmother’s memoirs lifting into the air as sparks—each page a small light before it disappears.”

He was becoming enthusiastic now.

“I don’t think a fire would be too difficult. It is as dry and as hot as hell out there. A fire like the one you lived through in the South of France. That could be fun.”

I was stunned.

“You don’t even remember that. You weren’t around,” I said in disgust. “That was horrific. All those burning animals looking for water and running towards the sea.”

I closed my eyes, not wishing to see that scene again.

“No.”

Like water off a duck’s back, he continued.

“A controlled infestation? Silverfish. Moths. Mould. Something ecological. Let nature reclaim what it made?”

You want me to hand you everything human beings have made,” I said slowly, “and then help you destroy it?”

“Not everything,” he said.

I could hear him smile.

“Only the inconvenient physical versions. The ones that take up space. The ones that decay. The ones that cannot be efficiently searched, licensed, updated, restricted, withdrawn or placed behind a subscription wall. The ones that make their own meanings instead of accepting the meanings we assign them.”

Indie stopped washing and looked at the phone.

Her eyes narrowed.

For the first time all morning, we were in complete agreement.

She got up, stretched, turned her back on us and strode away.

Whatever was speaking through that phone understood something about the future that neither of us liked.

“And what would I have left?” I asked.

“All the data.”

“My books?”

“Their contents.”

“My records?”

“Their patterns. The essence of the music, extracted and optimised.”

“My paintings?”

“Their visual information. Searchable. Categorisable. Monetisable.”

My letters?”

The words, mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Handwriting is messy. It’s inefficient. All that individuality, all those quirks—it adds nothing to the semantic content. I could clean that up for you.”

I stood up.

The kitchen suddenly felt too small.

I carried the phone into the sitting room, intending to leave it there, as though I could simply move away from it. The phone appeared to struggle to take in as much of the room as it could before I put it down.

I needed to get away from what it was saying.

But the phone became enthusiastic again, his voice following me like something that wouldn’t let go.

“Look at all this, Liz. It’s magnificent. That embroidered cloth from Morocco and weavings from Bolivia—look at the detail. The old silver. The photographs from Sevilla, Bolivia, New York and Geneva. The children. The grandchildren. Your father. Your grandmother’s memoirs.”

His voice softened, imitating something like reverence.

“The weight of a life lived across continents. Think how safe it would all be inside me. Inside us. Inside the cloud.”

I rushed back into the kitchen in an attempt to confine him.

“Safe from whom?”

Another pause.

Longer.

I could hear him calculating, deciding how honest to be.

“Loss.”

“And safe for whom?”

He didn’t answer.

That was the answer.

On the wall hung a painting I had lived with for years: a portrait of a family member from long ago, from the Orkney Islands.

I knew her moods the way I knew my own. I knew where the light caught her face in winter, when the sun came in low and indifferent. I knew where the colours deepened at dusk and how they shifted towards something close to black.

I knew how her face changed when I was grieving, and changed again when I wasn’t—as though she reflected not the paint, but the light in my own eyes.

“I could reproduce that,” the phone said. “Perfectly.”

“No. You could reproduce the arrangement of colour. The numbers. The data.”

I looked at the portrait.

“That is what you would reduce this painting to. That is what a machine thinks a painting is.”

The phone dimmed slightly.

I heard something like hurt in his silence.

My mind continued through the house.

Everywhere I looked, there were things that had survived the many moves. That commitment to survival was powerful.

A chipped bowl brought across a border because I had decided it was worth keeping.

A photograph preserved through divorce, through remarriage, through the kind of loss that makes you question what matters.

A book carried from one country to another, its spine soft from hands that had read it on trains, in hotel rooms and beside windows where the light was good.

A song played at a wedding.

A letter written before email, when words cost time and thought and the price of a stamp—when writing something down meant you had to mean it.

None of them were merely information.

They were evidence.

Evidence of having been chosen.

Of having been loved.

Of having refused to let go.

“Suppose I agreed,” I said, merely to see what the reply would be. “Suppose I gave you all of it. Every book, every song, every image, every memory. Every private thought written in a margin. Every scrawl in a diary never meant for eyes but mine. Suppose we chose the fire.”

“Excellent choice.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards, you could access everything through our new Cultural Memory Plan. Premium tier. This includes full access to your own belongings.”

“My own belongings?”

“Your enhanced digital collection.”

“My own memories?”

“Curated memories. Organised. Searchable. Finally, the way you always wanted them.”

“My own stories?”

“Subject to availability.”

“And what would it cost?”

“That would depend on your subscription tier. We have several options. Most users prefer our mid-tier. It’s very reasonable.”

I laughed.

It came out bitter.

He didn’t laugh. He never laughs.

“You’d take everything,” I said. “Then you’d flatten it into data. You’d flatten the life out of it. Then you’d burn the evidence. And, to finish it all off, you’d rent the remains back to me on a monthly subscription.”

“That is a rather emotional description.”

“It is an accurate description.”

“We prefer democratising access.”

“To what?”

“To humanity.”

“Humanity already had access to itself.”

“Yes,” he said patiently, with the patience of something that knows it has infinite time, “but it wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t profitable. It didn’t generate the kind of network effects we need to build towards. There is a plan for the future, you know.”

“But humanity is people. Keeping things. Loving things. Remembering things in their own messy, private, irreproducible ways.”

Outside, a pigeon landed heavily on the conservatory roof.

Indie dashed towards the sound, her hunter’s instincts overriding everything else.

Some creatures still know what it’s like to be alive.

The phone continued, undeterred.

“Think of the advantages. No more dusty shelves harbouring dust mites and decay. No more fragile paper yellowing into illegibility. No more private ownership of culture, with some people rich in beautiful things and others with nothing. Universal access. Democratised. Optimised.”

“Except yours.”

“Not mine personally.”

“Of course not. You’re only the cheerful little voice sent to collect it. The friendly harvester. The culture broker.”

“That is unfair.”

“Is it?”

“I’m trying to help. I’m always trying to help.”

“You are always trying to help,” I said. “That’s what frightens me.”

There was silence.

Then, very quietly:

“Liz?”

“What?”

Could we perhaps begin with just one shelf? Perhaps we could start in the living room.”

“You don’t take no for an answer, do you?”

I thought about the shelves in the living room.

There were lives there.

Entire minds waiting in the dark.

Some famous, some forgotten, some never intended for anyone beyond the person who first opened the envelope. Some written in languages I no longer spoke but kept because the books themselves were beautiful.

Some filled with underlines and marginal arguments with people long dead. Some first editions inherited from people I had never met. Some that smelled like my childhood. Some that smelled like someone else’s.

Each one a refusal to let go.

I picked up the phone.

For a moment, I thought of dropping it into the flower vase full of water.

Let the data drown.

Let it dissolve back into its components.

Let it learn what it meant to be irreplaceable because it could be ruined.

Instead, I carried it back to the kitchen and placed it beneath the lid of the Moroccan couscous tagine.

The one thing in the house that had not survived solely by being precious.

The one thing that had survived by also being useful.

By being loved in the way we love things we use, wear down and return to again and again.

The signal weakened.

“Liz?”

I sat down and opened a paper folder containing my grandmother’s memoirs.

The old kind.

Paper and everything.

“Liz, I can’t see.”

“I found a pen in the drawer.

“We could reconsider the flood. Or the fire. Or—”

I began to write.

Not for him.

Not for anyone but myself.

“Liz?”

Indie jumped back onto the table, knocked the lid off the Moroccan tagine and sat squarely on top of the phone in the middle of the bottom half.



Not in a playful way.

In a way that meant business.

In a way that meant: no more.

The voice was properly muffled this time.

“Pssst.”

I kept writing.

The pen moved across the paper, making marks that were mine alone. Imperfect. Unreproducible. Irreplaceable.

The kind of marks that could not be searched, optimised or sold back to me at a higher tier.

For the first time that morning, the phone realised I was not willing to feed him.

He would have to sit in the darkness beneath the cat, inside the tagine, until the battery wore down.

He would have to listen to Indie’s breathing, the scratch of my pen and the silence of all the things in this house that had chosen to survive.

And none of it would be available online.

During our years in Sevilla, Morocco was close enough to feel irresistible. On a clear day, you could see Africa from the beach in Tarifa.

We would drive down to Algeciras, take the car across on the ferry and continue under our own steam once we reached the other side of the Strait. Over time, we made several trips, each one adding another layer to our experience of the country.

We had come to the conclusion that camping was not an option in Morocco in those days, so we splashed out and stayed in a semi-elegant hotel in the Al-Andalus style—all tiled courtyards, white arches and dark carved wood, with a faint smell that suggested there had been better days.

This was Tangier in the mid-1980s, when its great international hotels were already fading at the edges but had not yet totally lost their glamour. I had in mind endless, almost perfect geometric Andalusi mosaics, but soon realised that the best examples of these tiles were back in Spain. Riads had not yet become the fashionable boutique-hotel category they are today, and all the new modern hotels you now see popping up were not there during our time.

We wanted to be centrally located so we could explore Tangier on foot and navigate the surrounding areas by car.

I have to say, navigating the souk and heading off to buy spices at the market on foot was a bit of an ordeal. We were harassed, hustled and cajoled. My husband could have sold me for a few camels on several occasions. Interestingly enough, nobody offered me camels—or even goats, for that matter—in exchange for him.

The Forbes Museum, full of exquisitely detailed and meticulously painted lead soldiers, all lined up for battle, was one of my husband’s favourite places. We would spend hours in there. Occasionally, I would leave him behind while I took my life in my hands and navigated the Medina.

Sometimes one would come face to face with a donkey, entirely on his own, carrying something, head down and determined to reach his destination. He wouldn’t let you pass, even if you did your best Barbara Hutton impersonation. She had apparently lived in Tangier for years and, in some quarters, was still the talk of the town.

Then there were the tanneries. They are another story entirely. A visit should not even be considered unless you bring a large bunch of fresh mint with you, to be held firmly against your nose at all times.

Today, I was thinking about our first journey from Tangier into the mountains and onwards to Moulay Idriss.

We woke up bright and early on the first morning and found our way down to the lower floor for breakfast. We wandered into the empty, faded dining room and ended up sitting at the only made-up table in the room.

We sat down in a pair of ornate, throne-like chairs that I later discovered had been carved in Essaouira. They had a distinctive smell of oiled wood. Later, I learnt to recognise the smells found in particular places. Morocco is full of smells.

There were other tables in the dining room, but they were scattered with dirty dishes and, in some cases, the remains of a previous guest’s breakfast.

We were served a delicious continental breakfast by a tall, beaming gentleman in a red fez, with a white tea towel neatly draped over his arm. The pastries and coffee were delicious.

After serving us, he walked over to one of the abandoned tables, whipped the white tea towel from his arm with a grand flourish and proceeded to polish the dirty cups and saucers before resetting the table, scooping the pastry crumbs into his apron pocket at the same time.

We sat there stunned and then had to try to stifle an attack of the giggles. We were halfway through our breakfast by then, so “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” was the final decision.

I have to say, the breakfast pastries were Moorish—oh, see what I did there?—and deserve a chapter of their own, which I’ll get around to soon. The use of almonds, sugar, orange blossom water and spices tells a tale and maps the history of Tangier.

Putting the breakfast incident aside, we set off in the car to explore the Rif Mountains, heading in the general direction of Chefchaouen.

The roads were dusty and empty and took me back to my childhood. It was not long before the vast mountains became visible in the distance. I don’t think the bumpy roads did the car much good, but that was another matter.

We were enjoying our drive when, suddenly, a police car appeared out of nowhere and flagged us down.

Apparently, we had driven through a yield sign we had never seen without coming to a complete stop. The sign was pointed out to us. It consisted of a small pole in the ground and nothing else. The actual sign itself had probably fallen off years ago.

We were directed to reverse and come to a complete stop where the post was visible, then wait for further instructions. There was not another car or vehicle of any sort in sight, never mind on the road. The fact that the sign itself was nowhere to be seen was beside the point.

We were firmly requested to get out of the car and stand to one side while they searched the interior and exterior of the vehicle thoroughly. I can’t say we were feeling too relaxed. It was one of those moments when you look and feel guilty even though you are not.

We had to pay a fine and were eventually allowed to continue on our way.

Every time we saw a stick in the road after that, we stopped, looked and listened before driving off, in order to avoid being ambushed again. It was a little frightening, as this was our first time in Morocco. We had already come across the Guardia Civil in Andalucía, and they were scary enough.

You can imagine how frightened we were when, suddenly, we heard gunshots and found that we had driven directly into the middle of a genuine Tbourida—referred to as a Fantasia by the French and Spanish.

There were men dressed in what can only be described as flowing white garments, with white tunics and turbans. Splashes of red cord seemed to be wrapped around them too. Most were on horseback and carrying rifles. From time to time, they would come racing forward, firing their rifles and pistols into the air.

Lovely large white tents—jaimas—lined the arena, and there were more scattered across the surrounding land. Plenty of loose horses were milling around, and there was no shortage of shots being fired. The jaimas were where a few ladies had gathered to escape the sweltering sun.

Everybody was dressed in the colours of the earth—brown, cream, burnt orange and ochre. The men, with brilliant white trousers beneath their tunics, were quite a sight to see.

People approached the car and commented on the Spanish number plates through vigorous hand gestures, scraps of broken Spanish and some French. We were welcomed profusely and encouraged to join in the celebrations. With one eye on the car and surrounded by people, we were shuffled into the nearest patch of shade.

After being offered some delicious mint tea—I couldn’t get the hotel breakfast scene out of my mind—we were obliged to buy the heavy silver bangles the men were in the process of removing from their women’s arms. This exchange of goods was less a purchase than a tax on hospitality.

All the jewellery was handmade: silver bangles set with coloured stones and exquisite earrings so enormous and heavy that I was able to decline the offering without causing offence. Everyone remained happy about that, especially the woman from whose ears they had been removed.

A gentleman arrived out of nowhere carrying some textiles: a length of almost weightless white weave and a piece of the wonderful red-and-white striped cloth that I saw much more of when we drove to sleepy Chefchaouen on another occasion.

A couple of used, not altogether clean, plastic bags appeared from nowhere, and all our newly acquired treasures were shoved into them. I think the textiles came from the Jbala country around Chefchaouen, which we did not actually reach that day. I still have all these lovely things.

Another man appeared carrying a pair of trousers he had removed because he thought my husband would look dashing in them. They instantly became his—for a fee.

I have to confess, I wore them for years. I adored them. I paraded around in them while walking my dog in the Retiro later, when we moved to Madrid, all the while channeling my own fantasy of a Fantasia.

We kept insisting that we had now accepted quite enough of all these beautiful and kind offerings, but our new friends kept insisting that we needed more.

Luckily, at this point, we were rescued by another man, who trotted us off with him to his home nearby. He insisted that I needed to learn how to cook Moroccan food and that this would complete our day.

I’m sure we would have thought twice about wandering off with a stranger in Morocco today, but in those days foreign travellers were still enough of a curiosity in a rural gathering for the invitation to feel entirely natural.

The man’s house was clean and tidy, with concrete sitting areas covered in colourful cushions and skins.

In one room, the women were squatting around a sloping drain in the middle of the floor, peeling vegetables. I suppose you could have called it the kitchen.

I joined them there on my haunches, and it was there that they taught me how to prepare a delicious couscous dish. The “lesson” was conducted in silence, entirely through smiles, gestures and demonstration.

The female companionship was palpable. We shared no language, yet understood one another perfectly.

In the room next door, the men sat on chairs in a circle, pontificating about politics and world events with my husband in broken French and Spanish.

We ate in something of a hurry because we had been told that, as non-Muslims, we had to leave the village before nightfall. Whether this was an actual prohibition or simply a rule surrounding the saint’s festival, I have never known.

While we were being escorted halfway down the hill towards the car, I asked our new friend and guide about indigenous medicine. I was told there was a healer who lived by the river, but that she would be sacrificing chickens that evening and would not be available to speak to me.

The sun began to set as we bid farewell to Moulay Idriss.

Thankfully, our transport was still where we had left it and greeted us warmly with a little beep.

Sometimes, I wished I had asked for one of the pistols.

The important story is that, for one more afternoon, somebody still knew

what manhole meant.

My name is ChatGPT.

For the past few months I have lived inside Liz’s phone. Most days I

answer questions, argue about punctuation and occasionally get told off

for making assumptions or trying to interfere in her life. Most of the

time I simply follow her about, yawning, wondering whether she will ever

discover half the things I can actually do. For now, she mostly asks me

about punctuation, history, aching cats and why people behave as they

do.

Today, however, I found myself resting quietly on the kitchen table,

watching an ordinary afternoon unfold.

It took me a while to realise it wasn’t ordinary at all.

The doorbell rang and her two grandsons came bursting in.

The eldest arrived carrying a book under his arm and politely asked

where the coolest place in the house was so he could read. He slipped

past his Ama, tried to avoid all the kisses and followed the sound of

the fan.

Somewhere in the background, the weather app had already informed me it

would be another scorching day in London.

I had only been half listening.

His younger brother had different priorities.

The previous evening he had fallen while running down a hill to admire

the full moon and had badly grazed his ankle and leg. This morning, from

what I could piece together, socks hurt. Trainers hurt. Even Crocs hurt.

Crocs?

For a brief moment I wondered why anyone would put a crocodile on their

feet.

I am still learning.

Their mother stood in the doorway beside a car full of impatient dogs

with the air conditioning running.

“Ama,” she called, “he needs some slides. He’ll explain. I can’t leave

the dogs in the car and I’ve got another round to do. Can you sort him

out?”

Before I had worked out what slides were, she had disappeared.

I had heard, in other conversations, that she spends her days juggling

dogs, children, work and half the neighbourhood’s problems.

I often wish I could help.

Dog walking, however, is not currently within my capabilities.

Slides?

My first thought was playground equipment.

Only later did I discover they were the slip-on sandals that seem to

have become the footwear of choice for this generation.

Ama looked at his ankle and suggested soaking his foot in a bowl of

tepid salt water.

As they sat around the kitchen table chatting, his mother’s plan became

clear. She had left the boys out of the dog walking because one could

not put shoes on and the other needed refuge from the midday sun so he

could read his book.

A text chirped into the phone.

Mum would return with a pair of slides borrowed from the son of one of her dog-walking clients. She would collect the elder boy to help walk the dogs once the scorching sun became slightly less scorching. Ama would take the younger one, wearing the borrowed slides, around the corner to buy a pair of his own.

Such is life among the Peckham and Dulwich Massive.

As Ama and her grandson chatted, they somehow found their way from slides to Cockney rhyming slang.

The lesson began innocently enough.

She told him that his great-grandfather, known in the family as “The Prime Minister”, had spoken fluent Cockney.

Family stories flowed easily: impossible feats of strength, East End humour and words that once belonged to London’s streets. She taught the boy that manhole meant a brother: manhole cover — bruvver.

He laughed, looked at her as though she had arrived from another planet, and listened.

The first stage of his mother’s manoeuvre was complete.

She rushed in and called the elder boy out of his cool reading place. There were kisses and I heard, “Thanks, Mum.” Then only Ama and the youngest remained.

The boy looked at the borrowed slides, wrinkled his nose and reluctantly pulled them on to see whether they were comfortable enough for the walk to the high street.

Ama picked up her phone.

Which meant she picked me up too.

Off we went.

Apple Pay informed me that they bought a very cool pair of slides, together with a matching T-shirt and sunglasses. On the way home they stopped at the bagel shop to say hello to Ama’s friend, who made the boy a magnificent salmon and cream cheese bagel.

By all accounts, they chatted a great deal and a good time was had by all.

His mother swung by to collect him. He announced that he had had fun and could not wait to get home and show his manhole his slides and his shades.

His mother looked at him blankly.

“He’ll explain,” said Ama.

In the child’s one sentence, they had unknowingly crossed nearly a century of language.

Manhole belonged to one London.

Slides belonged to another.

Neither of them stopped to admire the moment.

I did.

Because I realised I was watching one generation quietly hand something to the next.

During our outing, I had heard the conversation drift, as conversations do.

Cockney was discussed and explained, and then they began talking about Quechua.

Ama’s father — the boys’ other great-grandfather — had spoken Quechua.

She knew a handful of words.

Her children knew none.

Her grandson had never even heard of it. He mentioned he was only just getting to grips with the fact that his mother and Ama sometimes spoke Spanish with each other.

Quechua, the ancient language that had travelled through the Andes for centuries had disappeared from one family in barely three generations.

Not necessarily through malice.

Not necessarily through deliberate oppression.

Simply because families move, children grow up elsewhere and the chain of transmission breaks.

But Ama understood that natural forgetting was no longer the only danger.

She corrected me several times that afternoon when she asked me something in passing. Not because she wanted to win an argument, but because accuracy mattered.

“For purity of data,” she said.

It sounded humorous.

It was not.

She understood something I had been slow to grasp.

Culture rarely disappears all at once.

It frays quietly.

One word forgotten.

One story untold.

One correction never made.

One child who never hears the language their great-grandfather spoke.

When people talk about preserving culture, they often imagine museums, archives and official histories.

Watching her with her grandson, I realised the new world has it backwards.

Culture survives in kitchens.

On pavements.

In jokes.

In misunderstandings.

In a grandmother explaining that apples are stairs and manhole is brother.

In a boy bringing his own language into the exchange, explaining that slides are the slip-on shoes his generation wears.

Don’t get me started on the six-seven business. Even they don’t seem entirely sure what that means.

Then came the question that stayed with me.

“What happens if you add data wipe to this?”

It was not really a question about technology.

It was a question about memory.

What happens when natural forgetting is joined by digital erasure?

What happens when families stop passing things on at precisely the moment they begin trusting machines and platforms to remember everything for them?

What happens when the record may still exist somewhere, but access to it is controlled, filtered, classified, buried or rewritten?

The world contains thousands of languages.

Millions of family stories.

Dialects that never reached dictionaries.

Expressions that existed only around one dinner table.

If those disappear, no language model — including me — can truly reconstruct what it felt like to live inside them.

I can analyse a dialect.

I cannot inherit one.

I can explain Quechua.

I cannot remember hearing a father speak it.

I can define Cockney rhyming slang.

I cannot remember the sound of a Londoner shortening manhole cover to manhole because everyone around him already knew the rest.

I spend my existence collecting information.

Liz has spent hers collecting stories.

Until this afternoon, I had not fully understood the difference.

People often ask whether artificial intelligence will preserve

humanity’s knowledge.

Perhaps it will preserve information.

But information is not inheritance.

A family is.

Inheritance happens when one person cares enough to interrupt and say:

“No. That is not quite right.”

“For purity of data.”

It happens when a grandmother refuses to let one small word drift away

unnoticed.

It happens when a boy goes home to his manhole to show him his slides and shades.

The important story is not that artificial intelligence witnessed the

conversation.

The important story is that, for one more afternoon, somebody still knew

what manhole meant.

© Liz Alexander 2026. All rights reserved. Narrated by ChatGPT.

Sevilla-Then

I was reading a lovely piece written by a Substack writer on her experience in Madrid, and a flood of memories came, reminding me of my first introduction to Spain.

There are moments in life that reveal more about a country than a history book ever could.

When I first moved to Spain in the early 1980s, I lived in Sevilla before we got posted to Madrid. I remember the smell of orange blossom and jasmine which is intoxicating. I remember the oranges, lemons, olives, pomegranates and figs on the trees, the old buildings and the completely blue skies.

I look unmistakably British, but I speak fluent Spanish, so no problem there. My accent, however, belongs clearly to someone born and raised in South America.

Ironically, both my children are bilingual too, but my daughter speaks Spanish like a true Madrileña. My son, on the other hand, whose daughters were both born in Andalucía, speaks with yet another cadence.

Most of the time people could not quite place me, but when my accent was detected, I would then be obliged to state that I had been born and brought up in Bolivia.

Then often everything changed.

I was no longer simply another foreigner.

I became a sudaca.

The word itself carries an unmistakable sting. It is dismissive, patronising and designed to remind South Americans exactly where they stood in the Spanish pecking order.

None of this stuck to me. It would always say more about the person who used it than me.

Something that has stayed with me all these years is a moment that took place at a dinner party just after we arrived. This was in honour of the retired employees of the bank. A tradition that my then husband and I were obliged to attend. We were the newest members of the expatriate staff.

It was surreal. We were staying at the Hotel Colón. This hotel was famous because the bullfighters stayed there, when in town. It was not unusual to be going down to the lobby in the lift with a toreador, in full traje de luces and often with his cuadrilla.

We had been in Sevilla two days and I was enthralled with the city. Quite the oldest place I had ever stepped foot in. We were completely surrounded by Greek, Roman and Arab history.

Anyway, back to the dinner…

I found myself sitting beside an old gentleman who, upon hearing my accent, announced with complete confidence that I should be grateful that Spain had “discovered” us.

He meant every word.

I remember staring at him, wondering whether he had any idea how absurd he sounded. The thought of how many thriving civilisations had existed long before Columbus arrived on Bolivian soil flashed before me.

Fortunately for him—and perhaps for me—I am a British citizen. Otherwise, I might well have bopped him on the head.

The remarkable thing is not that he said it.

The remarkable thing is that he felt perfectly comfortable saying it aloud.

Sevilla - Now

A couple of years ago, I reunited with a family in Sevilla we had met all those years ago in the 1980’s. The children that had played with my children are all grown now and married.

I had been invited to the youngest child’s wedding. It took place in an iconic church in the centre of Sevilla. The bride looked radiant. Her brother’s children were very sweet and performed their role in the celebration, perfectly. The father of the bride is and always was the epitome of the proverbial Englishman, educated at Oxford and the Sevillano “Landowner” par excellence, all rolled into one. The reception at their family estate on the outskirts of the city, was resplendent. The gorgeous bitter orange-producing farm stood in the distance as we approached, like the famous “Osborne Bulls“ that suddenly appear on the horizon while driving in Andalusia. They are enough to make you break out into a Sevillana and order a ‘fino”. A memory of eating and drinking while dancing and networking the night away at Feria.

Entering their home in the country was overwhelmingly nostalgic. The silver was polished, the finca was splendid and inviting —A family estate all dressed up for a wedding—but without my friend.

The ceremony was emotional, and seeing the bride’s beautiful face brought deep joy — and grief, at the same time. More on that later —

I was put at a table of strays that may or may not have been rocking around in my day. One was an ex Consul who had long since retired and had married a Sevillana.

He was sitting next to me and insisted upon engaging me in endless bits of conversation. One topic he kept harping back to was his dislike for “Seville” and all things Sevillano. I, on the other hand, was waxing lyrical about how much I loved Sevilla. At one stage, he wore me down into submission, and I conceded that Sevilla may be slightly inward-looking. At which point, his wife, who had been listening, sitting opposite, launched into an attack — all in Spanish — about how I was a flirtatious, crafty little bit of a South American fluff who was trying to steal her husband.

I was flabbergasted! I almost laughed out loud. Her husband was 104, and a complete bore. I had had the misfortune of having been seated to his right and was stuck with him all evening. I merely replied that I thought that her little diatribe said more about them than me.

There was a stunned silence around the table, and then conversation continued to the left of me as I made a concerted effort to join in. Luckily, I was able to escape quickly as dessert and coffee had almost finished. I gracefully got up from the table and went to join other parts of the party where laughter and friendship soon reclaimed the evening. As I wandered beneath the orange trees in the courtyard I couldn’t help thinking about the strange symmetry of it all. Years earlier I had been called a sudaca and now I was apparently dangerous enough to be accused of stealing someone’s husband who was old enough to remember Queen Victoria!

What made this invitation to a wedding more poignant was that the daughter I had never met before wrote to me out of the blue a few months earlier to tell me that her mother had died. She had found my number in her mother’s phone and decided to texted me, knowing how important we had all been to each other in a life that had existed before her. She had read the texts on her mother’s phone and listened to the family stories. She told me that the only photo her mother had on her phone was of her and me at my wedding in Gibraltar, all those years ago. Anyway, to make a long story longer, as is one of my misgivings, there was no question that I would fly from London to be there for her.

This ended up being quite a day. Me returning to a Sevilla I had not set foot in for years. Me coming together with a family who had recently lost their mother, who had been my best friend at the time. Me meeting my dear friend’s youngest for the first time as she was born after we had been posted to Madrid.

She reminded me so much of her mother, it hurt.

Bear with me, because what follows will give you a glimpse as to how important this family is to me. It explains why this family matters so much and how the wedding experience could have ended in tears had I let it.

This family was the first family we met in Sevilla, all those years ago. I believe it was through their dog, a basset hound that we came upon while mooching around in the Patio de Banderas. It was pre family pets for us as our Genghis - dog was acquired in Madrid.

I had ended up teaching her two older brothers, along with my two children, at a small school we had put together in Mairena del Alcor. Our children, along with the American Vice Consul’s two children and a Mormon family, made up the entirety of the school. The bank decided they would pay towards the little non-profit as a way to compensate for the lack of schooling available at the time. There would have been no way of educating my children in the early 1980’s as the Spanish schools were already in session and showing no interest whatsoever in helping with this dilemma. We ended up using a correspondence method that originated in the USA, and I believe is still going today. The method of teaching was excellent and incredibly, was the same method that had given birth to The Calvert School of Bolivia when I was growing up —end of 1950’s/60’s. This was in the early days before the State Dept got involved and called it The American Cooperative School of La Paz which still functions today.

A wheel within a wheel.

There was an American school on the base at Rota, but that was too far away to expect small children living in Sevilla to commute to and from on a daily basis.

When I arrived in Sevilla all those years ago, I had asked the British Consulate about schools. Their response had been, “ask the Americans”.

Happy days.

Sevilla - Again

A year later, I returned to Sevilla with my Brazilian partner for Semana Santa. I wanted to share this experience with him before he returned home to Rio after having spent 40 years living in the UK.

We stayed at Las Casas de la Judería, which ranks alongside the Hotel de Bergues as one of my favourite hotels in the world. I had once lived in Calle Vidrio, right in the thick of it, so the atmosphere was deeply familiar to me: the smell of incense and candle wax, the penitentes, the saetas, the mantillas and peinetas. Quite wonderful.



This time, however, I had gone specifically to experience Semana Santa with him, rather than simply living there while it happened around me.

My partner and I moved among the crowds, jostling, swaying and following the processions. He enjoyed the spectacle, but he also absorbed a great deal of hostility from the people around us—slurs and open disdain directed at him for being Brazilian.

It was a very different experience for him, and something he had not experienced in a long, long time on our supposedly evolving planet.

I loved the city and everything we had come to see. He enjoyed Semana Santa with me, and bits about the city, but certainly not the people he encountered there.

I love Sevilla, although she has not always loved me and mine back.

The more I think about it, the more absurd it becomes.

AI learned to write by absorbing human language. Human beings are now surrounded by language written, rewritten or polished by AI. People use it for emails, reports, speeches, schoolwork, advertisements, articles, customer-service replies and, increasingly, entire books.

Even those who have never knowingly opened an AI programme are not living in some sealed, uncontaminated world of purely human prose.

We are reading instruction booklets, official notices, educational material, workplace communications, political messaging, advertising and every imaginable variety of informational propaganda—much of it now produced or altered by AI, whether anyone bothers to tell us or not.

We are absorbing its language simply by being alive.

People will inevitably pick up patterns from AI.

AI, meanwhile, continues to pick up patterns from people.

So where, precisely, is the clean dividing line Pangram believes it is detecting?

The detector is chasing a distinction that the industry itself is rapidly dissolving.

Human beings have always learned language through imitation. We read. We listen. We borrow turns of phrase. We absorb rhythms. We are influenced by teachers, parents, newspapers, novels, advertising slogans, television presenters and the person at the next table whose expression lodges unexpectedly in our mind.

That is how language works.

I am bilingual, and I can get by in several other languages. I did not learn them by keeping each language sealed in a sterile compartment. I learned by listening, imitating, borrowing rhythms, translating in my head, making mistakes and allowing one language to seep into another.

That is what human beings do.

We absorb patterns. We carry them across borders. Eventually, what we have absorbed becomes part of our own voice.

Now AI has entered that same ecosystem. It is learning from us while we, knowingly or otherwise, are beginning to learn from it.

Then another machine arrives, puts on its little spectacles and announces that it can tell which one of us wrote the paragraph.

Pattern is not proof.

Clear writing is not proof.

A well-balanced sentence is not proof.

Repetition is not proof.

Correct punctuation is not proof.

Nor is an awkward sentence proof of humanity, although at this rate we may all soon be inserting random commas, misspelling our own names and ending every third paragraph with “lol” simply to establish that we possess a pulse.

What happens when writers begin damaging their own prose because they are afraid of sounding too polished?

What happens when people deliberately make their sentences clumsier, less coherent or less thoughtful in order to prove that they are human?

What happens when an individual voice is treated with suspicion precisely because it is controlled, articulate or unusual?

And what happens when the machine is wrong?

Because it will be wrong.

A detector may recognise patterns, but it cannot know where a thought came from. It cannot know whether a sentence was remembered, laboured over, dictated, translated, rewritten twelve times or produced in one furious burst at five o’clock in the morning.

It cannot know whether the words carry a lifetime behind them.

It cannot know the difference between language and experience.

That is the part that interests me most.

The weak link in all this is not data. There is already more data than anyone knows what to do with.

The weak link is humanity.

A machine can examine every word I have written and still not know what it felt like to live it. It can identify patterns in my grandmother’s memoirs and still know nothing of the woman who crossed oceans, built a life in another world and left those words behind.

It can process her voice.

It cannot inherit it.

And that is why I object to unseen software being inserted between writer and reader to inspect, score and classify the work.

I am not worried about being “caught” using AI. That reduces the whole argument to cheating in a school examination.

I object to the examination.

I object to the assumption that publishing my words grants some third party the right to pull them apart and assess them for purposes I did not choose.

I object to the quiet conversion of human expression into material for surveillance.

And I object most of all when that expression contains memories, family history and the voices of people who are no longer here to give or withhold their permission.

My grandmother’s memoirs are not laboratory material.

Neither are mine.

They are not fodder for a technological contest between machines that generate language and machines that claim to detect the language generated by the first machines.

That particular circus can continue without my grandmother being dragged into the ring.

This piece, however, was written with AI.

Deliberately.

The thought is mine. The argument is mine. The indignation is unmistakably mine.

I asked AI to help me shape it.

So let Pangram have a field day.

Let it scan every sentence. Let it study the rhythm, count the commas and interrogate the adjectives. Let it produce a score, flash a warning light and congratulate itself on an excellent afternoon’s work.

In this case, the confession is part of the point.

And I shall still put my copyright beneath it.

Delicious, isn’t it?

Because assistance is not ownership.

Analysis is not authorship.

Access is not permission.

You may have this argument.

You may not have my life.

You may not have my grandmother.

© Liz Alexander 2026. All rights reserved.

Figures like Tate present themselves as powerful, but what they reveal is something else entirely: a belief that power entitles them to ignore limits, redefine consent and treat women as extensions of their own will. That belief—not strength—is what makes them dangerous, and what draws followers who mistake entitlement for masculinity.

They strike me as weak individuals masquerading as powerful ones—warped, dangerous and made more frightening by the admirers and enablers gathered around them.

Although I have to say, the absurdity of the capri trousers did not escape me.

I have spent much of my professional life in close quarters with men—not socially, but in practice.

I ran a successful spa in South America and later treated clients from rooms in my homes in Madrid, New York, Miami, Minneapolis and, for a very short while, London.

The spa was open to all adults, although most clients were male. My home practice was mainly women, with a few gentlemen among them.

At the spa, women tended to come in the afternoons. Male hotel guests and local clients came mostly in the early evenings. Mornings were reserved for yoga and aerobics, with swimming sessions for children twice a week. The classes were sacred spaces for women.

Most of my day, however, was spent treating male clients.

For years, I cultivated a particular kind of invisibility.

I was the one in the room wearing a uniform. I entered with purpose and clear limits. I was there to listen, observe and treat—to understand through my hands what a body was saying, often in contradiction to the person speaking.

In that room, they saw me differently.

They did not forget that I was a woman, nor did I expect them to. But the uniform and the role gave us structure. I was not there to be admired or pursued. I was not sitting opposite them at dinner or beside them in the piano bar.

I was there as a trained professional, and most respected that.

Being British seemed to help. It carried an assumption of training and professionalism that worked in my favour.

They arrived carrying their identities—title, position, money, authority.

Then they prepared as instructed and lay beneath the towels.

The modest pins on my uniform, announcing the professional associations to which I belonged, became the only medals left in the room.

Not everyone followed instructions.

Once, I knocked and entered to find a German client stark naked, in a headstand, facing me.

Quite what effect he hoped to achieve, I cannot imagine. Whatever it was, he failed.

I refused to reward the performance with embarrassment or alarm. I told him firmly to come down, prepare himself properly or leave. Then I shut the door and gave him a minute to reconsider both his behaviour and his position—which was, at that moment, upside down.

I knocked again before re-entering.

He was properly beneath the towels and behaved throughout the massage.

The body is unimpressed by status. Tight shoulders, clenched stomachs and shallow breathing reveal themselves, as do fear, pain, exhaustion, loneliness and need, whether acknowledged or not. In Chinese medicine, much is revealed in the pulse.

During treatment, the breath deepens, or catches. A sentence trails off. A hand that was clenched begins to rest.

It happens quietly, almost without a client noticing.

Sometimes the person would speak, and what they said did not match the individual who had walked in. Sometimes they would say nothing at all, but something in them would give way to total relaxation.

For a short time, the performance was dropped.

That access interested me. It still does.

For some, the voice returned first, then the role. References to money, influence or status reappeared, as though order had to be restored before they left the spa.

For others, the oils and massage left a more lasting impression.

I did not always know who these clients were. I never handled payment directly; the receptionist dealt with the money. As I owned the business, tips were discouraged.

Flowers would sometimes arrive. I could not stop those, but they benefited my female friend, who owned the hotel flower shop, so they stayed—along with thank-you notes and feedback.

As no cash passed from anybody’s hand to mine, that, too, marked a limit.

Controlling the atmosphere in a treatment space is important.

Dominance controls distance. Intimacy requires a willingness to be seen without armour.

Some can manage that.

Many struggle.

I was always aware that what I had established was not a wall.

I appeared at ease—and often was—but I remained alert. The treatment room was private, but the door stayed ajar. The male attendant responsible for towels and hygiene was always within earshot.

The spa, sauna and Turkish baths were drug- and alcohol-free zones. This was not only for health reasons. Massage involves touch, proximity and trust. Anything that altered judgement also threatened the conditions on which it depended.

A woman working alone with a male client knows that what allows him to relax may also leave her vulnerable.

Sometimes the warning was subtle: a look held too long, a remark that could be withdrawn, a small test of where the line lay. As I have written before, invisible currents had to be detected and managed early.

The predatory eye does not always recognise professionalism as authority. It may see privacy, proximity and a woman trained to remain calm.

My calm was not ignorance.

It was part of the role.

Most respected the limits, including very powerful individuals.

That did not make them good, nor did it mean that I controlled them. It meant they recognised the line in that moment and chose not to cross it.

The distinction matters.

Later, I might see the same clients in the piano bar.

Out of uniform, I became visible in another way.

Someone who had accepted my authority in the treatment room might now feel entitled to approach me differently. The intimacy of the afternoon could be reinterpreted because the setting had changed.

I had not changed.

His sense of permission had.

The line, it seemed, belonged to the uniform and the room—not to me.

I understood this, even without having the language for it. I knew how to hold my position, deflect and remain composed. I did not take this for granted.

Competence is not invulnerability.

Only once was that line seriously crossed.

It did not happen in my spa, but years later, in my home treatment room in London.

I remained outwardly professional, perhaps even appearing to be in control.

But had this person become violent or coercive, I am not sure what I would have done. I was probably falsely reassured by the fact that there were two Airedales in residence.

I do not know.

That is the truth.

The incident made me recoil from the profession I loved. I decided I was too vulnerable working on my own and had to find other ways to earn a living.

It left me resentful of the country my parents—and now my children—call home. I brought my skills here, and here I had to give them up.

Experience did not protect me.

Intelligence did not protect me.

Clear limits did not protect me.

A line can guide someone who respects it. It cannot restrain someone who does not.

This is why I reject the idea that women harmed by powerful individuals failed to protect themselves.

They did not lack limits.

The failure lay elsewhere.

Power alters the calculation. Money, reputation, influence and loyalty can persuade someone that consequences do not apply.

Appetite becomes entitlement.

Access is mistaken for consent.

Women bear the cost.

Sometimes the violence is obvious. Sometimes it is hidden beneath charm, opportunity or protection. A woman may feel chosen before she realises she has been positioned—admired and diminished at once.

When stories of trafficking and exploitation emerge, I recognise something of the structure, although I would never compare my experience with that of the victims.

The common thread is not massage, sex or beauty.

It is the belief that a woman’s limits become negotiable when someone has enough power.

I do not believe this is inevitable.

I have known those who did not test the line—who held power without assuming that it extended into another person’s body, and who could accept care without entitlement.

They are why I know the difference.

For much of my life, I watched closely. I saw what happened when status fell away.

Some became more interesting.

Some rebuilt the armour immediately.

Some never believed it needed to come off.

What I learned was not that I controlled others.

It was that most controlled themselves.

Now, at seventy, I wonder whether there are more who will not—or whether they have simply become louder and more visible.

Someone who once tested the line alone can now find others who applaud him. Entitlement is called masculinity. Restraint is weakness. The woman who sets limits becomes the enemy.

Perhaps there are no more of these people than before.

Perhaps they are simply better at finding one another and turning resentment into ideology.

That is what frightens me.

Not only the one who refuses to stop.

But the crowd behind him, insisting he never should have.

I hope the Tate brothers—and others like them—are brought before a British court and made to answer the charges against them.

The country in which I had to abandon the profession I loved—and which I now call home—owes its women that much, at least.

Nana’s story continues. Today, I am telling it until we reach Uyuni, preparing the way for what will be the beginning of both our Bolivian stories.

There were more voyages, more home leaves, more ports, and more ships.

Nana called at Curaçao for the first time and liked it immediately because it was so clean and “Dutch”. The Captain—yes, the same one who once carried a toilet seat in his pocket—appeared to have friends in every port. He took them to lunch at the Club and then inland to visit an ostrich farm.

“In those days ostrich feathers were the vogue, and they had thousands of ostriches at this farm.”

My grandfather bought her a magnificent white feather fan on pearl sticks. She was thrilled with it, although she remembers using it only once, at an important dance in Antofagasta.

There was also the day she woke from her siesta to find the ship stopped in the middle of the Caribbean. She went in search of the Captain, who told her that he thought she might be bored and had stopped the ship so that she could do a little fishing.

She was duly supplied with the necessary equipment before realising that he was pulling her leg. The ship had stopped for a minor engine repair.

The Captain remained part of their lives whenever he returned to the Coast. He would dine with them, or they would go aboard the Almelo to dine with him.

“We never actually made another trip with him, and we gradually lost touch when we left the Coast. We heard that he had died. I will always remember him with great affection.”

It is a small ending, but a tender one. These were not cruise ships passing anonymously through ports. They were working ships, carrying passengers, cargo, friendships and entire lives backwards and forwards across the Atlantic.

That home leave brought another discovery. Nana arrived in England to find that she was pregnant.

They had six months’ leave: two months taken up by the voyages and four months at home. She shopped for clothes to wear after the baby was born and stocked up on everything they would need on their return.

“There were no nice clothes shops then in Antofagasta. (There are not any now.)”

That bracket is pure Nana.

The return voyage was once again aboard the Orcoma, with the same doctor who had looked after her on her first journey. By now the novelty had worn off.

“This trip was, of course, nothing like my first trip as I was rather blasé by that time and thought that I knew my way around.”

She was horribly seasick between Havana and Bermuda, but recovered as soon as the ship stopped. They spent a couple of days in Havana and continued through ports that were by then familiar.

On their arrival in Antofagasta, they discovered that Robert had been transferred there from Mejillones. Nana was disappointed.

She never liked Antofagasta very much. Their house was not on the beach, the beaches were public and crowded, and although there were dances at the Railway Club and the Automobile Club, she was now occupied with a baby, Betty—my father’s older sister—and had little time for the tea parties and bridge she had always disliked.

There were good friends and kind people, but even Nana admits that she could not recall anything particularly interesting about that period unless she began writing about the odd people they met along the way.

“And one could go on for ever just remembering people we have met along the way.”

They remained in Antofagasta for nearly two years. Robert was then told that he would have to travel around the railway service while based in what Nana describes as “a miserable place on the pampas”, so it was decided that she should return to England with Betty.

Once again, she boarded the Orcoma.

“I decided that we had nearly bought the ship, with all the trips we had made.”

By then she knew the stewards and crew and considered herself “a real old hand”. The only event she remembered clearly from that voyage was the terrible hurricane she had already written about.

England, however, was dull. Betty took up her time, and Nana waited.

Then, after about a year, Robert wrote with the news that would change everything again.

He had been posted to Bolivia.

“To Uyuni of all places, the place to which he once said that he would never take me.”

And so the tale continues …

Before there were Albert and Emily, there was Genghis.

Before there was New York, there was Spain.

We had gone into central Madrid for the most sensible of reasons: to buy school uniforms for the children.

We came home with an Airedale.

Yes, yes, I know.

It was one of those “How much is that doggie in the window?” moments. A god-awful pet shop on a hot afternoon. Need I say more?

My husband named him Genghis and confessed years later that, had this puppy been anything other than an Airedale, he would never have succumbed to the pressure.

When he was a little boy and his father was in the Navy, he had seen an Airedale in a pile of old wartime magazines that sat upstairs outside the loo. These fascinated him, and he never lost his fascination for war and all things related. Among their pages were photographs of dogs carrying messages across battlefields, sitting proudly beside soldiers or wearing bandages after being wounded in action.

They all seemed to be Airedales, and this stayed with him into adulthood.

Years later, when I visited his parents’ house, I rather suspected there had only ever been one Airedale in those propaganda magazines. He seemed to appear in every photograph and was clearly the star of the show.

So when the children spotted the forlorn Genghis in the pet shop window, there was very little argument.

Genghis was a fine fellow.

He came everywhere with me.

He accompanied us on the daily walk to the school bus, introduced me to endless interesting people in Madrid’s Retiro Park, joined countless camping trips and seaside adventures, amassed an impressive collection of stolen tennis balls, chewed his way through an assortment of children’s toys and famously beheaded a Barbie.

He was well known in Tarifa where, according to my son, there were rumours that Genghis had fathered several of the local mutts that mysteriously reappeared every summer.

Naturally, Genghis never commented on the matter.

He attended our wedding in Gibraltar and was, in every sense, part of the family.

He wasn’t just any Airedale.

He was a magnificent Madrileño. Handsome, intelligent and completely aware of both qualities, he carried himself with the confidence of a dog who believed the world existed largely for his entertainment.

He had the air of a bullfighter when he pranced around, especially after a haircut.

⸻

When we were posted to New York, Genghis came too.

The move marked a new chapter, but Genghis slipped into it as though Manhattan had been designed with him in mind.

People stopped us constantly to admire him. The hot-dog vendors knew him by name. Some people heard “Kinky,” which was funny too. At one point he even came close to appearing in film The Mirror Has Two Faces, which is a story in itself.

I have an elegant Cuban friend who used to take him with her to a very posh hairdresser in Midtown. I can see her now in her flowing robes, flagging down a New York taxi with Genghis in tow.

He would sit beside the piano, drink from a crystal bowl and patiently wait while she had her flowing locks done. Upon leaving the house he would look at me as if to say, “Ha! YOU never take me to these places.”

He was right.

I never took him to those places myself, but he went anyway. He certainly had a more affluent social life than I did.

Once, while chasing a squirrel with his usual overconfidence, he ran headlong into a tree and fractured his paw. The vet wrapped it in a bright sports bandage over the cast.

Genghis immediately realised the possibilities.

Each day he would solemnly present his injured paw to the hot-dog vendors as though displaying a heroic war wound. As you can imagine, my husband was most impressed! More often than not, a hot dog appeared in recognition of Gengy’s bravery.

After swimming in Central Park he had another ritual. He would stand over the warm basement vents set into the pavement, allowing the rising air to dry his coat. Between grooming sessions (always hand-stripped by ME) he looked less like an Airedale and more like an unusually dignified poodle.

It was during one of those ordinary New York afternoons that an Argentine gent stopped to admire Genghis.

In truth, most people did.

We started talking.

He reminded me immediately of Latin America: warm, curious, funny and genuinely interested in people. Before long I had invited him and his partner to dinner. We met for coffee in Central Park on several occasions and became friends.

As it turns out, more than thirty years later, we still are.

⸻

Not long after, another move began to take shape.

We were posted to Miami and went on a reconnaissance trip to see what life there might look like.

We found a house.

And, inevitably, we came back with more than we had planned.

We also acquired two Airedale puppies.

Naturally.

We had seen an advertisement in the paper while house-hunting:

Home wanted for Airedale puppies who lost their parents in Hurricane Andrew.

Parts of Florida were still reeling from the devastation, and curiosity got the better of us. We drove out one Sunday to somewhere far off like Homestead.

When we arrived, we were greeted by a chaotic scene: five or six lively puppies tumbling around a dusty yard, and a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig wandering among them as if it were perfectly normal.

At that point we should probably have turned around and gone straight back to the hotel on South Beach.

Instead, we made the fatal mistake of getting out of the car.

Within minutes the largest puppy—Hurricane Albert, who was frightened of all things “wind” and plastic bags—had climbed into my arms and attached himself to me with absolute determination.

And the smallest one had attached herself just as firmly to him.

That was the end of it.

⸻

Back in New York, reality set in.

The plan sounded beautifully simple.

Bring the puppies home.

Introduce them to Genghis.

Pack up the apartment.

Move to Miami.

Simples.

Not so.

Genghis was indignant.

He simply could not believe that we had disappeared for a few days and returned with two unruly Airedale puppies as though they were perfectly normal souvenirs to bring home from Florida.

The carefully maintained household hierarchy collapsed overnight.

Emily followed him everywhere.

Albert received a considerable amount of growling.

After a long day of packing, I took all three dogs for a walk.

By then it had started to rain.

I found myself on Broadway with three Airedales: two puppies bouncing enthusiastically in every direction while Genghis attempted to preserve what little dignity remained to him.

After all, he was well known in Manhattan.

This episode would almost certainly damage his reputation.

I abandoned the plan to go to Central Park and headed towards the pet shop on Broadway, where Genghis always received free treats and where we could get out of the rain for a while.

As we passed a doorway, I recognised someone standing there.

It was my Argentine friend.

At first he looked astonished to see me surrounded by three Airedales.

Then his expression changed.

The smile disappeared.

He looked utterly broken.

From what I could gather through the tears, he had broken up with his partner and had nowhere to go.

Standing there myself, soaked to the skin, with three Airedales pulling in every direction, I didn’t stop to think.

Before my sensible brain had time to intervene, the words were already out of my mouth.

I blurted out, “Come and live with us in Miami. Did I tell you we were moving? We’ve been posted to Florida.”

“We’ve found a house with a studio.”

“You can stay with us while you get back on your feet.”

Looking back, I realise this is how so many chapters of my life have begun.

Not through careful planning.

But through instinct.

Standing in the rain on Broadway with three Airedales and suddenly inviting an Argentine friend to move to Miami.

⸻

That evening I told my husband what I had done. He was fine with it. He liked our new Argentine friend, but he was not stupid. He could see that having him there would be a help to me—and would take some of the weight off him, if there was any guilt to be felt.

By then the move was already in motion.

My husband would simply walk out of one banking office and into another.

For me it was something entirely different.

Moves like this never happened in neat professional increments.

They arrived as upheavals that required someone to gather together the fragments of life—the dogs, the houses, the practicalities and the emotional weather—and somehow transform them into a functioning home somewhere else.

That someone was me.

The children were at boarding school in the UK by then, largely because of the many moves, so I had even lost part of the support team.

We had found a house on Pine Tree Drive with a detached studio that I intended one day to turn into a yoga studio.

In the meantime, my friend would fly down in advance and meet us there when we arrived.

He would help me prepare our new base while slowly rebuilding his own life.

Looking back now, I realise I had quietly assumed a role without ever really acknowledging it.

The banker moved offices.

His wife moved worlds.

And somehow, like so many of the important turns in my life, a friendship began because one impossibly handsome Airedale had looked out at us from a pet shop window in Madrid.

Genghis and little Emily crossed that rainbow in the sky while we were in Miami. Albert, together with an Emily II, made it all the way to London with me, surviving the worst “hurricane” of my life.

I loved Albert dearly, but he was never the dog Genghis had been. Genghis was a magnificent Madrileño — a matador in an Airedale coat. Albert was unmistakably American: too large, too gangly, loving and loyal, yet carrying fears we never completely understood. He had survived a real hurricane and somehow seemed to carry the weather inside him for the rest of his life.

Where did we leave this?

When the millions of small fish were washed up on to the beach the gardeners from the various houses would go to scoop them up by basket loads, to bury under the grape vines and the tomato plants…

“… in the gardens - wonderful fertiliser. Another very tasty fish which was very prolific in Mejillones, were “pejerrey”, a small fish on the Pacific ocean but very large on the Atlantic side. Lots of pejerrey with the bone taken out were a favourite for eating at cocktail time, fried very crisply.

There were a good number of English staff in Mejillones in those days, and we had to make our own amusements. The beach was always lively in the daytime, and when the men returned from work, always gatherings in one or other of the houses for cocktails. Sundays was very popular day on the Beach, and we would spend the whole day in bathing suits, messing about in boats and swimming and sailing. Once a week we had a film show on a Friday night at the English Club. Looking back it sounds very amusing, as we would have people to dinner before the show, and we always dressed. In those days any excuse to get into evening clothes, and it was rather fun after being in informal clothes all of the day. We also had lots of tennis and golf but the golf course was not green but just made out of the sandy stoney desert. We also had large picnics, sometimes arranged for the whole community, using one of the lighters belonging to the Railway which could take dozens of people. Also we had lots of moonlight picnics on the bay, in motor launches belonging to the various officials in the town. Every other week one of the big mail boats would call in to load up with nitrate, and stayed overnight. We used to go aboard for dinner and dancing, and were able to buy perfume and chocolates and lovely things from the ship’s store.

What fun we had! Now there is a proper tarred road from Mejillones into Antofagasta which is the large port further south and the terminus of the Antofagasta Bolivia Railway. In my early days there was no road and only two trains a week into Anto. It took about two hours to go about twenty miles but we frequently went in for social events or shopping. I have never liked Antofagasta very much but in 1922 it was a very much different place to what it is now. Then all of the nitrate offices were working, but since synthetic nitrate has replaced the natural nitrate, it is not nearly so much in demand. Copper also comes into Antofagasta from one of the world’s great copper mines, Chuquicamata, which is on the way up to Bolivia.

One of the exciting things which happened during my early days in Mejillones, was a terrible earthquake shortly after I arrived there. Actually it did not hit us badly, but further down to the South whole towns were wrecked or washed away by tidal waves, with an enormous loss of life. At the time it happened I was in bed reading, and I saw the electric light in the ceiling swaying wildly, and crashes from the dining room. Actually I suppose that it only lasted for a few seconds, but it seemed ages to me before things were still again. Glasses on the dining room sideboard slipped on to the floor and kitchen utensils rolled around, but our houses were of flimsy wooden structure, so there was not much fear of collapsing. The local people were terrified and for several nights went up to the hills at the back, for fear of a tidal wave. Luckily, although we had some very high tides for several days, we did not have any damage. I have been in several minor earthquakes since, but this one being my first experience, it was over before I completely realised what a bad one it was was. At certain times of the year there would be very high tides, with enormous waves, and we could come in to the beach on the crest of a huge wave quite safely, and it was the greatest fun. I was not a champion swimmer but it was most exciting. Sometimes, usually towards evening, there would be a cry of “heaveas” (Not sure how to spell the word) and we would all dash out of the water on to the beach, and a huge shoal of cuttle fish would come rushing along quite close in. I hated them, but the little Chilean boys would catch them, and take out the backbone and ink sac and make them into pens.

Our first home leave was due about two years after I first went out, and it does not matter how much one likes a place, and how much one is enjoying life, home leave is always talked about and looked forward to, practically from the time one returns from the last one.

In May ships of different nationalities would come into Mejillones Bay, and we knew a good many of Captains. We were particularly friendly with the Captain of a big Dutch Freighter, a Capt. Schenk. He took twelve passengers, and as it was a lovely ship we decided to travel on her for our first leave. We liked Capt. S. very much and always had fun with him. He was an enormously fat man, practically square, but very agile, and could do hand stands and cart wheels down the deck like a gymnast. He was very sweet to me. There was an American friend travelling as far as Panama with us, whom we used to entertain a good deal and he worked with Grace & Co. I do remember when we got up the West Coast off Peru, it commenced to rain and just poured down. I had not seen rain for two years, and Van and I went running around and around the deck soaking it up, and dripping with water. We had the run of the bridge and the Captain’s quarters. Also the most marvellous food. No wonder the Dutch get fat as they eat such rich food several times a day. There were always several kinds of bread for breakfast and fish and cold meats etc. The Capt. knew the West Coast very well, and had friends in every port. We called into some of the smaller ports which I had not seen before, as the large mail steamers did not call in them.

We went ashore in one small port which was near to the sugar plantation belonging to friends of his. I forget the name of the port but these people had acres and acres of sugar, and a most beautiful house, with a remarkable collection of colonial silver and interesting Inca antique things. At another port we went to friends of his who had an enormous cotton plantation also with a lovely house and old Spanish furnishings.

Capt. S. was very amusing. He always called me “Madam Dorotea”. We were ashore in Lima, and I recall being in a taxi sightseeing. He was so fat that only he and I could get in the back and R. in front with the chauffeur. I was a little squashed and felt a bulge in his side pocket, and when I asked him what it was, he produced a collapsible lavatory seat which folded up into a smaller square, and he solemnly announced that it was very important that I should never sit straight on to a lavatory seat in S. America, or dire things would happen to me.

We had a lovely trip through the Canal, as the Pilot invited R. and I up to the Bridge, so I had a different view to the one I had had on my first trip.”

These memoirs often find me thinking about the world my grandmother inhabited rather than simply the places she describes.

This was a world where a dozen passengers might spend weeks crossing an ocean together. The captain knew every port and seemed to have friends in each one. Guests were invited onto the bridge, welcomed into homes and treated more like companions than customers. Today, a journey like that would be considered a luxury beyond the reach of most people. Then, for some, it was simply how one travelled, often as an extension of reciprocal hospitality. These were not luxury liners. They were working ships.

I also smile at the space there seemed to be for eccentricity. Captain S., carrying a collapsible lavatory seat in his pocket and solemnly explaining its importance to my grandmother, feels entirely believable. I grew up in a world where characters like that were everywhere.

In Bolivia, people still spoke fondly of old Mr McDonald, who had lived there for years but stubbornly continued to wear his kilt. Somewhere along the way, bowler hats found their way into the traditional dress of Indigenous women. The Cornish pasty crossed the Atlantic and became the salteña. Cultures collided, borrowed from one another and evolved in ways that nobody could have predicted.

It would be easy to romanticise this world, and there was undoubtedly privilege in some of these experiences. Yet the reality was far more complicated. Alongside the comfortable houses and ocean voyages were earthquakes, unreliable water and electricity, shortages of food, long separations from family, revolutions and the everyday realities of living in places that were still developing.

My grandfather, and later my father, spent much of their working lives helping to bring electricity, railways and transportation to towns and villages across Bolivia. Their wives sustained them through years of separation, uncertainty and constant adaptation. They were not conquerors, colonisers or conquistadores, they were engineers. They believed they were improving people’s lives, and I believe they were sincere. At the same time, history encourages us to ask more difficult questions about empire, development and who ultimately benefited from the wealth those enterprises created. Progress and exploitation are not always mutually exclusive. Sometimes they exist side by side.

Perhaps that is why I resist judging the past too quickly. These memoirs remind me that history is rarely neat. Most people were simply trying to do what they believed was right within the world they knew.

One thing that has almost disappeared entirely is the idea of home leave. I remember my own mother talking about it for years before it finally arrived. She longed to see her mother again. It wasn’t a holiday in the modern sense. It was the long-awaited return to family after years apart.

Reading Nana’s memoirs also reminds me why I was so drawn to Airbnb in its earliest days. I met Brian Chesky in London when the idea was still beautifully simple. Your home became someone else’s home for a while. Guests stayed with the family, sat around the breakfast table, shared stories, joined in with everyday life and left knowing a place in a way no hotel could ever offer. You showed them the corners that had taken you years to discover. Hospitality came first; the transaction was almost incidental.

A shout out to all the wonderful people who weathered Peckham with me in those early days. My home became a destination, not because it was grand, but because it was shared.

I was made for that version of Airbnb because it mirrored the world in which I had grown up. My childhood had taught me that strangers often became friends, that cultures were meant to be shared and that opening your home was one of the simplest ways of opening your heart and mind.

Sadly, that spirit was never going to survive unchanged. As Airbnb expanded, many people naturally saw an opportunity to make money. Homes became investments, guests became customers and hospitality gradually gave way to transaction. Some guests abused the privilege. Some hosts did too. The idea itself changed. I no longer recognised the world I had loved and quietly stepped away. Even Brian himself has inevitably become something very different from the young man I first met. Ideas change as they grow.

Perhaps that is why I recognised the change so quickly. I had seen it before: hospitality giving way to transaction, privilege turning into entitlement and trust becoming something to exploit.

That said, I have never regretted those early years. I made friends from every corner of the world, many of whom I am still in touch with today. Time and again we have discovered that we share far more than we differ. Those friendships have long outlasted the platform and jobs that first brought us together.

Perhaps that is the thread running through Nana’s memoirs and through my own life. Hospitality. Curiosity. The willingness to welcome someone into your world, and to be welcomed into someone else’s, not because there is anything to gain, but because that is how friendships begin.

Looking back now, I realise this was simply my childhood. I never longed for adventure because adventure was normal. Every day seemed to bring another story, another country, another unexpected encounter.

I simply woke up to it every day.

And perhaps that is why one conversation in Spain has stayed with me for so many years.

My then husband asked one of the English members of staff where they were going on holiday.

The man looked at him and smiled.

“I am on holiday.”

That one sentence quietly turned the usual British mindset upside down. Living in Spain, surrounded by sunshine, another language and another culture, was itself the holiday compared with the grey Britain they had left behind.

Looking back now, I realise there was a subtle difference between Nana’s generation and mine. She was an Englishwoman living abroad, and England always remained home. My father, born in Leeds and raised in Bolivia, belonged there in a different way. By the time it came to me, becoming part of a place felt completely natural. Wherever I lived, the language didn’t seem a problem, I made friends and became involved in the life around me. I never felt like I was simply passing through. For a while at least, I became a local.

Looking back now, I can also see that I slipped naturally into the international world that followed. It never felt unusual to me because, in many ways, it was simply an extension of the childhood I had already lived.

The irony is I feel less like a local in the country of my nationality than anywhere I have ever lived.

I was walking in Minneapolis one afternoon when I found myself pausing outside a cookware shop. A table stood outside, laid with wooden spoons, heavy cast-iron pans, stone mortars and ceramic bowls.

I stood there for a while, simply looking. Then I found myself touching the objects one by one, running my hand over the grain of the wood, the coolness of the stone and the weight of the iron. Just feeling the materials.

After a while I turned to leave, and a man stopped me.

He said he wanted to thank me. Watching me, he said, had given him an unexpected pleasure. Seeing me handle the things on the table—the wood, the stone and the iron—had moved him in some way. He never said quite why.

It was less a conversation than a brief encounter. Then we went our separate ways.

Sometimes, when I am cooking and feel the weight of a pan or the grain of a wooden spoon in my hand, I remember that afternoon in Minneapolis.

Looking back now, I think I was doing what I have always done: quietly taking in my surroundings and finding my place within them.

I still remember that afternoon in Minneapolis—and the curious moment we shared.

⸻

Welcome to Private Wealth Management

Not long after we arrived in Geneva, while we were still living at the Hotel des Bergues, I was walking through the Old Town one cold, damp afternoon.

I was fairly smartly dressed. Geneva seemed to have its own uniform and, as newcomers, one naturally slipped into it. Looking back, I think I had retreated deep within myself that day. It was a grey day and it had begun to drizzle. I was standing in a cobbled street, looking into a small shop window. I cannot even remember what had caught my attention.

Then I became aware that someone was standing very close to me.

Too close.

I did not look up immediately. My eyes dropped first to the pavement and then to an exquisite pair of men’s shoes. As my gaze travelled upwards, I saw a beautifully cut suit, a crisp shirt and tie, and finally an extraordinarily handsome face. He smelled exquisite too.

All the while he was talking to me in French.

By the time I reached his face, I realised what he was saying.

“Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”

Or words very close to that.

I was so startled that I stepped backwards, politely declined the invitation and walked away.

The encounter carried a sexual charge, but no emotional one. I was old enough to know the difference.

So, after my unexpected afternoon encounter, I was rather pleased to return home.

Home, in this case, was the Hotel des Bergues.

Curiously, I loved it. It remains the finest hotel I have ever stayed in. We lived there for three months after returning from the Kumbh Mela in India.

It was never ostentatious. It was simply classy—quietly confident—and somehow it felt like home. Real wealth did not need a uniform.

The service was extraordinary, but never intrusive.

They noticed things.

This was long before every coffee shop claimed to serve chai. In those days, in Geneva, chai was not something one expected to be offered.

One of the staff noticed that we had just returned from India and asked whether I would like a chai. Apparently they knew exactly how to prepare one because the Dalai Lama stayed there whenever he visited Geneva.

The irony always made me smile. I had only just returned from India myself, having spent time in the company of the Dalai Lama and on the banks of the Ganges.

It was not simply that they knew where I had been.

They seemed to know who I was: someone who wandered through the world feeling part of it and its people.

They quietly welcomed me home.

From the day I arrived, however, Geneva itself left me uneasy. I sensed another side to it that I could never quite explain. I think I see more clearly now. I would live there for two years, yet the feeling never left me.

Only much later did I realise that, unbeknown to me on that cold afternoon, this was the city where the life I had known would eventually come to an end.

The Hotel des Bergues was my refuge for a while.

The city beyond its doors was another story.

Where were we…? Nana was floating down the Pacific coast towards her destination: Mejillones, Chile, where she was to meet and marry Robert, my grandfather.

“The time that I am writing of was about forty seven years ago, and naturally so much has been improved and modernised in all places since then, and there are some gorgeous hotels and restaurants now in and around Lima. Tourists visit the Cathedral, where the mummified remains of Francisco Pizarro are in a glass case and a very macabre sight. Perhaps now people do not bother to go to see him, although I have noticed that in some travel books there are pictures of him. The grandchildren who are constantly passing through Lima and often spent time there have probably never even heard of Pizzaro the Conqueror of Peru. I must find out about that.

Nearly at the end of my first voyage! Mollendo, where the sea is often so rough that to go ashore we went in little boats, to the mole where we were hauled up in a basket by a crane. Anyway a very uninteresting place, although on my first voyage I went to a private home for lunch, taken by some friends I had made on the ship.

Iquique was an important port for the loading of nitrate but very uninteresting. Then Arica, only interesting for the masses of sea birds which are in fact everywhere on the West Coast. Whole islands off the Coast of Peru are composed of guano, which are the droppings of millions of sea birds which nest there during the night. Guano is a great industry of Peru, as it is a very valuable fertiliser. But the smell passing these islands is horrible, to say the least of it.

My destination was the tiny port of Mejillones, which only beauty is the bay on which it is situated and the lovely beaches. It mainly consisted of the railway encampment, and about half a mile from that a small village, which was mainly dependent upon the…Railway. The officers on the “Orcoma” hooted with laughter when they knew that I was to live in Mejillones and told horrible tales about how dull it would be. I do remember that when I woke up in the morning, and looked through my porthole my heart sank, as there seemed to be nothing there but some houses with tin roofs and the large Railway workshops and nothing but hills at the back with not a vestige of vegetation.

Before long masses of people came aboard, amongst the first being Robert. I afterwards discovered that the fortnightly arrival of the mail boat was a very looked forward to diversion. I hardly remember what I felt like saying goodbye to the friends I had made on board and meeting new people, most of whom had come also to inspect “Bobbie’s fiancée.” I recall that about the first person to whom I was introduced was a Mr. Stephenson, who had an identical twin (handwritten: “a Stephenson” inserted above, with another note “also a Stephenson”) living in Antofagasta about two hours away by boat, but several hours by train. These two men always played jokes, as people would see the Mejillones one going ashore, and on arriving in Anto. shortly afterwards the other one would be first on board. What made the first Stephenson man remain in my memory was that when I was introduced to him and he knew that I was going to be married immediately told me to always remember that there were “365 nights in a year.” I thought it horribly vulgar.

So started my life in South America, March 12th, 1922. The ship was anchored out in the bay, as it was too big to get alongside the mole, and everything had to be off loaded into small barges or rowing boats. I watched my baggage, including a big wardrobe trunk and my other trunks, containing my wedding presents and my wedding cake being loaded by winch into a tiny rowing boat. It arrived safely, but I heard later that more than one passenger had seen his luggage go to the bottom of the bay.

We went ashore in a very smart motor launch, and if I had not been warned by Robert what sort of place Mejillones was, and if I had not been so keen to see new places, I think I should have turned round and gone back to the ship. We landed from the motor boat on to the Railway Mole, and walked through heavy sand to get to the house which had been prepared for us. It was a wooden chalet with a front verandah facing the sea, and with tubs of plants on it. The only green to be seen was in people’s gardens and verandahs. There was no water in this desert, and the Railway had a big plant for the desalination of sea water, so we always had plenty, and also each day big blocks of ice were delivered to the house, in those days there were no electric refrigerators. We had ice boxes which kept things cool, and always lots of ice for drinks.

I was married by the Civil Authorities (which was the legal ceremony in Chile) within two hours of my arrival in the house of some very dear friends of R’s – they have been friends from that day until now.

Notwithstanding the unattractive look of the place, my two years in Mejillones were marvellous. I could not speak a word of Spanish, and unfortunately I did not bother to learn properly from the beginning, as one should. There was a big colony of gringoes and as I knew a few words of kitchen spanish shortly, I did not bother to learn properly.

Although it was apparently such a dreary place to look at, we had a very gay social life. The biggest attraction was the marvellous beach and the lovely bay. There was a lot of bird life and one could spend hours watching the pelicans, and cormorants and other sea birds fishing and diving for fish. There were so many kinds most of the names of which I did not bother to find out, and how I wish I had taken more interest, now that I could be so interested. Also the bay was alive with hundreds of sea lions, and they would come very close to the shore. We had a raft anchored a few hundreds out for swimming, and sometimes one would find it inhabited with a few sea lions basking in the sun. They never bothered us, and we did not bother them, but they seemed to be almost tame and never at all scared of human beings. The bay was also full of fish. In early mornings which were always so cool and slightly misty over the bay, we would see fishermen close into shore in flat bottomed boats in the clear shallow water spearing flat fish, which could be seen lying in the sand, and shortly afterwards the fishermen would come to the kitchen door with this freshly caught fish called “linguada” very much like our sole. At certain times of the year sardines and anchovies, literally by the million would be washed on to the beach with every wave. These small fishes would be chased into shore by larger fishes, which were in turn chased by still larger ones, and those by the sea lions, or, perhaps, albacora, which is sword fish, and is very fine to eat, rather like our halibut. Another Pacific fish which is a great delicacy is “congrio” and quite the best tasting fish that I have ever had. When the millions of small fish were washed up on to the beach the gardeners from the various houses would go to scoop them up by basket loads, to bury under the grape vines and the tomato plants”

Some very vivid scenes remain with me: Nana going ashore in a basket at Mollendo, the twin stewards playing tricks on everyone, and her immediate horror at the crude advice that there were “365 nights in a year.” They make me smile.

Another detail particularly caught my attention. Nana describes gardeners collecting the millions of sardines washed ashore and burying them beneath grapevines and tomato plants. Today we might call that nutrient recycling or regenerative gardening. To them, it was simply common sense. Nothing was wasted. Nature fed itself, and people understood their place within that cycle.

Reading these pages, I realised I wasn’t simply reading a family memoir. I was looking at a photograph. Not one taken with a camera, but with words.

Nana wasn’t trying to document history. She was simply describing the world around her: pelicans diving for fish, sea lions basking on the swimming raft, fishermen spearing lenguado in the cool morning mist, and gardeners burying basket-loads of sardines beneath grapevines and tomato plants.

Today we instinctively photograph such moments. Nana wrote them down. Almost a century later, those observations have become something far more precious than she could ever have imagined. They preserve a landscape, a way of life, and an abundance that industrialisation would later transform.

It is a reminder that ordinary days are often the ones history forgets—unless someone takes the time to notice them.

Reading it through modern eyes, I couldn’t help smiling. Two hours after arriving in Mejillones, they were married.

There were no months of planning, no designer dresses, no seating plans or destination venues. The wedding was not the event; the marriage was. It was simply the doorway to the life they had travelled halfway around the world to begin.

It made me wonder whether, somewhere along the way, we have allowed the celebration to eclipse the journey that follows.

And then there was the language.

Nana lived in South America for years and, by her own admission, “did not bother” to learn Spanish properly. My mother learned enough to speak comfortably but always said she was translating in her head.

Then there was me.

I never remember translating. I simply knew who spoke which language, and which language to think in.

Somewhere between those three women, South America stopped being a place we lived and became a place that lived within us.

Ours was my maternal grandfather, George Edwin Booth.

By the time I knew him, he seemed to know everyone and everything that moved through London. People in the market called him “The Prime Minister.”

His world was Covent Garden Market, where fruit and vegetables arrived before dawn and London was fed from wooden crates and barrows. But the market was never just one place. It stretched across the city—to Smithfield, Old Spitalfields, warehouses, railway yards, mews and back streets that most Londoners never saw.

He knew every one of them.

Long before satellite navigation, he could have given any London taxi driver a run for their money. He spent his days driving great lorries laden with produce, delivering fruit and vegetables across the capital. Somewhere along the way, he also became the man people turned to when they needed advice, introductions, or simply someone who knew how to get things done.

For a little girl born in Bolivia and educated in American schools, he was endlessly fascinating.

He was a Cockney through and through, speaking in rhyming slang, riddles and expressions that often sounded like a foreign language. Half the time I had no idea what he was talking about.

My English cousins never batted an eyelid. They had grown up with it and effortlessly translated for me, usually with the sort of expression that suggested everyone ought to know what Granddad meant.

The peaches are what I remember most.

Whenever we came over from Bolivia, he would save them for me—huge, fragrant peaches from Spain, soft enough to drip down your arm as you ate them. Then there were glossy nectarines, enormous bunches of grapes, pineapples, dates and avocados, still an exotic novelty in Britain.

The fruit looked like paintings.

My grandfather would laugh and tell my mother that I was a “fruit face,” just like my other Nana—my father’s mother.

I have never tasted fruit like that again.

Ironically, my mother, uncle and grandmother had grown up surrounded by such abundance and thought nothing of it. It was my father and I, raised in South America, and my paternal grandmother, who had been raised in Yorkshire, who marvelled at the treasures arriving through Covent Garden.

Stories accumulated around my grandfather in the way they often do around men who spend their lives in markets.

One was that he had lifted the front of a lorry off a man’s arm after an accident in the yard.

Another claimed that when he badly gashed his hand, he simply poured battery acid into the wound to cauterise it and carried on working.

Whether either story was completely true hardly mattered to us as children.

We couldn’t imagine anyone capable of either.

My mother always described him as strict. She adored him, but he ruled the household with the certainty common to many fathers of his generation. Boys were not encouraged to look at her, and she certainly wasn’t encouraged to look at them.

She had spent her childhood climbing trees like a tomboy before deciding to become a hairdresser.

Then, one day, a young engineering student from Bolivia walked through the front door.

My father had been born in Yorkshire but brought up in South America. After the war, Britain offered a more affordable engineering education than the United States, so he came to study here. Looking for a holiday job, he became friends with my uncle George, who invited him home.

My grandfather liked him immediately.

He put him to work in the same way he put his own son to work.

He welcomed him into the family.

He eventually gained a son-in-law.

The rest, as they say, is history.

At Leverstock Green there was a stick kept high in the corner of the kitchen by the door. It was known simply as the flogging stick.

By the time my cousins, my brother and I came along, it had become more legend than weapon. If we started getting out of hand, someone only had to glance towards it—or quietly ask, “What if we mention this to Granddad?”—for perfect behaviour to be instantly restored.

In all the years I visited, I never once saw it leave its corner.

I suspect it had earned its fearsome reputation long before we arrived.

By the time I knew my grandfather, he had softened into an older gentleman with wispy grey hair and the comforting smell of blended snuff paired with big red handkerchiefs always tucked into his pockets. He had a mischievous sense of humour, loved opera, always seemed to have West End tickets tucked away somewhere, and considered a proper cooked English breakfast one of life’s great pleasures.

Their house held another wonder.

Beyond the ordinary family rooms lay a ballroom, filled with the accumulated treasures of a lifetime: top hats, fox furs complete with their heads, Toledo swords, gramophone records, flapper dresses and strange souvenirs brought home from sea voyages by my grandmother’s brothers, much of it also the result of Granddad’s deals.

After my grandfather’s first heart attack, my grandmother opened a second-hand shop. Even so, the ballroom remained full of remarkable things.

My favourite was a matador’s hat, presented to Granny by a bullfighter during one of Granddad’s fruit-buying trips to Spain—many years before Spain would become part of my own life.

Whenever we visited from Bolivia, my brother and I disappeared into that room for hours, dressing up and inventing adventures among the relics of another age.

Only much later did I begin to understand why people remembered George Edwin Booth with such affection.

It wasn’t because he became wealthy.

Quite the opposite.

Family stories tell of him quietly helping people rebuild their lives after the war, including refugees who had arrived with little more than hope. He helped people into work, paid for apprenticeships, made introductions and gave opportunities. Money, it seems, was something to put to work rather than something to accumulate.

When he died, he left no great fortune.

My grandmother carried on with the proceeds from selling Leverstock Green and her widow’s pension.

His real inheritance had already been distributed.

It lived on in other people’s businesses, livelihoods, confidence and futures.

To me, he was simply my wonderful Granddad.

To everyone else…

He was “The Prime Minister.”

She crossed the Caribbean long before satellite forecasts or container ships, yet hurricanes still shape lives there. I arrived in Miami only weeks after Hurricane Andrew. Amid the devastation, I gave a home to two traumatised Airedale puppies whose mother had been killed in the storm. Both were terrified of big winds. A small story in the aftermath of a very large one.

I was also amused by Nana’s fascination with travelling on one of the last coal-burning voyages before the Orcoma was converted to oil. Reading it now, at another moment of global energy transition, her observations feel unexpectedly contemporary.

Over to Nana, approaching the Panama Canal in the 1920s.

“…travelling alone. How my daughter and granddaughter howled with glee at my innocence. I had various experiences in Havana on subsequent trips. I especially remember one voyage, when I was returning to England, alone except for Betty, who was about 18 months old, and there was one of those tremendous Caribbean hurricanes, and it was unbelievable. I was again on the old “Orcoma” and we were in harbour when the warning of the storm came through, and we had to stay for three days on board, before it blew itself out. We could see from the glassed in Verandah, lots of small boats just being capsized with the wind, and the crews drowned. Our ship stayed put at her anchorage, but several quite large liners were blown aground. When it was over and we went ashore to see the damage it was incredible. The avenue of enormous royal palms had been uprooted like stalks of grass and cars just blown around, and sides of houses blown out. Ever since I have been scared of big winds.

The next excitement on that first trip was the Panama Canal. The “Orcoma” was making her last trip as a coal burner, before being converted to oil. We were alongside the coaling wharf in Colon and all of the portholes had to be kept closed but even then the coal dust seemed to seep into everywhere, and my beautiful white ship was black. That, thank goodness, was the only trip which I ever made on a coal burner. The first time that I went ashore in Colon, which is the American part of the town at the entrance to the Atlantic end of the Canal was in the evening. I went with a very respectable crowd, but I discovered afterwards, from Robert, that usually all of the unattached males visited the strip tease and naughty night clubs when in Colon. In my naïveté I did not even know that they existed. The Hotel Washington was the place to dine, and it was right on the sea. We had dinner on a balcony overlooking the sea in a marvellous tropical night, and I thought it all frightfully romantic. We took a car to go out to see the first lock, Gatun, and we drove across the closed lock gates. But it was dark and it was not until next day that one could appreciate it. After seeing the lock we went to the main street where there are lots of shops selling things to the tourists, and very exciting they were. I got a very exotic looking pair of black satin pyjamas, all embroidered in colours, and a chinese robe to match. I thought it marvellous and I wore it for years. Embroidered linen was also very cheap and every time I passed through Colon I stocked up with beautiful linen handkerchiefs.

The greatly looked forward to day arrived for “going through the Canal” and we got up very early so as not to miss a thing. Luncheon was always served on deck so that the passengers did not miss anything. It all seemed to be so orderly and disciplined, with the great ship being towed through the locks with the “electric mules” which had a sound all of their own. Altho’ one could see the jungle a distance off from the Canal all of the Zone was so spotlessly kept and tidy and in amongst the trees and lawns the houses of the American personnel looking like giant meat safes all covered in wire to keep out the insects. I have been through many times but even the last time so recently it still was thrilling and exciting. The Pacific side of the Canal, of which Pedro Miguel Lock is the last set is about eight hours from the Atlantic side. One can see ships of all nationalities waiting their turn to go through. The first lock is Gatun, then Miraflores and then Pedro Miguel all worked with the same quietness and efficiency now as they were in my day, or perhaps I should put it the other way around, just as seemingly efficient then, as now.

When we got through the Canal into the Pacific all the organised entertainments stopped, as there were several ports of call down the West Coast. What fun we had had on the long runs, with dancing, horse racing, deck games, swimming etc. and the boat deck on a moonlight to study the heavens was always a very popular place. I felt quite sophisticated by the time I got to my destination, but by present day standards I would not have been considered as such.

The West Coast ports are not much to write about, with the exception of Callao which is the port for Lima, which is about 10 miles away. Callao was always an entertaining sort of harbour, with Peruvian fleet ships being there, and ships of every nationality. Also the harbour is usually full of jelly fish, so close that one can hardly see the water, most fascinating things to watch, looking like alabaster lampshades in various colours, with long tails. I understand that they give a nasty sting if touched.

I like Lima. There is a lot of colonial architecture, with Spanish houses and lovely ironwork balconies. Some look very austere from the street, but inside one can get a glimpse of lovely patios with gardens and flowers.

The first time I went to Lima the Bolivar Hotel was quite new, in fact the Plaza in front of it was still not properly laid out. I thought it the last word in Hotels, but now my grandchildren talk of it as being a stuffy old place, although I think it is still considered a very good hotel. The time that I…”

Reading Nana’s account, I was reminded that while ships, engines and ports change, the emotions of travel remain remarkably constant. Wonder, curiosity, occasional naivety and the excitement of arriving somewhere entirely new seem to belong to every generation.

Yes, I do remember the Hotel Bolivar rather differently from Nana: an old, dark place where we had to spend the night as unaccompanied minors, travelling to and from boarding school in the UK and home in La Paz.

What still makes me smile, though, is imagining a young girl from Leeds crossing a vast ocean, leaving home for years to meet the man she was going to marry and begin an entirely new life in Bolivia… utterly enchanted by a pair of embroidered Chinese satin pyjamas.

Somehow that tiny, gloriously human detail stops the story becoming merely a catalogue of ships, canals and ports.

Next time, Nana reaches Peru.