Monday, January 5, 2009

Coincidences



That's Mum, my baby brother Michael and me behind the pram.



Nora Dixon’s house below is the house in the background in the picture on the right, the company car looks the same too…:)

Below, Me, Dad and Michael.



















On an idle Sunday afternoon spent browsing through my Mother’s most dated albums, I found pictures of myself as a little boy two years old in La Oroya. This was October 1951, James and Josephina Stocks had occupied a house provided by the FCC with their children, Thomas and Michael. Dad was Assistant Traction Manager on the FCC, and the photos evoked one of the few memories I have of Oroya, that of Dad trying to cut my hair with hand operated clippers and me wishing I could go to the barber in town where there were electric clippers that never pulled hair and the mirrors made hundreds of me repeated for ever…

I image googled ‘Oroya 1955’ just fooling around, and found jamd.com had two photos, one of which my Mother recognized as being Chulec, where a lot of the Cerro de Pasco personnel lived, which was about a kilometre up the road towards Cerro de Pasco from where our house was. I opened Google earth, and lo and behold, Oroya is on and clear as a bell!

I googled ‘chulec’ and found this site (and the mention by Sylvia Walker!!) and several pictures of La Oroya taken around the time we were there, of special interest are the photos of Amachay in 1957 sent by Francoise Caudron, the pictures sent by Paul Dixon of the family posing in front of a fireplace and of Mrs Nora Dixon standing in front of her house (the house that contained the mentioned fireplace).


















Looking at the Amachay site on Google Earth now and comparing it to Francoise’s photos you can see that all the houses on the other side of the road on Francoise's photo are gone, though you do see patches where they once stood. Mrs Nora Dixon’s house still stands though, a group of three houses lined up east-west, top right of the Google Earth picture, with a larger house (the semi-detached houses, 2 in 1) in the middle, Nora’s house is the west end house… Our house was the east side of the middle house (the semi-detached house),


Here's a photo of it in the distance taken from the entrance to Amachay at that time, when there was nothing but the two houses on it (the third most easterly house was built in 1952-53).

The other half of the semi-detached was occupied by the Kent’s. Mrs Kent spent a long time teaching by Mother English (Mum is Brazilian) using newspaper articles…
















And the fireplace? Well, I have a photo of the Stocks’ and the Moore’s (whose fireplace it was back in ‘52/’53) lounging around the self same roaring hearth!!
We lived in Oroya from 1951 to 1953, when we moved down to Lima, first to Magdalena del Mar then later, to San Antonio, near Markham College where us kids went to school. In 1957 I suddenly had two more brothers, the twins Richard and Anthony... The Stocks' left Peru in 1965.

RECONNAISSANCE

Pinning down the relevant people-points,
One contact leading to three, to fifteen, seventy ...
Is less the leisurely gathering of a bouquet
Than the grasping at leaves in a gale -
At that whirlwind mosaic of scattered lives -
In an effort to connect them to an original tree
When only the ghost of it remains.
But, seeking anew the comfort of those shadow-branches,
We grace them with the qualities of our metamorphosis.
Achievement and deadwood have added their layers
To the bilingual and carefree children
Who played against the backdrop of the Andes
And knew it later for a privileged kingdom.

Lark Burns Beltran

(Sent by Wilfredo Beltran)

(In Chulec 1953-56)