“Super Mac’s” finger on the UK’s nuclear button

I have just read a review of Peter Hennessy’s latest book, Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties. Hennessy is perhaps the most acute historian of modern Britain of our times. During the period in which his book is set the Prime Minister was Harold Macmillan. The title of his book is taken from a phrase used in Macmillan’s speech in South Africa in 1960, in which “Super Mac” acknowledged that Britain would have to allow its colonies in Africa to become independent states.

I worked with Macmillan in 1980. I was a Vice President of a tiny publishing company, Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, Inc, incorporated in Delaware, with its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Headquarters” is a rather grandiose term: we were four people in a room on the 12^th floor of the National Press Building at 14^th and F streets. Maryse Rhein, a Swiss national, had worked with me since 1977. Rose Ann Nichols joined us later. She had a military background: her husband Bob was a US army colonel, a psychiatrist by trade. Linda Kraynak was our young office assistant, possessed of a charming southern accent which charmed our male customers.

Pinchas Zuckerman

Macmillan came to the USA in November 1980 to launch The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians at a glamorous event in the Starlight Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. Our guests heard Pinchas Zuckerman play and listened to speeches by the composers Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein. And, of course, Super Mac.

Macmillan with JFK at the White House

When he was Prime Minister, Macmillan was responsible for ordering a nuclear attack in the event of war. In 1962, civil servants had to decide how the Prime Minister could issue the order to launch if he were in his official car when the four minute warning was issued. This was, of course, long before mobile phones. It was decided to give Macmillan’s diver the kind of radio used by the Automobile Association to contact its motorbike mechanics. The driver was then to find the closest public phone box:

Perhaps the kind of phone box the Prime Minister would have used

one of the famous red boxes seen in many tourist photos. Super Mac was then to call his office and give instructions. The civil servants spotted a flaw in this plan: what if neither the driver nor the Prime Minister had the correct change to pay for a call? The solution was to instruct Mr Macmillan to reverse the charges. One suspects that the time taken to radio the driver, for the driver to find the phone box and  for the Prime Minister to reverse the charges might have taken more than the allotted four minutes of warning.

An AA motorbike mechanic in action

By the time I met him, Macmillan’s eyesight was failing and eventually he became almost blind. My friend and colleague, Richard Garnett, who was Macmillan’s editor, told a story of visiting Macmillan at his country estate during the shooting season. He found the former Prime Minister alone with his driver pointing his gun skyward. Richard asked the driver how Super Mac knew when to pull the trigger. The driver explained that he had learned to judge the exact moment to pull the trigger. As the driver told Richard, “I shout fire, he shoots and hits the bugger”.

Slightly mad as the story about the phone box and reversing the charges might seem, I recall paying a visit to an expert in civil defence at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. He told me that the first thing that would happen after a nuclear strike on the USA would be that the Mexicans would loot the country. I left our meeting with an image of vast numbers of Mexicans waiting at the border with their running shoes on ready to start looting.

Suffolk Pirates and a Raid on the Manila Galleon

During a recent walk along the River Alde, at Snape in my native Suffolk, a sailing barge passed by. Such barges were once a common sight on the coast and rivers of Suffolk. My grandfather Harry Lucas captained a barge called the Raybel and his son Arthur sailed on the Thalatta. In the bookshop at Snape Maltings I picked up a book (Robert Malster, Maritime Suffolk), which, to my surprise, includes a few pages about a piratical escapade off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, in 1587.

 

A sailing barge on the River Alde

It might seem a rather long leap to go from the contemporary backwaters of Suffolk to the Pacific, but in the 16^th-century the east coast ports were among the most important in England. Dunwich, most of which was long ago swallowed by the North Sea, supplied a large part of the fleet that defeated the Armada of Felipe II, king of Spain. While his compatriots battled the Spanish, Thomas Cavendish, a gentleman adventurer from Trimley, Suffolk, set out to raid the Spanish empire in the Americas for profit with a privately-financed fleet of three ships. A number of other Suffolk men were on board, among them Francis Petty of Eye, who chronicled the voyage, the Ipswich merchant Thomas Eldred, and Thomas Fuller also of Ipswich. Eldred was famous enough to have a pub named after him in Ipswich.

 

Left to right: Drake, Cavendish, Hawkins, British School 17th century

Navigation was a dangerous business in those days. In early 1587, the fleet spent seven weeks passing through the Straits of Magellan at the foot of South America. The smallest of the ships, the Hugh Gallant, was so damaged that it nearly sank. The other two, Desire and Content, had rounded the Cape earlier and put ashore to look for water, only to be attacked by Indians, who mistook the English sailors for Spaniards. Schoolboys of my generation learned of famous sailors such as Cavendish, Drake and Hawkins as English heroes. To the Spanish, they were, of course, murderous pirates. Cavendish was certainly piratical as he made his way up the coast of South America, engaging in occasional combat with Spanish forces and burning settlements. By the time the ships reached the coast of Ecuador, the complement of men was so reduced that Cavendish decided to sink the Hugh Gallant and distribute its crew among the remaining two ships.

Off the coast of Mexico Cavendish seized a large Spanish ship. A captured Frenchman had enticing news: the merchants of Mexico were expecting a galleon from Manila with a rich cargo. Cavendish sailed north to the coast of Baja California until he sighted the Santa Ana. The Spanish galleon was much larger than the English ships, but it was heavily laden and had no cannon. Its only defences were Spanish soldiers armed with pikes and arquebuses. The smaller but more manoeuvrable Desire and Content’s cannon bombarded the Santa Ana until the crew were forced to surrender. Cavendish loaded gold and precious textiles on to his ships, set the Spanish crew ashore and set light to the Santa Ana. Then he continued his voyage across the Pacific, around the Cape of Good Hope, and returned home with a handsome profit and the fame of circumnavigating the globe.

 

A map of Cavendish's circumnavigation

The journey from Acapulco to Manila was a perilous and unpleasant undertaking, especially the return from the Philippines, which could take from three to six months. Space on board was limited, so much so that in 1620 the King issued an order limiting passengers to one slave per person to conserve supplies. Rats, cockroaches and other bugs were endemic, food rotted and became worm-ridden, water could become foul or simply run out. Scurvy, bubonic plague, typhoid and dysentery were common. The risk of death was such that all passengers were obliged to confess and take communion at Manila before leaving for Acapulco. A royal decree ordered that there should be two pilots on each galleon, since pilots frequently died en route.

 

Model of a Manila galleon

A Japanese fall front cabinet, 16th or 17th century

In June 1624 a Catalan scribe by the name of Gaspar Pagés de Moncada boarded a galleon in Manila. Gaspar took some precautions against the privations of the voyage. He took on board a barrel of chocolate, known to keep when other foods had rotted, and four amphorae of wine, so that he did not have to depend on the ship’s limited water supply. He also took with him a range of exotic Asian silk and cotton fabrics, items made of marble, a Japanese writing desk, two Chinese porcelain plates (broken) and a salt cellar. The fabrics included two pairs of Chinese silk stockings (one silver coloured, the other white).  Gaspar planned to sell his modest treasure of Asian goods in Mexico to make a quick profit. He hoped to return to the two houses and the vineyards he had left behind in Cataluña, but he would never see them again. He fell ill on the journey and was set ashore in January 1625. His final resting place was historic, since he was buried in February in the church of the town of Colima, now the cathedral, built 1525-1540, less than 20 years after the Conquest of Mexico.

 

Colima cathedral

Just as Gaspar would never again see his native Cataluña, Thomas Cavendish would eventually die far from the estuaries and marshes of Suffolk. The Content disappeared from view soon after the looting the Santa Ana, and Cavendish set out alone in the Desire across the Pacific to complete his circumnavigation of the globe. He sank his profits from the Santa Ana in a fleet of five new ships and in 1591 set out once again to raid the Pacific coast of the Americas. This expedition was an utter disaster and Cavendish died in May or June 1592, probably near Ascension Island in the south Atlantic.

These connections between far-flung places, are a reminder to those of us who now travel with ease from Europe to the Americas and to Asia, that our global world has its roots in events some five centuries ago. Gaspar and Thomas were, no doubt, driven by dreams of riches, but they also had a capacity to tolerate privations and death in ways that we would hardly imagine if historical documents did not reveal them to us.

Offering love to a young Malaysia lady

Yesterday, Saturday 14 August, I did something rather unprecedented. I offered love to a young Malaysian lady in the presence of my wife. More of this shortly.

Malaysia Hall, London

We spent the afternoon at Malaysia Hall in Bayswater to support a friend at a book signing. Jan’s friend and former library colleague, Nooraini Mydin, decided to mark her 60^th birthday by travelling by train from London to Kuala Lumpur. She recently published (in Malaysia, so not currently available in the UK or USA, excep from the author) Aini’s Railway Odyssey: An exile’s 18,200 km journey home from London to Kuala Lumpur. I collected the money while Nooraini signed books, and her friend Farida charmed diners into buying a copy: well, nine diners at least.

Malaysia Hall is a hall of residence for Malaysian students in London and a place where expatriate or travelling Malaysians meet and enjoy excellent Malaysian cuisine. In addition to the canteen, there is a prayer room and ablution rooms for men and women to wash before praying. We ate early in order to get ready for the book signing. This is where the young Malaysian lady comes into the story. She served us our lunch and Noraini taught me to say “thank you” to her. The Malaysian phrase is tarima kasi (which apparently translates as “I offer you love”, a rather more effusive phrase than the restrained English expression of gratitude). The young lady replied sama sama (“same, same” or “you too”).

Lunch in the canteen

The canteen offers a wide array of dishes: I had a fish curry, Jan spinach, aubergine and rice. There was also a lamb curry, clams a curry sauce, salted eggs (delicious: we tried one), red snapper in a sweet and sour sauce, tiny fried fish. During the afternoon, new dishes emerged from the kitchen to replace those sold out. I asked about a dish of grilled chicken with bright blue rice: the rice is coloured with a flower which adds the blue colour and a distinctive flavour. Puddings are not recommended for those watching their weight or diabetics. They seem to be mostly fritters of various kinds or sweetened with palm sugar. We had a sweet of sago an

Sweets

d coconut, coloured bright purplish-red. Diners eat with a spoon and fork or with their hands.

Over the next four hours or so we watched the dining hall fill with students, family groups, and the odd non-Malay guest (non-Malays are allowed only as guests of a Malaysian citizen). We chatted to Farida, a lawyer by training who coordinates support for people with learning difficulties in a London borough. She also plied us with her home-made brownies, sardine rolls, and a sort of steamed banana and coconut pudding.

The dining hall

Nooraini teaches English to adults in London. One of her colleagues came to the signing, a Malaysian lady who came to London some 40 years ago. She had run a beauty salon in Virginia Water, not far from our home, but now lives somewhere near Winchester. She speaks impeccable British English.

We also met Sarah, a Chinese businesswoman, and student of Nooraini, who had been in London for four weeks to improve her English. We managed to expand her vocabulary, including a few idiomatic phrases which we urged her to use with caution. She and her husband established a trading company in Shanghai two years ago. They sell surfactants produced by German and American manufacturers. Sarah occasionally struggled to understand us, but speaks English with a rather charming British accent.

We also met a Malaysian businessman who was in London at the end of a long business trip (including Latvia and Sweden). He is a Bitcoin agent and also produces an energy drink made with two Malaysian plant-based ingredients. He gave us some samples.

The signing session ended with more food: a light flatbread to dip in a vegetable curry.

As we travelled home (Southwestern had cancelled the train we had expected to catch so our journey was longer than expected), Jan and I chuckled over a notice we had seen (respectively) in the ladies’ and men’s toilets. A notice in Malay and English requesting users not to squat on the toilet seats is accompanied by a diagram depicting the prohibited manoeuvre. We decided that two pensioners are not capable of the contortions required to squat in such a small space: indeed, we doubted that any of the diners that day had the required agility.

Myths, Heroes and Transformations: Churchill, Martin Luther King and AMLO

During the contest to become leader of the Conservative Party, Boris (real name Alexander) Johnson was asked whether he had ever put public service above his own interests. His reply was that he had had to postpone a lucrative book about Shakespeare that the public was desperate to read. A few

Boris Johnson as Churchill

years ago, he published a biography of Winston Churchill. Now, I have not read his book, but there is no shortage of books about Churchill. Rather than a desire to contribute something new to our understanding of our war time leader, I suspect that Johnson’s objective was to associate himself with Churchill. Most Conservative politicians like to portray themselves as a modern Churchill, and preferably as the heir to Margaret Thatcher as well. They tend to gloss over Churchill’s failures in order to conjure up the myth of plucky little Britain left alone to defeat the Nazis and defend the free world. The Soviet Union’s participation in the same war is rarely mentioned. Recently, John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to reply in one word whether Churchill was a hero or a villain. His reply, “Villain”, apparently with reference to the suppression of a coal miner’s strike in 1910, brought immediate opprobrium. Whatever one’s evaluation of Churchill, it was not he who brought about a Transformation of the UK that introduced the NHS and Social Insurance, but the post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Liberal reformer William Beveridge.

 

William Beveridge

We Brits are not alone in loving our myths. A few years ago, I visited the National Civil Rights

The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN

Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum is attached to the motel where Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated: one can visit the balcony on which he stood and, rather creepily, the exact position of the gunman in a building across the street. The museum shows a splendid film, which documents King’s campaign for Civil Rights, but also his absolute opposition to the Vietnam War and his unflinching support for workers’ rights, including a garbage worker’s strike in Memphis. One image in the film shows a striking African American man carrying a cardboard sign that reads “I too am a man”. There can be few contemporary politicians who would not associate themselves with Dr

LBJ and Dr King at the signing of the Civil Rights Bill

King  as a champion of Civil Rights, but most prefer the one-dimensional hero of civil rights, and conveniently omit his other campaigns. Nevertheless, The Civil Rights Bill, advocated by Dr King and implemented by President Johnson was certainly a Transformation.

The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), relies on Mexicans’ love for their heroes when he refers to his Cuarta Transformación (“Fourth Transformation”). The other transformations to which he refers are the struggle for independence from Spain (1810-1821), the Liberal Reform of the 1860s, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. All three are replete with heroes — and villains — who give the Fourth Transformation all the right resonances.

Independence began with the Grito de Dolores (“the shout – or call to action – of Dolores”), father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s declaration of Independence from the steps of his church in the small town of Dolores. Hidalgo led an assault on the nearby Guanajuato, important for its silver mining.

El Pípila

Another hero gave the rebels victory: a young boy, known as Pípila, who worked in the mines, died laying an explosive charge at the doors of the granary where the Spanish troops had taken shelter. The Spaniards were massacred and their heads displayed on the walls of the building. Hidalgo died in March 1811. Another priest, José María Morelos y Pavón succeeded as the heroic leader of the struggle. Morelos convened the first Mexican congress in 1813, before dying for the struggle like Hidalgo.

Now, it is hard to argue that independence was a bad thing, but the results of the First Transformation were not entirely positive. For four decades opposing factions (crudely Centralists with a monarchist and pro-church bent, versus Federalists opposed to monarchy and the church) battled for power. Pronunciamientos (rebel proclamations) and the toppling of presidents were frequent. Upon independence, the indigenous peoples of Mexico were declared to be equal citizens with rights and obligations identical to those of non-indigenous citizens. Who could complain? But there were catches, which the newly equal Indians did not like at all. Firstly, they lost the special protections that they and their communities had been granted by the Spanish Crown. Independence eroded their self-government and, in many cases, villages’ communal lands. Individual liberty obliged the he Indians to pay new and very unpopular taxes.

The standard history includes a good number of 19^th century villains. Agustín de Iturbide, independent Mexico’s first ruler (as Emperor Agustín I) gets a bad press, as do the Catholic bishops. Antonio López de Santa Anna gets the blame for numerous pronunciamientos, the loss of Texas, and much of the responsibility for the later loss of California, Arizona and New Mexico. The arch-villain is Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian prince installed by Napoleon III and the Mexican monarchists, in 1862. This was when the Second Transformation occurred. The President at the time was a Liberal, Benito Juárez, an Indian from Oaxaca. Juárez packed the Mexican government into his carriage and wandered around northern Mexico to keep independent government alive and to escape capture. Juárez is AMLO’s ultimate national hero, triumphing in adversity. Eventually, Napoleon, tiring of the enterprise, withdrew his troops. Defeat at Querétaro cost Emperor Maximilian his life in 1867.

 

Juárez in a mural by José Clemente Orozco, National Museum of History, Mexico City

The Liberals were now free to implement their Laws of Reform. One of the most important results of the Reform was the expropriation of all church property. The church owned vast amounts of agricultural land, as well as churches, monasteries and convents. The law prohibited the right of any corporate body to own property. This included indigenous communities, many of which cultivated communal land to meet their expenses. Thus, the Reform laws were a direct attack on one of the fundamental elements of indigenous society. Curiously enough, that villain of history, Maximilian, had proposed laws to protect community land.

Porfirio Díaz

Despite their victory over Napoleon and Maximilian, Juárez’s Liberals. In 1876 they were replaced by a Liberal general, Porfirio Díaz (also an Indian from Oaxaca). Díaz remained in office as a dictator until 1911. His policy of pan y palo (bread and stick), suppressing rebellions and strikes and keeping opponents under his thumb. He also invited foreign capital to build railways and invest in agriculture, mining and petroleum. Landowners were given a free hand to expropriate community land, legally or illegally.

Zapata (centre left) and Villa (centre right)

By 1910, when he was due to be “re-elected” again, Díaz was opposed by political enemies, by a growing and ambitious middle class, and by oppressed peasants and rural workers. The Third Transformation was about to burst on the scene. This was the Mexican Revolution, a ten-year civil war littered with heroes and villains. Hero number one was “the Apostle of Democracy”, Francisco Indalecio Madero, a wealthy landowner and spiritualist from the northern state of Coahuila. His revolutionary slogan was Sufragio efectivo y no reelección (“A free vote and no re-election”). In the north Pancho Villa, a teetotaller and ardent lover of numerous women, led cowboys and other rural workers in revolt. In the southern state of Morelos Emiliano Zapata (played by Marlon Brando in the film Viva Zapata, screenplay by John Steinbeck) led rural villages in revolt under the banner of Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty”) and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Madero, Villa and Zapata are heroes in Mexican school textbooks. The victorious Madero was elected, but turned out not to be a wily enough politician for his enemies in the army. The arch villain General Victoriano de la Huerta deposed and murdered Madero and his Vice President. De la Huerta was in turn deposed by revolutionary armies assailing him from north and south.

 

Pino Suárez (left) and Madero (right) lie dead outside Lecumberri prison

The victorious Constitutionalists led by President Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón, a chickpea magnate by trade, wrote the current Mexican Constitution in 1917.  The Constitution set out the basic tenets of the political regime that ruled Mexico rarely challenged until the beginnings of this century: restitution of communal land to the villages, distribution of land from large estates to landless peasants, a degree of workers’ rights, and no re-election to any office in the nation. The

Zapata assassinated

heroes all came to a sticky end. Zapata was ambushed by a colonel in the federal army in 1919. Pancho Villa was given a large estate by the government and retired there but was ambushed in his car in 1923. Carranza died at the hands of federal troops while fleeing the capital and Obregón was assassinated by a fervent Catholic as he ate lunch.

To a degree the regime of managed democracy established by the Revolution brought benefits to peasants and workers, and stimulated industry and tourism. On the other hand, revolutionary leaders enriched themselves and their supporters and those who protested or opposed them could be dealt with very harshly. By the time the rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) came to an end in 2000, the system was groaning under the weight of corruption, waste and a young population unable to find employment. The violence created by drug cartels, with whom politicians were complicit, had reached alarming levels. Unfortunately, the new democratically elected governments failed to address profound social inequality, corruption, unemployment and violence. AMLO has promised that his Fourth Transformation will solve these enormous problems.

 

Jeremy Corbyn and AMLO in Tabasco

The United Kingdom is itself in the throes of a process that AMLO might well define as a Transformation: the ineluctable Brexit, in which myths and heroes are very much to the fore. One candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Esther McVey launched her campaign with a framed photo of Margaret Thatcher by her side, much as any devout Mexican might display an

The winning run out in the World Cup

image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The England cricket team recently won the cricket World Championship in an exceedingly close and tense final match against New Zealand. A fervent Brexiteer, Jacob Rees Mogg, MP, declared that this was proof that we do not need the EU. Rees Mogg’s subtext was the myth of plucky Britain standing alone without the support of the cowardly Europeans who capitulated to the Nazis. We were not bowed by the Blitz and we can take whatever hardships might result from leaving  the EU. Let’s hope that in the case of both the Mexican and British Transformations good judgement and sense prevail over myth.

Roma: a hit movie and life in 1970s Mexico City

Roma was perhaps the most surprising international hit film of 2018. The dialogue is all in Spanish or in Mixtec, an indigenous language of the southern state of Oaxaca. Its star is Yalitza Aparicio, a young woman from Oaxaca who had not acted in a film before, and who learned Mixtec for her role. Roma is Alfonso Cuarón’s loving portrait of the Mexico City neighbourhood in which he grew up. As it happens, I was living in the neighbouring district of Condesa, so the sights and sounds of the film were familiar to me.

 

Mopping the driveway: Roma

I first arrived in Mexico in 1972 as part of an exchange programme between the Mexican and British governments, with two other young students: Alan Knight, now professor emeritus of Latin American History at Oxford, and Guy Thompson, emeritus of the University of Warwick. Two employees of CONACYT, the government agency that funds academic activities in Mexico, collected us at the airport to drive us to our lodgings. I decided to get out at the second stop and was greeted by my landlady, the recent widow of a businessman. When I returned to Mexico to research my PhD, she had remarried and moved to the USA, so I lodged with her daughter’s family in the same home.

Mexico City is divided into colonias, each with its own history and character. The original core of the city includes the vast main square or zócalo, the cathedral and the Palacio Nacional, the president’s official office. Many colonial buildings that have withstood Mexico’s violent past and numerous earthquakes give the centre recall the three centuries of Spanish rule. As the city grew, it colonized (hence colonias) pieces of land. For example, the victorian district where the British embassy now stands is Colonia Cuauhtémoc, known for its spacious homes of government ministers of the late 19^th and early 20^th-centuries.

Hotel La Casona, a former Roma mansion

On the other side of the east-west Avenida de la Reforma, and either side of the north-south Avenida de los Insurgentes, is Colonia Roma. One of the glories of Roma is its domestic architecture, notably Art Deco but also a variety of European-influenced styles popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th-centuries.

 

Colonia Roma domestic architecture

Colonias have their own distinctive street naming system. The streets of Roma are named after Mexican cities and states, as are the streets of Colonia Condesa, my colonia, so named because it was built on land owned by a countess. I lived on Mexicali street. This was a modern concrete and glass building, with a small indoor garden, a large sitting room/dining room, a perpetually busy  kitchen, and three large bedrooms. At the back was a concrete yard and another very plain concrete building which housed the laundry and the maids’ apartment, reached by an external stair.

 

Calle Mexicali: number 14 is centre left behind the small tree

Condesa was a solidly middle class neighbourhood, occupied by families for whom the post-revolutionary regime that dominated Mexico from 1930-2000 had been a source of good incomes. Mexicali had a mix of modern houses, small apartment blocks and some European-style and Art Deco homes that dated to the 1920s or 1930s. At either end of the street were wide avenues whose lanes of traffic were divided by trees. Avenida Insurgentes is a short walk east. There I would catch my bus to the archives and libraries where I researched. On my way home, I could stop at Sanborn’s café for a cool drink, and, if I felt extravagant, a bowl of strawberries.

My landlady was fairly typical of Condesa’s population. Her deceased husband was a prosperous businessman. She was an emotional, adorable lady of fiery temperament. She made a mean margarita, a mixture of only tequila and Cointreau, omitting the non-intoxicating lime juice. She had a collection of saints in her wardrobe, although as I recall she did not attend church. Every afternoon, a group of local ladies came to the house for the afternoon tertulia (social gathering) of coffee, chat and good manners. It was these ladies who persuaded me to abandon the Castilian I had learned for eight years, in favour of wonderfully expressive Mexican Spanish. I learned my earthier vocabulary over Friday night poker sessions with younger friends. My landlady’s daughter had worked as a flight attendant and spoke good English. She married an economist who graduated from the national university. He was active in the student protests of 1968 and, after the Tlatelolco massacre and government repression, had gone into hiding for a time. When I met him and lodged with his family, he was working for the Ministry of Public Works.

A Mixtec quinceañera and her "chamberlains"

Just as in Roma, the family had two maids. Silvia, a Mixtec speaker with an accent when speaking Spanish, and dark skin. Both marked her out as an Indian. She reached her 15^th birthday during my stay. In Mexico the celebration of a girl’s 15^th birthday is an important occasion for a mass and a party. I doubt that Silvia’s family could afford a very grand party, but her employers bought her an elegant white dress and sent her to her home village for the celebrations. And, just as in Roma, another of the maids became pregnant out of wedlock. The maids worked six days per week, did the laundry, swept and mopped floors indoors and out, cooked and served breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, and breakfast on Sunday, but not after 10am when their day off started.

Serving breakfast in Roma

A Condesa nevería

Condesa was a calm and agreeable place to live. Its iced cream shops were legendary and there was a good selection of taquerías for an excellent snack, or small restaurants serving a hearty comida corrida (fixed price lunch) for 12 pesos (the equivalent of a US dollar). There were street sellers also. I recall vividly the sound that announced the arrival of the itinerant seller of baked sweet potatoes, a low, throaty steam whistle.

Life for the residents of Condesa was immeasurably more comfortable and cossetted than for residents of Mexico City’s poorer neighbourhoods, such as Tepito, a central district notorious  as a den of criminals. The home on Mexicali was spacious, well-lit and comfortably furnished. The Ministry of Public Works ran a subsidized store where employees could buy food and clothing. The butcher was a cross-eyed gentleman. It was terrifying to see him wield a sharp cleaver with abandon. Items not available there could be bought at the Puerto de Liverpool or Palacio de Hierro department stores.

 

El Palacio de Hierro department store

Those who had achieved a still more prosperous lifestyle than the residents of Condesa, might live in the swish modern neighbourhood of Polanco. Polanco housed the best hotel in the city, the Camino

Deportivo Chapultepec

Real (the Queen stayed there while I was in Mexico City). Across the road from the Camino Real was the Deportivo Chapultepec, a combination sports and social club with the best facilities in the city. I was often invited there by a group of young men, which included one of Mexico’s best tennis players and two brothers who played for the national badminton team. The gentleman members who were a little too old for strenuous sports might gamble away a sociable afternoon playing chuti mul, a form of dominos, in a room in which the continuous clack of dominos slapped on to the table drowned out most conversation.

A home in Lomas de Chapultepec

More prosperous still were the neighbourhoods where the truly rich had their homes. One such was Lomas de Chapultepec, close to Chapultepec park at the far end of Avenida de la Reforma. A friend who lives there once introduced me to a neighbour who was chief of staff to president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. To the south of the city, San Ángel was a wealthy district of cobbled streets with homes and gardens concealed behind high walls covered in gloriously colourful but very thorny bougainvillea.

 

Homes in San Ángel

Certain things were beyond the reach of any but the very rich. For example, when Mexicans referred to vino (wine) they invariably meant not wine but rum, tequila or some other nationally produced spirit. Wine came from Europe, and European goods were prohibitively expensive. On a road trip with my Deportivo friends I visited the federal territory of Quintana Roo. This area, now an international tourist destination, was then so remote from central Mexico, and transport of goods so prohibitive, that it was a tax free zone. Goods from overseas were imported by. I bought a small supply of Cadbury’s chocolate and English tea (unaffordable in the capital) and smuggled them past the customs officers on the territory’s border as a treat for my host family.

I recall only one alarming event. I was sitting at home one Sunday reading calmly when I heard six gunshots. I did not go out that day, but learned later that in the apartment building across the street, the doorman had been pestering a pretty young girl. Her brother borrowed a gun from a friend to persuade the doorman to leave his sister alone. The doorman argued the point and received six bullets for his trouble.

A sweet potato seller

I can testify that Cuarón’s film captures beautifully the lifestyle, the sights and smells of 1970s Colonia Roma. During one scene, I heard in the background the whistle of the sweet potato seller and was transported to Colonia Condesa for a moment. If you are tempted to visit Condesa, my old neighbourhood has become one of the chic colonias, full of expensive restaurants, late night clubs and lively gay bars (Mexico City is a remarkably tolerant place for gay men and women). Except for those brought down by 2017’s earthquake, the buildings are mostly the same, but the ladies of the Condesa tertulia where I learned to speak like a Mexican have long gone.

Mexican cuisine and meeting a dinosaur

I recently spent part of a week cooking Mexican takeaway dinners for some of our neighbours to raise funds for the charity where our eldest son Chris works in Mexico. One of the glories of Mexico is its cuisine, which varies considerably by region. Cooking for my neighbours made me think about the ingredients I was using and the origins of the dishes I served. I recall a friend who is an historian of Indian art remarking that Indian food originally relied on spices for its flavours. The chiles that make some Indian dishes so hot cannot have been used in India until after the contact between Spain and Mexico in 1519, since only ancient Mexicans had the pleasure of eating chiles until that date. In fact, the relevant date was probably 1565 when a friar by the name of Andrés de Urdaneta succeeded in finding a route from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila in the Philippines and back. Andrés’ feat of navigation launched the annual Manila Galleon, through which Mexico traded with all of Asia for 250 years. Foods travelled from Mexico to Asia and from Asia to Mexico and shaped the cuisines of both continents.

Acapulco Bay in 1852

When I was a graduate student in Mexico I spent a few weeks in Chilpancingo, independent Mexico’s first capital, but by the 1970s an unprepossessing provincial town (it had two cinemas, one “with rats”, the other “without rats”) and seat of the government of the state of Guerrero. I was researching the career of a family of revolutionaries from Guerrero by the name of Figueroa. One of their descendants was the state governor and I had been trying to track him down. I followed him to Acapulco, from where the galleons used to leave for Manila, but he was fishing with the Shah of Iran and seemed not to have time to see me. So, I left the luxurious resort city for Chilpancingo to consult the state archives and try again to meet governor Rubén Figueroa Figueroa.

Acapulco bay. In the foreground is the Fort of San Diego, built to deter pirates

My first move was to visit the rector of the Autonomous University of Guerrero (UAG), who kindly allowed me to use the student canteen and assigned a senior member of staff to make sure I was looked after. This gentleman invited me to the dining event of the week in Chilpancingo. This was a restaurant that opened only for Thursday lunch and served only one dish, pozole verde. Pozole is a stew of pork and hominy seasoned with various ingredients according to its colour (white, red, green), and served with accompaniments such as oregano, onion and radishes. I could get the white version any day at a pozolería (pozole restaurant) near my hotel, but the green pozole was special and anybody who was anybody in Chilpancingo set aside Thursday lunch for it. As we got started with a few glasses of mezcal (a spirit made from agave cactus) we noticed the general in charge of the military district, Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, at the next table. His troops had been busy lately, rescuing governor Figueroa from the guerrilla band led by a local schoolteacher, Lucio Cabañas. They had also, recent scholarship has discovered, murdered and tortured their way through the mountains in the search for the governor. Let’s return to that black page of Guerrero’s history later.

Pozole verde

The ingredient that makes pozole green is what Mexicans call tomates and Americans tomatillos. In fact, these are not tomatoes at all, but they are delicious and one of many foods that have come to us from ancient Mexico and its cuisine. The tomato proper also comes from Mexico, where in the Náhuatl tongue it was called a xitomatl, which the Spanish could not pronounce, so they called it a jitomate in Mexico and a tomate in Spain. Another all-Mexican food whose name in English comes from the Náhuatl is chocolate (xocolatl). Before 1519, cacao beans had two functions. One variety was used as coinage (there was no metal or paper currency), but above all cacao was used to make a luxury drink that could be afforded only by the aristocracy, who drank it out of colourfully painted gourd cups. The āhuacatl (Spanish aguacate, our avocado) also originated in Mexico. The staples of the diet of ancient Mexicans were maize, first cultivated by a lake in the northern part of the state of Guerrero around 7,000 B.C., and beans.

A modern painted gourd cup similar to those used by ancient Mexican lords

Other ingredients arrived in Mexico with the Spanish. The Mexicans had no large domesticated animals (the turkey was the largest) but the Spanish introduced cows, sheep, pigs and goats. A decade or two after the defeat of the Aztecs in 1521 great herds of these animals wandered over Mexico’s plains and valleys, no doubt to the initial amazement of the locals. So, beef and pork arrived, and chickens (for a time an expensive luxury). Sugar cane was introduced very quickly (before 1521 honey was the main sweetener). The Spaniards also imported wheat, orange and lemon trees, and brought wine and vinegar from Europe in barrels. The wine came in handy if water supplies ran out during the sea voyage.

Foodstuffs also arrived from Asia by a long and dangerous sea voyage of several months. Rice was soon growing on the Pacific coast, along with coconut palms. The mango, found in profusion in Mexican markets, came from the Philippines as did cinnamon and other spices. And in return Mexico sent to Manila tropical fruits and vegetables that are now favourites in the Philippines.

As in Spain, lunch is the big meal of the day. It usually starts with two “soups”: a sopa aguada, literally “watery soup”, and a sopa seca, or “dry soup”. Last year the daughter of my former landlady in Mexico City made us a splendid tortilla soup, made with stale maize tortillas, tomato, chile, chicken stock and epazote, a native Mexican herb also known as Jesuit’s tea. A dry soup might be a small plate of tomato-flavoured rice or pasta. Next might be a quickly fried or grilled steak with a sauce of tomato, onion and chile, turkey in a sauce of mole poblano (featuring sesame, chile and chocolate) or a green pepper stuffed with cheese. Lunch will finish with some fruit or a small sweet dish. Our favourite last year in Michoacán was jericalla, an egg custard flavoured with cinnamon.

A short time after my lunch of pozole verde I succeeded in meeting governor Figueroa. His cousin Arturo introduced me to him at a meet-the-public session. I was taken to the front of the queue, where I found the governor flanked by two elderly men, all three wearing guayaberas, an elegant loose-fitting shirt that originated in the Philippines. Governor Figueroa introduced his two companions as Guerrero’s greatest living poets. Given the governor’s reputation as a gun-toting politician, it struck me as curious that he felt the need to be accompanied by literary men. We discussed his rescue from the band of Lucio Cabañas and he invited me to attend a seminar of the treasurers of the state’s largest municipalities the next day. I recall the governor saying that some municipalities were so poor that they could barely afford pencils and paper for the mayor’s office. The truth of this statement was vividly illustrated when I visited the mayor (presidente municipal) of Buenavista de Cuéllar. I found the presidente sitting alone in the modest town hall in an office with a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. His desk was bare. He seemed to have nothing to do except wait for an occasional visitor. The fact that his (only?) visitor that day was a young student from Cambridge did not seem to surprise him.

 

Governor Figueroa with two of his captors

I was reminded recently of my lunch of pozole verde, and of governor Figueroa when reading a PhD thesis about Lucio Cabañas’ group. Figueroa had tried to persuade the guerrillas to abandon their struggle in return for cash and a guarantee of political office. Instead, the band held him for ransom. Figueroa escaped twice only to be recaptured. Eventually the army tracked down the fighters who were guarding him and in the ensuing gun battle Figueroa walked to the army’s side unharmed. He demanded that the soldiers give him a gun so that he could shoot at his captors. Mexicans came to refer to their traditional politicians who tried to block democratic reforms as dinosaurs. Governor Figueroa was, without doubt, one of the fiercest of the Mexican dinosaurs – perhaps a tyrannosaurus.

Lucio Cabañas during his guerrilla campaign and (right) soldiers posing with his body