The evening before Maman died my Mother and I saw what seemed like a porcupine running across the path we were walking on. I was eleven so my memory might well be distorting my notion of distances and dimensions but we saw it cross from right to left, not fifty meters from where we stood, trotting onto the path from the hill side and then crashing through bushes on the slope leading down to the bottom of the valley. It seemed to be the size of a medium sized dog. I have no idea if they are native to Portugal although “Wiki” tells me they can be found all along southern Europe. There is no doubt that we saw something of the like – my Mother will corroborate this story – and by way of proof I remember finding a black and white quill on the path a few days later. Surprised and perhaps a little frightened we backed up and headed back up the path towards our house. This must have happened in early September 1983.

We lived at that time in Quinta de Charneca; a large, beautiful country house that occupies around four hectares of wild and wooded land on a valley that goes all the way from Praia do Guincho to Malveira da Serra. At that time it was owned by a Belgian lady – Mme B – who, together with her extended family, occupied the gatehouse and converted stables. A tall, languid woman, I remember she enjoyed a serious game of bridge and was given to sunbathing and collecting husbands of some means. I imagine she was somewhat sharp. Maman was her mother and had come to live with them in the months previous to our encounter with the porcupine. The Quinta itself is at the end of the village as it tips into the valley. As you drive past the main gates you have the gatehouse to your right and the old stables in front of you. The driveway veers right and down – the slope of the hill to your right – about fifty meters towards the main house that we occupied. The house was built into the hill and was all ours except for the basement that was occupied by Maria Rosa (Mme B’s housemaid) and her husband, the husky  Antonio Maria. Maria Rosa was a pale, anxious woman given to hand wringing and her husband, I seem to remember overhearing, might well have been of other service to Mme B when he wasn’t busy working on a rather palatial house he was building for himself a few hundred meters up the hill with timber he took quite casually from the grounds my parents rented. Rumour had it his father had, in his time, been of other service to the then exiled King of Italy in his youth.

Not long after Maman died – perhaps a week or so later – one morning we were all woken up by the most tremendous bang. It must have been at around seven am. My Father says he was in the shower at the time and right before the lightning strike he felt a tremendous surge of energy in the air that instinctively made him jump out from under the gush of water. A large cedar next to our kitchen was struck by the bolt and set on fire, partly splitting it, which required the intervention of the fire brigade. For me as a kid it was an exiting start to the day and I had much to tell my friends when I got to school. A few weeks later my Mother witnessed two mirrors in a corridor of our house come off their hooks simultaneously and hit the floor quite violently, as you might imagine, but without smashing.

My Mother lost her mother to a protracted illness when she was in her teens. It must have been lunchtime at the weekend when I remember starting to ask her consecutive questions concerning my grandmother which my Mother answered – one after the other – quite calmly. We were eating pasta around the kitchen table and she answered my innocent queries quite unfazed until her voice broke and her eyes began to fill with tears at which point we all fell silent. I felt awful. We were sitting at that very kitchen table a few days later, having pasta for dinner, when the phone rang one evening with a call from Tio Ricardo from El Salvador. My Mother took the call in her bedroom and I recall the rising urgency in her voice before it broke into a wail of denial. My Father came back into the kitchen to explain our grandfather had died. I’m not certain Sacha understood what was going on but I remember playing with the food on my plate as I sobbed into the sauce. A few weeks later – towards the end of October – a call came in, in the small hours, to tell us my Uncle Tom had been found dead. The ringing of the phone woke me up and I sensed that something must be wrong but I went back to sleep and it was only a few hours later when I came down for breakfast that my Mother gave me the news.

One of the things my Father had to do as a middle ranking executive of the bank at that time was entertain key members of his portfolio of clients. A rather plush dinner had been planned at our house for mid November and the house had been decked out the day before for a dinner party of a couple of dozen people. That night the Heavens opened up over Portugal and a year’s worth of rain fell over our part of the country in the span of a few hours. The storm drains of the village channeled downhill towards where we lived and the inevitable overflow came crashing down our drive and through our front door, flooding the main floor of the house eventually almost to waist level with the village’s bilge. My Father remembers being woken up first by our dog who kept on trying to get on their bed and then the cries of Maria Rosa and Antonio Maria downstairs as the water rushed down the internal stairs that linked our house with the rooms they occupied in the basement. Completely disoriented, he tells me he had no idea at that moment what might really be happening and wondering if the whole valley might not be flooded. To those of you who know me it will come as no surprise that I slept through the deluge. Once the downpour had subsided and water had stopped rushing through the front door my Father came up and woke us. I remember him saying that this is perhaps something we should see. The fuses had gone and I came down to a mud-splattered scene, water up to my knees, to the light of a dozen or so candles with my Mother trying to calm Maria Rosa, her baby in hand, whilst my Father and some other grown-ups milled about in the mud on the main floor of our house as they tried to take stock of the situation. At some point – my Mother tells me – I got on the piano and started practicing my scales. The house was trashed!

The Diamants (God bless them; a Dutch family and friends of ours) took us in the next day and we must have spent the best part of a week at theirs whilst The Bank made arrangements for us. The wooden floors of the house had been damaged and would require extensive work before we could move back in. Then of course there were the carpets, the objects, the appliances, and the furniture, much of which were ruined and could not be saved. The insurance company battled my parents for every last cent.

The Bank moved us into a flat at the Hotel Citadela, which is where we spent Christmas and saw in the New Year, whilst all the work was being carried out on our house. New Year’s Eve we were asked to a boring party at the British Embassy that began wrapping up at about a quarter past twelve. I remember Auld Lang Syne being played just after the twelve strokes of midnight and my Mother crying in my Fathers arms. I think she exteriorized what we collectively felt in our different ways; we had all just about had enough. A few days later we moved back into our house, looking forward to 1984.

Ten days later my Father was almost killed. He was hit by a motorcycle whilst crossing the street on his way to lunch with a client near Largo da Trindade in Lisbon.

I’m not certain about the exact date but for some reason I remember the 9^th of January as the day this occurred. My Mother had picked us up from school and by the time we were driving home it was dusk and the light was starting to fade. We got to the front gate of The Quinta and were greeted by several people frantically waving their arms about and shrieking hysterically; “ O Sr Dick, O Sr Dick, O Sr Dick!!!” My Mother accelerated down the drive and brought the car to an abrupt halt in front of the house before we burst through the door and ran to my parent’s bedroom to find my father lying on their bed, his form dimly lit from the lamp on the bedside table behind him, his face deformed and very lacerated. It took him months to get back to his old self but he did make a full recovery and with this the Gods let us be for a while. It did change him though. He still denies it but he lost his love of music.