Stiff Upper Lip

Posting this on 30th August 2016 - a Bliper friend "SweetArt" in Hong Kong is about to leave her sons in the UK when they start University. She is understandably going through the hell of  "cutting the umbilical cord".

Luckily the postmark is still very legible. Being still 9 years old at the time, I can assure everyone the postcard had nothing to do with Valentine's Day and I can't for the life of me think where I got the postcard, at least at that time of year.

From September 1962, aged 8 and a few weeks, I was sent to a boarding school in Somerset, 5,000 miles from home and was only able to go home once a year for the summer holidays. Every second year my parents had their leave and came to Europe for Christmas.

That's just how things were in the colonial days. One used to say that before one's father got one's birth registered, he sent off a letter to a school in the UK asking for a place in 8 years time.

I and all the other exPat children thought little of it as it was the norm and we regularly plagued the normal passengers on various BOAC planes in July and September.

I am sure my mother suffered badly but could not show her emotions especially as she was a foreigner in a very British colonial community. I can't imagine postcards like the above did much to ease her pain.

The "Devil" referred to was our dog and the "Guesthouse" was the small VIP house that BP had to house visiting UK management. She managed the place for a few years, I think there was a staff of 10 or so. The bad luck was because the company closed it as being unnecessary presumably as the oil production in Trinidad was diminishing and the thoughts of ceasing operations were already starting and did then happen in 1969. No idea where any VIP stayed as there wasn't a hotel for miles.

The address was in full "Beach Camp, Palo Seco". It was a village directly on the coast overlooking Venezuela. The village belonged entirely to BP employees, 99% colonial. We had our own police, kindergarten, primary school, sports club with pool, squash, tennis, cricket and leisure area with bar and used for evening/weekend dancing etc. The company also had it's own medical centre a few miles away.

I suspect I had bought the postcard on a school organised day trip the previous summer to Swanage. I seem to remember hiring one of those tandem, side-by-side bicycles.