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CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE UNKNOWN

I left England as the autumn leaves were falling. It was the early days of jet flights and a new experience to be thrust back into my seat as the Boeing 707 leapt down the Heathrow runway. A few hours earlier we, two Catholic priests, had been seen off by relatives and friends at Leeds/Bradford airport and had said goodbye for five years. The call had gone out from Popes Pius XII and John XXIII requesting bishops to lend priests to the developing countries to live and work among “those people who are striving to escape from hunger, misery, endemic diseases and ignorance; of those who are looking for a wider share of the benefits of civilization”.1 There was a severe shortage of clergy in Latin America; vast areas were almost untouched by Christian missionaries, and poor food production combined with unfair land distribution was causing massive emigration to the cities. Some hoped that the Catholic Church in the United States would send a third of its clergy to Latin America. In England, the Bishop of Leeds had appealed for volunteers to help an Irish missionary society working in the shanty towns of Lima; Gerald and I were the second batch of volunteers from our diocese.

1 Encyclical letter of Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, 1967

I knew not a word of Spanish, nothing of the ecclesiastical or political situation of South America, and had but the vaguest notion of where Peru was. No preparation was offered us beyond a medical check-up. If we were young and healthy and were ordained priests, we could perform the sacred functions which a Catholic people needed and that was enough. Nowadays prospective missionaries would be assessed as to their suitability for overseas mission and perhaps offered courses, for mission today is a very different matter: missionaries appreciate that they are not working in a vacuum, that the divine is already present among native peoples with their values and their own religiosity. It was 1966 and we were two greenhorns being sent on an extraordinary adventure.

But there we sat, blissfully enjoying the luxury of the early air travel. When you flew in those days you were treated as honoured guests; you dressed in your best suit, smoking was permitted onboard, alcohol was plentiful, and prior to meals passengers were handed a menu which would have graced the best restaurants. The crew had time to chat with passengers, and one pretty hostess was impressed when we told her we were going to work in the shanty towns of Lima.

That day it was beautifully sunny across the Atlantic, no turbulence, and I got a thrill when the pilot announced we were flying down the coast of Maine and later when he pointed out “the towers of Manhattan”. For us, it really was the New World.

Downtown New York, for all the excitement it held for us, was dirty and garish and seemed full of tired faces. Everyone seemed to be smoking or reading newspapers. I was whisked into a radio shop by an insistent Italian youth and actually ‘given’ a transistor radio. I refused it and escaped his sales talk. A hobo with a bottle under his arm noticed my clerical collar and said: “Jesus, its years since I was at confession”! I liked the relaxed atmosphere, though not the stalls with their sex-mad magazines. In the mission house where we stayed the Society’s priests were coming and going to Korea, Japan and Peru. The creeks of the Hudson River were beginning to look beautiful, with the sun glinting through the browns and yellows of the autumn leaves. I walked along the riverside among black nannies looking after white children. At night we were taken on a motor tour of Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, the Bowery, Staten Island and Chinatown, all fascinatingly lit up, but we were told sad stories of the poverty, drunkenness and crime of the people who lived in those places. Another day I visited the United Nations building. They were discussing Vietnam and the resignation of U Thant, which nobody seemed to want. I ended the day by going to the top of the Empire State Building and peering down on the lights after the sun had set over Jersey City.

At that time, if you were on a long-haul flight, you were allowed excess mileage. They gave you a small booklet and tore off sections as you travelled the different connections. So, after a few days in New York, we visited Silver Creek by Lake Erie – the ancient lands of the Iroquois – saw the astonishing colours of the fall leaves and admired Buffalo and Niagara. Then, south to Florida, where we spent a couple of weeks in Miami and a few days in Nassau and Montego Bay, all at no extra cost. We knew we had a shock coming, so decided to enjoy ourselves beforehand.

And a shock it was: so much so that my companion, after his first trip around the shanties, thought he couldn’t face the ordeal.

It is now over fifty years since I first stepped off the plane into a damp, grey Lima morning. Tourists arriving in Lima on such a day think it is the worst place they have ever seen, for a low, dull white cloud-cover overhangs the city for some seven months of the year. Herman Melville, comparing white things to his great White Whale Moby Dick, calls Lima the ‘white city’:

“Nor is it the remembrance of her cathedral toppling earthquakes, nor the stampedoes of her hectic seas, nor the fearlessness of arid skies that never rain nor the sight of her wide fields of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones and crosses all adroop… and her suburban avenues of house-walls lying over upon each other… it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can’st see. For Lima has taken the while veil and there is higher horror in this whiteness of her woe old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins forever new”.

One more laconic English visitor commented:

“It’s just like Manchester on a foggy morning”!

That November day the tops of the nearby barren mountains were covered in mist. Near the airport the hills are quite low; further inland they rise to some 2,000 feet. A friend from the north of England, familiar with coal mines, stepped out of Lima airport and asked, “Who put those pit hills there?” I told him they were the foothills of the Andes, and indeed, they are, for this great mountain range extends almost to the Pacific Ocean, whose deep trough under the Humboldt Current continues the downward drop of the mountains to one of the world’s most prolific fishing grounds. The coastal plain is narrow, but where it widens, around the airport, lies the capital, Lima. There is a story, surely apocryphal, that the Incas, to revenge themselves on their Spanish conquerors, persuaded them to build their capital city on the gloomiest part of the coast.

One of the first things I noticed on arrival in Peru was the iron bars on all the doors and windows – decoration or security? I was to learn that I had come to a country under siege.

CHAPTER TWO

A NEW WAY OF LIFE

The first thing I had to do on arriving in Peru was to learn the language: for of Spanish I spoke not a word. If English is the language of diplomacy, Italian the language of song, French the language of love, then Spanish is the language of prayer, and prayer was going to be my job. So, with other newcomers to South America, I was packed off to a language institute in the hills outside Lima.

The teaching method in the institute was based on a North American system in which the students listened to and repeated a dialogue, without seeing the text. In groups of three or four we listened to the teacher repeating phrases which meant, to us, not a thing. The theory was that we were to learn the language as does a child prior to being able to read. But we were not children: most of us were in our twenties and thirties and had long ago left our books so many found the three-month course difficult and frustrating. Spanish is not a difficult language and some of us with a touch of a classical education had a background in the Romance languages. However, some wit said that Spanish is an easy language to speak badly. I was determined to speak it well, because I realized that I would not be able to work efficiently without an adequate command of it. So, I worked hard and spent long hours in the language lab at ‘verbal substitution drills’, suffering insomnia as the wretched stuff went through my head at night.

We were given a Christmas break and a few of us made a trip to the central highland town of Huancayo. Running up from Lima is one of the world’s famous railways, built by a North American, Henry Meiggs, between 1870 and 1893. It follows the valley of Lima’s river, the Rímac, and in nine and a half hours reaches a height of over 15,000 feet above sea level, some 130 kilometres from Lima. It wanders through 66 tunnels, over 59 bridges and around 22 zigzags. There were beautiful things to see en route: little gardens of flowers, Inca terracing (Andenes), and the hazy brown mountains rising higher and higher to snow peaks. When the train stopped at stations, local women sold fruit. We passed what must be the ugliest town in the world, La Oroya, a mining town of huge slag-heaps cut out of the mountains providing minerals for overseas markets. Local youths happily played football, their lungs well adapted to the altitude. It was in later times in La Oroya that a courageous bishop (now a cardinal) struggled against the North American Mining Company because of the environmental pollution it was causing and the illnesses the town’s children were suffering from polluted water.

At Galera the train passes its highest point, at 15,681 feet. But in spite of beginning the descent to our destination, I began to black out and had to press a button to summon a white-coated medical orderly who appeared with first-aid kit and a cylinder of oxygen. He revived me, but it was a nasty moment.

Concepción is at a lower altitude, in an open valley, and there a priest was parading up and down the platform shouting: “Anyone see Charley Coffey?” Charley, our larger than life, North American trip organizer, tall, fat and jolly with a character to match, guffawed and said: “Jesus, that’s the craziest thing: way in the middle of Peru this fellow shouting out my name”! But Charley was one of those people known to everybody, and news of his arrival had reached the mountains of Peru! Whilst most of us rested in our hotel in Huancayo, recovering from the long journey and nursing headaches caused by the altitude, Charley was chain smoking and excitedly organizing sight-seeing tours for us, talking to everyone in heavily North-American accented Spanish and lapsing into English.

Huancayo is a busy colourful town; its market is renowned for silverware, leather goods, rugs, garments and guitars. Small women toddle around in their black-banded trilby hats, which they removed in church. They, and even some tiny girls, but elder sisters, carried babies on their backs wrapped in colourful shawls – little heads and eyes peeping out, gazing on the world.

We visited an experimental agricultural station where they were researching cattle and then, behind a garden of flowers, we went to a small linen factory, a mere hut with a mud floor and little furniture, where women hand-loomed beautifully coloured table cloths and napkins using ancient shuttles. A girl of ten was spinning at an ancient loom whilst her blind mother worked in the background. A woman was spinning vicuna wool on a spindle, as one still sees the mountain women, toddling along with little steps, going about their business. At the end of the village they pointed out to us the shell of a church, destroyed in the Pacific War of 1870, where Chilean soldiers had taken refuge.

For the return to Lima, a kind doctor gave me pills to cope with the altitude. But though I felt a bit numb on the journey, all was well. Strange, I thought, that I was the only one of the party who had suffered from sorroche (altitude sickness), especially as I had that summer been mountaineering in Austria.

After two more months at the language institute it was a great joy to realize I had acquired a new skill – a new language, though at that time the Catholic ceremonies were still in Latin, so that, at weekends, I was able to help in the new parishes being formed in the shanty towns without the necessity to speak Spanish, except to say a few words of greeting to the parishioners.

My first weekend assignment was to a rough place on the edge of downtown Lima: the notorious El Montón or ancient rubbish heap of the city. For generations rubbish had been dumped there and pigs had rooted among the metres deep offal. It lay along the gorge of the contaminated River Rímac. A French ‘rag-picker’ priest had once worked there, but had been evicted, and now my colleagues from Ireland had taken over.

This parish house had suffered in a recent earthquake: its walls and the church’s walls were cracked. A skylight and the windows of the house were thick with brown dust. Somebody had dug an eight-foot-deep hole in the patio in an attempt to reach Mother Earth, and one could ‘appreciate’ the layers of refuse which had been deposited over the years. I could believe what some had said; that it was the worst slum in South America.

Saturday night was a popular time for baptisms, and families would go take their babies to the nearest church with the godparents, all dressed to the nines, the men in unaccustomed collars and ties and anticipating the fiesta which would follow in the child’s home. The godfather was often the middle-class manager of the factory where the father worked, for poor people sought the patronage of the well-to-do who would help the child financially. In the southern highlands, they tell me that the peasants would also choose a padrino from the professional classes, and though he was committed to helping the family financially, they for their part would be obliged to give him a sheep, pig or llama each year. Long before the film The Godfather, the reality was being lived out in Latin America!

Our first job was to register the baptism, because, at that time, baptismal certificates were still official documents recognized by the State and needed for the interminable bureaucracy which plagues Peru. Esoteric names were often given to babies – gleaned from a calendar, a popular personality or Greek philosopher. I have baptized Hitlers and Lenins, Ringos and Anaximanders. The ceremony was often chaotic, with large numbers of families sweating in the great heat, babies often at the breast to stop them from crying and the priest doing his best to maintain decorum. Since Christians are supposed to be the “salt of the earth”, part of the ceremony consisted of putting a pinch of salt into the baby’s mouth, but such was the chaos on one occasion that a celebrant popped a pinch of salt into the mouth of an astonished godmother! Another danger was that the poorly evangelised people sometimes thought that the paperwork in the parish office was all that was needed, and without entering the church at all went straight home to the festivities and heavy drinking which lasted into the early hours. In these Catholic countries baptism or christening has become a rite of passage, and some of us have attempted to give it a deeper meaning by insisting on an adequate preparation for the parents. In the early days of Christianity, baptism was a sign of a profound conversion to the faith and was mainly administered to adults capable of taking such a step. I have often thought we should return to those centuries!

The life of the people of the settlements can be interminably drab, even today, when many have the amenities of light, water and sewage disposal and in many cases quite comfortable homes with modern appliances. They rarely get a break from the routine of their lives, and with the tedium of long journeys crossing the city to work in crammed buses, and during the dour winter climate of Lima, they need their fiestas and can be excused if every now and then there is some jollification and heavy drinking.

In those – my early days – the priests often visited the homes of the new Christians immediately after the baptismal ceremony. This usually meant just popping into the houses, congratulating the family and perhaps accepting a soft drink. After the baptismal ceremony on this occasion, we went to the parents’ home. Bottles of champagne awaited attention. The family feast had been scheduled for five o’clock, but by now it was nine. After toasting the family, we went to a meeting in a men’s club where we drank more cheap champagne, listened to lengthy speeches and sat down to a meal of pork, beans, onions and hot peppers. The results were disastrous a few hours later, when ‘Atahualpa’s revenge’ (more of him later) attacked me with a vengeance and I spent the night scrambling through a kitchen full of unwashed dishes to the grimy toilet of the parish house.

After three months studying at the language institute, we received our appointments, to parishes where our language skills were put to the test. Shortly afterwards, the Catholic Church allowed the liturgy to be celebrated in the vernacular, and reading the Spanish text was quite easy. With the aid of books, I was able also to prepare a short sermon, though I soon got into the way of putting questions to the congregation in our small church. This kept the parishioners’ attention, and they seemed to like the dialogue and perhaps learned more than by merely listening to me.

A year or so later I had the opportunity of a more advanced Spanish language course – at an institute outside the town of Cochabamba, Bolivia. We had to fly to the capital, La Paz. The airport there lies on a plateau, at some 13,000 feet above sea level, and 1,000 feet above the city. Among fields of savannah grass and barley, it is open to the ever-present wind. Planes need the long runway to take off in the thin air and passengers must step gently onto the tarmac to avoid dizziness. The views from the airport are spectacular: the city, as though cut with a knife among the sheer walls of a canyon, lies well below, shanty towns creep up the surrounding hills and one sees the snow mountains across the uplands away in the distance.

I liked Bolivia: the people spoke more slowly than the Limeñans and in clearer Spanish. It is an even more ‘Indian’ country than Peru and the streets are crowded with stout, little ‘Indian’ women in their wide skirts – they say they wear all the skirts they possess, together – with their funny little bowler hats perched at rakish angles. Another dubious story has it that a hat-salesman from London went there selling bowlers and the Bolivian women took to them!

The language institute was above the town of Cochabamba, another flight away. That town, at an altitude of 8,000 feet above sea level, was a small place in those days; today, I believe it is large and modern enough to accommodate international conferences. The language school was housed in a beautiful building on the outskirts of town, among the stone walls and fields of maize, barley and flowers. They told us that the large building housing the language institute had once belonged to the Nazis, as a possible refuge for Hitler had he attempted to escape to South America after the Second World War.

From the garden of our residence we could see the surrounding mountains – a 4,000-foot, rounded grass dome just behind our building which we climbed, Taquiña, and especially the highest in the area, Tunari, at which I looked longingly, and eventually I got a trip organized to visit it.

Tunari was quite accessible, because a road rose to some 14,000 feet, not far from the 15,000-foot summit, so we hired a windowless bus to get us there. In spite of the cold, the dust, and the driver’s hazardous three-point-turns round sharp bends, we reached the highest point of the road from where we could hike across the open, rather boggy grassland (pampa) to reach the final rocks. There were two summit pyramids, and we chose one of them. We could have done with ice axes, crampons and good climbing boots for the final 500 feet, but I was able to kick steps up the snow. It was not so easy for my companion, Tim, in his shoes and Sunday suit. From the summit, there was a daunting drop on the other side of the mountain. The day was cloudless and the cold intense, but the views of other mountain ridges made our efforts worthwhile. After glissading from the top, we stumbled back across the high grassland very tired, for the altitude was taking its toll. We sheltered from a brief storm and, seeing our weariness, a peasant gave me a wad of coca leaf, though it didn’t have its numbing effect, so Tim alleviated things by sitting down in a field of barley, pulling out of his pocket the Oxford book of English verse and reading Gray’s Elegy!

The nuns and the bus were still there, with hampers of food and drink. We had broken no records, but Tim claimed a ‘first’ ascent in black suit and cufflinks!

A more sedate and colourful day in Cochabamba was spent at a folklore festival, listening to haunting Andean music played on guitar and charango (a kind of mandolin). Girls in colourful heavy blouses and skirts swirled to the music, and when one girl fell, she was unable to get up without help, so heavy was her costume. At one stage a tiny child wandered onto the field and did his own little solo dance to the music, whilst another small mite, masked as a pig, came off crying for his mama.

Cochabamba was a lovely place in those days, with little plazas and trees where people perambulated on Sunday afternoons. No wonder the tin king, Patiño, said to have been the third richest man in the world, had chosen it for his home. I heard later that the town had become a centre of the drug trade.

In Bolivia I visited the towns of Santa Cruz and Coroico, down on the jungle edges. The former was an undeveloped place of mud streets at that time, but later also became a centre of the drug trade. A group of North American priests ran the parish in Santa Cruz and gave us accommodation. One of them was taking off over the trees in his plane. He came from a well-to-do family in the United States, and had brought an airplane kit to Santa Cruz, assembled it, and saved a huge amount of time by flying to outlying villages rather than going by boat. If there was no level field on which to land, he made use of the main street of the village. Having landed one time, he needed some assistance and searched around the crowd of on-lookers for an intelligent looking person to help him. He chose the village school master and explained to him that whilst he himself was rotating the propeller he needed the someone to press a button inside the cockpit. The teacher leaned into the cockpit but released the brakes. The plane shot off on its own into the trees and that ended its working life: the bits are probably still there in the jungle.

A strange experience we had near Santa Cruz was a visit to two colonies, one of Melanites from Canada, the other of Japanese from Okinawa. Here we heard mass in Japanese. The people had been invited by the Bolivian government to colonize these remote parts. In another jungle town we visited, there lay, at the foot of the church steps, the grave of a North American priest who had been shot by one of his drunken parishioners, whom he had reprimanded for illegal business dealings.

Perhaps someday the stories of Peruvian missionaries will be sung. Most have had to learn the building trade and have built parishes, convents, schools and clinics. Some have become competent administrators. One friend spent many years in a remote village in the southern highlands. He was a technical wizard and built his own TV disc and showed North American programmes – the locals peered at modern advertised products for the first time – perhaps a dubious exercise.

Another missionary, a highly competent businessman, employed 200 people in his coastal town, financing clinics, soup kitchens and everything else with money from the USA. An English priest discovered that toilet paper was cheaper in northern Peru than in Lima, so filled his small car with thousands of rolls and drove them to Lima. This man also exported a tortora boat (the kind of thing in which Thor Heyerdahl sailed to Easter Island from Peru), and eventually took the thing to the UK.

Then there was the big, burly Irishman, Martin, who quarrelled with all the local authorities to get his own way. I visited him once when he was parish priest of a miserable little fishing village on the beach in northern Peru, where after a couple of years he had renewed the place and provided work for the poor. He was always involved in some big project to help the people. He once bought a sow, handed out piglets to the population and told them they had to return a piglet when they multiplied. When I visited him in that poor little coastal village he was ‘into’ windmills and planning to visit Holland to study them. The ocean wind would drive them, and the village could have electricity. Sadly, a government organization got him out of there, so he went further up the coast and lived in small house just off the beach, next to four nuns of various nationalities who followed him around. There, to make his point against authorities, he once blocked the main road with his bed. One night there was a tsunami, and his house and the convent were washed away. Undaunted, Martin soon had a new complex further up the hill, away from the ocean’s fury. Despite all his bluff and business acumen, he was a good priest to his people, and his nuns loved him.

And then there is my good friend and countryman, Miguel: Oxford Blue and Roman University, well-known Peruvian novelist and uncrowned cultural king of Cajamarca, who turns his hand to any lecturing or writing task asked of him. Once a year he used to hike from Cajamarca to visit us in the mountain Province of Rodriguez de Mendoza, a walk of eleven days across the highlands, down into the Marañón gorge, up again and across the hills of the Department of Amazonas.

And Father Pat, my older companion, in the Mendoza valley, who tramped to his villages armed with umbrella and coffee flask, one of which he invariably left on a wall or hedge and had the whole countryside searching for it.

One is humbled by the stories of missionaries who spent their whole lives in far-away places. A priest who left Spain at 17 and joined the Franciscans in Peru never returned to his native land, but spent 40 years rowing up and down the rivers in the jungles south of Iquitos. They dubbed him “the Rowing Missionary”. One time his canoe overturned, and he spent the night in the water, unable to swim because of the weight of his soaked habit. He sailed up rivers whose headwaters bordered on Brazil and where no white man had been previously. He founded the modern town of Requena, and his bust is there today in the town square.

The tales of the Spanish Dominican Fathers in the jungles of Madre de Dios in southern Peru are legendary. Sometimes they faced death from native arrows as they came upon previously un-contacted tribes. And my friends, the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, are proud of one of their own who died when a river boat overturned, and she let the other passengers escape first through the only exit.

And yet one temptation for the foreign missionary is ‘anglicising’ or ‘gallicising’ the native people, and building little islands of his or her homeland on the outskirts of the world. In 1956 the Catholic bishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, sent one of his priests, Ivan Illich, to Puerto Rico to prepare the New York clergy for work with the Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. After a few years Illich moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he founded a language institute to prepare foreign missionaries for work in Latin America.

In 1967 Illich wrote an article, which caused ructions among overseas missionaries in the subcontinent. “The Seamy Side of Charity” suggested missionaries should go abroad to learn, not to teach, and for some it would be better if they returned home! His concern was that North Americans in Latin America would inevitably “carry a foreign Christian image, a foreign pastoral approach and a foreign political message”; the U.S. missioner is an “undercover agent, albeit unconscious, for U.S. social and political consensus”. The Latin American Church would thus become a “satellite of North American cultural phenomena and policy”. As with many at that time, he saw the need for the Church to undergo real change because “missioners sent to Latin America can make 1) an alien Church more foreign, 2) an over-staffed Church priest-ridden and 3) bishops into abject beggars,” masking fear of a new Church.

Illich’s article was written shortly after the Second Vatican Council, when many of the Church’s traditional liturgy, teaching, ideas and customs were being questioned and revised, and his article made those of us who were already involved in the Latin American Church ponder our missionary work.

The great archbishop of Recife in Brazil, Hélder Câmara, didn’t tell missioners to return to their own lands, but he did suggest that they should learn from Latin America. I like to think that many of us did!

The road to Coroico, the other jungle town we visited in Bolivia, is typical of those which run down into the South American jungles from the highlands – dug out of the sides of the hills and overlooking daunting drops onto forest trees far below. Someone pointed out a place where legend had it that the Incas threw criminals to their deaths.

I returned to Peru with a colleague who had been studying with me. We sailed across Lake Titicaca, the highest fresh water lake in the world and, supposedly, the birthplace of the Incan Empire, though before boarding our ship at Guaqui in Bolivia, we passed by the Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco – remains of a civilization much older than the Inca. Our boat, the Ollanta, took twelve and half hours to cross the 110 miles of water, but the price, including first class berth, supper and breakfast, was cheap. The Ollanta was an old British steamer,

built in the UK, shipped to Peru, dismantled on the coast then carried piecemeal over the Andes and reassembled on the lake. Having served its time, they tell me that today it is used as a restaurant at the lakeside.

We spent a cold night in Puno, an ancient colonial town, and had a look at its baroque cathedral. This is the heartland of the Quechua and Aymara peoples, whose every village retains traditional music and dances.

In those far-away places, at that time, you took whatever transport was available. As we waited by the roadside, along came a large army truck driven by a beaming army chaplain, who, recognizing his own kind, drove us to Juliaca. Further north, in Cuzco, we met another of our kind, an Australian priest, and hopped a lift in his Land Rover. The pastoral work of these priests in the altiplano was not easy; the Aymara people are more reserved than their Quechua-speaking neighbours, as they have been enslaved by generations of newcomers. Their land is also bitingly cold.

The road from Cuzco leads along the spine of the Andes to Andahuaylas, by way of the gorge of the Apurímac River, where, in olden times, the people had swung rope bridges across the gorges. The American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder based his story, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), on an accident which took place on 20th July 1714, when such a bridge collapsed, killing five people. A Franciscan friar, one Juniper, saw the accident and wrote up the story; he thought the tragedy might not have been what it appeared. The Spanish Inquisition in Lima didn’t like his story, burnt his book and killed Juniper. Thornton Wilder fared better; his book was also inspired by a famous Limeñan actress of the 19th century, known as La Perricholi, noted for her beauty and frivolous life, but who spent her final years in prayer and in charitable works.

The ancient peoples fabricated those bridges over the river gorges by twining material from plants into thick ropes and swinging them over the rivers hundreds of feet below. Von Hagan, who wrote about Peru, pointed out that the bridge over the Apurímac, some 300 feet long, had to be re-strung every two years, and that the people of the nearby village of Curahuasi performed this task. Nowadays the bridges have gone, but in some places one has to cross rivers in the mountains sitting in a box suspended on a cable and hauled by the traveller himself or some kind person on the far bank. It was here in Curahuasi that the Inca Huáscar had been taken prisoner by the forces of his brother Atahualpa, the ruling Inca, who was eventually slaughtered by the Spaniards at Cajamarca.

We called on a group of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in Curahuasi, a religious congregation which I was to come to know well and work with in later times.

The route we had followed must be one of the most beautiful in the world: deep gorges below our road which twisted and wound around mountain-sides of grasslands and fields, fertile with cereals and red with quinoa where peasants dug potatoes; blue-green eucalyptus trees lined the track, and away in the distance I saw the snow-capped mountains.

From high in the hills we could see the town of Abancay, deep down in the valley, hours before we reached it. We passed through the town, for our overnight stay was to be further on in Andahuaylas. We arrived there at dusk. The parish there was run by a group of North American priests, and as we arrived they were showing a Laurel and Hardy film in the town square!

From Andahuaylas we flew back to Lima in one of the old, but reliable, DC-3s from World War II. There were no luggage racks nor comfortable upholstery, and oxygen tubes hung down in front of the passengers in case they got a touch of sorroche among the heights. The airfield, for it was only that, was reputed to be one of the most dangerous in the world. A friend of mine was once watching an approaching plane there and noticed a cow on the field. He warned the traffic controller in the hut which served as coning tower. “Oh, I hadn’t noticed that,” said the man. Neither had the pilot, because he had to approach the landing strip blindly over a mountain. On another occasion a pilot was awaiting his landing instructions from the air traffic controller at Andahuaylas, but as none were forthcoming he continued circling, and after some time returned to Lima. It turned out that the air traffic controller was still in bed after a night of heavy drinking. Our little four-engine plane flew through the mountains rather than over them; the wings were almost touching the hillsides.

I had spent six weeks in Cochabamba concentrating on the subjunctive tenses – tenses much used in Spanish – and returned to my parish in the Lima shanty towns, priding myself on emitting present and perfect subjunctives to the people, many of whose first language was the Inca language Quechua, and who were happier using infinitives! A language teacher once pointed out that learning a language is more than vocabulary and grammar, it involves communication and culture and identifying with a different people and a spirit of poverty.

Misunderstandings were easily made by missionaries who imperfectly understood their new language. A lady approached a priest who thought she was asking him to visit a sick person. “Just a minute,” he said, “I will get my book and the holy oils.” Back he came: “I am ready.” “No, Padre,” she replied, “I have only come to sell raffle tickets!”

Sometimes a new missionary’s introduction to the country was quite spectacular. One man reported that during his first few days in Peru there had been five earthquakes, four break-ins to his parish house, in two of which he had attacked the thieves, and he had four crashes in his car.

A missionary bishop once said that a “missioner is a man who goes out to preach the gospel to a people who don’t want to hear it, who will never completely integrate himself into the culture or people to whom he goes and will therefore never fully be understood by his own people whom he leaves at home”. We are ‘of no fixed abode’ and one of the most difficult things we have to face is culture shock.

Culture shock is the disorientation suffered by those who are plunged into an alien culture. Tourists do not suffer culture shock because their visit is short, and all is new and fascinating. The problem is how to survive for a long time in the midst of a different people with an alien mentality, language and customs. Culture shock is the frustration and inability to cope with this situation. It is a loss of social peace of mind which affects all overseas residents in some form or other and can be mild or severe, short or prolonged, but it is a ‘normal’ affliction. Because we naturally assume that ‘our’ ways are best, we value our own customs and values. Traditionally the English person has esteemed fair play, honesty, justice and straight-forward dealing. Immersion into a society where these values are not widely practised can be highly frustrating. Latin American society functions on personal relationships, favouritism and flexibility with rules.

Yet, standing back from one’s own culture, new values can be discerned. The flexibility of Peruvian society can be very useful at times, and the warmth and acceptance of the people make life very pleasant. After the informality of the Americas, the reserve of English society can seem cold. Many things will seem incongruous and incomprehensible at first, so the best advice for the first year in a new country is to observe our Yorkshire saying: “Hear all, see all and say nowt”!

The great Jesuit priest, Father Arrupe, who later became Superior General of his order, was sent to Japan, and when asked how he spent his first years there, replied “Learning to make tea!”