In the same way that I had no idea I wanted to go to Trebizond with Rose Macaulay, I really had no intention of reading my way to Brazil until a copy of Brazil That Never Was by Dr Andrew Lees, Professor of Neurology at The National Hospital in London, arrived from Notting Hill Editions.
If you don’t know them these little books are really worth checking out, and with The Season of Gifts on the distant horizon (way too soon to give voice to the word) they would make excellent presents for those difficult to buy for people. I’ve got a little shelf full so I’m going to pick one every so often to read and write thoughts on here. I love a good essay and Notting Hill Editions, in their beautiful linen-bound livery, are just the right length to engage the grey matter and give it a work out. The company was founded by Tom Kremer, the man responsible for bringing us the Rubik’s Cube, who had a vision to revive the art of the essay 'and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be lingered over and cherished' and that and more has certainly been achieved.
If I can make a personal connection with a book or a writer, the book nags for my attention even more than usual, and there were three lovely connections with Brazil That Never Was...
Firstly, I walked past Andrew Lees' place of work, the National Hospital in Queen’s Square, every day to go on duty at Great Ormond Street in the 1970s. I’ve never been inside but along with the Homeopathic Hospital next door and what was then the Ospidale Italiano across the way, those three places were markers on my way to work.
Secondly the book is set partly in the docklands of Liverpool where a young Andrew is taken by his father on their regular trips from nearby St Helens to watch the ships come and go.
‘Liverpool was an impermanent place of passage, full of silos and stores, simultaneously a space of entrapment and liberation. We felt the pull, but we’re too afraid to put out to sea...’
My mum was born and raised in the dockland area of Liverpool 8, The Dingle. She was born at No 4 Elswick Street (where the TV series Bread was filmed) which ran downhill towards the River Mersey and my grandfather worked on the docks for most of his life. I have fleeting yet vivid childhood memories of this view...
I never knew my grandfather because it was a tragic accident on the docks that would end his life before I was born.
My aunt (my mum’s sister) married a merchant seaman who would eventually become a captain for the Elder Dempster shipping line, and so when the yellow funnels of Elder Dempster got an early mention from Andrew Lees I was nicely in tune with Brazil That Never Was. One of Uncle Frank’s ships, the Apapa, was bombed and sunk during the war and he spent three days in a lifeboat awaiting rescue, none of which dimmed his love of the sea (and I suspect time away from my aunt who was what we called ‘Very High Maintenance’ & led him a fairly miserable life). He was a Yorkshire man, short and stocky and very jolly, with the characteristic seaman’s gait and we adored him. He’d come home from the Africa run bearing palm nuts and melons, and little tables inlaid with ebony and ivory, and stories of his travels, and we would marvel at it all and to think we actually knew someone who’d been to Africa.
And it is Andrew Lees’ childhood imagination that is first fired up about Brazil when his father gives him a copy of Exploration Fawcett, the story of one intrepid explorer’s search for a lost civilisation in the depths of the Brazilian rain forest in the 1920s. Percy Fawcett is an unusual character. Born in 1867 and seen as one of the last great Victorian explorers, Fawcett's belief in the supernatural was powerful enough to to propel him into a search for 'beings of great mystical power' who he was convinced were to be found in the depths of the Mato Grosso of Brazil.
Bartholomews Handy Atlas 1924 comes to the rescue again...
Percy Fawcett's adventures inspire belief and trust in a young Andrew Lees and the question is, as an adult, do you cling to the childhood story or do you dissect and explore it for yourself. Eventually the pull is too great and Andrew Lees sets off for Brazil in pursuit of the truth.
‘following the ancient Atlantic path laid down by the whales. The unbounded horizon had now become a promise....’
Incidentally, did anyone else hear on the radio recently that in recent months, since the world and the seas went quiet, whales have heard each other clearly for the first time in two hundred years. I was astonished and surprisingly moved by that.
There were two more personal connections which resonated with me, the first being A Level Geography, where, for our sins, we would suffer a triple lesson on a Friday afternoon, our region for study was South America and, as if this were to get any more tortuous, the teacher couldn’t pronounce her ‘rs’ other than as a ‘w’. It wasn’t her fault, none of it was, but what else were we supposed to do every time she said ‘Wio de Janeiwo’ but quietly mimic.
I’m not pwoud of it now, weally I’m not.
The other unexpected connection with Andrew Lees was this...
‘My maroon Kent stamp album, with its heavy leaves imprinted with delicate quadrille, has more stamps from Brazil than any other country...’
Do children still collect stamps? I'm thinking fewer and fewer letters arrive with a stamp these days, it must be a dying hobby, but ours did and, having been given my mum’s stamp album, I was a fanatical child philatelist for a few years. Always on the look out for the Cape of Good Hope blue triangle turning up unexpectedly in one of those packs I’d send away for on approval with my pocket money. Not a lot of them were genuine I’m sure, especially the Polska ones, and we could never afford to buy them so had to send them all back, but we all doted on our stamp albums, and now I’m thinking how much world geography we learned as a result.
My Brazil page looked (and still looks) like this...
Andrew's has slightly more to commend it...
‘Their drab correios mostly depicted national heroes, but there were two of the capital, one depicting two lines of Imperial palms at the Jardim Botanico, and another labelled ‘Saudade’ showing an angel and a small church on a hill.
I knew my stamps off by heart too and reaching for the album off the shelf this week and flicking through was a very familiar revisiting.
Andrew Lees will eventually make the journey to the Mato Grosso in search of his childhood hero and whether or not he lives up to the imagination is something I couldn't possibly reveal because it is one of this little book's best secrets, creating a compelling and fascinating story even for me, who had no intention of heading for Brazil on the page or otherwise.
I’m thinking I’m probably not the only one travelling in my imagination right now. I seem to be popping to New Zealand almost daily, so I’m wondering where you are heading off to in your imagination...please do share your current most coveted destination in comments. I reckon we’d probably cover the world if we tried.
And meanwhile enjoy a little round of the tune that Andrew's father would croon as they travelled home from their Liverpool days. 'That tune sends me' he would say to his son, and I have to agree...
The melon story incidentally was legend in our family....
We were staying with the Liverpool family and Uncle Frank had just sailed into port. He walked in the door with a melon under his arm and we had never seen one before. ‘Don’t pick it up in case you drop it, because it will split in half and then we’ll have to eat it straight away,’ was the instruction we were given. And there it sat, day after day, goading and tormenting me, until eventually I did pick it up, I did drop it, it did split in half and we did have to eat it. Mission accomplished though I was in terrible trouble. Worth it though, never say ‘don’t’ to a seven year old like me.
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