IT WAS FUN

IT WAS FUN


We came to live in a big city after having already done so many other things. Not me, of course, I was only five when we moved, but my family was already a big family. Six children in all plus an adopted one who became my companion for everything. My oldest sister was left behind, she was married then. My father worked for the Leopoldina Railway, the British railway system that operated in many towns in Brazil. He had been sent to so many different small towns where my mother had to face difficulties of all kinds, with babies coming to life and terrible diseases that they didn´t know how to deal with.

Rio de Janeiro was a second beginning for the whole family. Surviving was of course a problem but my mother´s energy and my father´s discipline made that problem a lesson for all of us. We went to live in a big place that was very common those days and my mother kept busy renting rooms for people who came from other cities, like us. They were young men who came to go to college, to try to find a better job or something else. I grew up among those people, learning from them and from their own experiences. I didn´t know they were not my family, I just saw them as the world I had for me. All of them influenced my decisions, my hair style and my activities in general. They helped me to learn the first things and they also confided me their genuine anguish. Some are more vivid in my memory, probably because they were timid and unprepared. I watched and listened. I had all the time for that, being a child.

I had never heard the word “privacy” before being an adult. I wouldn´t have understood it. Our living room was like a stage where characters come and go after saying their lines. Nothing was so terrible that couldn´t be forgotten a few minutes later : laughter followed tears and commotion for someone, in a succession of events.

We had fun, I can remember that. We all grew up and made our own families. Was it good or bad to live like this? I don´t know. I just think it was fun.