Potatoes in the Andes

By 1956 my mother and stepfather had been at the British Embassy in Peru, their posting after Syria, for over a year. When the time came for me to leave my prep school in Dorset and move on to a secondary school, it was decided that I should spend six months in Peru first. The Andes seen from the plane window were on a different scale from anything I could have imagined. It was as if I had travelled to another planet and was looking down on a giant’s kingdom - on the roof of a rust-red, gold and purple world. The sunlit peaks and deep, darkly shaded valleys were in sharp focus, terrifyingly grand and beautiful. Finally, when we approached the city of Lima under its characteristic cloud on Peru’s coastal desert strip, it was like coming back to earth.