...Since I was five, Mother started giving me piano lessons, and this was reenacted with each one of the children. There came a time when Margarida (the sixth offspring) also begged to learn to play the piano. Mama remonstrated that she had to give lessons to the other five the whole week, and little Guidy piped in: "But you have Saturday free, Mama!"

So the piano was sounding off the whole day, while practising Czerny exercises, scales and small tunes. Soon we outgrew, and there was a piano teacher, Da Gama, who came to give us lessons. I still recall how well he played Lizst’s stirring rhapsodies. In fact , all of us learned to play the piano, and only Paulo did not cotton to it, though he was very capable in mechanical or electrical chores. We were all reading and writing before six years of age, and Papa gave me French and science lessons before he went to work, while Mama undertook the task of teaching us German. A tutor, a Hindu , called Rajarama, dressed with the traditional white puddvèm, with a white tunic on top, trudged up the hillock of Altinho to teach us Portuguese grammar, and prepare us for the annual primary examination in the school downtown. We had a tutor, another Hindu, Manguexa Quencró, a well-known painter, always dressed like a westerner, who gave us drawing lessons, and taught us to work with crayons and water-colours. Quencró was later known for his paintings inspired by Indian motifs, such as "The Dancing Girl", "The Divine Enchanter", and "The Smoker of Gud-guddi". Soon, our home Villa do Monte was known as the junior University of Villa do Monte, because all kinds of teachers came up from downtown to teach us different subjects. (In 1951 when my Parents emigrated to Brazil, the house was sold to the Patriarchate of Goa, who had the house demolished and the Church built in the same compound, the Lar dos Estudantes , or Students’ Home, which is still going strong in Altinho, and still has a jackfruit tree which existed in our times).

On my sixth birthday many people came to the party including elder people, and one of them was Mariana Correia-Afonso, a distant relative of ours, belonging to a well-known and famous Goan family. She was the headmistress of the Middle School for girls, and she asked me, after giving me a wet kiss: "Fred, what is it that you lack to become like your Father?".

And, much to her astonishment and embarrassment, I replied pointblank: "Hair on my body". Naturally she expected that I would say that what I needed was to become a doctor like Papa... Al present laughed a great deal; it seemed it was a good joke, though in reality there was no guile in me, and I had responded spontaneously. This same Mariana had chided my Father sometime before, as to why he taught us French first, instead of Portuguese, which was the official language. And Papa had answered her, tongue-in-cheek: "It’s because they were begotten in French!".

By sea-mail I had received for my birthday a beautiful Swiss Omega wristwatch, sent by my godfather in Berlin, Herr Professor Dr.Paul Friedländer, under whose guidance my father had done postgraduate work at the Potsdam Institute. I never saw my godfather and only have a sepia photograph of him sitting on a chair sporting a long beard which hid the knot of his necktie. Less than three years later he died of a heart attack on the day when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and installed the Nazi Third Reich. Nowadays quartz watches are plentiful and cheap. In those times, a wristwatch was the most cherished gift that a boy could hope to received from his parents, on the occasion of his confirmation at the age thirteen. To determine how good a wristwatch was, one asked at the local watch-repair shop, how many rubies were employed in its mechanism. My Omega watch had 17 rubies, the acme of watch quality level. The dial was a luminous green, which one could read in the dark because the hands and the hour marks contained a little radium.

Just recently I looked at a photo taken at my High School in Bangalore in 1940, consisting of the School’s First Eleven football team. There I was, kneeling in the middle of the group with the football under my knees – as Captain of the team – and curiously enough, one can see that I wore a wristwatch on my left wrist, whereas none of the other team mates around me had one. However, I am sure that one boy standing in the second row, with his arms folded across his chest, had a wristwatch, which was hidden by the other arm: he was the son of a Maharajah ( a minor one), one of the five hundred odd Maharajahs who had their feuds and petty kingdoms under the British Raj.

Reverting to my sixth birthday, a couple of months later, in September 1930, Papa had to inaugurate a new clinic in the town of Mapusa, in the northern district of Bardez. It was quite an adventure for me, as we had to cross the river Mandovi on a ferry, which carried cars and passengers. Ferries were plying constantly between Panjim and Betim, the village on the opposite side, and the ferry bore the name "Bicholim", which was the name of a town, northeast of Mapusa, the latter being some thirteen kilometres to the north of Betim. Some professors of the Medical School accompanied my father for the ceremony, and it happened that a football match between the perennial champion Siolim Oxel Unidos and the team of Argus de Panjim was to take place that afternoon, and my father, as a dignitary was requested to preside as guest of honour.

In those times there was no such thing as a stadium . It was merely a flat field, with two goals, each consisting of two wooden poles topped by a wooden bar, and the limits of the field, marked by chalked lines defining the well known middle line of the field, and the rectangular area encompassing the football field proper, and the two goals surrounded by the rectangular areas which define the zone, within which a foul meant a penalty against the defending team, all marked by chalk on the green grass. The public gathered, standing up on both long sides of the field to watch the game. It was the custom also, when a high dignitary was present, that the start of the game was not in the center of the field between the two opposing teams. The dignitary, as a demonstration of respect, was supposed to start the game, by kicking-off the football, from the grandstand which stood on the middle of the west side, where the game could be watched without facing the sun.

My father was supposed to kick the ball; all was set for the match to start, when suddenly there was a commotion, as two horses, one mounted on top of the other, galloped into the compound, right across the field . The public cheered, jeered and leered at the frenetic duo in their fight. I heard a lot of injunctions, and words I had never heard before, piercing obscenities and barbaric phonemes; when the horses passed in front of me, probably due to a sudden, encouraging, malicious, lascivious yell of the onlookers, the horse in front slipped away from its attacker’s embrace, and the panting rear horse, with its forelegs still high in the air, stopped in its tracks, and its thick weapon almost reaching the ground , spitted in jerks a viscous whitish oozy liquid ; a sweeper quickly came with a bucket and a spade to remove the messy pond in front of me. The umpire blew his whistle, my father kicked the ball into the middle of the field and the match started.

Dr. Joâo Pacheco de Figueiredo was next to me, and I asked him what was going on, and he answered cryptically: "Coitus interruptus!", the first two words in Latin I ever heard, and was none the wiser. The good Doctor did not proffer any other explanation, so I did not dare to ask any further.

It was many years before I realised that the horse in front was a mare, and that a sexual intercourse was interrupted by the jeering crowd, uttering fowl, dirty words, which I was to learn later on. Dr. Pacheco’s artful explanation was according to Oscar Wilde "a spirited protest, a gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place!" ( Intentions - Oscar Wilde)