From Viña del Mar 1906 to London 2012 – A Chilean family story
“Mientras escribo estoy ausente,Y cuando vuelvo ya he partido, voy a ver si a las otras gentes les pasa lo que a mi me pasa…
“While I write I am absent and when I return I have already left; I am going to find out if other people experience the same thing as I do, if they are as many as I am, if they look like each other, and and when I have found all this out, I’m going to learn things so well that in order to explain my problems, I’ll talk of geography…” Pablo Neruda
My late father Tom Burns was the seventh child of David Burns, who in the final quarter of 19th century crossed the world from his home in Scotland to Chile, settling first in Valparaiso and subsequently in Viña del Mar as a branch manager for Banco de Chile. There was money to be made from nitrates at the time.
Not long after David’s arrival, he met and married a local Anglo-Chilean Clara Swinburne Echazarreta. Clara on her father’s side was of English North Country stock but had been born and bred in Chile. Her mother descended from 18th century immigrants, with roots in Azpeitia , in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa–birthplace of Ignatius of Loyola.
I still have a faded photograph of my grandparents- as my father put it, “he tall and straight with a grey top hat, the height of a chimney and a grey frockcoat; she a little shriveled woman in a shawl with traces of her mother’s strong Basque features.”
My father was six months old when in 1906 a great earthquake shook Chile. The roof fell on him but he was saved by his nanny or Ama who threw herself on his cot and protected it from the falling masonry. My father was uninjured except for a small cut on his lip which scarred him slightly for the rest of his life. His and his Ama’s survival was no less miraculous than that of the rest of the Swinburne family . Much of Valparaiso was destroyed and there was severe damage across central Chile. Some 4,000 were estimated to have died.
My father’s parents were profoundly shocked by the experience and decided to leave for London with all their children. It must have been a sad departure for the Burns Swinburne family were happy in Chile and had an extended family. My grandmother Clara, for all her English and Basque origins, was a passionate Chilean patriot.
My father would later recall that for many years, once she and her family had settled in a large house in Wimbledon, Clara would celebrate Chilean Independence day, 18th September with her numerous Chilean friends in London. I was also told that the President of Chile himself had given her the gift of a little wooden table on which the actual Independence Treaty was signed. It was never quite explained who, if anyone, had ever signed at it – whether it was the colonial governor turned transitional president Count Mateo de Toro y Zambrano or the great liberator Bernardo O’Higgins remained a mystery. I looked at the table again just today. It’s a nice table but very small. Hard to imagine people signing documents on it. But its made of beautiful old Chilean wood and has my daughters’ toys in one draw, just where my mother used to keep them.
Let me fast forward now to to December 1981 when, recently recruited by FT, I was posted to Buenos Aires, accompanied by my wife, then an English teacher. An Argentine diplomat in London told me before I left that I should look forward to lots of good wine, and delicious steaks. It proved a rites of passage for me as a young journalist which brought my relationship with Chile down new unexpected paths.
Scarcely eight years earlier as a young university student , studying Modern Iberian and Latin American Studies at London University, I had found it hard to react with anything but huge distress to the news that a democratically elected government in Chile had been overthrown by a military coup in 1973.
Let’s put this emotion in context. My Spanish mother came from a liberal Catholic family who had been forced to flee Madrid and go into exile during the Spanish civil war after being threatened by left wing militias . I had been brought up between the UK and Spain where a Generalissimo called Franco allowed my Spanish family to return from exile and live in peace and relative prosperity. And yet I was shocked by the images of the Presidential palace in the Chilean capital Santiago being bombed by the air force and civilians being rounded up , tortured, and killed in the football stadium. They included Victor Jara, the singer and author of one of the most beautiful ballads I knew of then , called Yo Recuerdo Amanda . Jara had his fingers broken before he was killed.
And yet in Argentina that April 1982 , Pinochet’s Chile became a country I came to trust as an ally of the British and I developed a close relationship with Chilean diplomats in Buenos Aires who seemed to be very well informed.
Chile saw itself quite clearly threatened by the Argentine junta’s territorial ambitions and provided critical support to the British , most of it covert. The UK was allowed to make use of Punta Arenas, with RAF planes disguised in Chilean colours. Chile in turn provided the UK with human and signals intelligence on Argentine military movements. She also provided a safe haven for British special operations , as when several of its members turned up in a Santiago hotel after escaping across the border .
In many respects the Falklands crisis provided a graphic illustration of the primacy in policy-making of political expediency and opportunism rather than support for the international rule of laws.
Many years later, by which time I was a senior journalist with the FT, covering security and diplomatic affairs in London, I was assigned to cover General Pinochet’s arrest in London. I was as much surprised by it as he was. Some months before I had bumped into the General as we both attended mass at the Jesuit Church in Farm Street in London’s Mayfair. As I subsequently discovered and reported , he was on his way to a secret meeting with British Aerospace to discuss some British arms sale to Chile.
Whatever the feelings provoked by Pinochet’s arrest- and clearly Mrs Thatcher was not the only person who was incensed by it- there can be can be no doubt about its outcome. While Pinochet was held in the UK, Chilean political life lost much of its fear. It evolved in new positive direction, which ultimately paved the way for a consensual transition towards a democratic society, and political and economic stability of a kind that was exemplary to the rest of Latin America. Future historians will I am sure look back on these years as a key period in the consolidation of Chilean democracy.
But let me return to my Dad….
After the Falklands War was over, my parents came to visit us for the first time in Buenos Aires. These were difficult times. My wife has only just managed to get her job back after the closure of her English language school during the war. I had received a death threat. By contrast to these negatives, it struck my parents, my wife, and I that the situation provided a wonderful opportunity to visit Chile. After all, my father had not returned since leaving, aged six months- in 1906. Now entering the last years of his life aged 82, my father wanted very much to meet up with his Chilean extended family Swinburne with whom he had kept in touch by letter over the years.
So we set out from Buenos Aires, by plane to Mendoza and from there caught the bus to the Andean border. There was a strong mountain breeze blowing. I will never forget the site of my ageing father stepping out of the bus to have his passport checked, and then looking up at the Chilean flag fluttering against the sky, with tears of emotion in his eyes. It had taken him more than eight decades to return to the country his mother had never forgotten.
“When I saw the Chilean flag” , my father later wrote in his memories, “I realized that my feeling for the country was visceral, nothing to do with sentiment or memory. I had left Chile as an infant but it had evidently infected me in the womb as might a mother’s drugs or drink. Here I was coming back with a sense of recognition, as happens sometimes with a poem never seen.”
That evening several generations of Swinburnes congregated in the Las Condes neighborhood of Santiago and celebrated my father’s return with a party. We gathered under the stars drinking Chilean wine, one of the best in the world. My father made a short speech in his English accentuated Castilian – he had learnt his Spanish while serving as a British diplomat in Madrid in WW2. When he finished , cries of Viva Chile Viva Inglaterra rang out across the garden.
My father, much later, would wonder at the tapestry of our lives –“a jumble of multi-coloured threads and knots on one side, a day-to-day stitching of this and that, but on the whole a coherent pattern or picture of infinite variety and surprise…”
For me the process did not end there , it was barely half way through.
Within a year the same family clan that had celebrated my father’s return, gathered with no less a collective sense of joy and thanksgiving at the christening of our first adopted daughter Julia Isabel born in Santiago. She was destined to shine a huge light in our lives , just as did the arrival of our second adopted daughter Miriam , also born in Chile.
We would grow older, as our daughters would grow up, living mainly between England and Spain but always in touch with Chile through friends, through news, through books, and travel. These connections would touch us emotionally in many and varied ways: a visit to the cinema to see a beautiful film based on Skarmeta’s novel about a postman’s friendship with a poet; the sound of Andean pipes; a pair of lapis lazuli earrings; a good Chilean red wine warming one’s heart and soul.
As a family, we followed from start to finish the extraordinary saga of the Chilean miners who were buried under ground for weeks and yet whose survival would endure as a lasting testimony to a truly exemplary human endeavor – embracing as did it the faith and selfless ingenuity and generosity of spirit of the miners and those who came to their rescue, as well as the statesman ship of President Sebastian Piñera. The Virgin of La Candelaria , the country were my late father was born in the midst of an earthquake , as were our adopted daughters in the midst of poverty and repression, came to the mine of San Jose , performed her miracle, and then returned to her Church in Copiapo, stopping on the way to pray at the hospital where those rescued were temporarily housed.
Believe me I have had my fill of bad news stories over three decades in journalism. But this was a good news story that prevailed, on that involved human resilience, endeavour, and solidarity , underpinned by faith. The dramatic scenes both below and above ground, not just watched but accompanied by a global audience , showed how conditions of miners in Chile have changed, but also how much better they can be. A century ago, Baldomero Lillo, the country’s Emile Zola, wrote that down there was no distinction made between man and beast inside the mines . But the miners were nor forgotten by the world like so many in their profession have been in the past, but were elevated into a international cause as millions of others , beyond the mining community, identified with their plight.
Credit for acknowledging what humanity can achieve when there is a will, courage, and commitment to a noble purpose, must go to Chile’s President Piñera who within minutes of hearing of the mine’s collapse, cut short a trip to Ecuador to take personal charge of one of the most audacious search and rescue operations in modern times.
I want to begin to close my remarks by stating that I love football. So it is great to see Alexis Sanchez, who cut his spurs in Colo Colo, come to my team Barca. Great too to see Carlos Pellegrini doing so well coaching in Malaga. He should never have been pushed out of Real Madrid.
I love poetry…..Back in 1984 when we made that epic journey across the Andes with my parents, we travelled south to Viña del Mar in search of where my father had been born. Where the original Burns/Swinburne family house and garden had been, stood a department store. But the parish church had survived over the years and we found his name in the register of babtisms..
In my Battersea home among our Chilean mementoes , one stands out as one of my favorites: it is a framed piece of text and a broken clock that an artist friend of us gave to us as a present. Called Broken Glass, the text and the time recall the earthquake of 1906. The text says thus:
“These days I came back to my home in Valparaiso, after being away a long time. Huge cracks on the walks were just like wounds. Disheartening images of shattered glass covered the floors of the room. The clocks, also on the floor, grimly recorded the time of the earthquake…
We have to clean up, to put things back, and start all over again although it’s hard to find things in the middle of the mess, to collect one’s thoughts. My last work was a translation from Romeo and Juliet and a long poem ….- a poem that was never completed….
Help me , love poem, to make things whole again, to sing in spite of the pain..
It s true that the world does not cleanse itself of wars, does not wash off the blood, does not get over its hate. It’s true. Yet it is equally true that we are moving towards a realization : the violent ones are reflected in the mirror of the world, and their faces are not pleasant to look at, not even to themselves.
And I go on believing in the possibility of love. I am convinced that there will be mutual understanding, that things will be achieved, in spite of the suffering, in spite of the blood, in spite of the broken glass.”
I read this to one of my Chilean cousins on a visit he made to London once. “ Who wrote such wonderful lines? he asked me, having not read them before.
Pablo Neruda I answered. I felt Chile had been reconciled in our London home. Viva Gran Bretaña! Viva la Republica de Chile tierra araucana poblada , entre otros, por españoles e ingleses. Many thanks
Delivered at The Anglo-Chilean Society’s Christmas Dinner, Imperial College’s Dean House, December 6th 2012
