I blame my mother, which is not very gentlemanly of me, but probably accurate. She was born in Brazil and spent her childhood there. In fact she never spoke English until she came here for the first time as an eleven-year-old. She and her older sister Helena, with whom she was telepathically close, developed a language of their own. At least, that’s how it seemed to their children. It contained elements of the four languages which they and the rest of their family spoke – English, Portuguese, German and French. 

It was a weird, mangled hybrid, with here a pronoun from one language, there an adjective from another, followed by a noun from a third. But then, over and above all that, were coinages of their own – mongrel words, acronyms, nicknames and goodness knows what else. They often used it conspiratorially, when they wanted to communicate without anyone else understanding. Again, that’s how it seemed to us children, but then it could hardly have seemed otherwise. It certainly gave them great pleasure and they would whoop with delight as they used it. 

Once, when I was about ten, I pretended to have cracked their code and it gave them the fright of their lives. My mother was in Brazil during the 1930s, when the family had lost its money in the depression. She was teaching dance in Rio to help support some of her young relatives, but then, when the Second War started, she came back to England as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse. In the big hospital complex at Chartham, just outside Canterbury, there was a paratrooper convalescing after being shot in France and saved by the care of an American field hospital. The two of them met at one of the big Saturday night dances and he became my father. He also wrote a book about parachuting, called The Red Devils, which sold for sixpence. She never went back to Brazil, but the house where I grew up was full of presences from that country. These sometimes took the form of cousins – first ones or others so far removed that I never did grasp the connection. There were also exotic bags of sugar in thick blue wrappers which my mother’s brother managed to send over while rationing hung on into the 1950s. And there were records of Brazilian music, which gave my ear an appetite that has never gone. 

Some of it was on the highbrow side, like the compositions of Heitor Villa-Lobos who, I suppose, was about the most famous classical composer in South America. Some was gloriously trashy; “Copacabana Princesinha do Mar” comes to mind, and other corny, touristic celebrations of the country’s natural splendour. Not a patch on the stuff you hear now from such as Gilberto Gil or Seu Jorge. There’s no way that I would lay claim to a dual culture; it’s just that there was routine mention of these strange, alluring names, for example the famous Villa Boas brothers, who lived and worked with the Indians of Xingu; the footballers like Didi and Garrincha from the pre-Pele era; the novelist Jorge Amado, who wrote so much about Salvador de Bahia, the cosmopolitan town where my mother was born. 

The time I pretended to have cracked the code was when I had got my Portuguese-speaking cousins to teach me the worst profanities they knew. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them – it just felt good to install the capability. They also taught me the words for “I have understood everything” – escoute todo. One day my mother and aunt were in the kitchen, in the middle of one of their multi-lingual sessions. It was raised-voice stuff, obviously a diatribe which they were working up, and the only two words I could understand were “Alan” and “Michael”, my brother. I burst through the door and dropped the bomb – escoute todo!  They looked at each other as if someone – but who? – had betrayed them. Something unusual happened – silence. A long one, probably the best part of two seconds. 

My mother, photographed above in Brazil in her youth, when she was a professional ballet dancer and teacher, died last year. She was 93. Her grandson, my fourth child, was five. He’s called Arthur, after my father, but his Portuguese-speaking relatives refer to him as Artursinho. Three years earlier, when she turned 90, I asked her if she would speak her memories of Brazil into a tape recorder. Ninety years was a big gap for three generations and, as she volunteered, “ I could go at any time.” She started; it was 1916, the middle of the Great War, and she was three years old. The Bahia seafront was hardly developed. Three women were walking towards her along the sand; her mother Lenchen, her grandmother Vovo and her great-grandmother Bisa; the link went back to within touching distance of Napoleonic Europe. The story is that in the middle of the nineteenth century one of our ancestors was en route to Buenos Aires. On the way down, the ship put in at Bahia where he saw a pretty girl on the quayside…As you’ll see from Augusta, there is another faraway country of which we know nothing. It is called Cambio Wechsel and we know nothing of it because it doesn’t exist. Yet it is where Alfredo, the subject of Patrick’s biography comes from. And, as you’ll also see, the charged relationship between an author and his biographee is at the heart of the action. But why make up a place when so many perfectly adequate ones already exist? I haven’t got an answer, but maybe the play will do some explaining. What I do know is that a few people seem aware of its existence and have nodded knowingly at the mention of its name. It’s great to have got the real thing – I mean the Brazilian TV star Antonia Frering – for the title role, and I want to thank her for cleaning up my Portuguese. I also want to thank the director Chrys Salt for all her help and support through my many drafts of the play; and the late Patrick Trevor-Roper, brother of the historian Hugh, for his book, The World Through Blunted Sight. Augusta is a painter, and his writing about the relationship between flawed vision and perceived truth was an eye-opener.