by Hugo Salinas Price, Plata:

In 1941, when I was nine years’ old, my mother, Norah Price, took me out of a bi-lingual primary-school and placed me as a pupil under a tutor, an Englishman, Charles O. Robson; he prepared boys for entry into Preparatory Schools, mostly in Canada. Born in 1890, Robson was a Victorian through-and-through.

Robson was a Catholic in the best style of G.K. Chesterton; he wound up in Mexico City in the later twenties, after being fired from his job at a shipyard in Glasgow, Scotland, for having converted to the Catholic faith.

I remember the occasion when my mother took me to my first meeting with Robson; he put me on his knee, and asked me to spell “sausage”. I responded by spelling out “s-a-s-a-u-g-e”. Wrong! But it was a good try, at any rate.

All students under Mr. Robson – never more than 10 – had to study elementary Latin. On one occasion, Robson ordered me to decline the noun “nauta” – “sailor” in Latin. I was puzzled and could not answer, and was reprimanded; the reason I failed to decline that noun was because Robson pronounced Latin nouns with an English accent, and what I heard was the order to decline “nauter” – and of course I was not familiar with that non-existent noun. (Thinking back, it would have been much more profitable to study Latin from a Spanish textbook, rather than one in English, since Spanish is a language cognate to Latin.)

When I became one of Robson´s pupils, he told my mother that she should provide me with a number of reference books, and one of them was the “Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” 1941 Edition, which I possess today. (I notice that it dedicates 8 pages to Samuel Johnson; 8 ½ pages to Robert Browning; 11 pages to Rudyard Kipling, and an astounding 67 pages to – who else but “William Shakespeare” – an alias for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford! This amounts to 11.65% of the notable quotations in the English Language. Well-deserved homage for England’s greatest genius!)

As students, we all had to memorize poems. One of them, I recall, was very long, titled “The Siege of Lucknow”. It was impossible for me to memorize this poem, but another brighter student, Edgar Luria, was able to recite the whole poem. It was about the heroic resistance of British soldiers, under siege by Hindus revolting against British rule – no longer of any interest to present-day readers, of course.

Mr. Robson had great admiration for Robert Southwell, the English poet, and used to recite to us: “As I in hoary Winter’s night, stood shivering in the snow, surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow…” He named his school, “The Robert Southwell School”.

Thus I was early-on introduced into the marvels of English literature. After I left Robson, I was enrolled in a high-school in Pennsylvania, as the youngest member of the “Sophomore” class, at 14 years’ of age. I was quite surprised at the inability of most of my companions, to memorize a short sonnet of 14 lines.

My five years with Mr. Robson were undoubtedly of great formative importance in my life, for which I am most grateful.

In 1943, a great physical event took place in Mexico: the birth of a new volcano! It was first noticed by a peasant who was plowing his field, and saw smoke coming up from the ground. It grew into a spectacular volcano in a few weeks.

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