My ten Cadillacs
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Meredith
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When I was nine, I won ten Cadillacs from my father in a bet. The deal was that I'd be able to claim my luxury American gas guzzlers when I was twenty-one. Until then, my father reserved the right to win them back through further bets.
The marque had a lot to do with my father's aspirations. The multinational oil company he worked for gave its employees cars precisely commensurate with their fingerhold on the slope of the corporate pyramid. At the time, my father was driving a middlebrow Ford with a radio and white-walled tyres. A Cadillac Eldorado or De Ville was a distant future prize but, given his temperament and the forces that were propelling him through life, I've no doubt he had his eye fixed on it even then.
The year was 1954. We were living in Guatemala, a small Central American country prone to earthquakes and social inequity. My father was manager of Shell's Guatemala operation, whose function was to market imported oil products around the country. The subject of our bet was the quetzal, one of the western hemisphere's showiest birds and Guatemala's national emblem. With iridescent green tail feathers up to three metres long, the quetzal lived in the remote cloud forests of Guatemala's central highlands. I'd been learning about it at school, so when my father claimed one day that it was extinct, I pounced.
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is."
"Betcha it's not."
He looked me in the eye for a moment, sucking on his pipe and making
it gurgle like the bathroom sink draining.
"Righto. I'll bet on that."
He was prone to using British idioms like that. "Righto", "righty-ho", "goodo", "cheerio", "snafu", "tally-ho, chaps" and "jolly good show", that kind of thing. He'd probably grown up with some of them in Chile before the war and picked up a good many more in the RAF during it. I was at the American School in Guatemala City and had acquired up-to-the-minute yankspeak. When he uttered those quaint expressions alone to me, I would jeer at him inwardly; when there were other people around to hear him, the sweat would break out on my upper lip.
"Okay," I said. "Twenty Cadillacs."
"Good grief! No, just one."
"Ten then."
"Righto, ten."
ALTHOUGH MY FATHER WAS AN OIL MAN, he could just as easily have been a detergent man or a home-appliances man. He would have succeeded in any business that held out to an impatient rookie the shiny prospect of a place at the top of the heap. This impatience may have had much to do with circumstance: he saw the business world as offering him an escape route from mediocrity and provincialism and he couldn't wait to hit the road.
Despite his skills and a growing bank of experience, my father insisted in later life that luck played a major, if not the major, role in his business success. He conceded that there were other people more talented and more clever than he in Shell but that he leapfrogged over them because he happened to be in the right places at the right times and knew the right people. He was, he said, the last of the uneducated to become a senior executive in the company.
Luck and contacts played their role from the start. My father joined Shell in Santiago, the Chilean capital, in 1937, at the age of fifteen. His father, Lionel Meredith, got him the job. Lionel was a Freemason; the general manager of Shell's Chilean operation was also a Freemason but junior to him. So Lionel pulled rank to give his son a leg-up.
Lionel, a stocky, good-looking fitness fanatic, had emigrated from England's midlands in 1906 to work in the nitrate industry in northern Chile. Nitrate, which yielded nitrogen for explosives, fertiliser and a range of chemicals, was Chile's biggest foreign-cash earner, although the industry was mainly British-owned. In 1910, Lionel married Maria Concepción Pinto Ceballos (always called "Conchita"), the youngest of eighteen children of a Sorbonne-educated Ecuadorian doctor and his Peruvian wife. Conchita produced a daughter and five sons, the youngest of whom was Wilfred, my father, born in 1922.
While the nitrate business flourished, Lionel and Conchita's children led charmed lives, spending their free hours horse riding in the Atacama Desert, swimming in pools and the Pacific and playing tennis. But the idyll began to crumble in 1924, when Conchita died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six. Then a combination of the Depression and the growing output of synthetic nitrate killed the Chilean nitrate industry. Jobless, penniless and wifeless, Lionel ended up in Santiago in about 1927 selling insurance. Life for the Merediths had become far less carefree.
Having inherited Lionel's love of physical activity, as well as his good looks, Wilfred did better at sport than academic subjects at school. The most useful skills he brought to his first job were shorthand and typing. He started as secretary, filing clerk and dogsbody to the general manager's female secretary, who took advantage of the handsome lad in the filing cupboard on more than one occasion, though not against his will.
After a while the routine became so boring that not even the hanky-panky could compensate. The only job worth having in the organisation, he decided, was the general manager's. He saw that the way to get it was to study for a qualification, gain a reputation for hard work and foster useful contacts. So he embarked on a correspondence course in automotive engineering and began to put in long hours at the office. Three years later, with a diploma in automotive engineering in his pocket, he was posted as sales rep to Antofagasta, a copper and nitrate port on Chile's mid-north coast.
WORLD WAR II INTERRUPTED WILF'S UPWARD MARCH ONLY BRIEFLY. Like many of his fellow expats in Chile, he volunteered to fight for Britain. Unlike most, he had a good war, flying bombers for the RAF and emerging from it unscathed, self-confident and itching to celebrate life. Having married his long-time girlfriend, Joan Irvine, another Chilean-born British expat, he was back in Antofagasta in 1950 as Shell's branch manager. By then he and Joan had three children – me (born in England in 1946) and my two younger sisters (Gill and Jean, born in Chile).
Despite his flourishing career and the nightly parties in Anto, by 1951 Wilf was beginning to feel he was slogging up a dead end. The most he could hope for after a lifelong Shell career in Chile would be the post of general manager there. He wanted more than that. He wanted to jump from the little pond into the big pond, from Shell Chile to Shell International, "to a life where horizons were broader, where I could prove myself to be as good as any other in the Shell Group".
Shell International was Big Daddy. This supranational corporation was an entity set up by Royal Dutch Shell to manage its subsidiaries around the world. Royal Dutch Shell was born in 1903 out of a merger between the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (founded in 1890) and The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company, a United Kingdom firm (founded in 1833) that handled cooking and lamp oil, though initially it imported seashells for British collectors. In the early twentieth century, Shell expanded vigorously, buying or setting up subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The immediate post-World War II period marked the start of a worldwide boom in oil demand that paralleled the explosion in car sales.
For some time my father had been suggesting to Shell Chile's general manager that a trip or posting outside the country was bound to sharpen a young man's business skills. Early in 1952 his hints paid off: he was to be sent on a temporary assignment to Guatemala, though he'd still be on the Chile payroll. It was his big break, "one of those chances that hardly ever comes in a whole lifetime", as he said of it later, another of those turning points that he ascribed to luck or the hidden hand of a sponsor or patron somewhere in the corporation.
His hunger for this posting was put to the test on the morning we stepped off a disintegrating DC3 at Guatemala City's airport. The British local manager, one of the Shell dignitaries who met us, handed my father a telegram as soon as they were done with greetings. Its message was that Lionel had died in Chile while we'd been en route. To have returned to Chile for his father's funeral might have stalled Wilf's career right then. He read the telegram in silence, folded it, put it in his jacket pocket and got on with the business at hand.
We moved into the departing manager's house. Called "Las Brisas" ("The Breezes"), it had two storeys and stuccoed walls and was our biggest and most luxurious so far, though it had no phone. It came with three servants, all Mayan: a gardener with a torn ear and a grudge against the colonising race; a sad crone, the kitchen maid, who drank and had a disturbing way with a carving knife; and a sweet, plump housemaid named Marta who loved children.
My father started travelling a day or two after taking over the job. After touring Shell's facilities in Guatemala, he started on neighbouring countries. During his trips, my mother's anxiety filled the house like a fine aerosol, and the replica Roman broadsword that normally stood on the mantelpiece migrated to her bedside. She'd sit in a wicker chair on the back patio, smoking du Mauriers, darning socks or writing letters as hummingbirds drank from the honeysuckle on the balustrade. I'd sometimes find her there when I came home from school. We'd have tea and biscuits that Marta brought us on a tray, and my mother would occasionally gaze beyond the honeysuckle and the kikuyu lawn to the high wall at the bottom of the garden. A ladder was propped permanently against it. The gardener lived on the other side in a shack with his family. He'd toss bricks over the wall from his side if he knew I was nearby on our side.