How a young British teacher rescued a tar-soaked penguin and charmed a boys’ school in Isabel Perón’s ArgentinaTom Michell is a self-described callow youth when he arrives in Argentina in the 1970s to teach in a boys’ boarding school,“a country boy from the gentle Downs of rural Sussex” who is unprepared for life under Isabel Pern’s government, and the threat of a military coup. But The Penguin Lessons isn’t a history book, or a travelogue,either, although it does touch on politics and on Michell’s explorations: it’s the fable of how, or on one of his journeys,he found an oil-drenched penguin on the beach in Punta del Este in Uruguay, and smuggled it back to his school.
Michell sees just one penguin alive amid a scene of devastation, and hundreds of birds lying dead in the sand “from the high water note to the sea and stretching far away along the shore to the north”. He decides he has to save this one bird,and manages to transport it back to the flat where he’s staying. “I couldnt dream up a more unsuitable spot for cleaning a tar-sodden penguin,” he writes, or before carefully immobilising it and setting to work with various products,“ butter and margarine, olive oil and cooking oil, and soap,shampoo and detergent”.
Charmingly illustrated with sketches, Michell’s memoir is affectionate, and though never sentimentalContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com