The two men in khaki wielding guns.

I would have been five years old. It is one of my earliest memories and, as is often the case with these, vague and more of a series of snapshots than anything with a narrative. There was noise on the street and i run to the brim of the 'azotea', the kind of terrace overlooking Calle El Cristo in our house in Catia. There is a black patrol car across the road and two men dressed in khaki uniforms are wielding hand guns and shooting. My father suddenly grabs me and dives to the floor, lest be are seen by those men and shot at. It was January 1958 and only many years later did I understand the significance of this, as well as the danger: there was a revolution in progress that would overthrow the military dictatorship of Genearl Perez-Jiménez. Men in uniform would have been loyal, police or secret service and they were completely in the wrong place for their safety, in a working class neighbourhood that would have boiled in anger of the regime.