The chickens were young and tender and the fat that dripped into the burning coals gave off an enchanting odour. I can remember one afternoon when our neighbour’s servants roasted three chickens. Sometimes, in the morning, our whole family stood outside the windows of the rich man’s house and listened to the musical sizzling of thick strips of bacon or ham. We hung about and took all the wonderful smells of the food into our beings. Now, this rich man’s servants were always frying and cooking something good, and the aroma of the food was wafted down to us form the windows of the big house. His house was so tall that his children could look in the window of our house and watched us played, or slept, or ate, when there was any food in the house to eat. While we boys and girls played and sang in the sun, his children stayed inside and kept the windows closed. We had as a next door neighbour a very rich man, whose sons and daughters seldom came out of the house. Father’s farm had been destroyed in 1918 by one of our sudden Philippine floods, so several years afterwards we all lived in the town though he preferred living in the country. When I was four, I lived with my mother and brothers and sisters in a small town on the island of Luzon.
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