Man Who Gave Me A Biscuit

A coming-of-age memoir of love, rebellion, and political awakening, set amid Argentina’s buried history of Indigenous genocide, military coups, and disappearing women.When Penny Woolcock set out to write a memoir about growing up in in the little-known British Community of Buenos Aires, Argentina, she anticipated telling the story of a stifling childhood where girls like her were trained for marriage and gossiping at tea parties. But, when researching this revelatory book, she discovered that behind the genteel façade of afternoon cake and games of hockey lay a dark story of genocide and amnesia.Along with seven million other Europeans, Woolcock’s great grandparents emigrated from the United Kingdom and settled in Argentina at the middle of the 19th century. Penny spoke only English at home, attended British schools where the history taught was all about the Tudors and the Stuarts, shopped at the only Harrods outside Knightsbridge, and remained oblivious to the world just beyond her front door.When Woolcock first learned about the genocide of Indigenous people in Argentina she imagined it had been carried out many centuries ago. She was shocked to discover that the so-called Conquest of the Desert—which took place, in fact, on the fertile lands of the Pampas and Patagonia—had occurred fifteen years after her great grandparents’ arrival. The genocide was funded largely by British investors. Anglican missionaries in Tierra del Fuego spread deadly diseases with their Christianity. And Scottish and English “Indian hunters” were paid a pound a head to kill Selknam and Yamana people when they defended their lands. Alongside establishing the banking system, railways and meat packing plants, the British were crucial in shaping the explicitly white supremacist Argentine constitution.Woolcock weaves memories of a tumultuous adolescence, which saw her join a radical theatre group and fall in love with the most unsuitable man she could find, with the legacy of violence and authoritarianism that still permeates her country of birth: six coups including the murderous Junta of the 1970’s and early 80’s; the surreal idiosyncrasies of Peronism; and the madness of today’s President Javier Milei, whose key advisor is his dead mastiff, Conan.

Penny Woolcock was born in Buenos Aires in the mid-20th century and raised in a conservative British expatriate community that few know exists. Expected to conform to strict social norms, including marrying a suitable Anglo-Argentine boy, Woolcock felt stifled by her upbringing. After finishing school, she rebelled by joining a radical theatre company, running off with a man considered entirely unsuitable, and becoming a single mother. From these unconventional beginnings she built a remarkable career as an award-winning filmmaker, opera director for the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the English National Opera in London, and a solo artist with exhibitions of her work.