Mysterious Wisdom (32 page)

 

 

The letters written by Palmer and Hannah from Italy are irregular. They reached the Linnells haphazardly, sometimes in the wrong order, sometimes two at once; long and (as far as Hannah's parents were concerned) nerve-wracking interludes often fell between them, provoking terrible anxieties and leading to angry recriminations. Read all together, however, they give a vivacious account of foreign adventures. Palmer, who would pull out his pen as soon as the tea was drawing, had rather less time than his wife for writing; but their missives – his often poured onto the page without revisions or erasures, hers full of apologies for not writing sooner, for having bad handwriting, broken pens or for being too brief – bring their experiences to vivid life. ‘An account of all the novelties which I have seen, if hung from the top of the Monument, would trail upon London Bridge,'
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Palmer said.

He and his new wife observed everything wide-eyed, from the extravagant masquerades of the Rome carnival to a papal procession in which a white satin pontiff was borne aloft like ‘something the English boys carry about on the fifth of November'.
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They remarked on the ‘dear precious shining heavenly faces' of the ‘poor barefooted pilgrims'
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arriving at churches to pray. They witnessed a monk securing his dinner by offering fish-market traders a coloured print of the Virgin to kiss in exchange for a small gift from each of their stalls: ‘I think in Billingsgate he would find himself as much out of his element as the fish themselves,'
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Palmer observed dryly. They met a curly-headed urchin who had been christened after Christ's prophetic cousin: ‘I saw John the Baptist this morning eat a very large raw Cucumber for breakfast,'
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Hannah said. And they watched a funeral in which boys dressed as angels carried the bier, their large pasteboard wings knocking against everything, and making, Hannah noted, the most uncelestial noise. They listened to nightingales, saw the oxen of Theocritus and the frescos of the Florentines, ate pomegranates and oranges and sketched cypress trees planted in the days of Ariosto. They crammed their letters full of detailed observations of everything: from the way that bedsheets, shaken out of windows, scattered passers-by with bugs, through how swaddled babies were hung up on hooks to keep them out of the way, to the heat of the door handles which could not even be touched. Nothing was too small to mention – from a screaming match with a curricle driver to the loss of a parasol.

The weather proved a matter of constant discussion. One moment Palmer was shivering in Rome ‘wearing always two shirts and two waistcoats lined with flannel – and sometimes an India rubber cloak',
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a few months later he was sweltering through the high summer of Pompeii. ‘It is a labour here to lift my hand for a dip of ink,' he moaned, though at least he was being baked in a ‘pleasantly ventilated oven'.
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In Florence a stifling heatwave reduced him to the consistency ‘of the jelly fish which we find on the sands'.
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Food provided a source of at least as much fuss. They started off, Hannah assured her mother, by eating only the sort of things that they could be sure of: fowls, beefsteak, fish and veal, and, since all was ‘cooked in the French way, covered with sauce and curiosities',
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they left anything they didn't recognise. At first Palmer considered Italian cookery ‘most hateful' – ‘nothing portly, nothing round, majestic or profound in it'
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– but in Rome he mastered a modestly priced bill of fare and, from the 580 dishes on offer, found six he could manage, though macaroni, he warned Richmond, was ‘vile rubbish . . . most constipating . . . and hard of digestion', its effects only rectified by ‘blessed bowel opening' oranges, grapes and figs.
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But they soon grew accustomed to foreign eating habits and came to relish raw ham and fresh fruit for breakfast or the ample ‘fat of the land' fare of mountain dwellers. Every dinner seemed to be ‘better studied than the last',
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the increasingly portly Palmer declared. In the course of his Italian sojourn he grew so fat that a visiting friend reported back to his family that he stood ‘like a fixed easel'. ‘Well you are likely to come home a man of substance in some sense,'
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the sardonic Linnell remarked.

The Palmers described all their encounters with the natives, from the cries of ‘
Piccola Inglese
', pursuing Hannah down the streets, to the body odour of the locals which Palmer found more problematic than their beliefs – though it was not just the human population that could be troublesome. The local fauna proved equally threatening, from the pack of fierce dogs which Palmer charged with his iron-tipped walking stick, through the wolves that supposedly prowled the wild mountain tracks (and which Palmer, hearing strange rustlings, one day bravely confronted, only to find that ‘lo! up came a goat!'
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), to the snakes and the scorpions that lurked under beds. And though, in the long run, none of these creatures caused them any difficulties (a scorpion was even popped into a box as a present for Hannah's little brother), the mosquitoes turned out to be a constant torment. Palmer and Hannah spent many a sleepless night rubbing themselves alternately with soap and vinegar, pacing their rooms and scratching, before eventually one day deciding to travel ten miles by donkey (Anny falling off on the way when the girth suddenly broke) specifically to buy nets. Even these didn't entirely solve the problem since the nights were so hot that even a layer of gauze could become unbearable. The fleas – F sharps, they called them, F for their initial letter and because their bites were so sharp (whereas the bed bugs were known as B flats, B for their initial and because the insects were flat) – proved to be a particular trial. Palmer suffered ‘perpetual minute venesection', he said. ‘I suppose daily body washes are peculiarly tempting to vermin,'
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he groaned, unwilling to give up the personal hygiene that ever since Shoreham had remained a point of pride.

Despite such tribulations, however, the Palmers soon began to feel at ease in Italy. In Rome, they met up round a trestle table every evening for dinner and animated discussion with a colony of English artists. They discovered a Protestant church, and they quickly learnt to make friends with fellow travellers, a cast of characters that included a Mr Macdonald, a Scotsman who angrily stormed out of the room when one day a rude comment about the bagpipes was passed (Palmer was not the offender but tried to make peace, he assured Linnell) and the artist Edward Lear whom they met in Civitella and who played the flute for an impromptu ball. A year into her trip, Hannah was not remotely worried to find herself travelling in the company of complete strangers. ‘I made myself at home with them in minutes,' she wrote, ‘though at first they gave me the usual fashionable glare which I am now so used to that it does not in the least discompose me.'
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Soon the Palmers were taking siestas and speaking passable Italian. Hannah befriended the locals with particular ease and an Italian lady in Papignia was so grieved at the prospect of their eventual parting that, amid profuse tears, they exchanged locks of hair. In her second winter in Rome, Hannah started Italian lessons with a man whose brother was a captain in the Swiss Guard. The Palmers became seasoned travellers. They found out how to face down the wily
veturino
drivers, to bargain with shop keepers and boil up coffee in a tin in their room. They learnt to carry their own soap because there was never any on the washstand, to sleep between blankets when the sheets were damp, to hire a boy to fend off the people who would crowd them while they were sketching and, when communicating with locals, to exchange decorous English manners for boldly flashing eyes and a loudly raised voice. Unfortunately, it was only many years after leaving that Palmer learnt that burning camphor could keep mosquitoes away.

As soon as she arrived in a new lodging, Hannah would pull out her knitting and make herself at home. ‘Travelling is nothing when one is used to it,' she airily informed her sister. ‘A clean coarse mattress in a little hot room without a single decoration'
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came to feel like a blessing. The Italians, she enthused, were ‘truly delightful people'; she praised their warm-hearted affection, the way they would jump up and hug. ‘We are such a cold set of people,' she remarked.
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She was particularly charmed by the way that the villagers would kiss her hand in the street and say ‘
Buon-giorno Eccelenza
'.
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They were ‘wonderful people in spite of their fleas',
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Palmer declared. ‘I have learned more of mankind since I left England than I did all my life before . . . [I] fancy I know how to get through the world pretty well.'
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Though the Linnells had had qualms before the wedding of their daughter, Hannah's honeymoon letters were designed to reassure them. ‘The propriety of our marriage is a thing I never doubt for a moment,' she told her mother a few months after leaving. ‘If Mr Palmer had come abroad without me you would have lost me altogether as I am quite sure I should not have lived.' ‘I am fatter and better than I have ever been in my life.' ‘Mr Palmer is kinder to me than even I could have expected.'
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‘We live in increasing mutual delight in each other's society'. ‘We have not had one quarrel yet, and I do not think there is any fear with so kind a creature.'
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Palmer, in his turn, was equally enthusiastic. ‘Anny is exactly the wife I wanted,' he told Linnell. ‘My anticipations of happiness' in her society ‘have been most fully realised and every day I think brings an increase of affection without exception or alloy.'
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He especially liked her high-spirited moods. ‘I had no notion she had so much sparkle and buoyancy,' he declared one evening when, fearing that she might have been unsettled by the bustle of the Roman carnival, he had approached her ‘thinking to comfort her very tenderly' only to find to his amazement that she had leapt up and, bursting into laughter, had started to dance and sing. ‘I thought myself a tolerably merry animal,' wrote Palmer, ‘but I am quite a Simon Pure compared with Anny who is all dance and frisk and frolic.'
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The young couple's missives offer glimpses of close mutual happiness: of Anny giggling as she mischievously erases a bit of a letter that Palmer is writing, or laughing open-mouthed as her husband, kneeling on the carpet before her, attempts to stuff three large onions into a duck. When Julia Richmond brings news that Anny has permission to draw a privately owned Titian portrait, Palmer is so pleased that he falls upon the floor and, kicking like a lady in hysterics, seizes a tambourine before leaping up to perform a Bacchic dance. Linnell would no doubt have considered the response a trifle undignified, though the Richmonds would more probably have understood, for it was in a letter to them that Hannah told of how she had had to tick her husband off for his ‘most beastly' trick of trying to cram as many grapes as possible into his mouth at once ‘till the juice ran out of each side, like the lions of the Roman fountains!'
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