What the Traveller Saw (2 page)

O
F ALL THE COUNTRIES
I have ever been to, Italy is the one I feel and know and understand best, by which I mean that I know Italy intuitively rather than in the sense of having accumulated a mass of factual information about it. Its politics are impossible to understand and its history, apart from its artistic history, peculiarly baffling. One soon gets fed up with Guelphs and Ghibellines. I find that what really interest me most about Italy are its inhabitants.

I was twenty-two years old when I first set eyes on it through the periscope of a submarine. What I saw, against the sun in the late afternoon of an August day in 1942, was a low-lying coast shimmering in the heat, an undulating black line, like some minor tremor on the Richter scale, which might have been anywhere.

That night, when my companions and I hauled our canoes up out of the surf on this same coast, for the first time in my life – although I had travelled something like one and a half times round the world already – I found myself in Europe; that is, if you can actually call Sicily a part of Europe, or even a part of Italy. The important thing is that at that time I thought it was.

My impressions, because of how we had arrived, were somewhat different from those received by more conventional visitors. They were of a sandy shore with surf booming on to it, concrete blockhouses, barbed wire entanglements and, somewhere ahead of us, German dive bombers coming in to land.

After cutting our way through the barbed wire we met our first Italian living thing, an old white horse in a field. It was difficult to think of it as an enemy horse but if it had decided to start whinnying or galloping around it could easily have brought down on us a horde of the enemy. Instead, it preserved a benevolent neutrality and went on eating its dinner.

After this we became imbrangled in a vineyard in which I ate my first bunch of Italian grapes. They were not particularly nice as they were still unripe and had been recently sprayed with what I identified after the war, when I began to learn about grapes and wine, as copper sulphate.

There then followed an encounter with some very nasty dogs in a farmyard – savage dogs on long chains were, I was later to learn, a feature of most Italian farmyards – but after this, as we neared the airfield we had come to attack, we began to have our first encounters with European people, presumably Italians; dark figures who sidled up to us out of a darker darkness, emitting noises that sounded like, ‘Eh! Eh! Eh!’, and then, getting no reply, disappearing as quickly as they had come, no doubt as frightened of us as we were of them.

How much that, then ostensibly lonely, shore had since changed (in fact it was swarming with German as well as Italian soldiery), was evident when I returned to it a couple of years ago to find a rather low-class seaside resort with
alberghi
and
pensioni
forming a continuous barrier along the shore, which, if they had been there some forty-five years previously, would have been much more difficult to negotiate than wire entanglements, while the long pipes which now ran seawards from them would have ensured that we were engulfed in sewage even before we set foot on the shore.

The following morning, having spent some hours swimming about in the Mediterranean, and failing to re-join the submarine, with Mount Etna, our first Italian volcano, smoking away overhead, we were picked up by the first Italian
fishermen we had ever seen who were sufficiently kindly, having saved our lives, to make unthinkable the idea of banging them on the head and trying to get to Malta in their boat.

And as we chugged into the harbour of Catania I had my first sight of an Italian city beside the sea, as I had always imagined it would be, just as Rex Whistler might have painted it, with baroque domes and Renaissance
palazzi
, all golden in the early morning sun.

We were hurried off the boat and up through narrow streets to a Fascist headquarters with a picture of II Duce on the wall where, minus our trousers, which we had lost at sea, we met our first Blackshirts. They consigned us to a fortress in the moat of which one of their number, more excited than the rest, said we would be shot at dawn the following day. In spite of not knowing until some time later that this fate had befallen a previous party, we believed him. But we weren’t shot. Instead we were taken to Rome and kept prisoners in the barracks of a posh cavalry regiment. Here we tasted our first, real Italian food. It came from the officers’ mess and was delicious,
pasta
and
peperoni
, and our first Italian wine. From the window of my room, which was high up under the eaves and very hot, all I could see of Rome was an officer exercising a charger of the tan in a courtyard. A whole decade was to pass before I would again visit Rome in August.

In the spring of 1943, about nine months after I was captured, a number of us were sent to a rather superior prison camp situated in what is known as the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the River Po flows on its way from its source in the Cottian Alps on the French frontier to the Adriatic. This camp was in a disused orphanage on the edge of a large village called Fontanellato, which is now very close to the Autostrada del Sole, and the nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road that runs through the
pianura
in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.

There, once a week, parties of us were allowed to go for
route marches in the surrounding country under a general parole that we would not try to escape, but we were nevertheless still heavily guarded. The route chosen deliberately avoided villages.

We walked along flat, dusty roads on which we rarely saw a motor car, only cyclists and carts drawn by oxen; past wheat fields, fields where what resembled miniature forests of maize (Indian corn) were growing, in which I longed to hide myself and make my escape. We marched along the foot of high, grass-grown embankments, known as
argine
, built to protect the land from the torrents that at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the nearby River Po, and also from the Po itself, a powerful, dangerous and unpredictable stream.

We also saw fields of tomato plants that when ripe would be used to make
salsa di pomodoro
, sugar beet, groves of poplars, the trunks of which, soaring up overhead, were like the pillars in a cathedral, endless rows of vines which produced the naturally fizzy red wine known as
Lambrusco.
And we saw rambling, red-tiled farmhouses, some of them very large, with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese and the inevitable savage dog on a running wire. And there were barns, sometimes with open doors, through which we could see big, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semidarkness. We were permanently hungry and it was strange to think that, apart from the meals I had been served in the cavalry barracks in Rome, I had never eaten a proper Italian meal in Italy – all the food I had eaten in the prison camps had been cooked by British cooks.

On these walks we saw very few people, probably they were ordered to make themselves scarce. Most of those we did see were
contadini
, bent double working in the fields and all wearing straw hats with huge brims to protect themselves from the fearful heat of the sun. Sometimes they waved but because of these hats it was difficult to know who waved, men or women or both. Others, women and girls mostly, seen
momentarily through half-closed green shutters on the upper floors of the farmhouses, also waved a bit apprehensively. No one was obviously unfriendly. And in all these expanses of
pianura
there was not a tractor to be seen.

Our presence in the orphanage provoked lively interest among the inhabitants of our village, Fontanellato, and as the local cemetery was located alongside the orphanage large numbers of them, most of them women, both old and young (the young men were mostly in the armed forces), some of them on bicycles, took more numerous opportunities to pay their respects to the dead than they had done before we arrived on the scene. In fact I first saw the girl I was subsequently to marry on her way to the cemetery with a group of friends, all of them on bikes. I waved to her from one of the windows overlooking the main road. She waved back and I was shot at by a sentry who was careful to miss, which was a warning against looking out of those particular windows.

On 8 September 1943 the Italian government asked for an armistice. On the following day we all broke out of the orphanage with the connivance of the Italian commandant and took to the countryside to avoid being sent to Germany, which we did by a hair’s-breadth.

It was an extraordinary situation. Up to this moment, apart from various interrogators and members of the camp staff with whom we came in contact, few if any of us had ever spoken to an Italian since we had been captured. Now, suddenly, we found ourselves more or less surrounded by the sort of people we had seen working in the fields and riding bikes up the road to the cemetery, most of whom seemed anxious to help us, not, most of them, for any political motive, but because, as they told us, they too had sons and brothers away at the war, many of whom had not been heard of for a long time.

So far as I was concerned the first Italians I now met appeared in the following order: an Italian soldier who led
me out of the camp on a mule because I had sprained my ankle and couldn’t walk (he then went off with it – ‘Vado a casa,’ he said, ‘I’m going home’); next were a farmer and his wife who hid me in their barn for that first night, who had a son and a daughter; then there was the girl to whom I had waved, by sheer coincidence, who brought me clothes, including one of her father’s suits – he was the village schoolmaster; there was a Sicilian doctor, a great friend of the schoolmaster, who arranged for me to be hidden in the maternity ward of the local hospital; then there was its mother superior and various nuns, an elderly male nurse called Giulio who looked and sounded a bit like a walrus, and Maria, a mongoloid child, a permanent member resident in this
ospedale
, who was immensely strong, highly affectionate and used to prove it by going through the motions of strangling me with one of her pigtails, creeping up behind me like a miniature Italian version of an Indian thug.

Until now my fellow prisoners and I had thought of Italians, rather arrogantly, more or less as figures of fun.

We were arrogant because this was one of the few ways in which we could vent our spleen at having been captured, and at the same time keep up our spirits, which were really very low. Before the armistice it is believed that, in spite of innumerable attempts to do so, only two allied prisoners of war actually succeeded in escaping from Italy. This was because Italians of all sorts and conditions were, and are, extraordinarily observant, and all the ingenious subterfuges, disguises and false documents which might have satisfied a German or an English official were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to satisfy even the most myopic Italian ticket collector. It was not only officials. The kind of inspection an allied escaper was subjected to by other travellers in an Italian train compartment would usually be enough to finish him off.

Now, all of a sudden, these same Italians were risking their
lives for us, and as I was passed from one helper to the next I began to feel rather like a fragile parcel on its way to some distant delivery point.

It was in this fashion that I arrived at a lonely farmhouse high up in the Apennines, more or less midway between Parma and La Spezia, the Italian naval base on the Ligurian Sea.

There, almost 2500 feet up on what was soon to become, with the onset of winter, the cold, northern face of this 800-mile-long mountain range that forms the backbone of Italy, I found myself suddenly transported, as if by magic, to a way of life that I had never imagined existed in Western Europe, and one that had changed hardly at all for fifty years or more. And there I worked for a farming family who had little enough to eat themselves, in this the third year of the war for Italy, without me to feed, and who lived in the constant, very real, fear of being betrayed by informers for having sheltered me and of being either sent to Germany as forced labourers, or shot.

The people who lived in these remote mountain communities were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain. They had always been short-handed. Even before the war, to make ends meet, many of these mountain men had gone off to work in the industrial areas of northern Italy, France and Switzerland, and even further afield, leaving their wives and children and the aged to fend for themselves as best they could, returning home at rare intervals. Some worked as itinerant knife grinders, others as navvies employed on such superhuman tasks as excavating railway tunnels. Some, more fortunate, had found their way to London where, having found their feet in the catering business, they had been able to send for their wives and families and open little cafés. Some of these men were interned at the beginning of the war and were subsequently drowned when the
Arandora Star
, the ship that was taking them and other internees to Canada, was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

Now many of the young men of these Apennine families were away at the war, many of them with the Giulia division of the Alpini which was now on the Russian front. The only able-bodied men were deserters who had left their units after the armistice, like my friend with the mule at Fontanellato. Like me, they too were on the run, not only from the Germans but also the Fascists, who, after their initial reverse, were making an altogether too rapid recovery.

Up there in the mountains no one except prisoners of war and the deserters, who had to keep an ear open for what was going on, was really interested in the war. For them it was an inexplicable calamity that had deprived many of them of their sons. Few of them were even nominally Fascists, those few that were still practising were, unfortunately, hyperactive.