Love and War in the Apennines
Eric Newby
Hailed as Newby's 'masterpiece', ‘Love and War in the Apennines’ is the gripping real-life story of Newby's imprisonment and escape from an Italian prison camp during World War II.After the Italian Armistice of 1943, Eric Newby escaped from the prison camp in which he'd been held for a year. He evaded the German army by hiding in the caves and forests of Fontanellato, in Italy's Po Valley. Against this picturesque backdrop, he was sheltered for three months by an informal network of Italian peasants, who fed, supported and nursed him, before his eventual recapture.‘Love and War in the Apennines’ is Newby's tribute to the selfless and courageous people who were to be his saviours and companions during this troubled time and of their bleak and unchanging way of life. Of the cast of idiosyncratic characters, most notable was the beautiful local girl on a bike who would teach him the language, and eventually help him escape; two years later they were married and would spend the rest of their lives as co-adventurers. Part travelogue, part escape story and part romance, this is a mesmerising account of wisdom, courage, humour and adventure, and tells the story of the early life of a man who would become one of Britain's best-loved literary adventurers.
ERIC NEWBY
Love and War in the Apennines
Dedication (#ulink_736e728f-5227-5ef8-8d2c-83c5390c9811)
To all those Italians who helped
me, and thousands like me, at
the risk of their lives, I dedicate
this book.
Contents
Cover (#u2e6b4b8a-4b45-581e-ba3e-e5b5db2c7144)
Title Page (#u0ee7421e-612b-5d1d-821d-c5f3e3e7736f)
Dedication (#ulink_2def47a0-3291-5eb4-a8c3-a2b0c5d31959)
Preface (#u6b169f18-d1cf-5de7-b6ac-c50271bac1b5)
Map (#ulink_fe84d257-a571-5781-b958-0821ce3da6d5)
1: Operation Whynot (#u854e6d04-278e-54af-b21b-25f82a91e42a)
2: Grand Illusion (#ua719a9fb-b706-5b15-b93a-2731cebda99f)
3: Armistizio (#ua9a44350-0c42-5236-8e5e-4181c40dead5)
4: The Ninth of September (#ue357c301-b33a-5940-bfec-e979c420677f)
5: Interlude in an Ospedale (#ub364ff3d-fb60-56c0-a154-7aefe72ff02d)
6: Back to Nature (#litres_trial_promo)
7: Down by the Riverside (#litres_trial_promo)
8: Haven in a Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
9: Appointment at the Pian del Sotto (#litres_trial_promo)
10: Life on the Pian del Sotto (#litres_trial_promo)
11: Encounter with a Member of the Master Race (#litres_trial_promo)
12: The Great Paura (#litres_trial_promo)
13: Interlude in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (#litres_trial_promo)
14: A Cave of One’s Own (#litres_trial_promo)
15: Journey to the End of the Known World (#litres_trial_promo)
16: Gathering Darkness (#litres_trial_promo)
17: Beginning of the End (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_fda15a7c-a4b8-59b8-a7a8-51d29764ac92)
Anyone who reads this book is entitled to ask how anyone can remember events which happened twenty-eight years ago and, what is even more extraordinary and unbelievable, what happened on a particular day. It is, of course, impossible, except for some rare people who have the gift of total recall, which I do not possess.
The events described fall into three distinct periods: the one in which I was captured; the time I spent as a prisoner of war; and the third period when I was free after the Italian Armistice. I find no difficulty in remembering being captured. It is something, as most people who have been captured would agree, that is such a disagreeable experience that one remembers the circumstances for the rest of one’s life. Neither does one forget what it was like to be a prisoner, although it is impossible to separate one day from another unless one keeps a journal, which I didn’t.
The third period was the one which I really needed to remember in order to write this book, and I was able to do so because I kept a skeletal day-by-day diary, without naming people or places, and I used this record to write a detailed account of what happened while I was in a prison camp in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1944 soon after I was recaptured. This, although I didn’t think of it as such, was the first draft of the present book.
The reader may also ask another, equally sensible question. Why have I allowed such a long time to pass before writing it?
Not long after the war finished a minor flood of books about prison camps, escapes and life with the Resistance appeared. Some of them were so good – George Millar’s Horned Pigeon and Maquis for instance – that I felt that a book about an escape that was nothing but a mass walk-out from a camp and my subsequent experiences, did not seem exciting enough to write about – I myself didn’t even succeed in getting through the enemy line as so many people did. In fact I did not even attempt to. Nor did I join the Partisans. There were none to join at that time in the particular part of the Apennines in which I was hiding, anyway. Scarcely a help in producing an exciting book. I let the whole thing drop.
I finally decided to write the book because I felt that comparatively little had been written about the ordinary Italian people who helped prisoners of war at great personal risk and without thought of personal gain, purely out of kindness of heart. The sort of people one can still see today working in the fields as one whizzes down the Autostrada del Sole and on any mountain road in the Apennines. If only I had been able to speak the language better at that time perhaps their qualities would have emerged more clearly than they do now.
There are certain omissions and additions. In the Autumn of 1943 there were more prisoners of war in the part of the Apennines described in this book than actually appear in it. There have also been widespread changes in the names of people and places, and many characters are composite. As Belloc wrote in Cautionary Tales for Children:
And is it true?
It is not true.
And if it were it wouldn’t do.
If I have only succeeded in producing an inferior version of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’, without the music and the song, then I can only apologise. I can’t give the reader his money back. Those who are bored by descriptions of abortive cloak and dagger operations should skip the first chapter.
The peasants are the great sanctuary of sanity, the country the last stronghold of happiness. When they disappear there is no hope for the race.
Virginia Woolf
Map (#ulink_1c21f1ba-1a39-51c6-9845-b7334fbaf794)
CHAPTER ONE Operation Whynot (#ulink_aac914db-3101-5a24-9ad7-651c6a8772f1)
We were captured off the east coast of Sicily on the morning of the twelfth of August, 1942, about four miles out in the Bay of Catania. It was a beautiful morning. As the sun rose I could see Etna, a truncated cone with a plume of smoke over it like the quill of a pen stuck in a pewter inkpot, rising out of the haze to the north of where I was treading water.
There were five of us. Originally there had been seven, but one, a marine, had had to be left behind on the submarine and another, Sergeant Dunbar of the Argylls was missing, killed, wounded or captured, we none of us knew, lost among the coast defences in the dunes. We were all that remained of M Detachment of the Special Boat Section. Three officers, of whom I was one, Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment and Guardsman Duffy of the Coldstream, one of the smallest sub-units in the British Army, now about to be wiped out completely.
About eight o’clock we were picked up by some Sicilian fishermen who hauled us into their boat like a lot of half-dead fish. They were surprised. We were thankful, although we knew that we would now never make the rendezvous off Capo Campolato which had been fixed for the following night if we failed to reach the submarine by one o’clock on the morning of the twelfth.
I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness than we did, and discussing with the others the possibility of taking it over and forcing the fishermen to head for Malta, 120 miles to the south, for the boat had a sail, as well as an engine. And if we had been in a war film made twenty years later this is what we undoubtedly would have done, but we had been in the water for nearly five hours and were very cold and could hardly stand.
Besides, the fishermen were kindly men. They thought that we were survivors from a torpedoed ship and they gave us what little wine and bread they had with them which amounted to a mouthful each. To them the war, as they made clear by various unequivocal gestures, was a misfortune which had brought misery to everyone and, as far as they were concerned, had seriously restricted their fishing. The idea of using violence against such people was unthinkable. And even if we had decided to try and take over the boat it would have been impossible to get away. It was one of a fleet of a dozen or so whose crews now brought them alongside so that they, too, could view this extraordinary haul. We were prisoners without, as yet, having admitted the fact to ourselves. It was too soon. Everything had happened too quickly.
On the afternoon of the tenth, immediately before we sailed from Malta, we had been given the bare, gruesome bones of what had been christened Operation Whynot. For the flesh we would have to rely on some last-minute aerial photographs of the target which were still in the darkroom and which we would have to study when we were submerged.
We were told that we were going to attack a German bomber airfield four miles south of Catania in Sicily which was expected to have between fifty and sixty J.U.88s on it on the night of the eleventh, and destroy as many of them as we could so that they would be out of action on the twelfth and thirteenth when a British convoy essential to Malta’s survival would be within a hundred miles of the island but still beyond effective fighter cover from it. There would be no time for a preliminary reconnaissance. We had to land and go straight in and come out if we could. The beach was heavily defended and there was a lot of wire. It was not known if it was mined but it was thought highly probable. The whole thing sounded awful but at least it seemed important and worth doing. Irregular forces such as ours were not always employed in such ostensibly useful roles.
We travelled to Sicily in Una, one of the smaller submarines. Her commander, Pat Norman, was a charming and cheerful lieutenant of our own age.
I was already in the conning tower and we were just about to sail when a steward came running down the mole brandishing a piece of paper which, after having received permission to climb into the conning tower, he presented to me. It was a bill for an infinitesimal sum for drinks which I had ordered in the wardroom (our hosts, the Tenth Submarine Flotilla were so generous that it was almost impossible to buy them any). Apparently the others had already been presented with theirs while I was elsewhere. Actually, I had been attempting to dig down to my kit which had been buried when a large bomb had fallen that morning on the great impregnable-looking Vaubanesque fort in which we were billeted and destroyed my room.
No one, including Norman, had any money on them. Like me, none of them had thought that they might conceivably need money underwater.
‘I’ll pay you when I get back,’ I said, airily. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. I’m attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla.’
‘That’s what they all say, sir,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Military officers attached to the Tenth Submarine Flotilla. And then we never see them again, more often than not. I’m afraid I must ask you to give me a cheque, sir.’
I told him with some relish that, if he wanted a cheque from me, he would have to shift some tons of masonry in order to find one.
‘No need for that, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a blank cheque. All you have to do is fill in the name and address of your bank and sign it.’
Even then it seemed an evil omen.
As soon as we were submerged and clear of Sliema Creek, George Duncan, who was our C.O., gave us all the information about the larger operation of which Whynot was a minute part that his superiors had thought fit to give him. The rest he had picked up for himself, which he was very good at doing. Listening to him I was glad I was no longer a merchant seaman.
In a final attempt to save Malta from capitulation, a convoy of fourteen merchant ships was being fought through the Mediterranean from the west. One of them was a tanker, the only one that could be found that could attain the sixteen knots at which the ships were to steam. The safe arrival of this tanker was essential, for without it the island would be deprived of fuel.
The convoy had already passed through the Straits of Gibraltar the previous night and it was now somewhere south of the Balearics. The escort and covering forces were prodigious: two battleships, four carriers, one of which was going to fly its entire complement of Spitfires into Malta when it got within range, seven cruisers and twenty-five destroyers. Somewhere at the mouth of the Sicilian Channel the covering force would turn back and the remaining cruisers and destroyers would take the convoy through to Malta. Heavy losses were expected.
The enemy’s preparations for the destruction of the convoy were on an even grander scale than the arrangements for protecting it. They had been following its movements with great interest ever since it had left the west coast of Scotland and they probably knew its destination (crates marked MALTA had been left conspicuously on the quayside at Glasgow while the ships were loading them for anyone interested to see but, mercifully, none of us knew this at the time). All the Sardinian and Sicilian airfields were crammed with bombers of the Second and Tenth German Air Fleets, and that remarkable military jack-of-all-trades and master of most of them, Field-Marshal Kesselring, was in overall command of the air operations. There was also a force of Italian torpedo bombers, which was to play an important part in the operation, and large numbers of German and Italian submarines and motor torpedo boats had been deployed along the route.
The code name of the convoy was Pedestal. It was commanded by a rear-admiral, and the cruiser and destroyer force which had the truly awful task of taking the convoy through to Malta, by a vice-admiral. George didn’t know their names but it was unimportant. I did not envy them; but I envied much less the men in the merchant ships. Besides, we had enough on our hands with our own piddling little Whynot to worry about them. By this time, one o’clock in the afternoon of the tenth, although none of us knew it, the carrier Eagle had already been sunk by an Italian submarine. And this was only the beginning.
It would be tedious to relate the details of the voyage. They were the same as any other for passengers in a submarine. The wardroom was so minute that apart from the times when I emerged to eat and discuss our plans, such as they were, and pore over the aerial photographs which had been taken from such an altitude that they needed an expert to interpret them and we soon gave up trying to do so, I spent the rest of the time lying on a mattress under the wardroom table, a place to which I had been relegated as the most junior officer of the party. I shared this humble couch with Socks, a dachshund, the property of Desmond Buchanan, an officer in the Grenadiers who was one of our party and who had persuaded Pat Norman to allow him to bring her with him because of the noise of the air-raids on Malta which were practically continuous. (‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving my little girl here. Her nerves are going to pieces.’) From time to time Socks went off to other parts of the submarine, from which she returned bloated with food and with her low-slung chassis covered with oil, a good deal of which she imparted to me. But on the whole it was a cheerful journey and we laughed a lot, although most of it was the laughter of bravado. We all knew that we were embarked on the worst possible kind of operation, one that had been hastily conceived by someone a long way from the target, and one which we had not had the opportunity to think out in detail for ourselves. I felt like one of those rather ludicrous, illbriefed agents who had been landed by night on Romney Marsh in the summer of 1940, all of whom had been captured and shot.
By four o’clock in the afternoon of the eleventh we were in the Bay of Catania, about a mile offshore, and Pat brought Una up to periscope depth so that we could have a look at the coast.
He got a bit of a shock when he did. He had come up in the midst of a fleet of Sicilian fishing boats and they swam into the eye of the periscope like oversize fish in an aquarium. Raising the periscope he was lucky not to have impaled one of them on the end of it. Nevertheless, with what I thought an excess of zeal, he insisted on giving each of us an opportunity to look at the coast which we did, hastily, before causing Una to sink to the bottom where she remained for the next five hours with everything shut off that might produce a detectable noise. It had not been a very successful reconnaissance; but there had been nothing to see anyway. With an immense sun glaring at us from behind a low-lying coast, the shore had appeared as nothing more than a thin, tremulous black line with a shimmering sea in front of it.
We surfaced at nine o’clock and the four folboats were brought up on to the casing through the torpedo hatch without their midship frames in position, the only way we could get them through it, and we carried out the final assembly.
It was not a very dark night, but after thirty-six hours in artificial light underwater it seemed terribly black until we became accustomed to it, when it seemed altogether too bright. To the north we could see the lights of Catania and to the west the landing lights of the airfield. Planes were coming in to land a couple of hundred feet above our heads, and when they were directly above us the noise was deafening. The wind was on-shore and there was a nasty swell running which made the launching of the canoes over the bulges difficult with the tanks blown, and the loading of them once they were in the water even more so. One canoe was so badly damaged getting it into the water that it had to be left behind, together with the marine who was going to travel in it. He was very disappointed at the time. How fortunate he was.
‘Rather you than me, mate, but good luck anyway,’ were the last words addressed to me by a rating as he threw me the stern line; then we set off in arrowhead formation towards the shore, if three canoes can be said to constitute an arrowhead.
The water was extraordinarily phosphorescent. We might have been in a tropical sea and as we dipped the blades of the paddles it exploded into brilliant green and blue fire and as we lifted them out of it they shed what looked like drops of molten metal which vanished when they fell back into the water. At any other time these effects would have seemed beautiful; now they seemed an additional hazard. Surely to the sentries patrolling the beach it must look as if there was a fire out at sea, and surely the crews of the bombers which were still coming in to land over our heads from dead astern must see it, just as surely as they must have already seen the submarine. Together with Corporal Butler of the South Lancashire Regiment, my companion at bow who was no doubt sharing these gloomy thoughts, I paddled towards the shore, trying to hearten myself with the prospect of the bacon and eggs which we had been promised if and when we returned on board.
After a few minutes we heard the boom of surf and soon we were on the outer edge of it. It was not very heavy, but we got out of the canoes as we knew how to without capsizing them, and swam in with them until our feet touched bottom and we could stand. It is better to arrive sopping wet on two feet on a hostile shore than to be capsized or thrown up on it dry but immobile in a sitting position, unless you are a secret agent who must immediately enter the market place and mingle with the crowds.
The beach, with the wind blowing over it and the surf beating on it, seemed the loneliest place in the world. The wire began about fifty feet from the water’s edge. We carried the canoes up over the sand and put them down close to the entanglements without being blown to pieces. At least this part of the beach did not seem to be mined with anything that a man’s weight would set off, or perhaps we were lucky, there was no way of knowing.
Now we attached the time pencils to the bombs, which were a mixture of plastic and thermite. (With the white cordtex fuses they looked like big black conkers on strings.) This was something that could not safely be done on board a submarine costing a mint of money, because time pencils were rather erratic, and I always hoped that the workers in the factory in which they had been made had not got all mixed up and substituted a thin, thirty-second delay wire for a thicker, thirty-minute one, or simply painted the outside casing with the wrong colour paint, which was one of the methods of identifying them, mistakes that could quite easily happen after a pre-Christmas factory beano.
When the bombs were ready we buried the canoes upside down in the sand and obliterated our footprints, working upwards from the water’s edge.
The wire entanglements were about twenty yards wide and they stretched away along the shore north and south as far as the eye could see. Behind them, there were two blockhouses about 150 yards apart. We had landed exactly half way between them. I felt as if I had survived the first round in a game of Russian roulette.
Now we began to cut a narrow swathe through the wire at a place where there appeared to be none of the more visible sorts of anti-personnel mines with which we were acquainted. Nevertheless, it was a disagreeable sensation. Only God and the enemy knew what was buried underfoot.
By the time we got to the other side it was ten o’clock. An hour had passed since we had left the submarine. We were already late, but it was difficult to see how we could have been any quicker. The earliest possible time at which we could arrive back at the submarine had been estimated to be eleven o’clock. The latest possible time, providing that Una had not been discovered, in which case she would have to submerge and leave us anyway, was one o’clock in the morning. If all went well it still seemed that we might make it by midnight, or earlier.
On the far side of the wire at the edge of the dunes, we came to a track which ran parallel with the shore and presumably linked all the blockhouses on this stretch of coast. Fortunately, it was deserted and we pressed on across it and pushed our way through a hedge of some kind of coarse vegetation which had probably been planted to stop the sand drifting inland. For the first time in my life I was in Europe.
Behind this windbreak there was a line of stunted pines and a low drystone wall with a sunken field on the other side of it. Coming from this field was an appalling noise which sounded like a body of men marching along a road and we crouched behind the wall for what seemed an age, waiting for them to pass, until we realised that it was only a horse that was munching grass.
Feeling very stupid we dropped down into the field and crossed it. The horse went on munching. It was a white horse. How I envied it. How silly the whole business seemed at this moment. It was a nice horse but at this moment it was an enemy horse. If it whinneyed or began to gallop around the field we might be discovered; but it did neither of these things. It simply went on eating its dinner.
On the far side of the field there was a high stone wall which, like the wire entanglements on the beach, seemed to be endless, and we pushed George up on to the top of it so that he could see what there was on the other side; but all that he could report was that the landing lights on the airfield had been put out. No more planes were coming in and everything seemed quiet. Our prospects began to seem quite good.
He hauled us up one by one, on to the top of the wall and we dropped down into what proved to be a farmyard full of dogs. Previously they must have been dozing, but the thump of our great boots as we landed on the cobbles brought them to life and they came at us barking and yelping furiously.
The farmhouse had been invisible from the top of the wall, hidden among trees, and now we had to pass the front door, but in spite of the din the dogs were making, no windows or doors were flung open and we made a dash for the far side of the yard where there was a gate which opened on to a dark lane, overshadowed by trees, which seemed to lead in the direction of the airfield. And as we went along it an engine, which sounded as if it was on a test bench, began to scream and sob, drowning the din the dogs were still making, and then died away, tried to start again, but failed.
After about a mile, the lane suddenly came to an end and we found ourselves in the workshop area of the airfield, among buildings with bright lights burning in them. One of them had a number of large wooden crates standing outside it, some of which had only recently been broken open. They contained aircraft engines. On as many of these as we dared expend them we stuck a bomb. It was a terrible waste of explosive; but if we failed on the airfield itself we wanted to leave something to be remembered by. Perhaps, unconsciously, in destroying the engines we were performing some primitive ritual of atonement.
We were now very close to the edge of the airfield and we were just about to split up into pairs and set off for our various targets, Butler’s and my own being the bombers on the far side of it, more than half a mile away, when we ran straight into a body of men, one of whom shouted at us in Italian, demanding to know who we were. We said nothing but pressed on through them until the same man shouted at us again, this time more insistently – what sounded to me like ‘Eh! Eh! Eh!’ – so insistently that George was forced to reply, using one of the phrases which we had all memorised, ‘Camerati Tedeschi’, which we had been told meant ‘German Comrades’.
It sounded even less convincing now, on enemy soil, coming from the mouth of a captain in the Black Watch who had been a sheep farmer in Dumfriesshire before the war, than it had when we had all practised it, and other Italian and German phrases, on one another in the submarine. And it must have sounded even more so to the Italian because he immediately took a pot shot at us with some sort of firearm. Fortunately it was not an automatic weapon, or perhaps it was on single rounds. If it had been he would probably have rubbed us out completely. Whatever it was, he only fired a single shot.
Then one of our party, I never knew who it was, fired back, a single round from a machine pistol.
The effect of the two shots was positively magical. Immediately the airfield was brightly lit by searchlights which were disposed around the perimeter – as if the man who had fired at us had his hand on the switches – and then pandemonium broke loose: lorries and trucks started up; Verey lights rose; the air was filled with the ghastly sounds of commands being issued in Italian and German; and there was the, to me, equally terrifying noise made by men in boots running on hard surfaces in step. It was difficult to repress the thought that we were expected.
I was not surprised. What had surprised me, had surprised us all, was that we had managed to land at all. This kind of operation had been successfully attempted so many times in the past and with such losses in aircraft to the enemy, that by now it was inconceivable that they would not be permanently on the qui vive, and on the very eve of a major action, doubly so. Probably the only reason we had got this far unchallenged was because not even the Germans could imagine that the sort of small party that had done such damage on their airfields in the past would be crazy enough to make a frontal assault on a target of this magnitude. We were lucky to have got over the wall into the farmyard. In this way we seemed to have avoided the official way in.
There were men all round us now but they were confused as to who was who, and afraid to open fire for fear of killing some of their own side. Fortunately the workshop area was one of the few parts of the place which were still comparatively dark, because it was masked by the buildings.
It was at this moment, with everyone milling around in the darkness as if they were playing Murder at a party, that a man loomed up in front of me speaking excitedly in German. There seemed no alternative but to shoot him before he shot me and I stuck my pistol hard against his ribs and was just about to press the trigger when he said in Lowland Scots ‘Don’t shoot you stupid bastard. It’s me!’
Then we dodged round the corner of one of the buildings and ran as hard as we could across a piece of brilliantly illuminated ground on which some clumps of bushes partly hid us from view, towards a wood, a hundred yards or so away.
As soon as we reached it we lay down and tried to make out what was happening. There was no need to use night glasses. With half a dozen searchlights playing on it, the airfield looked more or less as it must have done under the midday sun, except that now it was swarming with infantry who were being formed up to carry out a large-scale battue, and every moment more lorry loads were arriving. I felt like a pheasant looking out on the approaching beaters from the false security of a covert. Surprisingly, there seemed to be no guard dogs. I had expected the place to be seething with them, as some of the Cretan airfields had been, according to those who had visited them.
And beyond the soldiers were the planes. I had never seen so many J.U.88s in my life.
‘What I think we should do,’ George said, ‘is …’
‘Fuck off,’ said a readily identifiable voice which was not that of an officer. ‘That’s what we ought to do, fuck off, while there’s still time.’
The suggestion was so eminently sensible, and the person who made it so experienced in these matters, that it only remained to put it into practice. The operation was off for anyone who was not trying for a posthumous award of the Victoria Cross, and there would be no one left alive to write the citation if he was. There was now not a hope of crossing the airfield and reaching the planes, and even if one succeeded there would still be the guards to deal with. The thing to do now was to get out before we were cut off from the beach.
We moved back through the wood which was all lit up and reminded me vividly of Act Two, Scene One of As You Like It, the Forest of Arden in the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, until we came to an expanse of open heath in the middle of which stood a tall electric pylon, one of a long line which stretched away in the direction of Catania – strange things to find close to an airfield where one would have thought that they would have been a serious obstacle to flying; and we stuck a couple of bombs on it and piled the rest at the foot of it and set them going too. It was a puerile thing to do. The pylon would certainly be repaired in a couple of days.
It was now eleven-twenty. To get back to where we had started from we had to travel on a diagonal course across country, roughly south-east, and we set off very fast in single file until we reached a wood filled with dead and dying trees which had fallen across one another and dry branches which made a shattering noise when they broke underfoot. Beyond the wood there were some fields planted with lines of vines supported by wires at right angles to the direction in which we were travelling and beyond them there was a swamp with thousands of frogs croaking madly in it and in this we floundered miserably, and beyond the swamp were the dunes. It was midnight. Just as we reached the dunes we heard the sound of an approaching aircraft and immediately all the lights on the airfield went out and so did those to the north in Catania, sirens wailed and flak began to rise lazily in the air from around the perimeter. This was a solitary Wellington gallantly coming in to drop its bombs and create a diversion in order to help us, although what purpose this diversion was to serve when no one except ourselves could know where we would be at this particular time, or what stage the operation would have reached, had not been clear to any of us; but whether we liked it or not there had been no one on Malta who had known how to stop the diversion happening. It was something out of Kafka, immutable.
Our feelings were expressed by the man who said that we ought to fuck off.
‘If they can send one Wellington to bomb the bloody airfield why not send six, knock shit out of it, even if they only get the runways, and save us getting our feet wet.’
But although we were unappreciative, the arrival of the Wellington was very opportune and it coincided with the explosion of our own first lot of bombs which we had planted in the crates outside the workshops.
We were in among the coastal batteries now. It was a place in which to move warily. If you fell into one of the trenches which linked them you could easily break your neck. Fortunately they were deserted. Everyone was in the casemates and in spite of the din of the air raid we could hear the mumbling and rumbling of conversation inside. The occupants were the coastal gunners, and probably the infantry as well, who should have been manning the trenches and machine-gun emplacements; all of them prudently keeping their heads down.
It was here, among the trenches that we lost Sergeant Dunbar who had been bringing up the rear of the retreat. One moment he was with us, the next he was gone and it was not until some days later that we found out what had happened to him. He had trodden on what he thought was terra firma, but was really nothing but a camouflaged groundsheet which a number of Italian soldiers had erected over an open strongpoint so that they could play cards without showing a light (not all of them had taken refuge under concrete) and he had fallen through it on to their makeshift table and in the ensuing struggle had been wounded and overpowered. It was lucky for the rest of us that there seemed to be no communication between the defenders of the airfield and those on the coast who did not appear to have been alerted to what was going on at all.
By the time we reached the wire the Wellington had droned away and it had begun to rain. There was no time to waste if we were to get back to the submarine before it submerged, which it was due to do in just over three-quarters of an hour. But while we were trapped in the middle of the entanglement we saw a party of men walking along the beach on the seaward side of it and they saw us, too.
There were about a dozen of them and it was obvious that they had seen us, because when they were opposite us they stopped and, literally, put their heads together. The effect was both alarming and comical. We must have had the same effect on them, frozen in the attitudes in which they had discovered us, most of us hooked on the wire, some of us, although they could not see this, with the rings of Mill’s grenades between our teeth, wondering whether to pull the pins and chuck them, or wait and see what happened. (How I prayed that the hothead who had returned the fire of the Italian outside the workshops would not do this. If he did we would never get off alive.) But they must have been as reluctant as we were to start any trouble, because, after what seemed an eternity, they turned round and went off southwards along the shore in the direction from which they had come, and no doubt they reported that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the course of what was probably a routine patrol. Both parties had had a very lucky escape.
Our route back to the beach had been so roundabout that when we finally emerged from the wire on the foreshore we were not sure whether the place where we had buried the canoes was to the north or south of us. I wondered why, if we had been travelling roughly south-east, as we all thought we had, we had not crossed the dark lane from the farm to the airfield or, failing that, had not seen the sunken field with the horse in it if the boats were now to the north of us. But as we were all reluctant to go in the same direction as the enemy, even an enemy as pusillanimous as they had been, we turned left, which was north, walking in the sea, so that we should be less visible from the blockhouses. And while we were splashing along the edge of the surf which was heavier now, the wind having freshened, there was a succession of glares and heavy thuds inland as the pylon charges and those in the haversacks, perhaps the whole lot of them, went up. It was now twelve-thirty on the morning of the twelfth. At home in a few hours, as George reminded us, grouse shooting would be beginning.
Luckily we were heading in the right direction and soon we found the canoes, or rather the place where we had cut the wire. It was fortunate that we had met the patrol where we did, otherwise they would have gone on and seen the hole in the wire and this would have been something that they could not possibly have ignored. They were going to have some difficulty in explaining why they hadn’t seen it, anyway.
Now we dug up the canoes. What had been George’s and Sergeant Dunbar’s was in such bad shape, having been smashed against the side of the submarine while it was being launched, that we decided to abandon it and after we had punctured the flotation bags and had made an unsuccessful attempt to sink it, I took George into my canoe. We were now three men to a two-man canoe and we had some difficulty in getting into it once we were through the surf and when we did there was very little freeboard.
It was now a quarter to one and there were only fifteen minutes left before Una was due to submerge. We paddled the two canoes off on the back bearing, occasionally flashing a hooded torch which was a terribly risky thing to do and might have imperilled the submarine if there had been a patrol boat offshore; but we could think of nothing now beyond being picked up and saving our skins.
But we were not picked up. By the following year a homing device had been produced which was used successfully in the Far East and with which we would have been able to find her. As it was, in the rain and darkness, we never saw her. We must have gone out and beyond her, probably passing quite close, and then the north-east wind and the tidal stream, which was setting southwest, must have taken us down to leeward of her.
By three in the morning there was a nasty sea running and shortly afterwards my canoe filled with water and we had to abandon it; and although we tried to get the flotation bags out of the bow and stern, which would have been a great help in keeping us afloat, we were not able to do so. The other canoe, with Desmond and Duffy in it, was not in much better condition, and if any of us had tried to hold on to it in such weather it would have gone too.
It was very dark, the water was surprisingly cold and I was very frightened, more frightened than I had ever been. What upset me more than anything, quite irrationally, was the thought that if we drowned – which seemed more than probable – none of our people would ever know what had happened to us and why.
I had just succeeded in getting my boots off when I saw George swimming away into the darkness, and I knew immediately that he was doing so because he felt that he could not keep afloat much longer and did not want to be a burden to the rest of us. He was not a strong swimmer and he had no spare flesh on him to combat the cold.
I was the only one who saw this and I went after him and persuaded him to come back, after a fantastic conversation in the sea of which I shall never forget the gist but have completely forgotten the actual words which passed between us; all I can remember was that he was very calm and determined, just as Captain Oates must have been, walking out of that tent in the Antarctic; but eventually he swam back with me and Desmond insisted on getting out of his canoe and giving George his place, which was difficult to do but undoubtedly saved George’s life.
Now we tried to swim shorewards to where we thought the mouth of the Simetto River ought to be. If we could only reach the right bank before dawn we might be able to lie up among the trees until nightfall and then make the rendezvous for the second night with the submarine, by Capo Campolato, six miles to the south. But although by first light the wind died away, we never reached the mouth of the river or the rendezvous. It was a pity because, at great risk, Pat brought Una back three nights running to wait for us although he and his crew having seen the explosions on the airfield and heard the shooting, were more or less convinced that we were captured or dead.
Of the fourteen merchant ships which took part in Operation Pedestal, five reached Malta, including the tanker Ohio, which was enough to save it. The remaining nine were all sunk, at least four of them by J.U.88s operating from Sicily on August the twelfth and thirteenth. Operation Whynot is not one on which I look back with either pride or pleasure. The fishermen took us in to Catania where we were surrounded by a hastily assembled escort, and marched, presumably for the edification of the inhabitants, bootless and in the few clothes which remained to us – some of us were without trousers – up past palaces and convents, some of them like those on Malta and equally golden in the sunshine, to a more modern building in the centre of the city. Here we were subjected to a long, inexpert interrogation by unpleasant men in civilian clothes. We were still very sure of ourselves and Desmond made the kind of rude remarks about the Duce, whose photograph glowered down at us from the wall, which only Guards officers are really capable of making, and to such an extent that we were in danger of being badly beaten up, as we certainly would have been if we had been Italian prisoners insulting a portrait of Churchill.
The Italians were angry enough without being taunted. We had penetrated their coast defences and the Germans, whose aircraft had been in some danger, had already pointed this out to them. That we had failed completely to do what we had set out to do did nothing to appease them. It was now that we made a rather feeble attempt to escape from the window of a lavatory to which the guards had, rather stupidly, taken us en masse. What we would have all done in the middle of Catania with hardly any clothes on, none of us had stopped to think; we were too bemused.
We were given nothing to eat or drink, and all that morning we sat shivering in our damp underwear and shirts in a northfacing room; and George, who had not recovered from his immersion, became ill. Finally an Italian colonel arrived and cursed our hosts for keeping us in such a condition and we were issued with cotton trousers and shirts and cotton socks and canvas boots made from old rucksacks, which were very comfortable, and we were also given food. Later in the afternoon we were put in a lorry and taken to a fort with a moat round it in which the conducting officer told us, we were to be shot at dawn the following morning as saboteurs because we had not been wearing any sort of recognisable uniform when we were captured. Looking out of the window into the dry moat in which the firing party was going to operate, I remembered the innumerable books about first war spies that I had read at school which invariably ended with ghastly descriptions of their executions. Mostly they were cowardly spies whose legs gave way under them, so that they had to be carried, shrieking, to the place of execution and tied to stakes to prevent them sinking to the ground, and although I hoped that I wouldn’t be like this, I wondered if I would be.
By this time George was very ill. He had a high temperature and lay on one of the grubby cots, semi-delirious. We hammered on the door and shouted to the sentries to bring a doctor, but of course none came.
Finally, sometime in the middle of the night (our watches had been taken away from us so we no longer knew what time it was), a young priest arrived, escorted by two soldiers, as we imagined to prepare us for the ordeal ahead; but, instead, he dismissed the sentries and knelt down by the side of George’s bed and prayed for him.
The priest spoke a little English and before he left he told us that the Germans were even more angry about the Italians’ decision to execute us without consulting them first, than they had been about the attack on the airfield, and that they had given orders that we were on no account to be shot but sent to Rome at once for further interrogation. Perhaps they never meant to shoot us but, all the same, we thought ourselves lucky.
The next day George was better, although still very weak, and later that day we left for Rome by train with a heavy escort of infantry under the command of an elderly maggiore who had with him an insufferably conceited and bloodthirsty sotto-tenente who had obviously been recently commissioned.
By now we were all very depressed but Desmond, who had a positively royal eye for the minutiae of military dress, had the pleasure of pointing out to the sotto-tenente that he had his spurs on the wrong feet.
‘He is quite right,’ said the maggiore who was not enjoying his escort duty and appeared to dislike the sotto-tenente as much as we did. ‘Go, instantly and change them. You are a disgrace to your regiment.’
At Rome station while being marched down the platform to the exit, we were able to pick up some of the ruinous and extensive baggage belonging to some very pretty peasant girls who had travelled up from the south on the same train. Happy to be given this assistance, for there were no porters even if they had known how to hire one, they trotted up the platform beside us between the escorting lines of soldiers who had been given orders only to shoot or bayonet us if we tried to escape, with the residue of their possessions balanced on their noddles, while the sotto-tenente screeched at us to put their bags down and the maggiore, not wishing to make an exhibition of himself, disembarked from the carriage in a leisurely fashion. These were the last girls any of us spoke to for a long time.
In the city we were housed in barracks occupied by the Cavalleria di Genova, a regiment in Italy of similar status at that time to one or other of the regiments of the Household Cavalry in Britain. They still had their horses and the few officers and men who were about looked like ardent royalists. They certainly all knew about which was the right boot for the right spur, which was more than I did and, although they were not allowed to speak to us, their demeanour was friendly. They sent us magazines and newspapers and the food, which was provided by the officers’ mess and brought to us by a white-jacketed mess waiter who had the air of a family retainer, was of an excellence to which none of us were accustomed in our own regiments, although there was not much of it.
After the first day we were all separated from one another and we began a period of unarduous solitary confinement in the course of which we contrived to communicate with one another by way of the mess waiter who carried our innocuous written messages from one room to another among the dishes. At intervals we were all interrogated, but never really expertly, by people from military intelligence. As we had been taught never to answer any questions whatsoever, however fatuous they might seem, we learned more from our interrogators than they did from us. It was interesting to find out how much they knew about our organisation. About some parts of it they knew more than I imagined they would; about others they seemed to know much less.
Once a day, but never together, we were let out to exercise on the pathway which surrounded the manège. Here ‘by chance’, we met other ‘prisoners’, an extraordinarily sleazy collection of renegades and traitors, most of them South African or Irish, dressed in various British uniforms, some in civilian clothes, who called us ‘old boy’ and offered to fix us up with nights on the town and escape routes into the Vatican in exchange for information.
I enjoyed being alone. It was so long since I had been. From my room, high up under the eaves of the barracks, I used to watch a solitary, elegant officer taking a succession of chargers around the tan. He was a wonderful horseman, even I could tell this without knowing anything about horses. The days were poignantly beautiful. The leaves on the plane trees were golden. Here, in Rome, in late August, it was already autumn. I was nearly twenty-three and this was my first visit to Europe. Locked up, isolated in the centre of the city, I felt like the traitor Baillie-Stewart, ‘the Officer in the Tower’, or, even less romantically, someone awaiting court martial for conduct scandalous and unbecoming, looking out across the Park in the years before the war.
After a few days we were dispersed, the officers to one camp, the men to another. We all survived the war and so did Socks, the dachshund. Pat, in accordance with Desmond’s last wishes, took her to Beirut where she took up residence with Princess Aly Khan. And George recovered sufficiently within a few days to make one of the most cold-bloodedly successful escape attempts from the camp to which we were sent when he, in company with a number of others, marched out through the main gate disguised as Italian soldiers. Unfortunately, they were all re-captured soon afterwards.
CHAPTER TWO Grand Illusion (#ulink_473f35b1-d671-5307-a815-f4b2eb863625)
A year later, on the seventh of September, 1943, the day before Italy went out of the war, I was taken to the prison hospital with a broken ankle, the result of an absurd accident in which I had fallen down an entire flight of the marble staircase which extended from the top of the building to the basement while wearing a pair of nailed boots which my parents had managed to send me by way of the Red Cross. The prison camp was on the outskirts of a large village in the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the river Po flows on its way from the Cottian Alps to the sea. The nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road which runs through the plain in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.
‘That’s right, knock the bloody place clown,’ someone said, unsympathetically, as it shuddered under the impact. The doctor who examined my ankle, who was also a prisoner, took much the same view. He couldn’t do much, anyway, because he hadn’t got any plaster of paris. It was, however, he said, ‘on order’ and for the time being he did it up with some adhesive plaster which was a rather wobbly arrangement.
The only other occupant of the hospital was another officer who was suffering from a boil on his behind. He was the one who had proposed that we should dig a tunnel, the most dreary and unimaginative way of getting out of any prison, on which a number of us had been working for some months, and which we had only recently abandoned because events seemed to have rendered it unnecessary. The head of the shaft of this tunnel was in a bedroom on the piano nobile of the building, practically in mid-air, and the shaft went down through the middle of one of the solid brick piers which supported it and down into the cellars. When we reached mother earth, somewhere below the floor of the cellar, if ever, he had planned to construct a chamber, in which the spoil could be put into sacks and hauled to the surface, and from it the tunnel would be driven outwards under the wire. The shaft had a false lid, designed and made by a South African mining engineer. It was a marvellous piece of work – a great block of cement with tiles set in it that was so thick that when the carabinieri tapped the floor of the bedroom with hammers, which they sometimes did, the lid gave off the same sound as the rest of it. This lid was so heavy that special tools had had to be devised to lift it.
There were a lot of attempts at escape, some successful, some of them funny. One prisoner hid himself in a basket of dirty linen, destined for the nuns’ laundry over the wall. We wondered what would have happened if they had actually unpacked him inside the convent. Some were very ingenious – two people had had themselves buried in the exercise field which was outside the main perimeter wire and was not guarded at night. They nearly got to Switzerland.
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No one from our camp ever reached Switzerland before the Italian Armistice in 1943. It was generally believed that two British prisoners of war had succeeded in getting there, but I have never met anyone who actually knew who they were or which camps they came from. It was very difficult to get out of a prison camp in Italy. Italian soldiers might be figures of fun to us, but some of them were extraordinarily observant and very suspicious and far better at guarding prisoners than the Germans were. It was also very difficult to travel in Italy if you did get out. The Italians are fascinated by minutiae of dress and the behaviour of their fellow men, perhaps to a greater degree than almost any other race in Europe, and the ingenious subterfuges and disguises which escaping prisoners of war habitually resorted to and which were often enough to take in the Germans: the documents, train tickets and ration cards, lovingly fabricated by the camp’s staff of expert forgers; the suits made from dyed blankets; the desert boots cut down to look like shoes and the carefully bleached army shirts were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to fool even the most myopic Italian ticket collector and get the owner past the barrier, let alone survive the scrutiny of the occupants of a compartment on an Italian train. The kind of going over to which an escaping Anglo-Saxon was subjected by other travellers was usually enough to finish him off unless he was a professional actor or spoke fluent Italian. And in Italy, before the Armistice, there were no members of the Resistance or railway employees of the Left, as there were in France, to help escaping prisoners out of the country along an organised route.
The building in which we were housed had originally been built as an orfanotrofio, an orphanage, with the help of money contributed by pilgrims to the shrine of the miraculous Madonna del Rosario who, in 1628, had performed the first of a succession of miracles when, in answer to his prayers, she raised a man called Giovanni Pietro Ugalotti from his death bed.
The foundations had been laid back in 1928, but the work had proceeded so slowly that the war began before it could be completed, and it remained empty until the spring of 1943 when it became a prisoner of war camp for officers and a few other ranks who acted as orderlies.
It was a large, three-storeyed building with a sham classical façade, so unstable that if anyone jumped up and down on one of the upper floors, or even got out of bed heavily, it appeared to wobble like a jelly. To those of us who were lodged on one of these upper floors, it seemed so unstable that we were convinced that if any bombs fell in the immediate neighbourhood it would collapse.
Next door to the orfanotrofio was the santuario in which the miraculous Madonna del Rosario was enshrined, and on its walls there were large quantities of ex-votos contributed by those who had been cured of some bodily affliction or saved from disaster by divine intervention – crutches, pale wax replicas of various parts of the human body that had been restored to health, primitive paintings of ships sinking, houses and barns on fire, or being struck by lightning, motor cars and aeroplanes crashing and farm carts being overturned, from all of which, and many other more fantastic mishaps, the occupants were depicted as emerging or being ejected relatively unscathed.
Behind the santuario, and joined to it, there was a convent in which a body of nuns resided in complete seclusion from which they never emerged except in case of grave illness or when they were being conveyed to another house of their order. Otherwise, their nearest approach to contact with the outer world was when they participated in the masses celebrated in the santuario, at which times they could look out on the congregation in the body of the church unseen, hidden from view behind an iron grille.
All the laundry for the prisoners was done in the convent and from time to time we discovered little notes wrapped up in our clean sheets or tucked inside our shirts, which said that those who had washed them were praying for us and were calling down the blessings of the Madonna del Rosario on our unworthy heads.
Although we never saw them most of us liked having the nuns next door, and the santuario, too. The clanging of its bells broke the monotony of the long days, making the campanile sway with their violence and frightening the swallows, making them sweep in panic to the sky, until some prisoners who had migraine, or were atheists, or simply disliked bells or noise generally, used to put their heads out of the windows and scream, at the top of their voices, ‘I SAY, WOULD YOU MIND TERRIBLY TURNING IT IN?’ And if by chance the bells did stop at that particular moment, ‘THANK YOU SO MUCH!’ Or, if they knew a little Italian, ‘GRAZIE TANTO!’
In the centre of the village, which was called Fontanellato, out of sight of the prisoners in the camp, was the Rocca Sanvitale, a forbidding-looking fifteenth-century castle, isolated behind a water-filled moat. In the castle, until the war came, had lived the Conte Giovanni, the last of the Sanvitales, one of the most ancient and illustrious families in Italy, which, today, is extinct. The buildings which faced the castle had deep, shadowy arcades under which there were shops and cafés where farmers used to congregate on Saturday, which was market day; and in the street which led to the santuario and the orfanotrofio, there was a war memorial of the First World War, which for Italy had been much more bloody than the one she was at present engaged in, with a long list of dead on a plaque at the foot of it. This was more or less all we knew about Fontanellato. Apart from a senior officer who had been taken on a tour of the village for some reason, none of us had ever seen it. What I have written is the sum total of what he told us when he returned. It was rather like listening to a lecture by some medieval traveller and hearing him say, as he pointed to the map, ‘Here be dragons’.
Living in such a grandiose-looking building we felt that we could scarcely be regarded as objects of compassion by the local inhabitants. Although some officers when they arrived at it from other camps complained about the overcrowding, which was severe, and the lack of privacy, which was complete, to me and most of my friends who had been brought here from a much more primitive camp, it seemed a luxurious place and we were very surprised to find that we were to sleep in beds instead of the double-tiered bunks to which we were accustomed.
When we first arrived, at the beginning of March, there was no space for exercise outdoors, apart from a small, wired-in compound behind the building in which we assembled twice a day to be counted, or more frequently if the Italians suspected that someone had escaped; but the Italian commandant, an old, regular colonello, allowed parties of prisoners to go for route marches in the surrounding countryside once a week under a general parole, which covered the period when we were actually outside the gates. Parole or not, we were heavily guarded during these excursions which always followed routes along unfrequented lanes far from any village.
We looked forward to these outings which were sometimes cancelled at the eleventh hour for unexplained reasons, or because the senior officers refused to come to terms on some piddling point of military etiquette which most of the people in the camp, being temporary soldiers, and almost none of the Italians, because there were only about two regular soldiers among them, were ever able to comprehend. As in every other prison camp, the most lively differences of opinion between the senior British officer and the colonello and his staff arose over the interpretation of the various clauses of the Geneva Convention, which governed the treatment of prisoners.
We marched at a tremendous rate, glad of the exercise and taking sadistic pleasure in exhausting our guards who were mostly small men with short legs. We marched along flat, dusty roads; past wheat fields; fields in which forests of Indian corn were growing and into which I longed to take flight; along the foot of high green embankments which protected the land from the torrents which at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the River Po; past huge fields of tomato plants and sugar beet, groves of poplars, endless rows of vines and great rambling farmhouses with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese, and red-roofed barns with open doors in which we could just see great, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semi-darkness. Where we went we saw very few people. Perhaps they were told to keep out of the way when we went past.
Looking at this burgeoning countryside in the spring and summer of 1943 it was difficult for the most optimistic of us to believe that Italy was in danger of collapsing through lack of food, although it was obvious that the Italian army was very badly fed. One had only to look at the exiguous rations which the soldiers who guarded us drew from their cookhouse. And here, so far as I could make out, there were no organisations as there were in Britain to make their life more supportable. No volunteer ladies dishing out fish and chips to them, and great squelchy, jam sandwiches, and cups of orange-coloured tea, and, saying ‘Hello’ and asking where they came from, making them feel that they were doing something worthwhile which somebody cared about. They were like souls in limbo or a lot of untouchables in Hindu India, lost in the low-lying ground which no one ever visited, somewhere between the railway workshops and the cantonment.
By prison standards, the food in the orfanotrofio was good. The official rations were not abundant for non-manual workers, which is what we were, and without anything to augment them they had a lowering effect, especially in the previous camp where the British cooks had usually succeeded in making the worst of them – their version of pasta al sugo being particularly loathsome; to me it always smelt of dirty dish cloths.
But here, at Fontanellato, for the first time since I had been captured, there was a regular supply of Red Cross parcels and instead of the parcels being issued complete for us to make what we would of the contents, as had been done in other places, here all the cookable food was removed and prepared in the kitchens. This was much more civilised than keeping a lot of open tins under one’s bed, as some of us had previously done (the Italians never allowed us to have unopened tins in case we hoarded them for an escape) and risking death by eating the contents of a tin of disgusting meat loaf that had been open for two or three days or, even worse, spending ages on all fours blowing away at a stove made from old tin cans, stoked up with bits of cardboard or, in extremis, pieces of bed board from the bottom of our bunks, as many had done in the past.
Drink and supplementary food were bought on the black market, which was even more extensive and better organised than it was in Britain, and a special float of Red Cross cigarettes was kept for this purpose and for the general corruption of the Italian camp staff, by responsible members of the British administration, ex-bank managers mostly, to whom this sort of thing was second nature.
Officially, we were allowed one tot of vermouth and one of wine each day by our administration, which was all that could be allowed if, in theory, everyone took their ration; but you could always buy other people’s ration tickets with cigarettes or chocolate if you preferred drinking to smoking. Because of this there were some good parties and some rather awful ones too.
The very first lieutenant-colonel who was sent to us, previously we had scarcely anyone above the rank of captain, gave a memorable one.
‘Well, good night gentlemen,’ he said when most of the drink was finished. ‘Time for bed.’
He opened the door of a tall cupboard which stood against the wall and walked into it shutting the door behind him, presumably under the impression that he was entering his own room. By the time it had been forced open, which was difficult because his rather ample trousers had caught in it, he was fast asleep. He was a nice, high-spirited old man, much too old in years to have been captured fighting in the Western Desert.
The wines were strange, dark and repulsive with various chemical additives, what the Italians call vini lavorati, worked on, primitive harbingers of the more sophisticated, doctored wines which rarely contain any grapes at all and which have made the Italian wine industry the byword that it is today; but like meths drinkers we enjoyed them better than no alcohol at all.
There was even a bar in which these concoctions were served, high up in a sort of minstrels’ gallery above the chapel, which was used by the more staid prisoners to play bridge, and on Sundays for church services. We were forbidden by the Italians to look out of the windows of the bar which faced the road to the village, and if we did, the sentries in the watchtowers beyond the wire used to fire shots at us, some of which used to come whistling through the windows – the glass had been blown out long ago – and bury themselves in the walls and ceiling of the bar which had the same ecclesiastical decor as the chapel below. These bullet-holes gave the place a raffish appearance, like a middle-western saloon built by some renegade, gun-toting priest.
But in spite of these fusillades we still continued to risk our lives by putting our heads out of the windows, in order to be able to look at the girls of Fontanellato who, every evening when the weather was fine, used to promenade along the road in front of the orfanotrofio.
Some of my fellow prisoners had not spoken to a girl since they had been captured in 1940. Old or new prisoners, few of us had set eyes on girls like these for years and years. They were all shapes and sizes and colours and as they went past they laughed, as if enjoying some private joke, and tossed their heads impertinently in our directions. They all had long hair, short skirts and brown, bare legs and, as they swayed along the road, the high-heeled wooden sandals, which they all wore because there was very little shoe leather in Italy, clacked on the hard surface of the road. Some of them walked arm in arm with other girls carefully chosen for their inferior looks; some were so sure of themselves that they walked with girls who were their equals; others wobbled past in little flocks on bicycles, so slowly that they sometimes fell off uttering squeals of alarm – none was ever injured. There were scarcely ever any men with them. Presumably they were at the war.
The effect of these visions on the wretched Italian guards who were immured high up in their watchtowers, was as powerful as it was on us. Utterly distracted, they turned their backs on the orfanotrofio in order to look at them more closely, until some N.C.O., old enough and sour enough to be indifferent to women, screeched at them so loudly that they whirled round and, seeing us, discharged their rifles in the direction of the bar.
But not even the Italian Army in its most bellicose mood was able to stop us looking at the girls of Fontanellato, or the girls at us.
On one side of the orfanotrofio was the village cemetery in which the dead were stacked in recesses in the walls, one above the other, as if they had been put away carefully in some giant filing-cabinet marked ‘Pending’ until the last Trump sounded. Every Sunday, wet or fine, what must have been almost the entire girl population of Fontanellato as well as large numbers from the surrounding country, used to make the long pilgrimage up the via Cimitero to the gates, ostensibly to mourn their loved ones, and completely outnumbering the real mourners who could be easily distinguished by their black garb. If all these girls had been visiting the graves of their own kith and kin then the cemetery would have had to have been at least five times the size it was. Like participants in a slow-motion film they crawled past the front of the orfanotrofio, past the exercise field which had been opened a month after our arrival, and in which all exercise ceased from the moment the first of them came into view, and turned left up the road to the cemetery. Few of them bothered to enter it. Sometimes they waved if they thought the guards were not watching, or they might simply twirl a scarf, and from behind the barbed wire in the field and from every upper window of the orfanotrofio, from which the occupants could also see on fine days, and equally unattainable, the peaks of the pre-Alps beyond Lake Garda, more than 150 kilometres away to the north, the prisoners cheered and waved at them.
But in spite of these distant encounters with girls we were not unduly troubled by the lusts of the flesh – perhaps it was something to do with the diet. As one of my friends said, after drawing on himself one or two random shots while craning out of one of the windows of the bar, ‘It isn’t that one just wants to poke them. I’m not sure if I could do it any more, but it would be heaven just to be with them,’ which for him was a pretty profound remark.
It was fortunate that most of us felt as he did. Had we felt otherwise there was not much we could do about it except pull our puddings, and to perform the operation while lying cheek by jowl with twenty-six other people in a room which was illuminated by searchlights, required a degree of stealth which had deserted most of us since leaving school. Nevertheless, some of the more vigorous among us revived these ancient skills.
The lavatories – the gabinetti – were even more unsuitable than the dormitories for this purpose. They were of the kind in which you squatted over a dark hole in the floor and at unpredictable intervals a huge head of water like the Severn Bore came swirling up and filled your boots. It was hazardous enough using the gabinetti for the purpose for which they had been constructed without lingering in them, even to study the astonishing graffiti which can only have been produced by people who owned wellington boots. One officer made a fortune in cigarettes, which were the hard currency of the camp, salvaging valuable objects such as lighters, false teeth and wrist watches which their owners had dropped down the holes while occupying the gabinetti and which had gone round the bends in the pipes.
Even more difficult for the residents in the orfanotrofio was any kind of homosexual act. Whatever loves there were between prisoners could only be expressed by looks and words or perhaps a surreptitious pressure of the hand, otherwise they had to remain locked away within the hearts and minds of the lovers until they could be free or were moved to some more private place.
(#ulink_50ef4b7d-d692-5e1f-9dce-035e35ea178a)
Although they were outnumbered by officers drawn from the middle and lower classes who had had to be commissioned, just as they had been in the First War, because there were not enough members of the upper class to go round, it was the upper class which set the style in the orfanotrofio, just as they had done in the pre-war world outside; the sons and younger brothers of peers and Highland lairds, young merchant bankers, wine shippers and gentlemen jockeys who had ridden in the National, most of them concentrated in cavalry regiments, rifle regiments, one or two Highland regiments and the Brigade of Guards. These amateur soldiers, for they were mostly amateurs, and any professional soldiers who had the same sort of background (any others were soon made into figures of fun), made up the coteries of O.K. people who exercised power.
These people were very reluctant to consort with outsiders, but as the orfanotrofio was very overcrowded and it was almost impossible to summon up a coterie large enough to take over one of the bigger rooms which contained anything up to twenty-seven beds, and because these rooms were the most desirable because they were on the side of the building which faced away from the afternoon sun, and because not all coteries found other coteries agreeable to them for innumerable reasons which there is no space to go into here, the members always tried to ensure that the rest of the beds were occupied with what they regarded as more or less acceptable ballast, that is to say, or as they would have said if they had actually said it out loud, marginally O.K. people, the sort of people they were prepared to talk to and drink with while the war was on, and then would never see again. And this included a number of people whom they regarded as being downright common but who had the saving grace of being funny; and they took these comics on to the strength in much the same way as their ancestors had employed jesters and dwarfs, to while away the tedious hours between breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyone else they ignored completely, unless they owned something worth buying, or had some skill which they could make use of to increase their comfort. It was not that they consigned these unfortunates to outer darkness; they simply never invited them in out of it.
If I had not had marginally O.K. friends who had not abandoned me when we moved to the orfanotrofio from the camp in which we had previously been imprisoned I, too, would have become a dweller in darkness, which I did not want to be. I wanted the opportunity to observe the O.K. people at close quarters and some inner voice told me, quite correctly for once, that this was going to be my last chance ever to do so in the whole of my life.
Before the war I had rarely spoken to O.K. people, let alone known any well enough to talk to. Even at Sandhurst in 1940, where I was a member of the Infantry Wing in the Old Buildings, which were so much more elegant than the New Buildings, O.K. people had been rarities. They were accommodated in the hideous New Buildings, which were not really new at all but were newer than the old ones; or else they were members of something called The Royal Armoured Wing – I now forget where they lived – which had to do with armoured fighting vehicles and therefore with what was still called the Cavalry, which was nothing to do with the Royal Tank Regiment and still isn’t, thirty years later.
When I was very young I sometimes used to see what I immediately recognised as midget versions of O.K. people in Children’s Hairdressing on the first floor at Harrods, to which my mother, who had been a model girl at the store and had a nostalgia for the place, used to take me from Barnes to get my hair cut, where they exercised themselves on the rocking horses while waiting to be given the treatment and never let me have a go. I used to see them, too, wearing hand-made overcoats with velvet collars and long gaiters with hundreds of buttons down the sides, the sort of outfit which would have caused any un-O.K. child to have a fit of apoplexy in the mild spring weather in which they were dressed like this, being pushed up Sloane Street in huge, glossy machines known as Victoria carriages, which were short-wheelbase prams with curled up fronts, like seashells, in which they travelled sitting more or less upright with their backs to whoever was pushing them and, usually, with a dark blue blanket clipped over the front with their initials, or their parents’ initials, embroidered on them, on their way to the Dell, a charming grassy depression on the far side of Rotten Row, in the Park. They were still being conveyed about in these carriages at an age when I had long forgotten what it was like to be in a push-chair, which was what I had had to make do with after my nanny had been shown the door.
The nurses who had the pushing of these little O.K. boys who sat, as it were, with their backs to the engines, were invariably bad-tempered looking and absolutely hideous. They wore porkpie hats with badges on them, long, drab overcoats of putty-coloured gabardine or grey flannel, with lisle stockings to match, and clumpy great shoes; not like my very sexy suburban nanny who wore a uniform bought for her by my mother – who had not been a model girl for nothing – a blue denim dress in summertime with stiff white collar and cuffs and black silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, and whose head was swathed in some sort of dark blue veiling when she took me out for an airing, often to have assignations with what looked to me like very old men but were probably quite young ones, in a graveyard, not in fashionable S.W.1 but in S.W.13, keeping me quiet while she did whatever she did with them by giving me handfuls of Carrara marble chippings from the tombs to play with. (She was fired when my mother found me still playing with them in the bath.) If this nanny, of whom photographs still exist in an album, which enables me to remember more clearly than I would otherwise have been able to do what she looked like, had taken me to the Dell, the other nannies would have ignored her, not only because she was far too good looking to be a nanny, but because I was not an O.K. child.
Whatever else I may have envied them I certainly did not envy these little O.K. boys their nannies.
‘Why is the sky blue, Nanny?’ I heard one ask in the bell-like upperclass voice which I envied and always wished that I could emulate – mine sounded as if it emanated from my boots. To which he got the reply, ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies, little Mr Inquisitive.’
And later when we were all a bit older, and I was on my way to or from the dentist, also in S.W.I, with my mother’s ‘Help’, I sometimes used to see a shambling crocodile of them, all wearing the strange-looking, tomato-coloured caps of a smart pre-prep school, which looked like the sort of caps that some Irish peasants still wear, being shepherded along the road by a number of brisk grown-ups, all wearing no-nonsense-from-you expressions.
‘Well-born they may be, Master Eric,’ the ‘Help’ said stoutly, when they had shuffled past, ‘but most of them look half-barmy to me.’ And when the war came and I was on embarkation leave I saw them again in Harrods, in various splendid uniforms with their mothers and sisters and girl friends who all wore miniature replicas of their regimental badges picked out in diamonds, and again listened with awe to their loud, self-confident voices, usually we were ascending or descending together in one of the lifts, slightly cracked versions of the bell-like tones I had listened to with envy on the way to the Dell sixteen years before. But this was the first opportunity I had had to consort with them and study them at leisure and en masse.
In the camp the members of the coteries moved easily in a mysterious, almost Edwardian world and when they addressed one another they used nicknames, just as the Edwardians had been so fond of doing, which were completely unintelligible to anyone else, and they knew who was who so far down the scale of the aristocracy to a point at which one would have thought that any blue blood corpuscles would have been non-existent. They alone knew that ‘Bolo’ Bastonby was the nephew of the Earl of Crake, that ‘Jamie’ Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon was the youngest brother of the Master of Dunreeking and that ‘Feathers’ Farthingdale was the third son of the Marquis of Stale by his second wife. No one outside these coteries had even heard of the holders of the titles, let alone ‘Bolo’ Bastonby, ‘Jamie’ Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon or ‘Feathers’ Farthingdale.
One interesting thing I noticed about them, and this applied to almost all of them, was that they would not tolerate any criticism by outsiders of anyone whom they regarded as being ‘one of us’, even though the person being criticised might be hundreds of miles away.
Down at the marginally O.K. end of the otherwise O.K room which I inhabited, there was an officer in a very grand regiment who was not completely accepted by the coterie because none of them knew anything about his family and because he had been commissioned from the ranks of the same regiment in peacetime, a rare thing and one that implied that he probably possessed gifts which, in such a regiment, might take him to the heights of his profession and one that most marginally O.K. and un-O.K. people in the orfanotrofio who knew about it, regarded as ‘a good thing’ or ‘a good show’. And because he was in such a grand regiment he was allowed more latitude than the average marginally O.K. resident. But one evening he went too far.
‘I think Randolph Churchill’s a shit,’ he said, in the course of a long, rambling, semi-drunken conversation about the past which had temporarily united the two ends of the room. And from the other end of it, like an echo that had somehow gone wrong, came a passionate cri de coeur from someone who – I happened to know, because he had himself told me so on a previous occasion – had never met Randolph Churchill in his life, and everyone else at his end of the room, some of whom did know Randolph Churchill well, knew it too.
‘How dare you say that! Randolph’s a personal friend of mine!’ He spoke in exactly the same voice as one of the little boys in Children’s Hairdressing in Harrods had when I tried to get a ride on the rocking horse which he had been astride ever since I arrived. ‘Go away!’ he said to me. ‘It’s my rocking horse!’
The next morning while we were out in the courtyard being counted by the Italians I asked Alastair why he had sprung to the defence of Randolph Churchill whom he had never met and might, for all he knew, be a shit.
‘I don’t care whether Randolph Churchill’s a shit or the sun shines out of his arse,’ he said, ‘I just can’t bear little men like that saying that kind of thing. Someone had to teach him a lesson. He had it coming to him.’
The ‘little man’ he was giving the lesson to was well over six feet tall.
Although some members of the coteries could be described, without irony, as being ‘cultivated’, none by the wildest stretch of the imagination could be said to be ‘intellectual’. The intellectuals in the camp, of whom there were not many, were most of them not even marginally O.K. One, who subsequently became a very successful leader of the Italian partisans, was regarded as being what they described as ‘Bolshie and odd’; not because he was not a good soldier, which they had to admit he was, but because every opinion that he held was completely at variance with their own – about the war and why it was being fought and why he was fighting it, and about the sort of Britain which would emerge as a result of it – and, most suspicious of all, he actually learned to read and write Italian while he was in the orfanotrofio.
On the whole they weren’t great readers, although we had a large library made up of books brought from other camps which had originally been sent out by the Red Cross, books from the British library in Rome and books sent by next-of-kin which were handled by the Bodleian. Books even continued to arrive, minus their covers, after an extremely inept attempt by a then highly secretive section of the War Office (M.I.9), interested in encouraging us to escape, to send us money and maps hidden inside the boards, after which every book had its covers ripped off and had to be re-bound with cardboard from Red Cross parcel boxes before it could be read.
But although not great ones for a book, few coterie men would have dared to express themselves publicly as one late arrival did, as soon as he arrived at the camp.
‘Since I’ve been captured I’ve been locked up alone for a bit and I’ve been thinkin’,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided to take up readin’ and I’ve written to Mummy askin’ her to send me the Tatler and the Book of the Month.’
In all the time I was in the orfanotrofio I can scarcely remember a moment, except when we were eating or we were being counted, or the lights were out and we were supposed to be asleep, when the rattle of dice and the shuffling of pieces on a backgammon board could not be heard. Down below in the cellars where we ate our meals, those temporarily expatriate members of White’s Club in captivity, who themselves formed a unique inner coterie, had a big table for baccarat, at which they played after the plates had been cleared away, for the kind of stakes to which they had been accustomed in St James’s Street before the war, using the letter cards which were intended to be sent to their next-of-kin as cheques which they sent to one another’s bankers on settlement days. And later in the summer, when the exercise field, from which we all admired the girls of Fontanellato on their way to the cemetery, was opened some of them used to race corks, also for big stakes, down a minute rivulet which rose mysteriously from the earth at the top end of the field, flowed briskly for a while, and as mysteriously died away. Or else they would make a book on the running races which some lunatic organised between members of the various armies which were represented in the camp.
I ran the mile for the Eighth Army, because I needed the exercise and loathed football and basket ball. And because of the form I displayed, by the day of the meeting there was a lot of money on me, mostly placed by White’s men who had been watching me during my early morning ‘gallops’.
At the beginning of the last lap I knew that I would win. I put in a tremendous spurt and romped home. Unfortunately, I had miscounted the number of laps and there was one more to go. I finished third. I was disappointed, but not nearly so much as the little group of White’s men, shoulder to shoulder, not as I have so often seen them on race courses since the war, dressed according to season or the grandeur of the event in morning coats and top hats or flannel-suited with squashy brown felt hats pulled down over their noses and always with big race glasses, philosophically marking their race cards before setting out once more for the paddock, but still shoulder to shoulder.
‘You didn’t pull it, Eric, did you?’ one of them said as I went in to change.
At the time, only having been to a couple of trotting races, I wondered what on earth he meant.
The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense – canes had been taken away for the duration, and the twisting of arms was forbidden by the Geneva Convention – there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been.
This state of affairs continued until a very regular full colonel arrived who had not been at Eton but at Wellington and was so horrified by the lackadaisical, demilitarised state in which he found us all, that he immediately organised the camp on the lines of an infantry battalion, in companies with company commanders. Under him the orfanotrofio began to resemble the prison camp in Renoir’s Grande Illusion. It had a commandant who was a regular colonello of the ancien régime who found himself in sympathy with our colonel, who came from the same sort of background as he did.
When one of the prisoners was found to be stealing food, a most awful crime in a prison camp where everyone started off with exactly the same amount however much more they managed to acquire by exchanging tobacco and cigarettes for it, and the problem arose of punishing him without the added and unthinkable indignity of handing him over to the Italians to keep in their cells, the colonello offered our colonel a small Italian infantry bivouac tent and a piece of parched ground in what was normally a zone that was out of bounds to us on which the sun shone all day, so that the offender could expiate his crime in solitary confinement and on a diet of bread and water provided by the British, from their rations, not by the Italians.
Some of the prisoners were very old prisoners indeed, not in age or seniority but because of the number of years they had been locked up. Most of the ‘old’ prisoners had wonderful clothes which no one who had been captured later in the war could possibly emulate, things that had been sent to them before the Italians had instituted rigid sumptuary laws for prisoners of war in order to prevent anyone having anything which vaguely resembled civilian clothes. By some technicality those who already had these clothes were allowed to keep them, providing that the larger items bore the large red patches which were sewn on to everything we wore. They had pig’s-whisker pullovers, scarves and stocks from the Burlington Arcade secured with gold pins, make-to-measure Viyella shirts, and corduroy trousers, and those who were members of the Cherry-Pickers wore cherry-red trousers. Some of this gear had reached them by way of the Red Cross and neutral embassies, but not all of it. One officer had an elegant hacking coat which had been made for him while he was a prisoner, out of a horse blanket which he had rescued from his armoured car when it went up in flames near Sollum, and which he paid the Italian tailor for with cigarettes.
The one thing which united the prisoners in the orfanotrofio and which gave them, as it were, a ‘team spirit’, was their attitude towards the ‘Itis’. ‘Itis’ in the abstract, because it was difficult for any but the most hidebound to actively dislike our ‘Itis’, apart from one or two horrors who would have been horrors whatever their nationality, and we all loved the ‘Iti’ girls – soldiers always make an exception for the women of the enemy, for otherwise they would feel themselves completely alone.
The colonello was generally conceded to be ‘all right’, a ‘good chap’ in spite of being an ‘Iti’; and most people liked one of the Italian officers because he smoked a pipe and was more English than many of the English. For most of the others and the wretched soldiery who guarded us, the privates and the N.C.O.s, with their miserable uniforms, ersatz boots, unmilitary behaviour and stupid bugle calls, we felt nothing but derision. What boobs they were, we thought. We used to talk about how we could have turned them into decent soldiers if only we were given the opportunity.
How arrogant we were. Most of us were in the orfanotrofio because we were military failures who had chosen not to hold out to the last round and the last man, or, at the last gasp, had been thankful to grasp the hand of a Sicilian fisherman and be hauled from the sea, as I had been. We were arrogant because this was the only way we could vent our spleen at being captured and, at the same time, keep up our spirits which were really very low. Deep down in all of us, prisoners isolated from the outside world and Italian soldati, far from home, subjected to a twentieth-century Temptation of St Anthony and without the money to gratify it, firing volleys at us in fury because we laughed at them in front of girls who by rights should have been their girls, tormenting us all, reminding us constantly of something for which we felt that we would give up everything we had for one more chance to experience, something we ourselves talked about all the time, was the passionate desire to be free; but what did we mean by freedom? I thought I knew, and so did everyone else; but it meant so many different things to so many of us.
We were, in fact, as near to being really free as anyone can be. We were relieved of almost every sort of mundane pre-occupation that had afflicted us in the outside world. We had no money and were relieved of the necessity of making any. We had no decisions to make about anything, even about what we ate. We were certainly much more free than many of us would ever be again, either during the war or after it. And as prisoners we did not even suffer the disapprobation of society as we would have done if we had been locked up in our own country. To our own people we appeared as objects worthy of sympathy.
(#ulink_c503ecf5-3d83-59ef-a479-1fd3fd6844b8) One of them was Captain Anthony, later Major-General, Dean Drummond, CB, DSO, MC and Bar, captured in North Africa in 1941 and escaped in 1942.
(#ulink_fdc26eab-f97e-5d0b-bab5-db95d513fc27) For a remarkable book on this subject, set in the orfanotrofio, see The Cage, by Billany and Dowie, Longmans, 1949.
CHAPTER THREE Armistizio (#ulink_0f4fbd95-f6d1-55e9-967b-82a4df1e1778)
The evening of the eighth of September was hot and sultry. The hospital was a room on the piano nobile immediately opposite the wooden huts in which the Italian guards lived and in which they kept the radio going full-blast.
At about a quarter to seven, while Michael and I were lying on our beds sweating, he on his stomach because of his boil, a programme of music was interrupted and someone began reading a message in a gloomy, subdued voice. It was to the effect that the Italian Government, recognising the impossibility of continuing the unequal struggle against overwhelming superior enemy forces, and in order to avoid further grave calamities to the nation, had requested an armistice of General Eisenhower and that the request had been granted. As a result, all hostilities between the Italian and Anglo-American forces would cease forthwith. Italian forces, however, would resist attacks from any other quarter, which could only mean Germans.
The voice we had been listening to was that of Marshal Badoglio who had been head of the Italian government since the fall of Mussolini on July the twenty-fifth. Although neither Michael nor I could speak Italian we both understood what was said because, like a lot of other prisoners, we had become quite proficient in the kind of clichés which the Italian Supreme Command employed in its bulletins, and this announcement was in the same idiom. What the Marshal didn’t say in his speech was that what had been arranged was not an armistice but an unconditional surrender signed under an olive tree five days previously in Sicily, and that he had been forced to make the announcement this evening very much against his will, because Eisenhower had already done so an hour and a quarter earlier, and the B.B.C. forty-five minutes before that, in what was to prove one of the most lamentable scoops of the war (lamentable, because it gave the Germans valuable extra time in which to disarm the Italian forces before any Allied landings began).
Later that night, without having done anything to organise the resistance to the Germans which he had called on his soldiers to make, Badoglio departed from Rome for the Adriatic coast, together with the King, from where they were taken by warship to Brindisi, leaving an apathetic and utterly disorganised nation in the lurch, a state in which the Italian people had long been accustomed to be left by their rulers and so-called allies. They were now left in an even deeper mess by the Anglo-Americans who had been stupid enough to inform the Germans of their intentions.
Badoglio’s announcement provoked some mild cheers from various parts of the building and a more extravagant display of joy by the Italian guards outside our window which we watched a little sourly. We had seen and heard it all forty-five days before when Mussolini had been deposed. Then the Italians had hurled his picture out of the window, torn down Fascist insignia, defaced the notices on the gable-ends of their huts with their injunctions Credere, Combattere … and other similar nonsense, and shouted to us in Italian simplified for our benefit, ‘BENITO FINITO!’ Now they shouted ‘ARMISTIZIO!’
The only difference Mussolini’s departure had made to us was that the sentries no longer fired at the windows of the bar when we looked out of them, and our walks were cancelled. If anything, we had suffered a reduction rather than an increase in our amenities. What now roused us from our lethargy was the thought that when the Germans retreated northwards, as none of us doubted they would have to, they might carry us off with them over the Alpine Passes. ‘Like a lot of concubines,’ someone said on one of the innumerable occasions on which we had discussed the possibility.
Our friends gave us all the latest news when they came to see us later in the evening.
‘The colonel called a parade in the hall,’ one said. ‘There’s to be no fraternisation with the Itis and we’ve mounted our own sentries on the gate. A party’s just gone off to recce the country round about in case the Germans come and we have to break out. If they do the colonello says he will fight, but there doesn’t seem much chance of his having to. Airborne landings are expected at Rome and Milan, and sea landings at Genoa and Rimini. It’s really a matter of holding out for twenty-four hours at the most until our people arrive. Anyway, we’re getting your gear together and we’ve got two of the biggest parachutists in the camp organised to help Eric if we do have to get out.’
‘I wish the M.O. would hurry up and get some plaster of paris for my ankle,’ I said. ‘Then all I’d need would be a stick instead of a couple of bloody great parachutists.’
‘Pity you’re both stuck here,’ said another. ‘Someone’s done a big deal with the Itis, and the bar’s doing terrific business. The ration’s been abolished; but we’ve brought your mugs. You can have some more when you’ve finished.’
Our drinking mugs were made from big tins which had originally contained powdered milk sent to us by the Canadian Red Cross, whose food parcels, together with those from Scotland, were easily the best. Each of these receptacles held more than a pint and they were now filled with a dark brownish liquid of a sort which neither Michael nor myself had ever seen before.
‘I say, this is rather strong,’ Michael said after tasting it. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘It’s supposed to be Marsala, but the wine merchants in the camp say they’ve never tasted Marsala like this. And I’ve just met someone on the way here who was drinking it out of an enamelled jug and the enamel’s coming off.’
‘Could you remember to put all my socks in my pack and my pullover and The Tour of the Hebrides,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, I mightn’t finish it before we go home.’
What we did not know, how could we, was that the Allies’ dispositions were already made, and that none of their plans included the liberation of the occupants of the orfanotrofio. The assault convoys bound for Salerno were at sea and had already been sighted south of Capri. The Sixteenth Panzer Division which was in the area had already ordered a state of alarm, and its members were now engaged in disarming all Italian troops and taking over the coastal batteries. The only airborne operations which had been planned, a drop on Rome by the United States Eighty-Sixth Airborne Division, had already been cancelled after its deputy commander, who had arrived in the capital on the afternoon of the seventh on a secret visit, had found on the morning of the eighth that all the airfields were in German hands. It was he who told Badoglio that the main Allied landings were due to begin the following morning, the first that the Marshal or any of his staff had heard of it. They had been led to believe that no landings would take place until the twelfth. What difference it would have made no one will ever know, or care.
For the rest, the greater part of the British Eighth Army was committed in Southern Italy where it was fighting its way up through Calabria in order to link up with the troops which were to be landed at Salerno. There were not going to be any airborne landings at Milan or anywhere else and no seaborne ones at Rimini or Genoa either.
CHAPTER FOUR The Ninth of September (#ulink_2be338e6-2475-5273-b5c1-6a43155f42fb)
Late on the following morning an Italian bugler sounded three ‘g’s’, the alarm call which meant that the Germans were on their way to take over the orfanotrofio, and everyone began to move out of the building into the exercise field at the back. From the window of the hospital, of which I was now the only occupant, Michael’s boil having burst during the night, brought to a head, perhaps, by the events of the previous day, there was no one to be seen on the road; only Italian soldiers setting up machine-guns and scurrying into slit trenches, reluctantly preparing to carry out the colonello’s order to defend the camp to the last round and the last man.
Looking at them I knew that they would not do so. By this, the fourth year of the war, too many personages too far from the scenes of the battles which they were trying to control, without themselves being under the necessity of firing a shot or of laying down their lives, had issued too many such orders to too many troops who invariably ended up by having to lay down their arms ignominiously, in order to save their skins. These Italian soldiers would have been mad to die in defence of an empty building, and they didn’t.
With my pack on my shoulder I hopped through the deserted corridors towards the back door. On the way, amongst the debris on the floor, I found a little book with the Italian tricolore on the cover, entitled ‘Say it in Italian’, or something similar, and I picked it up. By the time I reached the corner of the field where the rest of my company were, they were just beginning to move off through one of the several gaps which had been cut in the wire.
There, the two parachutists were waiting for me. They looked enormous in their camouflaged smocks, in which they must have been roasting, but without which any parachutist feels naked. They had been relieved of their packs so that they could help me.
They told me to take it easy and we went out through one of the gaps in the wire in the sweltering midday heat, and as soon as we were beyond it one of the British orderlies in the camp, a small, nut-brown man, a trooper in some cavalry regiment, came up and said, ‘It’s all right. You got a horse! Name of Mora, quiet as a lamb.’ And there she was, standing with a stolid-looking Italian soldier in the shade of some vines, taking mouthfuls of grass, swishing her tail at the flies, looking contented and well-fed. She was a little horse.
The parachutists were delighted to have my weight off their shoulders. They hoisted me into the saddle, half-strangled by my pack strap which was twisted round my neck, and then the soldier led Mora forward, chewing a straw, happy to be seconded for this easy duty, free of the obligation to sell his life to no purpose, while the rest of the people in our company moved on ahead in the shade of the vines, picking great bunches of grapes and churning the earth into dust.
For me the journey was a nightmare. Although the country was dead flat it was intersected by irrigation ditches (the same ditches that the escapers who had had themselves buried in the field had spoken of with revulsion after they were re-captured). The last thing one wanted in such country was a horse. The last thing I wanted anywhere was a horse. All I knew about horses was derived from a couple of ruinous visits to some trotting races at Heliopolis. I had never been on a horse in my life and I was terrified of them. And every horse I met knew it too.
At the first ditch Mora stopped dead on the edge of it and refused to move backwards or forwards, more like a mule than a horse. Perhaps she was a mule. She took no notice of the blows which the Italian soldier was raining on her behind with a cudgel; and I was no help at all. Every time my damaged foot touched her it was agony.
We seemed destined to remain there for ever, but something happened to make her utter a terrific snorting, whinnying noise, rear up on her hind legs and come down with her front ones in the slime in the bottom of the ditch with a resounding splosh, which catapulted me over her head on to the far bank and hurt my ankle dreadfully.
‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have struck a lighted cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. Everyone who witnessed it was cheered by this spectacular happening.
Then the parachutists picked me up and lugged me over a whole series of similar ditches while Mora, who had crossed them unencumbered, waited for me to catch up.
Finally, we emerged on to a narrow lane. In a field to one side of it men and women wearing wide-brimmed straw hats were harvesting wheat with sickles. They stopped work as the head of the column approached and looked alarmed, but when they realised that we were unarmed prisoners from the camp they smiled and waved to us.
Then a man in a striped city suit with square shoulders appeared and spoke to one of the Italian interpreters who was with us, and we halted in the shade of a grove of tall poplars. No one spoke and it was very cool and quiet. The only sound was the humming of bees and insects and the wind stirring the tops of the trees. High above them in a dark blue sky, small puffs of cloud floated, as if of a cannon that had been discharged at regular intervals. After some minutes we moved on again. None of us, except the interpreter and the more senior officers at the head of the column, knew what the man in the striped suit had said. None of us really cared. We were not yet used to the idea of freedom. Although we each one of us still felt that we were individuals, we were really a herd lacking any power to make useful decisions, and although we were in theory a battalion organised in companies of a hundred or so, any one of these companies could probably have been re-captured in this moment by two or three resolute Germans armed with Schmeissers. We were rather like one of those outings of lunatics which I had so often encountered in the Surrey pine woods when we had been training in the first summer of the war. And like many of them we were irrationally happy. Even I on my horse, or mule, of which I was terrified.
Then, suddenly, there was an awful roar and the Italian soldier was trying to drag Mora into a deep, watery ditch, and I clouted him over the head with his cudgel, of which I had relieved him, harder than I needed to in revenge for his having stuck a lighted cigarette end up Mora’s backside, as a Messerschmidt 110 skimmed overhead, two hundred feet above us, silvery, like a flying fish in the sun. It was gone before we had time to hide ourselves, and then it didn’t seem to matter much whether the pilot had seen us or not.
With so many stops and starts it took us until early afternoon to reach our destination, some fields on the far bank of one of the torrents which roared down from the Apennines at certain seasons, now with hardly any water in it at all. Here, below one of the steep, grassy embankments, we lay down under the vines and waited, dozing and discussing the various rumours that came to us, no one seemed to know from where: that the Germans had arrived at the orfanotrofio with tanks, that they were looting, were drunk, were smashing everything, had gone away for good, had gone away and were coming back the next day to round us up.
What had actually happened was that some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp, had fired a few rounds in the air, the Italian soldiers had capitulated instantly, the colonello had been arrested, and the Germans had taken him away as a souvenir of their visit. Later he was sent to a concentration camp in Germany where he suffered such privations that he died soon after he returned to Italy at the end of the war. He was an honourable, gallant but rather stupid man – honour being as much use in dealing with Germans in war time as a peashooter would be to a prehistoric man attempting to destroy a mammoth. The only looting was being done by the inhabitants of the village. It was lucky for us that they were.
Then the colonel sent for me. After a lot of frenzied hopping I found him hidden away behind a line of vines, together with his staff.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get under cover,’ he said. ‘We may have to move at any time and I can’t ask the chaps who have been helping you up to now to jeopardise their own chances of getting away in order to save you. Bad luck, but there it is. We’ve arranged with a farmer in that house over there to let you hide in his hay, but if the Germans find you he won’t know anything about you being there. If they do come it will be every man for himself, anyway.’
At the farm I said goodbye to the Italian soldier. If I had been a horse lover I would have said goodbye to Mora too. I gave him one of my six packets of cigarettes and we shook hands.
‘Vado a casa,’ he said. ‘I am going home.’ Then he got into the saddle and set off southwards along a line of vines, away from the colonel and the prisoners and the camp, a squat, rectangular figure. I wonder whether he made it. I expect he did. He was an invisible sort of man who blended well with the landscape. If I had had any sense I would have got up behind him and ridden pillion.
The farmer was a large, red-faced man with a roman nose. He was like a bucolic emperor, but his florid appearance belied his character which was shy and retiring. I was glad of this because I was not capable of making any sort of conversation. All I knew was a number of words – buono, male, oggi, domani, bello, brutto and some sentence which had stuck in my memory from the official communiques, Due velivoli sono stati abbattuti, two aeroplanes have been shot down, Un piroscafo è stato colato a picco, a steamer has been sent to the bottom, not much use in everyday conversation.
He helped me up a couple of steep ladders to a big loft where I lay deep in the hay with a bottle of water to slake my thirst, sneezing and with streaming eyes, wishing that I was in England where, for me, the hay fever season would have been over, and soaking the only two handkerchiefs I had with me.
Through a large opening in one of the walls of the loft, I looked out over a vast sea of vegetation to an infinitely distant horizon, from the surface of which, as if the lower parts of them were engulfed by it, rose red-roofed farmhouses, the tall campaniles of churches and dark groves of poplars. Much closer, a couple of hundred yards away, occasional movements among the vines betrayed the presence of scouts posted by the colonel, who were somewhat out of practice, otherwise there was no sign that there were more than five hundred prisoners hidden among them.
From away to the south, where the Via Emilia ran through the plain, came the solid roar of transport on the move. From somewhere closer came the pooping sound of motor cycles. They would probably be German B.M.W.s with sidecars, carrying three men armed with grenades and machine pistols. A few of these units could pick the lot of us up. They were probably using one of the minor roads which we had sometimes got to on our walks which ran roughly parallel with the Via Emilia from Piacenza to Parma and they were probably doing this because there was so much traffic on the main road. I wondered which way they were going, coming in from the north or pulling out across the river. The Italian Area General was said to have telephoned the colonello just before we left and told him that there was fighting in Milan where American parachutists had landed, and that there had been seaborne landings at La Spezia on the west coast. I didn’t believe any of this; but I still clung to the irrational belief that everything would be all right if only we could see the night through.
When it grew dark the farmer, whose name was Merli, came up the ladder and signed to me to come down. I was glad to get out of the fienile, the loft, although my hay fever had gone at last.
His wife was dark and pale and slight. The two children were beautiful, miniature editions of their mother. They were all curious about my uniform, the whipcord trousers, the battle-dress jacket with the polished brass pips, my silk muffler and my one beautiful new boot (the other was in my pack). Like everyone else, I was wearing my best clothes, wanting to appear decent when our own troops arrived. She fed me on pasta asciutta, and what she called grana, what I called Parmesan. It was nothing like the cheese of that name I had eaten in England. Afterwards she gave me a piece to eat. It had hard, salty nodules in it, the curd which broke into small pieces when the cheese was made. And her husband gave me some frothy, purple wine to drink, called lambrusco, which was very refreshing.
Then one of the Italian interpreters appeared, the elegant, pipe-smoking capitano who spoke excellent English. The news he brought was not altogether good.
‘The Germans are coming in from the north,’ he said, ‘and in great strength. But they may have left it too late. There’s been a big Allied landing at Salerno, south of Naples. We’ll know better what to do tomorrow.’
While we were sitting on chairs in the yard talking about the place where he lived, an extraordinary great vehicle, which in the moonlight looked as big as a barn, came charging round a corner belching sparks and smoke and disappeared.
‘What on earth was that?’ I asked him.
‘That was the steam tram that goes from Busseto to Parma by way of Ponte Taro,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised it’s out on such a night as this.’
I found it strange sitting with someone who up to a few hours before had been an official enemy. Like the soldier who had been put in charge of Mora, the capitano had been lucky to have been given the job of looking after us instead of being called upon to make a last stand at the orfanotrofio. I asked him how long he thought it would be. He said a week at the most. I noticed how the time from liberation was rapidly receding.
‘Now go and sleep,’ he said. ‘The farmer has put some sacks in the cowshed for you.’
Then he went off, into a dark mist which had risen. It hung just above the ground so that his head and shoulders emerged above it and the lower part of his body was invisible as he walked away. It was a weird sight. The moon was sinking, shedding an unearthly reddish tinge on the misty plain. Against the dark line of the Apennines Verey lights rose at intervals. From time to time there were explosions at the foot of the hills as if dumps were being blown. On the Via Emilia the traffic roared. Altogether, it was a thoroughly macabre night.
CHAPTER FIVE Interlude in an Ospedale (#ulink_14e0f757-812d-5899-920e-d125014cbb05)
The next morning, after a slow start, things began to happen with increased rapidity. It was as if a piece of an old film in which the actors emerge from vehicles, zoom into buildings with incredible speed, and miraculously appear at a window sixteen storeys up within seconds, had been interpolated in a modern one in which the characters move at a normal rate.
Around eleven o’clock an Italian doctor arrived in a Fiat 500. He was an enormous, shambling man with grizzled hair, like a bear and one of the ugliest men I had seen for a long time.
He examined my ankle, which was rather painful after the strains to which it had been subjected, raised his shoulders, made a noise which sounded like urgh and went off to have a conference with the capitano.
‘The doctor says you must go to hospital,’ the capitano said, when they emerged from their conclave.
‘But that means I shall be captured again,’ I said.
‘You’ll be taken anyway if you don’t. Apparently things are not going too well at Salerno and we’re six hundred kilometres north of it. Everything’s going to break up here, anyway. Unless you can walk you won’t stand a chance. The doctor can get you into a hospital in Fontanellato. No one will think of looking for you there.’
While he was speaking, the forerunners of an army of women, girls and small boys began to arrive at the farm on foot and on bicycles; the same girls, or the same sort of girls I had seen on the road outside the camp, except that now they were wearing their working clothes. I felt less bold now that we were at close quarters and there was no wire between us, and so did they, and all we managed were some nervous smiles.
They all carried baskets and panniers filled with civilian clothing, wine, bread, cheese, fruit, eggs and tinned food and cigarettes which they had saved from the orfanotrofio after the Germans had left and all at once the farm became a depot for the prisoners hidden behind the embankment.
I found myself a mechanic’s jacket and a pair of dark blue cotton trousers and a shirt, filled my pack with the food and cigarettes that were being pressed upon me from every side, and once again climbed the ladder to the loft where I changed into them, chucking my uniform down from the window into the yard from which it was instantly taken away.
While I was doing this I noticed a bold, good-looking girl. She was different from the others. They were all brown or black haired; but she was an ash blonde with blue eyes and she was very slim which made her seem taller than she was. She looked more like a Scandinavian than an Italian to me, but with more fire. Whatever she was she smiled at me.
Then the doctor arrived. For the last time I descended the ladder and said goodbye to the farmer and his wife who cried. They were the first people in the whole district to take the risk of helping us. Then I hopped across the yard to the Fiat.
As I was getting into it the girl came up and leant over the top of the open door.
‘I vill com to see you in the ospedale,’ she said, in fractured English. She had a deep middle-European voice. ‘Wonce I have seen you in the orfanotrofio and you vaved and the soldati went pom pom. Ve vill have lessons in languages,’ she said. ‘Your language and my language.’ And she smiled again. Then someone shut the door and we drove away.
‘If iu uont tu enter dhe steiscen iu mast haev e plaetfom tikit,’ Wanda said. ‘Se vuole entrare nella stazione deve avere un biglietto.’
I was lying in a bed in the Ospedale Peracchi on the outskirts of Fontanellato, only a few hundred yards from the orfanotrofio. I had now been free for three days. It seemed much longer. Wanda was seated on a chair which one of the suore, the nuns who were also expert nurses, had placed in a corner of the room, as far away from me as possible. Equally discreetly, the door had been left wide open. Both of us were armed with phrase books, she with a large Italian/English version, I with the English/ Italian booklet which I had salvaged on my way out of the orfanotrofio. With their help we were making heavy weather of one another’s languages, and it was not fair of her to change subjects like this.
Up to now we had been reading useful phrases to one another from the chapters on ‘Trams and Buses’. ‘Last stop. Ool ghet aut!’ ‘Kwah-lee ow-toh-bus vann-oh ah Toh-reen-oh? Which buses go to Turin?’ I ruffled through the pages of my book which was so small that it looked as if it had been printed for a midget, until I found a section headed ‘At the Station – Alla Stazione’, and said, ‘Oh per-soh eel mee-oh beel-yet-oh. I have lost my ticket.’ To which she replied, severely, ‘Iu haev misleid iur tikit. Iu caant continiu iur geerni anless iu ricaver it. Lei ha smarrito il suo biglietto. Non può proseguire il suo viaggio se non lo trova.’
‘Nohn vawr-ray-ee cohn-teen-u-ar loh. I don’t want to continue it,’ I said. I enunciated this, and all the other phrases, with such painstaking slowness that I sounded like a run-down gramophone.
‘Iu hev mist dhe train. È partito il treno,’ she said, triumphantly, like one of the White’s men in the orphanage putting down a natural at baccarat.
‘Grahts-ee-ay. Lay ay stah-toh jehn-tee-lay. Thank you very much. Most kind of you.’
‘Rieli nathing,’ she said, airily. ‘Ai em ounli tu glaed if ai kaen help iu. Proprio nulla, per me è un vero piacere poterla aiutare.’
She shut her book and looked at me with an air of despair which, to me, was very beautiful.
‘Hurrock,’ she said (this is what my name sounded like on her lips).
‘You will never learn italiano like this. You spik and then you forget. First you must learn la grammatica. I have learned English grammatica, so also must you learn Italian. And you must learn presto, queekly, queekly. Here, you see, I have written for you a grammatica with aggettivi, come se dice?
‘Adjectives! Adjectives! Che lingua! Also auxeiliary verbs and verbs, regolari and irregolari. You will learn all these, please, by tomorrow.’
‘I can’t learn all this by tomorrow.’
‘You vill,’ she said, ‘or I shall not kom more. I shall teach to someonels. The superiora says I can kom ven I vish. If you vont me to kom you must vork.’
She consulted her book, ‘Hueer dheers e uil dheers e ui. Proverbio. Dove c’è la volonta c’è la via.’
‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ I said. ‘That’s a proverb. I want you to come to see me more than anything.’
‘Then learn your grammatica,’ she said, consulting her superior phrase book. ‘Far presto! Luk slipi!’
When the doctor drove me to the hospital he made me sit next to him in the front seat. It seemed insanely risky, but the lanes through which we whizzed were as empty as the fields on either side. It was midday, mezzogiorno, and everyone, friend and foe, was under cover, eating their dinners and sheltering from the gigantic sun. Behind us a long plume of dust rose from the road and spread out across the countryside as dense as a smokescreen laid by a destroyer.
At the hospital we were expected. As soon as I got out of the car in the forecourt, two astonishingly powerful women wearing black habits and starched white head-dresses, whom I took to be nuns, came running down the steps towards me, flung my arms round their shoulders, just as the two parachutists had done, and rushed me into the building under a dilapidated iron and glass canopy, like the ones outside old cinemas, with the words Ospedale Peracchi above it, through a pair of mahogany doors, down a dim corridor in which there was a bust of Signor Peracchi, the benefactor, after whom the hospital had been named, and into a hall in which they paused for breath. To me they seemed tough enough to be members of one of those German parachute units whom everyone at the time believed had dropped, dressed as nuns, in the Low Countries, in 1940.
While we stood there a number of very old men and women of a sort who would now, in the ruthless jargon of our time, be called ‘geriatrics’, emerged from the room in which they had been eating their midday meal. In their hands, unheeded, they held crusts of bread, glasses of wine and bowls of pasta. They mumbled excitedly at the sight of this unexpected apparition, and their eyes lit up with pleasure. But it was not for long. They were shepherded back into their dining hall and the two suore picked me up again and whizzed me up a flight of stairs and into a small room on the top floor of the building, as if they were a couple of express messengers delivering a large parcel. And once we were safely in the room they began to unwrap me, just like a parcel. There was no false modesty about these women. In a minute they had stripped off my newly acquired clothes, inserted me into a pair of English pyjamas looted from the orfanotrofio, and put me to bed.
Then the doctor appeared, huge, authoritative and uncommunicative, and put my foot in plaster of paris, and I was given a bowl of the same pasta that the old people below had been eating, while various suore clucked sympathetically, saying poveretto and poverino – words that even I could understand – and then they all went away and after a while I fell asleep in heavenly, clean sheets, like a great cosseted baby.
I woke at four. The venetian blinds were down and the room was in darkness. I got out of bed, hauled on the webbing strap which raised the one over the window which faced the road, and looked out on it. I half expected it to be swarming with Germans; but apart from a small boy who was grubbing about in a ditch, and a girl with black hair done up in a yellow handkerchief who went creaking past on a bicycle, there was no one in sight. The heat was terrific.
By sticking my head out of the window I could see the whole of the front of the hospital, the peeling stucco, the mouldering canopy over the door and the little forecourt, now in shadow, with its iron seats under the trees on which ancient men and women sat placidly or slept and one or two idiots lolled, just as I remembered them on our early morning walks from the orfanotrofio under guard, before the sun had got too hot for them to sit there. Then I had imagined the inside of the building to be a mixture of nineteenth-century workhouse and madhouse, and I had looked at the occupants with feelings of pity and horror; but now that I was inside it and had seen it for myself it seemed a clean and friendly refuge from a crumbling world.
Then the superiora, the head of the hospital appeared, a middle-aged woman with a gentle, resolute face. She wore a more elaborate head-dress than the two suore who had rushed me into the building and a big bunch of shiny keys and an ebony and silver crucifix swung from her black belt. She was carrying a large tray loaded with tea things and bread and butter, ginger biscuits and raspberry jam; everything except the bread and butter looted from the orfanotrofio. She was a more elderly version of the Gaoler’s Daughter in The Wind in the Willows, visiting Toad in his dungeon with a great trayload of tea and buttered toast.
I tried to thank her, partly in French, partly with the few Italian words I knew, but they got mixed up with bits of school Latin, and then I ran out of words completely and looked at her in despair, and she smiled and went out of the room and came back with the girl I had met in the farmyard that morning.
She was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a blue cotton skirt. She was brown, she was slim, she had good legs, she had ash blonde hair and blue eyes and she had a fine nose. When she smiled she looked saucy, and when she didn’t she looked serious. She was all right.
She began to speak with the rich, faulty, slow English of which I have already tried to give some inkling, and which it would be tedious to continue.
‘You have not forgotten me?’ she said. (I would have had to have been peculiarly gormless to have done so in the five hours which had elapsed since I had last seen her.)
I assured her that I had not done so.
‘Your friends are well. They are now all dressed in clothes the people have given them. Some have already gone away across the Via Emilia. Some are in the farms, most of them are still in the fields. You must stay here until your foot is strong enough to walk on. Yesterday when the Germans came, everyone from the village was in the orfanotrofio. We were stealing the things you left behind. Che robe! What things you left behind you! I was with my father. We had just come out and we met them on the road. They fired, only in the air, but we did not know this. I lay on the road. My father had many packets of cigarettes and he jumped into a ditch to hide, but it was full of water. He held them up like this, above his head, and kept them dry. Then we ran away. My father spoiled his suit, but he is very pleased with his cigarettes.’
‘My mother has made an apfelstrudel for you,’ she went on. ‘In my country we call them struklji. We are not Italian. We are Slovenes. You can eat it after your dinner. Tonight you have chicken. The superiora told me. Be kind to her and do what she says. Now I must go. I have to take food to your friends.’
I asked her when she would come again.
‘I will come tomorrow, if the superiora allows. If you want I will teach you Italian. It will be useful for you, and you can teach me English. I speak badly. My name is Wanda.’ She picked up her basket. At the door she paused.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘You are the only one in this part of the building who is not incinta. You know what is incinta?’ She puffed out her stomach and banged it with both hands, like a drum. ‘You are in the sala di maternità and tonight a baby will be born.’
When they had gone I laughed out loud. For a year I had slept on a straw mattress with lumps in it, or on bare boards; the company of women had been a dream and I had thought constantly of food, the gnawing hunger of the bored and the unemployed, and I had longed to be alone, to have a room of my own and to be free. Then, suddenly, everything had come at once, freedom, at least of a sort, a wonderful clean bed, delicious food and a beautiful girl to talk to who had a name like a heroine in an Oppenheim novel. Perhaps it was all a dream, or worse, perhaps I had gone mad.
These reveries were interrupted by a huge droning. I got to the window and looked out. Three J.U.52 transport planes were beating over the village like great, dark birds, and as they passed overhead they let fall what seemed to be huge swarms of white butterflies which slowly fluttered earthwards, shimmering in the evening sun.
A few minutes later the ospedale’s male nurse and, apart from the gardener, the only man employed in it, puffed up the stairs to my room bearing one of the leaflets which the gardener had retrieved from the road outside. He was a fat old thing with a red face and a large, bushy moustache. He reminded me of Tenniel’s drawing of the Walrus, but without the tusks. His name, he told me, was Giulio.
The leaflet was printed on a single sheet of paper. Il Governo ha tradito l’Italia … the text began and it continued in the same vein. Anyone reading it could be in no doubt either about the Germans’ feelings or their intentions. They were very angry about being betrayed; they were going to fight, and God help anyone who got in their way.
‘Molto male,’ Giulio said, with gloomy relish, speaking in telegraphese to make it simpler for me to understand, which he punctuated with puffing noises, the sort of sounds which I imagined a real walrus might make, surfacing by an ice-floe in some Arctic sea.
‘PFF! Roma kaputt, PFF! Tedeschi in tutta L’Emilia, PFF! Una disgrazia per I’Italia. Una disgrazia per lei, Tenente, PFF! Kaputt.’ He was just like the Walrus. It was as if he was saying ‘I weep for you. I deeply sympathise, Oyster, but somebody is going to eat you up.’
Later that evening fearful groans and cries began to issue from the ward next to my room, which was only normally employed for ‘difficult’ cases. Powerfully affected by other people’s pains – I invariably faint away during performances of King Lear, Coriolanus, any Greek tragedy worthy of the name, and in any film in the course of which operating theatres and torture chambers form part of the mise en scène – and never having heard the sounds of a confinement at first hand, I lay on my bed listening to them in terror as they rose to ever greater heights. If this was an ordinary childbirth what on earth could a ‘difficult’ one sound like, I wondered. Finally, in the early hours of the morning they ceased and were replaced by the powerful roarings of a baby. Only then did I go to sleep.
Every afternoon Wanda visited me in the ospedale. We sat together in the back garden, hidden from the outside world by one of the projecting wings of the building and a hedge, under the benevolent but constant chaperonage of the superiora and her attendant suore who were never far away. Centuries of invasion of their country by foreign soldiery, and the concomitant outrages which had been inflicted on them had made the members of female religious orders particularly adept in protecting not only their own virtues, but that of those temporarily committed to their charge.
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