Love and War in the Apennines (10 page)

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.

She used to tell me the latest news about my friends. How some people had already set off towards the line; others were thinking of going to Switzerland; how one officer whose identity I never discovered had been hidden in the
castello
of a local
principessa
who had been so impressed by his girlish face that she had the brilliant idea of dressing him as a young woman of fashion and putting him on a train to Switzerland. This she had done but, unfortunately, he looked so desirable on the train that some soldiers had ‘interfered’ with him, as the
News of the World
used to put it, and discovered the truth, although one of them got punched hard on the nose in the process of doing so.

Wanda herself was in favour of my going to Switzerland – she
had none of my optimism about the Allies’ capacity to advance rapidly up Italy – crossing from somewhere near the head of the Val d’Aosta with a party which was being organised by the pipesmoking interpreter; but I hated the idea of going to Switzerland and perhaps spending the winter not imprisoned but interned which seemed to me the same thing, perhaps locked up in a hotel on the shores of some drab Swiss lake, watching the rain beating down into it. Her other plan, which seemed more cheerful and sensible than going to Switzerland, was that I should become gardener’s boy at the castle of that same
principessa
who had sent the transvestite officer on his last journey.

In the garden we worked away, teaching one another our respective languages. After our initial, disastrous, but diverting attempt to do it with phrase books, we went back to the beginnings. Wanda made me start at the bottom, conjugating verbs and struggling with pronouns. Fortunately for me she already had a sound knowledge of grammar and was far ahead.

I concentrated on teaching her new words, the way to pronounce the ones she already knew and some colloquial expressions. But as the days went by, listening to her, I found myself increasingly reluctant to destroy her rich, inimitable idiom, and her strangely melancholy accent which to me was a triple distillation of the essence of middle Europe. It seemed monstrous to graft on to this vigorous stem my own diluted version of English, originally learned in a London suburb and further watered down by school teachers and the B.B.C.

‘Questo è un sasso.
Dis is a ston,’ she would say, picking up a piece of gravel from one of the paths. ‘I strait it avay,’ throwing it over her shoulder. She also employed a remarkable word of her own invention ‘to squitch’. This could be used to describe any kind of operation from corking a bottle of wine to mending a piece of complicated machinery. ‘You just squitch it in,’ she said,
as I tried to replace the winder which had come off her dilapidated wrist-watch.

It would have been tedious if we had confined ourselves to studying one another’s languages; but, as well, we had long, rambling conversations about our lives. She told me about her family. They were Yugoslavs, Slovenes from the Carso, the great, windswept limestone plateau which extends inland from the Gulf of Trieste at the head of the Adriatic towards Ljubljana, territory which had been ceded to Italy after the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919. Her father had been a schoolmaster in a Slovene village in the Carso called Stanjel until the provisions of the peace treaty moved the Italian frontier with Slovenia twenty-five miles inland from the Adriatic, when it was re-named San Daniele del Carso by the Italians. Much later, in the early thirties, Mussolini decided to break down the strong nationalistic spirit which still existed in those parts of Slovenia which had been ceded to Italy. He forbade the use of the Slovene language and Slovenian teachers were deported to Italy. Among them was Wanda’s father. He was of the same age as the
colonello
at the
orfanotrofio
but his background was entirely different. He scarcely knew any Italian at all, his second language being German, the official language of the Empire (he had served in the Austrian Army in the First World War) but now he was sent to Fontanellato to teach in the school there where, for some years knowing little of the language, he experienced great difficulty in correcting his pupils’ essays. He was a liberal of the old sort and detested Fascists and Fascism. Wanda told me that her family had never been allowed to return to their country and that her mother cried very often when she thought of her home, although the local people at Fontanellato, who had originally called them
Tedeschi
, Germans, were now very friendly. She herself was an accountant and she worked in the
Banca d’ Agricoltura
in the village.

When Wanda was not at the
ospedale
she was either working at the bank or else taking supplies to the other prisoners in the surrounding country. Fortunately, the weather was still good. Meanwhile, I got on with the ‘prep’ which she had set me; but without her I found the garden a rather creepy, shut-away place. Occasionally a low-flying German aircraft roared overhead; almost equally loud were the roars of outpatients who were having their teeth extracted without the aid of painkillers, by Giulio who not only acted as
infirmiere
but also stood in as a dental surgeon in urgent cases in the absence of the real dentist who only visited Fontanellato once a week.

I had another companion in the garden. A little mongoloid child called Maria. She was olive-skinned and had a squat, pear-shaped body, a thick almost non-existent neck, a very large head, low brows, a vestigial nose and pig-tails. In fact just as Giulio looked like the Walrus, to me, Maria resembled the picture of Rebecca, the little girl who was always slamming doors, the one on whom the bust of Abraham had fallen and laid her out, in Belloc’s
Cautionary Tales for Children.
Having done little else for the past year but read, I found that I had a tendency to make such literary comparisons; but it was one which I felt I ought to curb, otherwise the little world I inhabited would be entirely populated with figures of fiction – the
superiora
as the Gaoler’s Daughter, Giulio as the Walrus, Maria as Rebecca Offendort, the daughter of a wealthy Banker who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater, and so on.

Looking at Maria it was difficult to guess her age; in fact she was nine but looked older. She was loosed on me every morning at eleven o’clock by the
suore
who were glad to have her off their hands for an hour. She used to enjoy being with me because I didn’t tease her as some of the nastier inmates and one of the older
suore
did; I liked having her with me, providing that she
didn’t hurt me too much. For Maria was immensely strong. She used to creep up behind me, seize one of my fingers in a powerful lock and bend it back until, unless I freed it, she would have broken it like a rotten stick.

Once she almost succeeded in throttling me with one of her pig-tails which she wound round my neck in much the same way as Indian thugs used the handkerchief to strangle their victims. Sometimes she tried to bite me or gnaw off one of my ears; but mostly she was affectionate and when she was she used to plonk herself in my lap like a five hundred pound bomb, and together we used to look through old copies of
La Domenica del Corriere
, a magazine which always had highly coloured and skilfully executed illustrations on its covers, pictures of British battleship sinking,
Bersaglieri
performing terrific feats of valour with shells bursting all round them, and more domestic incidents, some of them macabre – one depicted a cloister full of nuns being attacked by a hungry lion which had escaped from a zoo during an air raid. Maria liked this picture very much. She used to look at the lion and make wuffing noises like a little dog; perhaps she identified the
suora
it was beginning to consume as the one who used to tease her when she thought that no one was looking.

Every day the news got worse. On the twelfth of September Radio Roma broadcast the news that Mussolini had been rescued by German parachutists. The station was now in the hands of the Germans, and temporarily at least, it seemed more reliable and less euphoric than the B.B.C. which, according to Wanda who had heard it, had actually broadcast on the same day the sound of the bells of St Paul’s ringing out in rejoicing at the invasion of Italy.

On the thirteenth and fourteenth the news from Salerno was really awful. Rome announced that the Germans were launching massive counter-attacks on the beachhead, and this was confirmed by the B.B.C. By the sixteenth the news was better. The
counter-attack seemed to have lost its steam; but on that day an order was broadcast that all Italian officers, N.C.O.s and men were to present themselves forthwith in uniforms at the nearest German headquarters. No one but a lunatic would have obeyed such an order, and, in fact scarcely anyone did; but what was more serious was another announcement to the effect that anyone sheltering or feeding prisoners of war would be dealt with under martial law, and I had visions of the
superiora
going before a firing squad as Nurse Cavell had done. It was obvious that I could not stay in the
ospedale
any longer and, for the first time I realised what Wanda had been trying to din into me, that a knowledge of Italian was going to be essential if I was to avoid being recaptured.

On or about the sixteenth the
Gazzetta di Parma
, Italy’s oldest newspaper, which had enjoyed a very brief period of editorial freedom after the Armistice, before once again being muzzled, published a statement by the Commandant of the S.S. in Parma. Full of gruesome bonhomie, he conveyed his felicitations to the population and especially to members of the Fascist organisations, and then went on to speak of a new period of prosperity in store for the Italian people. Next to this absolutely crazy announcement there was a notice to the effect that a curfew was imposed on the inhabitants of the entire Province from ten p.m. onwards, and that anyone who disregarded it was liable to be shot.