Love and War in the Apennines (30 page)

At the end of this story, when the King went up in flames, the old man laughed longer than I had ever heard him before, which was exactly three Heh, Heh, Heh’s more than he usually allowed himself, and then embarked immediately on another story called
Il Figliolo del Re Portogallo
, but the effect of the exertions of the day were too much for me and I nodded off, waking fortunately at the very conclusion when he was saying something about someone or other calling the cook.

By now it was his time for bed. I hoped it was going to be mine, too. Nothing had been said about staying the night; but he lit one of the lanterns and led the way out of the front door to a little room which had some hay in it, illuminated it for a moment to enable me to appreciate the comfort of the place, and then went away without saying a word to me but laughing to himself as if he had played some kind of practical joke.

Here in the valley there was no wind. It was intensely dark and soft rain was falling. The only other sounds were the murmur of the river and the hooting of the owls in the woods. The old man’s room was on the ground floor, next to the kitchen and the shutters were latched back from the window. Inside it there was a large black iron bedstead with a high back as solid and funereal-looking as a catafalque. The sheets and bedding were very clean. On the wall to one side of the bed there was a crucifix, a medallion of the Madonna del Rosario and various sacred postcards. The old man, made even smaller by the huge bed, was in his shirt-tails, kneeling with his head on the coverlet saying his prayers; and then I, too, went to bed in what was perhaps the loneliest house in the densest wood in the Northern Apennines.

I woke late feeling refreshed but battered, and put on my rags. The old man was nowhere to be seen but he had left me some of the chestnut
polenta
, which was a bit cloying in the morning, and some tart red wine. What I really needed was a needle and thread to attach the lower part of my trouser leg which I had managed to retrieve when it was torn off, to the upper part and, in order to try and find them I made a tour of the house.

It was larger than I had imagined it to be from the outside and in an extremity of decay, although it would be some years before it actually collapsed because the great beams which supported the roofs and floors were as strong and sound as the timbers of a newly-launched ship-of-the-line. The floors of the rooms downstairs were all cobbled as if they had been intended for the use of cows and bullocks rather than human beings, and an outside staircase led to the upper floor on which there were two crumbling chambers, one of which had a large double bedstead in it which had not been slept in for years, and a lot of old clothes hanging on pegs and dozens of old boots, one of which was occupied by
a family of baby mice who dropped out of it when I picked it up and scuttled away. And there were other, smaller rooms leading off these principal ones, but the floors were too rotten to walk on and even if they had not been I was afraid that the old man might return and find me in them and be displeased.

Having failed to find a needle and thread anywhere I went and sat under one of the great chestnut trees above the river and waited for him to return. It was a beautiful day. As the previous one had been the first of winter, this, paradoxically, was the last of autumn, and as soon as it climbed high enough to do so, the sun shone down into the valley from an unclouded sky, although to the west, beyond the ridge from which I had come down into it, it was very black. From time to time a gentle breeze blew down the valley and out of the gorge, and when it did the pale golden, saw-edged leaves came floating down from the branches of the chestnut trees on to the grass in thousands. I wondered how old these trees could be. They were not nearly as tall as some of the sweet chestnuts I had seen in England but the trunks were enormously thick and their bark which had deep, spiral grooves in it, made them look like huge screws embedded in the earth.

Presently I saw the old man coming up the valley by a track which I had not noticed. He was moving at a tremendous rate, much more rapidly than I imagined such a frail, minute person could, walking in a rather crab-like manner as if he was about to move off the track to the right but never did. On his back was the old rucksack which he had had on his knees in the car, and his dog was trotting along ahead of him.

He went up past the place where I was sitting without stopping, and without paying any attention to me, although I heard him laughing, and went into the house from which he emerged after a few minutes and disappeared into an out-building. Nothing happened for about ten minutes but then clouds of smoke came
billowing out of the door, as if the place was on fire. After a while they ceased and I heard a strange whirring noise as if some giant insect was in flight.

Although I did not want to disturb the old man, and was a little in awe of him, I was curious to find out what he was up to.

The place was a workshop, and everything in it, apart from his axe, was home-made, even the saw blades and the bradawls, the biggest of which were in the kitchen.

He certainly had the means to do so. At this moment he was operating a home-made forge, working the treadle furiously, heating an iron bar that was already glowing. Close by, upside down on the floor, there was a handcart, about the same size as the one I had used on the Pian del Sotto and beautifully constructed, with spoked wheels with iron tyres. It even had a braking system operated by wires which led from the brake blocks to a wooden lever on the draw bar which was fitted in such a way that if the bar was lowered to the ground the brakes would go on automatically.

At present he was making the axle and as soon as he saw me he turned over the treadling to me. It was a very ingenious sort of forge in which the wind was produced by vanes made from old tin cans revolving in a tunnel. It took a long time for him to make the axle to his satisfaction – he was like a miniature Vulcan banging away at it with various sorts of hammers, talking to himself as he worked.

The rest of the room was mostly filled with baulks of seasoned timber which had obviously been cut many years before. To make the planks for the bottom and sides of the cart he had cut a chestnut log in two and then split it down the middle, using hard wooden wedges and a maul shaped like an Indian club; then he had cut it into quarters, then into smaller pieces and these he had split into planks using an iron blade set in a wooden handle.

Then, when he had finished, and I had shrieked a number of questions at him which he seemed to quite enjoy answering, about the tools and how he had split the wood to make the planks he turned away and said, as always, to the world rather than to me,
‘Faremo la merenda.’

And we went into the house for another dose of chestnut
polenta.

I had decided that I must tell him that I wanted to go after the
merenda.
But when we had just finished eating and I was about to say so he got up and said, ‘
Andiamo
.’

By the time I had rushed to the barn and picked up my pack he was vanishing round the corner with his dog. It was just twelve o’clock.

We climbed for two and a half hours very fast through dreadful woods, filled with bramble, but the path was clear and it never faltered. Once or twice we crossed other, wider tracks used by mules, which climbed more directly to the ridge, which was above us to the right, and we crossed several streams high up near their sources. The gradient was quite easy until the last half hour when it became very steep; but at last we came out on level ground in a plantation of firs and in a few minutes more we came to a circular clearing among the trees which had a long, narrow ride leading off from it to the south along the ridge. He had brought me to the Punta Perdera, the place where I had met the
Guardia Forestale.

‘Vediamo un
po,’ he said and set off alone to spy out the land with the dog following him.

Soon he was back, laughing, and nodding to me. Presumably this meant that there was no one about.

I thanked him for all he had done, but he wasn’t listening. I would have shaken his hand; but he was too remote. He just stood there waiting for me to go, and I went.

All the way up through the woods the sun had shone brightly, although away to the west, beyond the other ridge, it was raining heavily; but the clouds were moving eastwards and by the time that I reached the top of my own mountain, because that is how I now thought of it, it had begun to rain there too and this and the thought of the cave gave me an extra accession of energy, and I went down the cliff edge to the Castello del Prato in half an hour. Here I decided to have my first rest since leaving the valley three and a half hours previously; but it was already growing dark and it was miserable in the remains of Abramo’s hut so I decided to go on.

As soon as I entered the labyrinth where the cave was I had a feeling that something was wrong. I waited for some time listening for voices, but I could hear nothing. As soon as I reached the cave I was sure of it. It was still there, as invisible as it had ever been; but what I had thought of as some atavistic sixth sense which I had developed during my time in the woods was nothing more than a distant whiff of woodsmoke. Here, outside the hut, it was very strong. Someone had lit a fire inside it. Smoke was pouring from the chimney.

I couldn’t remain outside indefinitely in the rain. I had to find out who, if anyone, was in it. I went back through the labyrinth and left my rucksack on one of the paths I knew well which led up through the woods to the downs. If I put my head under the sacking in the doorway and found a
Guardia
or a German inside, at least I would have a chance of getting away quickly, and if I put my head in quickly without saying anything in my Anglo-Italian accent, whoever it was inside would be unlikely to shoot for fear of killing one of his own people. I was not sure where I would go if whoever it was inside turned out to be an enemy, but I knew that it would have to be either to the old man again, who had not invited me to stay, or to Abramo who had.

It was rather like diving into a swimming pool in the dark, not knowing if there was any water in it. I ducked my head under the sacking and was momentarily blinded by the fire – all I could see was the outline of a large figure sitting in front of it.

Then a voice I remembered well said, ‘Hullo, Eric. You’ve been a hell of a long time coming. Your pal from the village was getting worried. You look as if you’ve been trying to swim the Channel.’

It was James. He had arrived just as Wanda said he might.

I was really pleased to see James. I was very tired of living alone. We had been close friends ever since I had been sent from Rome to the camp in the Abruzzi which was my first introduction of being a ‘real’ prisoner of war, instead of a pampered one as a guest of a fashionable cavalry regiment and when we had both been moved to the
orfanotrofio
we had stayed together. It was James who got me the entrée to an O.K. room, although the wrong end of it. And we had planned to leave the camp together when the time came, until I fell down the stairs, after which it became impossible. I had never met anyone like James before the war and I have rarely met anyone like him since, not because he was a member of a coterie – oddly enough he wasn’t – but because such people rarely leave the English countryside in which the whole of their lives are spent, and there is no doubt that figures cast in this mould will soon cease to exist as very few are now being produced.

He was very tall, very burly and had a ruddy complexion, a Roman nose, a firm mouth, a big chin and very clear blue eyes which he always directed straight at whoever he was talking to. He looked exactly like the Captain of Games in an old copy of
The Boy’s Own Paper
, or Old Brooke, the Head of the House in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
and this is what he had been, Head of
the House at a famous school in the Midlands where the ability to play cricket and rugby football well, and be seen to enjoy doing so, were cardinal virtues.

He loved fox hunting and his favourite books were the novels of Surtees and Sassoon’s
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.
He loved England and, at this stage of the war, thought that it would be exactly the same after it was over as it had been before, except that its reputation in the world would be greatly enhanced, as I did myself. He seemed to know everyone in rural England. In the two camps we lived in together he would invariably return to our room and say, ‘I’ve just been speaking to So-and-So. His brother farms about thirty miles from our place,’ or ‘So-and-So’s cousin was at my college.’ But what he enjoyed most at the
orfanotrofio
was talking to one of the soldiers, the one who had got me the horse (or was it mule?) who had been in the yeomanry with him and before that had been a servant with one of the big Midland Hunts, and together they used to recall the sort of days which, for both of them, had been heaven on earth.

Occasionally, we used to get on one another’s nerves. Morally, he was altogether too good for me – the incident with Dolores in the hay could just not have happened to James, and I had not the slightest intention of telling him about it; and by the same token I was not quite good enough for him. Yet on the whole we got on very well.

I thought he looked very thin and rather run-down. Although he made it all sound very easy, I suspected that things had not been quite as pleasant as he made them out to be although, apart from not having lived in a cave, his experiences had been so remarkably like mine that the similarity was positively ludicrous and somehow detracted from what I had thought of as being an uncommon experience. To him it appeared less novel because there had been three or four other escaped prisoners in his
neighbourhood, all of whom had lived more or less the same sort of lives, alternately hiding and working on farms – all except one who had become very strange and had taken to walking through the woods barefooted, bearing a cross made of branches, alarming the local inhabitants and his companions by his altogether too public appearances. This was one of the reasons why James had been so happy to move.

‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been a Catholic,’ he said. ‘The locals wouldn’t have minded that. They just couldn’t believe that Protestants went in for this kind of thing.’

Eventually a guide had been provided to bring James over the mountains and down to the village where he had undergone a pretty stiff cross-examination by the Chairman of the Board. I was sorry that I had missed this because James’s many virtues did not include any aptitude for foreign languages for which, as he once told me, he could see no future use as, once the war was over, he had no intention of ever leaving England again.

‘Splendid chap,’ he said, speaking of the Chairman. ‘A bit prickly at first; but then we got talking about hill farming. I told him about my cousin’s place in Perthshire and he became very friendly. In the end we had quite a party. I haven’t had such a head for years. They got me up about four and his son brought me up here.’

‘I haven’t met him,’ I said.

‘Another good chap. Looks a bit like his father. He’d just arrived. He’s a medical student in Milan. The old man looks exactly like Lord Scamperdale in
Mr Sponge
, don’t you think? That picture by Leech of him sitting in front of the fire. Look, I’ve got it here.’

James had forced me to read
Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour
while we were in the
orfanotrofio
and much to my surprise I had thoroughly enjoyed it and now, when he opened the book at Leech’s drawing of Lord Scamperdale, I realised that it was true. The Chairman was his spitting image and from now on we always
referred to him as Scamperdale or Scampers. Now I told James about my journey and why I had made it.

‘I don’t think anything will come of this submarine thing,’ he said. ‘No more do you and from what you say all the passes will be closed in a week or two. I made the same mistake as you did. Now we shall just have to stick it out here as long as we can. It all depends on whether the people down below in the village can get through to us with food when the snow comes. It will be awful for them when it does and they have to slog up here. We shall feel terrible about letting them do it. But even if they do get through three or four months in this hut is going to be pretty hard. We shall be just sitting here and we’ll probably go to pieces; but we’ve got to try and keep going. We just can’t fail them after all the sacrifices they’ve made.’

Although I didn’t say it I thought the best thing we could probably do so far as the people who were helping us were concerned would be to give ourselves up.

This conversation took place the following morning, before Francesco had come up to find out if I was back. After rebuking me severely for doing what he had specifically warned me against doing, which was trying to force my way through the forest, he told me something about the mysterious old man, whose name, he said, was Aurelio.

‘When he was younger,’ he said, ‘he did what many of the men here did until the war came. He left the mountains and went down into the cities and about the countryside, sharpening knives with a machine. Then when he got too old to do this he went to live with his brother who had two farms, the one at La Tosa and the other the one you stayed in down by the river. The brother was married and both he and his wife were very unkind to Aurelio and worked him very hard, giving him nothing at all, except a bed to sleep in.
And when the brother died, at the beginning of the war, his widow went to live in Piacenza with her sister and she couldn’t sell the farms because they were too lonely and any of the young men who might have taken them were away at the war and so Aurelio stayed on. Many people think he’s mad; but he’s not at all. It’s just being alone all the time that makes him talk to himself. He’s a marvellous workman, in wood and iron. There’s no one anywhere in these mountains can beat him at it. When he was young he made a bicycle entirely out of wood, the only part he didn’t make was the chain. Another time he made a merry-go-round (he had to explain the word for this which was
giostra).
He made it for the children in the village. It worked by turning a big handle. It needed two people to do it and while the children went round sitting on the horses he had carved from the trunks of trees, he paid a man to play music on an accordion. He might have told you about the bicycle and the merry-go-round; but what he never tells anyone about is his aeroplane. He built an aeroplane, long, long ago, soon after the last war. It had no engine but he tried to fly in it and he launched himself in it from the top of a cliff. Fortunately, it was not a very high cliff and all he did was break a few bones but he had to be taken to hospital. People used to make jokes about it and he didn’t like being laughed at, and so he never spoke of it again; but it almost flew. If he could have done sums and had known how to read and write he might have been a rich man, Aurelio. And he’s a great story teller. No one knows how many stories he can remember. He’s one of the last. He learned them from an old, old man who used to make a living by telling them, who had himself learned them when he was young from another story teller, who was also very old, so you see the story that you heard is very old indeed.’

James and I spent twenty-two days in the cave and great parts of that time are now inseparable, one from another. The day that I
returned from the
crinale
the weather broke, as it had already on the tops, and autumn was finished. It rained and rained and cold, blustering winds howled through the woods stripping the last of the leaves from the trees and with them our last protection from the eyes of our enemies, and because of this it became impossible for anyone to approach the cave with supplies during the day. And soon the
crinale
became white with snow, at first only the peaks, and then only for short periods; but the time when they were white grew longer and longer as the days went by until, one day, the whole
crinale
was white and remained so, and from that time onwards, whoever came up to the cave, at dawn or dusk, used to stand and look at it without speaking for a while and then, finally he or she would say
‘E venuta la neve
’, in a voice that sounded like a knell.

In spite of this we spent as much time as we could out of doors, usually in the early hours and in the late afternoon, just before dusk. We had to in order to get firewood, and the cutting of it – Francesco brought us a saw which was much less noisy than an axe – and the concealing of the stumps of the trees and the branches and logging it up sufficiently small to get it all inside and then getting the wood back to the cave without leaving any signs, and fetching water from the spring, and covering our tracks from that, and any traces left by our visitors, took up to about four hours. During these excursions we invariably got soaked through, but this was the least of our worries, because when the fire was lit the corrugated iron roof acted as a giant reflector and if we strung our clothes up close under it they dried so quickly that the only problem was to prevent them charring and becoming unusable; both James and I each lost a precious pair of socks in this way. With the fire going we were never cold; but with the wind there was always a lot of smoke and soon the cliff, the walls, our skin and our clothes, were stained a dark, indelible bronze
colour. The smoke stained everything, and often it made the bunks untenable and then we lay close to the ground with our eyes streaming, just as Abramo’s had done but without any of his miracle herb to soothe them. As it grew colder and we had to keep it going night and day we became obsessed by the need to keep the smoke under control and we used to have heated arguments about the best way of doing it and sometimes, when the wind was in the right quarter, we were fortunate and then the three-foot logs of oak and the twisted ones of juniper burned steadily, hour after hour, although the beautiful, silvery ashes never grew more and never grew less on the hearth.

And we read a lot, although the only way we could do so was when the fire was alight or the piece of sacking over the door was brailed up. James read the Bible and
Mr Sponge.
I read
Barba-Nera
and the last thirty-four chapters of Gibbon which began with the Origin, Progress and Effects of the Monastic Life which, as practised in Egypt in the Fourth Century, sounded appalling:

‘The actions of a monk, his words and even his thoughts, were determined by an inflexible rule, or a capricious superior: the slightest offences were corrected by disgrace or confinement, extraordinary fasts or bloody flagellation; and disobedience, murmur, or delay, were ranked in the catalogue of the most heinous crime.’

‘Just like the house I was in in my first year at school,’ James said when I read it out to him. We were constantly quoting bits of Surtees and Gibbon at one another. And James used to read out bits of the Bible, usually some bloodthirsty piece of Old Testament military history which he thought appropriate and would amuse me. He was a conventional Christian. Just as he had before the war, he used to go to church every Sunday in the
orfanotrofio
, and it would have never occurred to him not to do so. It was not just
lip service to the established religion. He believed in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. I believed in God, and had done ever since I had been a sailor in a sailing-ship before the war; but the God I believed in was neither beneficent nor hostile. As he was everything how could he be? And if he was everything how could he be moved by prayer? If it was a question of life and death you died when the time came for you to do so, peacefully or horribly. My time had not yet come when the foot of an upper topsail had flicked me off the yard, a hundred and thirty feet above the Southern Ocean in 1939; or that night in the Bay of Catania, or the following one in the fortress where they told us that we were going to be shot; but it could be any time. It might be quite soon now.

At one time I had prayed that a bomb would not fall on the people in England I loved; but it seemed almost impertinent; better, if anything, to pray that bombs would cease to fall on anyone. To me prayer had no efficacy as a preservative, at the most it was a profession of love, a remembrance, a reminder that there had been a past and might be a future, and perhaps that was its value. At this time, whether I was right or wrong, I felt clearer in my mind about these things than I have ever done since. Another winter and I would cloud it by reading Boehm and Eckhart and enormous theosophical works in the course of which I would fall into the error of equating the act of reading with enlightenment. Now, in so far as I could decipher the eye-destroying type in the half-darkness, I read parts of the New Testament and the Book of Psalms and used the rest of the Old Testament as a sort of lucky dip, opening it each morning at random and putting my finger on a particular verse which was supposed to furnish information about the coming day; and if the prognostication was too bad, having another go; but even so the Old Testament was rarely much use at this season, most of
the action, where I chanced to open it, taking place in a warmer climate, and it usually came up with counsels such as ‘Thus shall ye say unto the men of Jabesh-gilead: Tomorrow, by the time that the sun be hot, ye shall have help,’ while an icy wind howled round our habitation.