Love and War in the Apennines (9 page)

‘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.

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.’