An owl hoots, and in the distance I hear wolves howling from the Mountain of the Moon. I picture them huddled together on the ridge, their muzzles raised to bay their melancholy song, stars blinking in the blue-black of night behind them. I know no matter how hard I try to sink back to sleep, the memories will attack me. It’s a pattern I can’t break.
There was only one teacher for our village school, and so all thirty-three of us, every age together, packed ourselves into that single classroom. In winter a wood-burning stove warmed us, and in summer all the windows, built high in the walls to banish distraction, were flung wide to let in the mountain breeze.
I am an only son; I’d always longed for a younger brother, but my mother’s belly never swelled again. And so I befriended the younger boy who shared my desk, guiding his hand to form letters on the slate, protecting him from the bullies in the school yard. We shared our simple merende – snacks of dried pears or a heel of yesterday’s bread.
When he was older, when school was finished, we’d camp together in a cave, where salamanders hid on cool walls that glistened in the night. We rose early to catch the birds migrating over Friars’ Peaks, treading softly to avoid our feet crunching on the rust-gold leaves and chestnuts. And now that we were brothers in arms, it stood us in good stead in our present danger. The fight against evil.
Years later, as sleep eludes me, I remember how I climbed to the cave that night, careful to skirt the sentries’ posts. I passed so close I could hear their guttural whisperings. I wanted to find him seated on a rock, waiting for the sun to rise above the splendour of our purple mountains. Was it madness to hope for a single day of peace? We’d read in school about the Great War: how Germans and British called a truce on Christmas Day and played football, their trenches forming the makeshift boundaries of their pitch. I prayed he was up there, gazing over the mist enveloping our hills, concealing the brutality beneath. Was it too much to hope?
Keeping to the track, I stopped beside a huge boulder, a stench of rotting flesh causing me to gag. A body lay face down across my path, half hidden in the foliage, hands pillowing its head as if in slumber. I turned it over, dread in my heart, but even with half the face blown away, I saw it wasn’t him.
As I turned back towards our occupied village, where our simple houses had been converted into barracks and gun emplacements, I heard his cries. The sound of his agony will never be erased from my head. It came from the village school. Light spilled from a barred window high in the wall. How often as a boy had I stared up at this scene from the classroom, gazing at the tips of two cypress trees swaying freely in the breeze, wishing I could be outside on the grassy slopes. I climbed onto a pail to look inside and my foot slipped, the metal container clattering in the night, setting the dogs barking.
The guards who rushed out to restrain me were from my own people, making it a thousand times worse. Men and boys I’d grown up with, tainted by misguided politics, dressed in militia uniforms. They dragged me inside as I kicked, swore and spat in their traitorous faces.
They had tortured him. Tied by wire to a chair too small for a grown man, knees hunched up, exposing what they’d done to his most private parts. I lunged towards him, but they held me fast. Mercifully he’d passed out, his bloodied head sagging forward as if in prayer.
But the worst betrayal was the man who leered over me, telling me I was next. I couldn’t believe his treachery. And as I sat at the table and he swung a hammer to nail down my fingers, I screamed in agony and stared through the window, averting my eyes from his blood-spattered, black shirt. Clenching my teeth against the pain, I watched the cypress trees and refused to believe I would never be free again to go hunting with my young friend or hold my girl in my arms.
On a dingy February afternoon in North London, Anna is having a duvet day after two bad nights. She listens to commuters scurrying home from work on the street below, half gloating at not having to join the bustle.
Life feels wobbly. She’s lost her job; her mother has recently died. They say things happen in threes, and she wonders what will come next.
Just as she’s nodding off, her doorbell rings. Sighing, muttering, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she untangles herself from her nest of bedding and opens the front door of her second-floor flat.
‘Parcel for you, miss.’ The young delivery man smirks and looks her over with a grin as she wraps her dressing gown tighter. Taking the parcel, she shuts the door firmly in his face, slaps across the kitchen floor in her slippers, flicks the kettle switch.
The package is bulky. It’s something she’s been expecting but relegated to the back of her mind. At the reading of her mother’s will last week, the solicitor had mentioned that, as well as fifty thousand pounds, she’d been left a file of assorted papers. Harry and Jane, her brother and sister, had been given everything else. While Peregrine Smythe of Smythe & Sons, in crumpled Savile Row pinstripe, droned on, Anna had watched a trapped fly batting against the windowpane. From time to time she glanced at her older brother and sister sitting opposite, thinking how fat and bald Harry had become, how dated and middle-aged Jane looked, with her immaculate hairdo sprayed stiff and crisp. She’d never felt close to them. They’d been old enough to be parents themselves when she was born, a surprise child arriving when her mother was almost forty, upsetting the family dynamics.
She makes herself a mug of Earl Grey, taking it back to bed with the package. Inside the paper wrapper is a cardboard box, the lid tied down with an old shoelace, which she pulls open. A brown envelope bears her name, written in her mother’s flowery handwriting, and there are notebooks, bundles of papers rolled up in a perished elastic band and a piece of folded fabric.
She withdraws a sheet of lined notepaper from the envelope, cheap and old-fashioned, with a spray of violets printed in the top left corner. Her mother has written in English, which she spoke with a strong accent but wrote well.
Willow’s End,
16 August 1997
My darling Anna,
As you read this you will have already been to my funeral. Maybe there were tears shed, but I hope it was also a happy occasion, with some of my favourite Italian music played in church and a spaghettata afterwards, my favourite traditional meal of spaghetti with a simple sauce. I imagine there were stories shared. Maybe the family will have recalled my quick temper and my dreadful mistakes with English. If people were kind about me or harsh, then so be it. Pazienza! as we say. It was hard for me to learn to be patient.
I have so much to tell you. Maybe this is a coward’s way out – to write it all down instead of telling you face to face. It was hard to know what was for the best. If I had told my own story of what I went through during the war, the results might have been cataclysmic. Cataclismico, disastroso… They are nearly the same words in Italian. There are many similarities, but oh so many differences between the English and Italians, as I discovered when I first came over here.
When the doctors told me my cancer was inoperable, I decided to sort out my papers and gather together all my untidy scraps of memories, jotted here and there whenever I’d felt the need. Let us call it a kind of diary. At the reading of the will, my solicitor will have mentioned these would be coming your way. Maybe you felt you were being left out. Apart from the money, Harry has Willow’s End – I know he will cope with the draughty old place, he always loved it when he visited and it will go with his new status as company director. Jane has my jewellery. She always loved dressing up with it when she was a little girl.
And you have this box containing my scribblings. My memory pearls, from me to you. I hope by the time you finish reading, you will understand that I never intended to make you feel left out, my darling. Maybe some details have been forgotten over the years. I didn’t write a journal from day to day, so there are a few gaps. I’ve never been able to talk openly about my life, but now I feel a duty to do so. And the only way to do that is through this diary.
Read it when you have time. Do with it what you will. It is my inheritance to you.
Your loving Mamma
Anna leans back against her pillows, intrigued but at the same time angry at her mother for being so enigmatic. Theirs had always been a difficult relationship. Her mother was fiery, inclined to be dramatic. Sometimes she’d be folded into her arms, but on other occasions Mamma was distant, undemonstrative: the two sides of a coin. It was typical of her to hint at ‘cataclysmic’ events.
Anna remembers one occasion when she must have been about six years old. Pushing open the door to the living room, where Ines, her mother, sat writing at her desk, she’d asked, ‘When are you having another baby? I’ve got nobody to play with.’ Ines had snapped shut the journal she was writing in and turned to pull her little girl into her arms. ‘Mamma’s too old now for all that,’ she said, kissing Anna’s cheeks, ‘and where would I find more love to share out? You have it all, my little tesoro.’
She remembers this vividly because endearments from her mother were few and far between, especially when Harry and Jane were around.
Her siblings did their own thing. They were much older than her, and unaware of their insensitivity when they teased. ‘You were an accident, one big mistake,’ Jane said once in a throwaway comment, and Anna had taken it to heart. She’d grown up feeling less loved than them, and nothing but a nuisance most of the time, alone for long spells while her grown-up siblings were out dancing or at the cinema with friends.
Strangely, she had felt a closer bond with her mother when she was in the Claremont rest home, where she died. When Ines was confused, Anna knew how to soothe her.
‘Tell me about your life in Italy before you came to England, Mamma,’ she would prompt, partly out of curiosity for a side of her life she knew little about, and partly because she’d discovered it calmed her mother down to talk about her Italian side.
Sometimes Ines would oblige, although Anna couldn’t follow most of her ramblings. Other times she refused to talk, content to sit staring out of the windows at the gardens and the sea. On one of the last visits before Ines died, she was tired, lapsing into a dialect which Anna couldn’t follow. She didn’t mind when her mother was quiet. There was room enough for both of them in her silence and the pair would sit holding hands, Anna giving her mother space to wander through her thoughts. Sometimes a sound or a smell seemed to spark a memory and she would talk as if an event had just happened. Perhaps a motorbike would zoom by on the promenade, and then it was as if she was plunged into the past.
‘The others have gone down to the city today. It’s too hot to dance, but the Germans are in the next valley now. They’ve been clearing the hamlets…’
Anna would humour her, treat her accounts as everyday occurrences. ‘Really, Mamma? And what happened next?’
But there were times when she felt like an intruder, listening to what should have been private moments.
‘If they find out I’ll be in such trouble, but it was so hot. My blouse clung to my body, my hair floated on the water like weed. He held me tight…’
Anna didn’t respond. She’d change the subject or fetch her mother’s box of photos from her bedside cupboard and they’d look at family snaps together.
There were afternoons when her mother sat with tears flowing down her cheeks and Anna gently wiped them away. Ines clung to her daughter. ‘He came back, Anna, he came back. But I’ll never leave you. You’re a good girl. My special gift.’
It had been hard to understand what was going on in her mother’s befuddled mind when she came out with those strange sentences, Anna recalls as she flicks through the batch of papers. And what a shame her mother seemed to feel so much more love for her at the end of her life, almost as if her bottled-up emotions couldn’t be contained any longer. Emotions Anna could have done with knowing about in her early years.
The shrill ring of her mobile makes her jump from the past to the present.
‘Anna! I’m sorry I didn’t phone you last night – I was up to my eyes in work. But why didn’t you wait for me?’
She can’t be bothered to calm her lover down. Right now she doesn’t feel like telling Will how, yet again, she’d grown tired of waiting for him at the restaurant, hating the way waiters cast pitying looks as she sipped her wine, trying to make one glass last until he eventually turned up.
‘Can I come over now?’ he says. ‘I’m in a taxi. Be there in, say, fifteen minutes?’
She glances at her watch. Five thirty in the afternoon. A few weeks ago she’d have said yes, but she’s no longer satisfied with snatched evenings with Will or these last-minute arrangements, as if squeezing in time with her is an afterthought.
He lowers his voice. The cabbie is probably eavesdropping on his famous passenger whose distinguished features are regularly seen on Channel 4 News.
‘I could stay the whole night, darling.’
‘I’m not feeling great today, Will, I’ve got a bad migraine,’ she fibs. ‘I’ll call you soon.’
She has no energy for an argument, and before he has a chance to persuade her otherwise, she snaps her mobile shut and switches it off, tossing it onto the bed next to her mother’s thick bundle of papers. She doesn’t know if she can really face reading through the mysterious documents. Mamma had never wanted to talk much about her Italian life when she was alive. It seems late to be doing so from the grave, with this diary and her enigmatic notes. Is there some skeleton in the cupboard Anna should know about?
She pulls out the top sheet from the pile. Her mother has written copiously, the handwriting smudged and difficult to read in places. Stapled to the front is another note written in English.
Anna, I kept a diary for a short while during the war. It was something I shouldn’t have done. If discovered by the wrong people, there would have been reprisals. I’ve not looked at it for years, and reading it now, I can hardly believe I was the young author. I hope you’ll be able to understand, because some of the Italian is old-fashioned. You have to remember this all happened half a century ago. How times have changed!
Skimming through the first few lines of Italian written in her mother’s untidy hand, Anna knows she will struggle. Mamma had taught her a smattering of basic Italian, but all three children were brought up with English as their main language. She makes a start, labouring over every other phrase, but it’s soon apparent that she’ll need to get hold of a good dictionary. She only has a tiny pocket edition, and she guesses at several words.
She can’t think straight. Her head is spinning with the task her mother has presented. Pages and pages of Italian to translate, and for what purpose?
As she slips under her warm duvet, she thinks sadly of how much less puzzling it would have been if Mamma had talked to her more when she was alive. But she hadn’t, and now she’s gone, leaving a bigger hole than Anna could ever have imagined. It takes her a while to fall asleep, and when she does, she dreams her mother is still near her, screened by a billowing gauze curtain, mouthing words Anna can’t understand.
It’s dark when Anna is woken by the long bellow of a car horn. She glances blearily at her alarm clock. To her amazement, she’s slept for almost twenty-four hours.
Yesterday’s package has fallen to the floor from her bed. An assortment of papers, notebooks and envelopes has spilled out – some of them numbered with red crayon. Number one is a large brown envelope. Number two is a scuffed school exercise book. Instead of lines, the pages are segmented into little squares, like graph paper. She remembers Mamma explaining how different types of copybooks were used by different school years in Italy, laughing when Mamma described the overalls and huge bows they wore to primary school – even the boys. Ines taught her a few simple words in Italian when she was little, but never when Father was around. He went berserk if he heard her speaking anything but English.
‘You’ll confuse them. How many times do I have to spell it out, woman?’ he’d shout, his face turning purple.
Then there would be a row. There was always lots of shouting. Anna would retreat to the bottom of the garden and climb the copper beech, or hide under the stairs clutching her teddy bear to her chest.
Sitting cross-legged on her bed, she resumes her attempt at translating her mother’s words.
Rofelle, 8 September 1944
He’s still in the stable. Mamma made up an extra plate of pasta with zucchini we bottled last spring and, when it was dark, she told me to put on my scarf and take a bucket of feed for the chickens with me in case anybody should be watching and ask what I was doing out at that time of night. I know she’s terrified somebody will find out we’re hiding an inglese but she said we must, for he will die otherwise.
We are all terrified. Last week we heard they shot the Benuccis because they wouldn’t vacate their house. The Germans only gave them a day’s notice. Poor old souls, they refused to go; they had nowhere to go to anyway, and the old signora was riddled with rheumatism and couldn’t walk far.
They are cruel, these tedeschi. We’re scared, but Capriolo says they won’t break our spirits. We use this name for him because we have been told again and again by the Resistenza not to call him by his real name. His family will be executed if they discover his identity. He’s named himself after the mountain deer, nimble and fast as they scamper up high. Capriolo comes automatically to my tongue now, but he would skin me if he knew I was writing this. If I don’t tell someone I shall burst – so I’m telling my diary, which I hide behind the loose stone in the niche in my room. Nobody will ever find it. And if they do, they will think it’s my old schoolbook.
It takes Anna over an hour to translate this section. And she is not sure if she’s really grasped the full meaning of it, or what to think. Try as she might, she can’t imagine her mother as this young country girl, or identify her with this voice from the past. Who is Capriolo? And the Englishman they are hiding? Could he possibly be her own father? There are so many questions, just from this one small section. She wonders what else she might discover from her mother’s diary.
There are many pages to tackle. Flicking through, she finds a few sections dated post-war in her mother’s writing, but she’d prefer to read everything in the correct order. If she’s going to find out more about her parents, it will be important not to tangle up events. Eventually she comes to the conclusion that the Italian will have to be translated by somebody else.
Inside a hard-backed vellum ledger, she finds a further couple of pages written in English. As she opens it, a slip of paper falls from between the covers, written in her mother’s hand.
Anna,
These few pages in here are a small part of your father’s story. I found them in his shed when I was sorting out his effects. Do you remember how it was a no-go area for us all? Your father’s sacred den!
I never knew he spent his time writing in there. I thought he was simply escaping from us, with the excuse of mending something or other.
I have read it through and I think he must have written it after the war. Your dadda never kept a journal, like me. He moved around a lot and he never talked much about what he endured. It wasn’t an easy time for either of us.
I decided to add this to my own record, to fill in the missing bits of our story. They say everybody has a book inside them but what you’ll read isn’t fiction, it was the truth. And I believe our story deserves to be told. The war still casts its long shadow over our lives even though more than fifty years have gone by.
It made me sad to read your father’s words. For a while they transported me back to the time when we fell in love. How things change. What a lot of rubbish life throws our way.
Mamma
Anna finds it strange to read those words, ‘when we fell in love’. She can only remember her parents fighting, and if she’s honest, she was always a little afraid of her father. She has a vivid childhood memory that haunted her: another type of occupation in Dadda’s shed, besides writing and mending second-hand furniture. She was about nine years old. Unusually, he had left the shed door unlocked that afternoon and she’d slipped in to have a nose. A magazine lay open on his workbench, revealing a photo of a woman’s legs spread wide, her breasts naked. She didn’t understand the ‘rude pictures’ and it didn’t feel right to gawp. Backing out of the shed, she tripped and grazed her knee, crying out in pain. Her father, hoeing in the vegetable garden, looked up and rushed over, shouting, twisting her ear, ‘I thought I told you never to go in there.’ He’d slapped her hard on the back of her sore leg and she’d run up the path and into the kitchen, sobbing. Mamma was ironing while listening to music on the radio.
‘Darling, whatever is the matter?’ She unplugged the iron, resting it on the side of the kitchen table.
‘Did you fall? Show me.’
‘I hate him, I hate him.’
Her mother pulled her onto her lap, wiping her tears with the corner of her pinafore.
‘Now, tell me what happened, tesoro. Stop crying, I can’t understand anything if you make that noise.’
Her father stormed in, reached for the tin on the dresser where spare coins were kept.
‘You spoil that brat. Next time I find her in my shed, I’ll give her such a hiding she won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ He pulled on his jacket. ‘And you needn’t wait for me for supper. I’m going out, and I’ll be back late.’
The door slammed.
They listened to him stamping down the front path and Ines sighed, pulling Anna closer. ‘Never mind, we’ll wash that poorly knee and then have a special supper – just you and me on our own with spaghetti and gelato for afters.’
She held her daughter close and safe and Anna listened to the kitchen clock ticking as her mother rocked her.
‘I meant it,’ Anna sobbed. ‘I hate him. He’s always so cross. I think he hates me too.’
‘Shh, don’t talk about hate.’ Ines undid Anna’s plaits, redoing them neatly as she searched for words. ‘Your dadda doesn’t hate you. Not one little bit. Sometimes it’s life he hates… how can I explain? Now, be a big girl and listen to what I’m going to tell you and try to understand.’
She lifted Anna from her lap and fetched onions, celery and carrots to chop up for the meat sauce.
‘Come and help me with supper. We’ll have a little talk.’
Together they prepared the traditional sauce and now, whenever Anna eats pasta and ragù, she always associates this meal with the strange conversation of that evening. Afterwards, she felt less of a child, as if her mother had been trying to give her a glimpse into what it was like to be a grown-up.
‘Dadda wasn’t always such a crosspatch. But the war changed him, you see. Horrible things happen in wars. It was difficult for everybody, but the young soldiers saw cruel things that people do in times of war. We must make allowances for his tempers. Now, lay the table and we’ll eat.’
‘What cruel things, Mamma?’ Anna asked.
‘Too cruel to talk about, my darling.’
And as far as mention of her father’s time in the war was concerned, that had been that. Her mother never spoke about those years to her again.
Anna’s childhood was filled with shouting, the slamming of doors, stormy arguments and her parents’ constant bickering. There were moody silences at mealtimes and then snatched moments, when her mother would suddenly scoop her into her arms, cuddle her, pouring out Italian as if she could no longer keep the words inside. But that happened rarely, and only when her father wasn’t around.
Once, she’d picked a bunch of red flowers off his runner beans for Mamma and arranged them in a vase on the kitchen table. Dadda was furious. ‘Stupid, stupid child,’ he’d shouted, smacking her and sending her to bed early, ‘now, because of you, they won’t fruit. There’ll be no beans this year.’
He was never there to play with, like other children’s fathers; there were no games of cricket on the back lawn or rough and tumble on the sitting room carpet. When he was home after long spells away, he would complain about the noise.
‘I can’t hear myself think in this place! What about a bit of hush?’ was his constant refrain.
Her father died suddenly of a heart attack when she was ten and she wasn’t allowed to attend his funeral. He disappeared from their lives, and not long afterwards they moved to Willow’s End.
‘We’ll start afresh,’ Mamma had said, packing away his photo from where it stood on the piano and dusting the surface. It was as if she’d wiped him from her mind.
The writing in the mildewed book is clear, precise, with tiny script and very upright letters, unlike her mother’s artistic scrawl. Her father was a meticulous man, rebuking his family whenever they left possessions around the house.
‘You’re not in the army now, Jim,’ her mother would snap at him as he squared up cutlery and glasses on the supper table, or passed a finger over the top of the door to inspect for dust.
Her mother’s memories are stirring up her own pictures from childhood, with all the emotions she hasn’t touched on for a long while. Anna picks up the papers and, with a deep sigh, resumes reading.
Campo Fontanellato, near Parma
2 September 1943
My injured leg is still playing up, but Bob says the climb onto the top bunk is good physiotherapy. I need to get strength back into the bloody thing for when we leave this place. It’s siesta time and there’s quiet for a couple of hours. Although it’s early September, it’s still hot and the cicadas in the fields are kicking up an almighty racket. Lying up here on the scratchy blanket, I examine the frescoes on the ceiling of this villa where we’re confined. Naked cherubs stare back at me, and bare-breasted virgins with harps surrounded by garlands of fresh fruit, puffy white clouds and trails of ribbons. Tantalising decor for a dormitory of frustrated men who’ve been banged up together for months.
This place is better than the last dump. Here, the Italian Comandante speaks some English, and he allows us . . .
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