Love and War in the Apennines (32 page)

At the end of November the rain was colossal and sometimes it was impossible for anyone to get through to the cave for days on end. Then it grew much colder and often there was thick frost, but there was one good thing, James’s impetigo burnt itself out, although I still went on coughing. It was about this time that we saw Fortresses overhead, flying very high, leaving long vapour trails and mostly heading north.

Then one morning when we woke there was a strange stillness in the cave and we both remarked on it, and when we lifted the sacking we realised the reason why. The snow had come.

Four or five days passed before anyone could get to us and we became very short of food. The snow was deep and soft but on the second day it froze sufficiently hard for us to get to the spring; but that was frozen too and what was worse we had left a
permanent trail to the cave for everyone to see. Now we had to melt snow in order to get water which, as anyone who has done it knows, is very slow work. Early on the morning of the fourth or fifth day, whichever it was, Scamperdale’s son, the one who was a medical student, reached us on skis, the only one in the village who had them. He told us that there was bad news and that one of us would have to go down at once in order to talk with his father. It was decided that James should go because he had now lost his impetigo and my cough was very noisy. I waited for him anxiously until about an hour before sunset when he returned with three of the others, one of whom was Francesco. With them they had brought a sack of rice and about twenty loaves of bread. Francesco and the other two simply sat down in front of the fire and said nothing but
‘Ma!
’ from time to time. I had never seen them look so dejected.

‘We have to go right away,’ James said, ‘within the hour.’ The
milizia
are coming for us tonight, at eight. They think we’ll be in bed. The whole village has terrible
paura.
Francesco says that we’ll have to go up to a place where there’s some sort of shepherd’s hut. You know it, apparently.’

‘He means the Castello del Prato,’ I said. ‘That’s a hell of a place to spend a night in this weather.’

‘We’re not going to. A guide is coming to take us across the valley. Fortunately, the snow’s going on the exposed places. The wind’s taking it. It’s only the gullies like this that are still full of it. Any rate, that’s where we’re going. They say there’s a
banda
forming. If we get a move on now they’ll help to get the stuff up. It was awful down there,’ James said. ‘The
paura.’

Then far off, somewhere beyond the
crinale
to the west we heard the deep, thump, thump of bombs for the first time. They must have been big ones and a lot of them, and by some trick of acoustics the face of the cliff and the corrugated iron roof gave
the sounds a resonance so that the cave actually hummed with the noise.

‘That will be the railway at Pontremoli, where it comes out from the big tunnel under the mountains,’ Francesco said.
‘Fortezze volanti
, they call them, these great planes.’

‘Fortresses,’ James said. ‘It must be clearer over there to be able to bomb from that height at this time of day. If only we could have a landing on the west coast, or even at Rimini. Perhaps it’s beginning.’

He was looking at me as he said it but I knew that he was thinking what I was thinking. ‘You don’t believe this, any more than I do. There aren’t going to be any landings. It’s going to be a long job. Next March at the earliest. This
banda
we’re supposed to be going to will be just like the other one, if it exists, wet. The snow has come and tonight they’re coming to take us away just as people said they would; but, my God, it’s good to be free, even this sort of freedom which isn’t anything like what I thought freedom would be. I never want to go back into the bag, never, and I hope I never will.’

The difficulty was to know what to take with us. Whatever it was, ultimately, it could not be more than the two of us could carry. In the end we left all the reading matter, except the Bible, and took only one small cooking pot. All the way as we crunched up the ridge a blizzard blew but, as James had said, the wind was so strong that the snow could not settle. It was terribly cold at the Castello, where the guide was waiting who was to take us down the cliff and across the valley. He was a young, shy, slight boy and his name was Alfredo. He was blue with cold.

‘You must separate the loads,’ Francesco said. He had to shout to make himself heard above the wind. ‘You, Giacomo must carry your own pack and the bread, Alfredo will carry Enrico’s and the cooking pot and you, Enrico, must carry the rice. It is a pity that we couldn’t find a pack to put it in. It is very difficult to carry a sack if you are not used to it.’ Then we said goodbye, quickly. It was no place to linger.

Alfredo was very quick on his feet. He took us down through a gorge like a gillie. After a long time he stopped where there was a waterfall that had not frozen and there he lit a fire and we brewed coffee. It was nearly ten o’clock. By now the
milizia
would have made their raid on the cave. The snow had stopped, the sky
was clear and the moon was about full. A freezing wind funnelled down the gorge, scattering the ashes of the fire in long trails of sparks. I was glad of the rest. The sack of rice must have weighed almost forty pounds and, as Francesco said, it was an uncomfortable load for anyone who was not used to it, especially on such steep, uneven ground.

Sometime about eleven o’clock we reached the bottom of the valley, just downstream of the village from which
Oberleutnant
Frick had set off with his butterfly hunt, and forded the river. The bottom was composed of big round stones and it was difficult to cross it when carrying so much gear. The water was bitterly cold, and the moon shone down on it through the leafless trees so that it shimmered, as it would have done in bright sunlight.

We crossed the road and began to climb steeply up the other side of the valley, stopping for about five minutes every two hours to share a cigarette with Alfredo who had a small supply of a terrible brand called
Milits
which were only issued to the armed forces. Alfredo must have been a soldier on the run too. Then we went on; but very slowly because of the big weights we were carrying. That night something happened to me on the mountain. The weight of the rice coupled with the awful cough which I had to try and repress broke something in me. It was not physical; it was simply that part of my spirit went out of me, and in the whole of my life since that night it has never been the same again.

Dawn the following morning, which was sometime around seven o’clock, found us far up along the side of the open mountain, as conspicuous as flies on a wall. The weather had changed and high grey cloud was racing overhead. We had come a long way and were now far up the valley. Here, we lay down for a bit on what looked like frozen heather and fell into a state somewhere between sleeping and waking. Then we stumbled on until we
reached some woods in which we could smell smoke, and after a bit we entered a clearing occupied by
carbonari.

It was something I shall never forget. There was a whole family of them, men, women and children, all living together in a
baracca
covered with turf and all of them were as black as night from the burning of the charcoal, and their teeth shone in their faces with an unnatural whiteness, as if they were nigger minstrels on some pre-war pier. Near by the charcoal was burning, a huge wigwam of trees which were being slowly carbonised by the fire, with earth and turf piled on them to prevent the wood from bursting into flame and being consumed.

When they saw us the
carbonari
spoke to Alfredo in some strange dialect which he could scarcely understand, inviting us into their
baracca
and when we were all crowded into it one of the men produced a greasy-looking bottle of marvellous
grappa
and gave us all a swig. They had a fire going and we all sat round it, the men, women and children, one of them a baby at its mother’s breast, as black as she was. No one spoke much. We were too tired; they were too dispirited. According to Alfredo, who did manage to talk to them a little, they would leave as soon as this last lot of charcoal was ready. They had their mules, although we never saw any sign of them, perhaps they were in a village, and then they would go over into Tuscany, into the Maremma; but they were afraid because there was so little to eat there. None of them had ever remained at such an altitude so late in the season before, and they had suffered great privation. In the rudeness of their way of life, and in their general demeanour, these people were like no others I had ever met before. Their life was not so much primitive as intensely uncomfortable, far more so than our life in the cave had been, as uncomfortable as that of the Patagonian Indians, without any kind of dignity to redeem it; but these were exceptional times and, perhaps, in better weather, it would have been different.

Here, after having given us the directions so that we could reach the place where the
banda
was supposed to be, Alfredo left us and went back along the mountainside by the way we had come. He had done everything and more than anyone could have expected of him and for no reward. And now we continued on our way, James carrying the rice, I myself carrying one of the packs and one of the
carbonari
, whom Alfredo had persuaded to accompany us, the other. But when we reached the hut, a semi-ruin, it was empty except for a mangled mass of newspapers and empty tins, and the place was so filthy that we decided to push on.

Here the
carbonaro
left us, going off without a word. We wanted to thank him; but he gave us no time. We now had a really prodigious weight to carry between us but, fortunately, after we had only been walking for about a quarter of an hour, we came out on a small alpine meadow, in the middle of which there was a little, two-storeyed barn, roofed with big stone slabs. The door of the upper floor at the back was level with the meadow which here sloped very steeply, and we forced it open. It was filled with beautiful, sweet-smelling hay and we crawled into it, not caring whether we were in a safe place or not, and fell asleep at once. We were utterly done for.

The next thing I remember was somebody tugging at my foot which was towards the door and an excited voice saying ‘Who are you? Who are you? What are you?’ again and again, and I opened my eyes to see a minute boy looking in through the open door. I answered that we were English because I was too tired to care whether we were taken or not. Then the small boy, whose name he told me was Archimede, disappeared and after discussing with James what we should do, and deciding to do nothing, we both fell asleep again.

Some time later the little boy returned leading a man of about fifty dressed in very ancient clothes by the hand because
he was almost blind. And with them came a little girl who was carrying a pot of
minestra
; and while James and I consumed the contents, both eating from the same pot, the almost blind man asked us about ourselves and we told him almost everything, except the names of the people who had been sheltering us where we had come from. When we had finished, looking in our direction, but not seeing us, he said, ‘I, too, will give you food and shelter for as long as you wish to stay here. I have nothing to lose.’

And so we remained there. With our arrival at the barn, time, which had shown itself in the past either so infinitely extended and slow-moving, as it had done during the time I spent with James in the cave, that events gave me no sensation that they were actually happening at all, or else were so compressed that they went equally unremarked, now entered one of its speeding up phases. It was as if who or whatever was shaping our ends had become impatient with the whole affair and was anxious to bring it to a conclusion.

That afternoon, because he could not see to do the work himself, the man returned again with two men from the village who made us beds in the lower part of the barn where we could light a fire by the entrance. They also cut us a supply of wood. The blind man’s name was Amadeo. Every day for as long as we were there, he came up the mountain with one or other of his children, all of whom were named after eminent Ancient Greeks, bringing food and comforts but also to have long conversations with us about the outside world, about which he had a great and intelligent interest.

‘Now,’ he would say from where he sat, ‘Turn me in the direction of America.’

And when the direction of America was established he would
draw a line in the earth on the floor and then he would begin to orientate himself to the other continents. He loved to talk for hours about outlandish places and people, places such as India where I had been and of which I was able to tell him something, although not nearly as much as he wanted to know. And James told him about England and farming there, in a way which I could never have done.

While we were living in the hut the weather was very cold, and whenever it was clear we saw the Fortresses going over, infinitely remote at thirty thousand feet or more leaving vapour trails and shining in the sun, and it was strange to think that those crews who survived the flak and the attacks of fighters, would be sitting down to eat and drink in a few hours among their own people.

It was now that I suffered a terrible misfortune. Drying my wet boots one night I left them too close to the fire and, as a result, the next morning I found that the whole of the forepart of the sole of one boot was gone, burned away. It seemed like the end; but I was to be spared a little longer. That day when Amadeo came up to the hut, this time with Pythagora, his youngest son, I told him what had happened.

‘Give me the boot,’ he said, that was all, and he went off with it, guided by Pythagora down the hill.

That night and the whole of the next day I stayed in bed because there was nothing I could do with only one boot, but the following evening Amadeo returned bringing it with him. The repair was one of the most skilful I had ever seen. Leather for boot soles was completely unprocurable by this time, but a bootmaker in the village had carved a piece of wood to the shape of the part of the sole which was missing and grafted it on to what remained of it. He did it so well that it lasted until the end of the war and never let in a drop of water.

On Christmas Eve we were invited to go down to the village where we spent the evening and the next day as the guests of various families, including that of Amadeo and of the man who had mended my boot.

‘What would you like more than anything?’ a little signora said on Christmas Eve, while her children looked up wide-eyed at these strange, smoke-stained visitors from another world. It was her husband who had helped to build our beds in the barn. There was no doubt about what we would like most, either in my mind or in James’s. Although we had got ourselves as clean as possible by washing in the icy spring behind the barn, what we both wanted more than anything was a hot bath.

‘And you shall have it,’ she said. Soon she had a number of enormous vessels heating on the wood stove and another, even bigger one, over the fire. And when the water was hot she half-filled a big empty wine barrel in the cellar next door. We stripped off by turns – it was no time for false modesty – and because the barrel was too close a fit for either of us to move our arms, she and her husband took turns to scrub us and wash our hair.

On Christmas Day, after a great lunch, we were taken to the house of an engineer who was in charge of the hydro-electric works on the mountain and there, at three o’clock, to the accompaniment of awful whistlings and other atmospherics, we heard the laboured but sincere-sounding voice of the King speaking from Sandringham.

‘Some of you may hear me in your aircraft, in the jungles of the Pacific or on the Italian Peaks,’ he said. ‘Wherever you may be your thoughts will be in distant places and your hearts with those you love.’ And although it was almost certainly not intended for people like us, the effect of what he said was too much in conjunction with all the food we had eaten and the wine we had drunk, and the people in the room witnessed the awful spectacle,
something which they are unlikely ever to see again, of two Englishmen with tears running down their cheeks.

And late that evening I received a little strip of paper with only two words on it –
Baci
, Wanda. It was the best Christmas I had ever had.

We were finally taken about midday on the twenty-ninth of December. It was the coldest day so far and there was a lot of snow. James had gone off somewhere up the mountain; but I had felt too ill to go with him. I think he was glad to get away from the sound of coughing which was enough to drive anyone mad. After he had gone I went to the door to watch some Fortresses going over, and the next thing I remember was hearing a voice say
‘Mani in alto!’
and I looked down and saw that there were a dozen very nasty-looking men, one or two of them in some sort of uniform, all armed to the teeth with carbines and Beretta submachine guns, standing in a half-circle round the door. Some even had the ridiculous little red grenades with which Il Corvo had planned to sabotage the petrol dump.

I raised my hands, thinking how lucky it was that James was away; but just then he came into view round the end of the hut. He, too, had his hands raised in the air. This was a detachment of Fascist
milizia.
I was surprised how really evil they all looked, like villains in a film. There was some kind of officer in charge of them, and we asked to speak to him and tried to get an assurance that nothing would happen to the people in the village who, we said, knew nothing about us. He told us not to worry.