by Graeme Leith
Other Americans were there on Fulbright Scholarships. I envied them, for they had the wherewithal to complete a nine-month course with enough money to take holidays between semesters. There were also a few Americans who were just parking, leading one of the English wags to comment that the Americans were all either Fulbrights or half-brights.
I can recall only two English students, both males, delightful in their different ways. We became friends, and the three of us—Charles, Misha and me—used to make 8 mm films together. We certainly had some good settings, and once filmed a Roman orgy scene on the balcony of the Arco Etrusco, the Etruscan arch near the university. One of the boys, Misha, who intended to become a filmmaker, had a room there, in the actual arch. It seemed incredible to this rude colonial, and still does, that you can rent a room in a building of such antiquity made by people whose very language was extinct in the reign of the studious Emperor Claudius, who had learned it from surviving writings. I seem to recall that he taught it to his consort Messalina, an ex-prostitute and noted scallywag who disgraced herself and the emperor in some way or another with a squadron of centurions on their night off—or on . . .
There were some Greeks too, all keen to learn the language, and fun loving with it. We became friends and communicated in tortured Italian, they calling me ‘Amico de Grasso’ (roughly, ‘Friend of Grease’). Domenic the Scot was there. His employers had sent him to learn some Italian, but would have been disappointed upon his return. No Germans, but some Swiss who, although they studied conscientiously, stayed together as a clique and never spoke to Italians. They probably had a good theoretical knowledge but couldn’t speak one comprehensible word of the language after twelve weeks, so were failed.
There were three other Australians, all female—one was Gill Smith, a highly intelligent and independent girl who learned much; she later married Brian Savron, one of the original five. We are still friends, fifty years later. The other two were both bright and cheerful, rebuffing, with good-natured Aussie humour, the often-unsubtle advances of the local Casanovas.
An ethereal wine
There was a Dutch girl whose mother was half Italian. This girl, whose nickname was Vosje, or ‘Little Fox’, spoke fluent French as well as English and German. English-speaking people couldn’t pronounce her name properly and usually called her ‘Vosh’ instead of ‘Vossjeh’. So rebellious and charming was she that I fell completely in love with her. She returned my affections and after classes we spent many happy hours touring nearby villages on the Lambretta, having sunset picnics in roadside copses, looking over hills and valleys in the soft glow of autumnal light, over the very plains that had been battle-fields when the men of Assisi fought the soldiers of Perugia.
One day, when we were looking for a filming site in a grassy field, Misha and Charles stumbled across an overgrown well. An inscription was chiselled into the stone but they could not read it, as it was in neither Italian nor Latin. Vosje, having knowledge of ancient Greek (perhaps a legacy of her expensive Dutch education), was able to interpret it as ‘fresh water’.
As students we soon found the Mensa Populare, a dining room run by the Communist party to give working people a good lunch at a fair price. It was humble, but located in an exquisite, recently re-excavated and renovated Roman cellar with vaulted ceilings of ancient bricks without mortar courses. The menu was simple and delicious. One day there’d be pasta with bolognese sauce, a piece of either cheese or fruit and, if you chose, a ‘quarto’ of either red or white wine which came in a charming little quarter-litre glass flask. The next day maybe there’d be minestrone with freshly baked bread and a green salad.
There were occasional variations as something came onto the market at a good price, none of it cafeteria style, and didn’t I feel so European taking the food and wine to our table! For dinners we had a fair choice: pizzas were very cheap and made on square trays, the pizza then sub-divided into smaller squares, the cheapest being, I think, Rosemaria, just a sprinkling of rosemary leaves on the pizza base.
There were plenty of other cheap places to eat, and we found a little trattoria, slightly more expensive than some, but boasting an array of traditional dishes we had never encountered before. They served wine straight from the barrel, and wine the like of which I had never tasted. It was a glorious full red colour, concentrated, with an array of flavours—berries and fruits and liquorice and earth that was stunning and unexpected to me, who had only had wine that tasted like wine.
It became a regular Thursday evening meal and we loved it. But one night, after ordering and having our carafe of wine brought to the table, we took our gloriously anticipated sniff and taste and were shocked to find that this one was different and profoundly ordinary. Bewildered, we asked the proprietor for our usual wine, and he informed us that the barrel was finished; we were now drinking a different barrel from another vineyard, another winemaker.
Questioning revealed that the new wine actually came from the winery and vineyard next door to our favourite, so the following Sunday saw me and Vosje on the Lambretta, heading up to the hills behind Perugia. As we approached, we could see that the road was stained red from the juice of the grapes that had leaked through the floors of the wooden carts, for the vintage had not long been over. We were like hounds following a blood trail. At the vineyard we asked the mystified owners if we could buy some of their bottled wine. But the proprietors of this mixed farm told us that they only bottled wine for the family, the rest being sold by the barrel. Still, they sold us a few bottles. Leaving the group that had now gathered to observe these peculiar strangers, we returned triumphant to Perugia with as many bottles as we were able to purchase and stuff into our pockets. That proved to be the basis for a riotously successful party on the ancient balcony of the Arco Etrusco.
But it continued to vex me, that question . . . How could this wine be so good and the one next door so ordinary?
That puzzle remained dormant in my brain for a long time and, even now, is only partly resolved. For wine during fermentation is a living thing and a series of barrels filled with the same wine will produce different results after the maturation. There are still some things about wine that science cannot properly explain; there is no universal formula for making the best wine possible from the available grapes: we come close, but the variables, the permutations and combinations of fruit ripeness in terms of flavour, the total acid, sugar, tannins, pH and, ultimately, alcohol are endless, and fashions change.
It was many, many years later that I looked at Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s The World Atlas of Wine and learned that the tiny pocket of vines above Perugia produces excellent wines using grape varieties of which I, of course, hadn’t heard; and if we were drinking Sangiovese, Cilliegiolo, Sagrantino, Trebbiano or Grechetto, or a combination of these, I will never know. But I wonder if the men who dug the well and capped it with the inscribed stone were the same men who brought the Grechetto vine cuttings from ancient Greece to the hills above Perugia.
All too soon it was time to leave Perugia. It had been snowing heavily and it appeared that I was stuck there unless I sent the Lambretta to England by train, which is eventually what I arranged. On the night before our planned departure we were having drinks at a little bar cafe with some of the gang, including a few of the American boys, with whom I had always for some reason been competitive.
Vosje and I had been down to that particular bar before and knew some prostitutes who worked from there. Vosje was fascinated by them, as she was by courtesans generally. (Her favourite author was Colette—she loved the illicit erotica Colette sometimes wrote about—and the short stories of Anaïs Nin.) At that earlier meeting, when we first met the ladies, they invited us for a meal a couple of nights later and I asked them what we would eat. ‘We’re eating cazzo impera,’ the spokeslady responded, but when we arrived on the correct day and at the correct time, they weren’t there. It was the day after, when I learned the translation of cazzo impera was ‘erect penis’, that I realis
ed we’d been sent up gloriously by these ladies of the night, these puttana.
Anyway, as our last night in Perugia progressed it seemed to be an increasingly good idea to pull a ‘No Parking’ sign out of the ground and place it over the lance of the bronze soldier on horseback whose statue was in the square in front of us. This was achieved with some difficulty, due to it being 3 a.m. and snowing, but it was achieved.
Unfortunately the statue was that of Giuseppe Garibaldi, saviour of Italy and the Italians. Later that morning, on their way to work, many Perugini didn’t find it funny to see Garibaldi holding a ‘No Parking’ sign, and a hornet’s nest was stirred up. After all, it was virtual sacrilege and some witnesses from the bar said that the man who climbed up onto the statue with the sign looked a lot like me.
So we left, after I told my landlord and landlady that we were going to Rome. However, we hadn’t left yet and I went down to the circolo, the large circular dining and meeting room in the university, to say goodbye to our friends. While we were talking, two young Carabinieri (military policemen) came in, recognised the man they were looking for and arrested me.
My mind worked fairly quickly as they escorted me along the corridor towards the entrance to the university. I was desperate and could only envisage a long jail sentence in a cell with poor food, no wine and without a girl to keep me company; but a thought sprang to mind—a long shot, but worth a try.
The male toilets were on the left-hand side of the corridor and served by one doorway, but I knew there was a small ventilation window in there, high up, above the hand basins, but possibly accessible for a fit and desperate young man. On the negative side, it was about 3 metres above the road; on the positive side, there was about a metre of snow banked up against the wall. I had seen it there fifteen minutes before when Vosje and I walked up the Via del Fico, having left our luggage at the railway station on the Firenze side of the platform. So I pleaded with the two young officers that I needed to go to the toilet and they, believing there was no escape, stood on each side of the doorway and let me go about my business. As the walls were thick, I was able to leap up and perch upon the sill while I opened the window and soon thumped onto the snowdrift below. I was extremely lucky, but later felt sorry for the two young officers who had let me escape, if of course they owned up to it. Vosje walked down to the station and was delighted to find me hiding in the luggage room.
As we left on the train for Florence, as disguised as we could make ourselves from the contents of our suitcases, we could see many Carabinieri, frighteningly close, on the Rome platform opposite.
Joining up with Vosje
That wine at Perugia was the last ethereal wine I tasted for an awfully long time, for after returning to England I was joined by Vosje and we lived in a bedsitter in Hampstead. I worked as a bricklayer’s labourer and she read and walked and talked, occasionally picking up stray hippies whom she wanted me to meet. One night I came home from work to find the walls of our room newly ornamented with appalling murals done in charcoal and the bereted and moustachioed perpetrator happily sitting on the end of our bed, for Vosje had asked him to stay until I came home, knowing that I would love to meet him!
Some nights we drank at a pub in the High Street, The Pilgrims Arms, patronised by lots of struggling artists and poets—some struggling so hard that they apparently couldn’t afford paint or paper. But cider was cheap and talk was cheaper so it was a cheerful place to be; the conversation was often so animated that we referred to it as ‘The Gesticulating Arms’.
Saturdays we would go to the market and I would cook on our single gas ring, then after our meal I’d go to the pub and buy a little ‘pig’ of cider, attach it to the carrier rack on the Lambretta and we’d share the cost with friends and all have a party in our bedsitter. Vosje was very popular because of her charm, looks and sense of fun, and we were never short of party guests, particularly male ones.
For recreation I was rewriting The Rape of Lucrece, putting it into a form more acceptable than the original opaque Shakespearean version, but mercifully the manuscript was lost—or used to wrap rubbish.
For in England we had discovered calamari and also cos lettuce; we bought the calamari whole, cleaned it and sliced it, wrapping the remains in many layers of newspaper—or useless manuscripts—before putting them into the bin. The cos lettuce was a delight, crisp and crunchy with olive oil and vinegar but no wine—anything affordable was undrinkable. We had pasta, too, but, having had proper bolognese sauce in Italy, it was pathetic to try to substitute it with minced meat. A leg of lamb cost as much as a decent wristwatch so we ate frugally, although once or twice I bought a small piece of eye fillet, locked the door, and we cooked and ate it guiltily but blissfully.
It was to be in Holland where I next ate well. After some time Vosje went back to complete her studies there and I would go across some weekends to stay with her and her parents. I was introduced to the new sensations of Indonesian food—satays and sambal, nasi goreng, cap cay and lumpia—from little restaurants dotted around Amsterdam.
I was making comparatively good money in England, working long hours commissioning the electrics and electronics back at Aldermaston and Harwell, so I could afford a couple of really good restaurants in Amsterdam. What a revelation that was. I had never had food of such quality or presented so well, and I became, after just a few visits, a worshipper at the shrine of pinot noir, since the Burgundians sold much wine to the Dutch at that time. The South African wine was generally appalling, apparently being made from grapes chosen more for their resistance to powdery mildew than for their capacity to make good wine. To hear the name of the variety pinotage still makes me shudder slightly. With Vosje’s parents I was also introduced to the joys of Dutch food—cold meats and cheeses, baby carrots and peas. Her father was a member of a socioeconomic group that could afford to buy their edams and goudas quite fresh from the maker, then have them cured in a special storeroom with other people’s cheeses until they were considered mature enough to eat.
The smoked horseflesh, a luncheon delicacy, offended my scruples, as had the fresh horsemeat displayed in the horsemeat shops in Italy. But it certainly had a wonderful texture, and really tasted more of smoke than anything else. Evening meals were hearty but elegant, and almost always included baby carrots sautéed in butter as well as potato and green peas or beans.
The Bols Genever, though, I could not stand; it absolutely offended my young palate, and when offered one at the yacht club restaurant by my future father-in-law, I only just managed to get it down. He enquired as to whether I liked it or not and when I responded politely that I did, immediately signalled to the waiter for another, which I discreetly managed to pour into my shoe, for had I drunk it my lunch would have been ruined and possibly also that of some fellow diners. I managed to do this by using the old trick of pointing to something, in this case yachts, to distract the eyes of my table companions.
Sometimes Vosje and I would borrow the family car and go to the yacht club where I learned to sail her small yacht, experiencing the exhilaration of being powered and empowered by the wind.
But Vosje had another agenda of which I was unaware. She wanted to thumb her nose at the stuffed shirts from the yacht club and one day encouraged me to leave the sails down and gun the boat around with the outboard motor, which I cheerfully did, finding it great fun and not knowing that it was absolutely forbidden. But she knew; she was cutting her ties with what she considered to have been her excessively disciplined childhood, and was using me as the knife.
She made another cut a couple of days later. Vosje was a member of an exclusive rowing club and therefore had access to the club’s rowing sculls. I had learned to row at lakes Jubilee and Daylesford as a child and had refined those skills with the Richmond Rowing Club on the Yarra River before I went kangaroo shooting, so I knew how to handle the craft. We often rowed up and down the conventional course but, one afternoon, with me rowing and Vosje as cox, she directed us away from the co
urse and into the canals. I became uneasy as people were pointing at us and staring but, despite my protestations, she declared it okay. But it was just as ‘unconventional’ as the motorised yacht had been.
Many serious words were spoken after Mr Fros received the phone calls. I didn’t speak much Dutch then, but I got the gist. I was due to fly home to Australia within a few days and Vosje planned to follow by ship some time later. Thus she had rebelled with both barrels; she was unrepentant and she was going to Australia! Her parents may not have been pleased for their only daughter to be going to the other side of the world with a young man of unknown origins and expectations, but possibly less displeased after the boating incidents.
I was worried at the time that Mr Fros might have had another phone call from the police, for Vosje and I had used the family car for a day trip to Dusseldorf in Germany. It was intriguing there to observe the long queues outside the cinemas, for the American-made film about the Normandy invasion, The Longest Day, was screening. Apparently the film portrayed the Germans unflatteringly and there was some resentment towards English-speaking people. So when Vosje and I went to a nearby cafe and spoke in English, some young males hectored me and a fight ensued, resulting in the family car being escorted to the border by two police cars, one behind and one in front. My passport was stamped with a very long German word that Vosje interpreted as ‘Not wanted to be seen in this country again’, or words to that effect.
If Mynheer Fros ever did get a phone call about that incident, he kept it to himself.
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