Dear Olivia

by Mary Contini

  Despite Mussolini’s Government’s grand designs, the Fascio became in effect a social club. None of the Italians were interested in politics, in fact involvement in local politics was expressly forbidden. This was a family social club. They were interested in getting on in business and being respected in their adoptive country.

  In the absence of a piazza, the dopolavoro, the after-work club, became a meeting place for the older generations. The Ballila and Piccolo Balilla were clubs for the youngsters.

  The golf club, football club, Italian conversation club, the dance committee and fundraising committee all proved popular, providing much-needed social contact for the families who by now had lived in Scotland for many years. Every meeting or class began with a prayer, the Roman Salute and a rendition of the Fascist song, ‘Giovinezza’.

  For the teenagers in the community, some who had been born in Italy like Domenico, Lena and Johnny, and most born in Scotland like Margherita, Vittorio, Olivia, Alex, Anna, Gloria and Filomena, dances and family picnics were arranged.

  Under the watchful eye of the aunties and nonnas, they could mix and match, maintaining the traditions of their parents’ youth, resisting the tide of modernity and assimilation. Pressure was strong to marry within the Italian community. Those who chose not to found themselves and their new partners ostracised.

  Johnny, aged 12, in uniform of Avanguardisti, c. 1932

  A few joined the Fascist Party entranced by the cult of Mussolini. Most joined to satisfy nostalgia and replace a sense of belonging and nationality that they had lost in the early years of immigration. The leaders in the groups, people like Alfonso, saw great advantage in the whole community being bound together. Others used it only as an occasional social club, never signing allegiance, but were welcomed just the same.

  To participate in holiday trips to Italy the youth had to sign up as members of the young Fascist club, the equivalent of the Boy Scouts or Guides, which almost all did. The chance of a free holiday in Italy was too good to miss. They all wanted to go; it was such a treat.

  For the immigrant community, in general, things were looking good. Dreams were beginning to come true. Italy had a strong leader that both the Catholic Church and the British Government approved of, Grazie a Dio.

  As Alfonso liked to say, things were on the up and up!

  The only cloud on the horizon was that Emidio had run into bad times and, with his every move scrutinised by enthusiastic policing, had eventually returned to Italy, leaving his wife and family behind. Alfonso had been upset, but they corresponded regularly, and Emidio now helped Pietro maintain the supply of sausage and cheese coming from Fontitune.

  Despite Maria’s misgivings, Alfonso had made a good deal with Valvona. Fired up by the enthusiastic response from his compatriots, by the end of the year he and Valvona had decided to open a second retail shop in the premises Emidio had vacated at 19 Elm Row. On 29 November 1935 the second branch of Valvona & Crolla was opened.

  Maria felt overwhelmed. She remembered the meagre supper of salsiccie and pecorino she had shared with Giovanni and Alfonso that first night she had arrived in Edinburgh. Now her husband and son were importing the produce and selling it to the substantial Italian community in the very same place.

  Back then she could never have imagined that Alfonso’s vision would come true.

  21

  Cockenzie

  1935

  It was a warm sunny morning. Everyone had been up since dawn. Cesidio and Johnny had been making ice cream for hours. The new boiler and electric freezer were saving a lot of time. Now as many as six ten-gallon cans of milk were delivered to the back door every morning.

  Marietta and the girls had been cleaning the shop and getting it stocked up with chocolates, cigarettes and sweets. Jimmy Caulder and Tommy Dougal had peeled and chipped five sacks of potatoes and were now gutting fish, slick and efficient as they layered row upon row of fillets of haddocks on top of each other.

  Alex had left school. For his eleventh birthday he had been given a pair of long trousers and a white coat. He had started work. This morning he was busy cleaning and scrubbing the ice cream tricycles that he, Johnny, and another two lads would cycle down the coast.

  He really hoped he would get to go to Seton Links. A madman had started selling five-bob aeroplane flights from the sands and he wanted to see the plane go up in the air and fly over the Forth with its single passenger in the back.

  This was the first week of the Edinburgh Trades Holiday fortnight. They would all be working flat out right through the Glasgow Fair in the second fortnight in July and until the September holiday weekend.

  The Di Ciacca family on the beach

  It was as if the whole of the Central Belt of Scotland moved east. Boarding houses filled up, front rooms were let out, and along the coast makeshift camps grew up where holiday homes were made out of ramshackle huts, tents and even old railway carriages.

  With the long bright summer evenings and the cramped space of the holiday accommodation, the holiday-makers spent their time on the beaches and walking up and down the promenade. The men hung around the local taverns, drinking with the fishermen.

  During the day Johnny and Alex took ice cream barrows all the way down the coast and at night they all stood in the shop selling fish suppers and chips from five o’clock until well past two in the morning. With no other competition in the village, except the Grant family’s Wemyss Café, they could hardly keep up.

  The housework also had to be done. Marietta employed a young local girl, Margaret Davidson, whose mother had come every year to Cockenzie as a herring packer.

  As a youngster, Mrs Davidson had travelled, working with two other girls, gutting and packing the herring into coopers, working from morning until night and getting about a shilling a barrel between them – about fourpence per hour. If the catch was good over the twelve weeks, the girls could earn twelve shillings, a fortune. Then the work ended for the winter, leaving them unemployed.

  It was a harsh way of life, and one that was declining. Before the war the herring had been prolific in the Scottish waters, providing livelihoods for many communities. Most of the herring were sold to Germany and northern countries. This market closed over the war years but, worse than that, fishing had been banned in the Firth of Forth because of the imminent dangers of enemy attack. The fishing industry collapsed.

  Margaret’s mother was glad to find her a job with the Italian family. A friend from school, Jeannie Heriot, from a fisherman’s family, also came to work there.

  Margaret and Jeannie had arrived at the house as usual at seven in the morning and cleaned and dusted the rooms. Today was wash-day. Marietta insisted that everyone wore a starched white cotton apron. That meant that the girls had to wash about thirty aprons every week, as well as all the sheets, shop cloths, towels and the boys’ white shirts and collars.

  Everything was done by hand. The girls would wash all day. Outside the back of the shop was a small washhouse: a stone-flagged room with a large sink and a cold-water tap. After filling the large brass pot with water, Jeannie lit the range under the boiler. First everything was scrubbed with carbolic soap against the washboard in the big ceramic white sink. Then the water was boiled again and all the whites were added in batches, and boiled for half an hour or so to get all the stains and grease from the frying out of them. Then the girls had to rinse everything twice in changes of cold water poured into a big steel tub. Finally they wrung out the clothes and put them through the mangle.

  The weather was good so everything was hung out to dry, arranged tidily and evenly on the washing line strung between big poles in the back green. It was long hard work.

  There was so much to do that Marietta was helping the girls, her sleeves rolled up, her white apron damp with soap suds.

  ‘Marietta!’ Cesidio called through. ‘Do you want to talk to this man?’

  ‘Who is it, Cesidio? We’re busy here. We still have a load of washing to do.’

 
‘Talk to him. He says he can help you.’

  At that Cesidio pushed a thin, wiry man in a dark jacket with his tie loose at his opened shirt, into the back green.

  ‘Who are you? I’m too busy to talk to anyone.’

  ‘Mrs Deechacka, please give me five minutes. It’ll be worth your while. I can save you a lot of time.’ He had his sales patter down to a fine art.

  Marietta and the girls kept on working. If they stopped they’d never get finished.

  ‘Mrs Deechacka, I would like to compliment you on the wonderful white of your apron, if you don’t mind me saying so. But I can see that you will take the rest of the day to finish. You are also, if you don’t mind me pointing out, paying these young girls at least ten shillings each a week; half the time they will be doing the laundry. Am I right? Am I right?’

  Before Marietta could open her mouth he went on.

  ‘I have in my car the very newest model, a Bendix automatic washing machine, just arrived off the boat from none other than the United States of America. I am happy to inform you that, if you sign up today, Mrs Deechacka, I can offer you the latest Bendix electric or gas-powered automatic washing machine for the offer price of a deposit of eighteen shillings and a repayment of only one pound a month for eighteen months. What do you girls think of that?’

  The girls would not dare say a word. By the sound of it, this cheeky man was trying to take their job from them. Much as they hated doing the washing it was a job after all.

  Marietta did a quick calculation in her mind and worked out that it would cost the best part of the girls’ wages for a year to pay off the washing machine. Not a bad investment, if it worked.

  ‘I’m sorry, my man, I am not interested. It is not at all worth the risk of paying a deposit and taking a debt for a machine that I don’t need.’

  Jeannie and Margaret listened carefully.

  ‘But, Mrs Deechacka, it is such a good price and a wonderful labour-saving device.’

  Marietta was not interested. She turned to leave the room. ‘Good day.’

  ‘Mrs Deechacka, if you don’t mind, I can offer you a free trial for a day to see how wonderful this appliance is. It would be unfortunate to see these poor girls work so hard when they could be employed elsewhere and leave you with free time.’

  That was a thought. There was so much work to do. If this machine saved two days’ work a week it would be well worth it.

  ‘Girls, what do you think? Would you prefer to go out and sell ice cream rather than do the washing?’

  This idea appealed to the girls.

  ‘OK, you’ve got a chance. You can give us a free trial.’

  ‘Done.’ The traveller took his chance. He’d driven all the way from Edinburgh and not sold one machine in two weeks.

  The following week the machine arrived and, plugged in and plumbed with wires and hose pipes, the washing was put into the top of the machine. It churned and rattled, swishing the soapy water backwards and forwards for the best part of two hours. Jeannie, Margaret and the man watched in admiration. Everything was going according to plan until it started its spin cycle. Then all hell broke loose.

  Upstairs Cesidio heard screams from the girls. He ran out the front door, down the stairs and into the shop. He joined Marietta, Anna and Lena hurrying through to the back. They all stopped in their tracks.

  The salesman was alarmed: shirt sleeves rolled up, sweat pouring down his brow, hanging on to a contraption that appeared to be spewing white foam and jumping with speed across the floor.

  ‘O, Mamma mia!’ Marietta watched in dismay.

  The machine shuddered again, jumped forward, pulling the electric plug from the wall and continued to shudder and shake for a further five minutes until the central drum stopped revolving.

  When it finally stopped, the salesman stood back and, wiping his brow, straightened his tie.

  ‘Well, Mrs Deechacka, what do you think? Is this not the most marvellous invention?’

  The clothes were all crumpled and creased. Many of the greasy stains were still showing. Some of Marietta’s fine linen was torn.

  ‘What? Money, noise, disruption and damage – just to prove a point? I don’t think so! Go on! Sling yer hook!’

  The unfortunate salesman was shown the door. The poor girls were left to dry the floor and wash the clothes by hand all over again. So much for convenience!

  The room at the back of the chip shop had been converted into a sitting room. With the addition of a wireless, a coal fire in the winter and the two lovely Italian girls serving, it became a magnet for the youngsters in the village.

  Anna in the shop, c. 1939

  The young fishermen hung out in the shop when they came back at night from the fishing. Auld Coolie, Hammer, Dingle and Shipmate all vied for the attentions of the girls. Tommy Horne and John Bryan were almost inseparable. Village tittle-tattle had it that Big Paul had a soft spot for Lena, who was now eighteen. Coolie was Anna’s favourite. She was still only thirteen but well aware of her charms.

  The local Cockenzie girls were forbidden by their parents to hang out in the shop and were less than happy with the attention the Italian girls were getting. Of course it was an unspoken understanding that the Roman Catholics girls would never be allowed to marry a Scots lad, let alone go winching with one, so in fact it looked like there was no serious competition.

  At night the sitting room filled up with smoke and noise as the boys lingered over a Barr’s Irn Bru with a ball of ice cream or a Macallum dripping with scarlet raspberry sauce. They often ate their evening meal there, mushy peas and chips, tea and bread and butter, a bargain for sixpence with as much hot water added to the pot as necessary to make it last as long as the night.

  In November Cesidio got a letter from Alfonso asking him to come to a special Mass that was being held in Edinburgh.

  ‘What’s it about, Cesidio?’ Marietta was always suspicious of letters from Alfonso when they were marked with the official stamp of the Fascio.

  ‘I don’t know. Something about La Giornata della Fede, the “Day of Faith”.’

  ‘Ignore it. If he asks us we’ll tell him we didn’t get the letter.’

  A few weeks later two of the Italian women from Edinburgh arrived in Cockenzie. Marietta was surprised to see them. It was very unusual for any of them to travel without their husbands, and especially not all the way down to Cockenzie in the winter.

  ‘Hello, Carmela. Hello, Peggy.’ Marietta came round from the counter to kiss the women. ‘You’re looking well, both of you. What are you doing all the way down here?’

  ‘We wanted to talk to you and Cesidio about something.’

  Marietta brought them through to the sitting room. She told Anna to find her father. Over a cup of tea, the women told Cesidio and Marietta why they had called.

  ‘Cesidio, do you remember if you received a letter from the Fascio recently?’

  Marietta nudged Cesidio under the table.

  ‘Eh, no, not that I can remember. We filled in the census that Alfonso asked us to. And Johnny and Alex have put their names down for the summer camps.’

  Peggy ventured, ‘Yes, isn’t it marvellous what Il Duce has done for us. Look how much we have gained from standing together as a group.’

  Marietta, Lena, Anna and Cesidio outside the shop in Cockenzie

  Marietta spoke up; she wasn’t shy of saying what she was thinking. ‘That’s all very well, Peggy, but this Abyssinian affair, Mussolini going to war in Africa, it doesn’t do any of us any good.’

  ‘Oh, but it does. Il Duce says we have to be strong as a nation. We have to make sure that in Europe we can stand up and be counted with the same respect as all the others.’

  Carmela added: ‘The thing is, the League of Nations has imposed sanctions on Italy. After all that he has done for us, all the good that he has done, for the first time Mussolini needs us to support him. For the first time he is asking for something in return.’

  Here we go, thought Marietta.r />
  Peggy took over the argument. They had obviously handled this double act a few times already because they had all the answers ready.

  ‘In Italy, only last month on La Giornata della Fede, the Holy Father, the cardinals and bishops stood up in their pulpits and asked the congregation to donate gold for the good of Italy.’

  ‘What do you mean, gold?’ This was a new one on Marietta.

  ‘They asked the women of Italy to give their wedding rings for the cause. Priests and bishops set an example; they gave the church bells so that they could be made into guns, gold statues that could be melted down for the funds of Il Duce.’

  Marietta snorted in disdain. ‘I’m sorry, girls, I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Why is Mussolini going to war when we are at peace and he can’t afford it? I’ll not give anything. It will just encourage him.’

  Peggy showed Marietta a steel ring she had on her wedding finger. ‘Look, here’s the steel ring I got in return for my humble offering. Inside, look, it is engraved with the name of Il Duce. It’s a small price to pay, Marietta.’

  Alfonso Crolla, c. 1936

  Marietta was not interested in war nor in funding Mussolini’s hair-brained schemes. Just like the washing machine salesman, the women left Cockenzie empty-handed and with Marietta’s reputation of being furba intact. Nonetheless, they had successfully collected a lot of gold from other Italian women in Edinburgh who were happy to give their support.

  That night Marietta lay awake worrying. She nudged Cesidio awake.

  ‘Cesidio, Sis. These women are mad. If they encourage Mussolini to like the taste of war, their sons will be called up to fight.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. It’ll be a flash in the pan. You’ll see. Thank God our boys live in Britain. They are far safer here than if we were still in Italy. Go to sleep. It’s nothing to worry about.’