by Jo Riccioni
Scribe Publications
THE ITALIANS AT CLEAT’S CORNER STORE
Jo Riccioni was born in the UK to an Italian father and English mother. She worked in Singapore and Paris before settling in Sydney, and she has a master’s degree in literature from Leeds University. Her short stories have been read on the BBC and Radio National, and published in The Best Australian Stories 2010 and 2011. Her story ‘Can’t Take the Country out of the Boy’ has been optioned for a short film.
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
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50A Kingsway Place, Sans Walk, London, EC1R 0LU, United Kingdom
First published by Scribe 2014
Copyright © Jo Riccioni 2014
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The epigraph by T.S. Eliot is reproduced with the permission of Faber and Faber. The quotation in the first chapter is from ‘Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte’ by Vincenzo da Filicaja. The quotation in the fifth chapter is from A Room with a View by E.M. Forster, reproduced with the permission of The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the E.M. Forster Estate. The quotation in the sixth chapter of part two is from ‘Sea-Fever’ by John Masefield, reproduced with the permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Riccioni, Jo, author.
The Italians at Cleat’s Corner Store / Jo Riccioni.
9781922070883 (Australian edition)
9781922247391 (UK edition)
9781925113020 (e-book)
1. Immigrant families–Great Britain–Fiction. 2. Italians–Great Britain–Fiction.
A823.4
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
In memory of my mum,
Pat Riccioni (nee Waiton)
1940–2007
Dimmi chi sono, non mi dir chi ero
(Tell me who I am, not who I was)
Italian proverb
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Leyton
1949
The first time she saw them, they were mending the gate on Henry Repton’s land. She was cycling to Leyton on her way to Cleat’s and had reached the top of the hill that was good for sitting upright and freewheeling. She might have missed them, coasting at speed as she was, the hedgerow budding thickly on either side of the lane, but as she rounded the corner at the dip, there they were, two of them, their heads bent together over the broken gate, tools in their hands. One had his face obscured by a shock of hair, slick and jet as a raven’s wing. They both stood up as she flew by, and she couldn’t help but glance back over her shoulder to see the shine of their brown faces and forearms in the clean light of early morning, their neat, compact waists as they straightened. One of them put his fingers to his mouth and let out a high-pitched whistle.
As she pedalled towards Leyton, she could no longer see them, but their voices hung in the air, foreign words rolling over one another, rapid and restless and no more meaningful to her than the chatter of pebbles in the brook after a downpour. Afterwards she heard a laugh — she guessed it was the whistler — loud and playful, cutting the morning in two, and then she heard no more.
‘Eye-ties,’ Mrs Livesey fired across the counter, as Connie raised the blind and flipped the Open sign in the window of Cleat’s. The string bag on Mrs Livesey’s arm danced under the trembling shelf of her breasts. Connie finished buttoning her serving coat and said nothing. Mrs Cleat was resting her flour scoop on the countertop, fixing her customer with small, hard eyes, like a hedgerow animal disturbed. After a moment, she motioned Connie towards the sacred domain of the new Berkel compression scales, presenting her the scoop with both hands, like a sceptre. It had been Connie who had talked Mrs Cleat through the instruction booklet and the complexities of the weighing grid when the scales had first arrived, but this was a detail Mrs Cleat chose to forget, except in times of urgent distraction. She rounded on Mrs Livesey.
‘Eye-talians?’ she demanded, perhaps more greedily than she’d intended.
‘Eye-ties, that’s what I said. Back again. For farm work. Paid this time.’
‘I see,’ said Mrs Cleat. She cast her eye past Mrs Livesey as if down an imaginary queue of customers at the counter. Connie could tell she was peeved that a farmhand’s wife, and a shabby one at that, had the advantage of such news. Mrs Cleat prided herself on being the most informed woman in the Leyton and Parishes Christian Ladies’ League, not to mention the Greater Huntingdon Amateur Operatic Society. She was the one to whom others came precisely because she did not gossip. Mrs Cleat gave updates. It was true that most of the village placed her version of news not far below the hallowed authority of the BBC. But Connie knew, from being in the shop with Mrs Cleat five days a week, that these updates had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was largely countertop gossip.
‘I see,’ Mrs Cleat said again, buffing the new Formica with a cloth.
‘Apparently, Henry Repton told one of his WOPs there’d always be work for him on the farm if ever he wanted it. Well, that’s done it. Eye-tie’s come back and brung the whole ruddy family. Get that.’
Even from behind, Connie saw the change in the set of Mrs Cleat’s shoulders, the marginal shift of her hips. She would not be told, least of all told what to get.
‘You do read the newspapers, don’t you, Janet?’ she said in her Christian Ladies voice. Connie smiled: Mrs Cleat knew very well that the only newspaper they’d ever sold Mrs Livesey was a royal-wedding edition two years ago. ‘They say there’s no jobs on the Continent. And anyone who’s got one is wheeling their wages home in a barrow.’ She proceeded to ply Mrs Livesey with the paper packages Connie had placed on the counter and topped them with an air of worldly superiority.
Mrs Cleat enjoyed regurgitating the casual items of global news that Mr Gilbert shared with them when he picked up his morning Times on the way to the schoolhouse. No doubt she felt that this snippet, opportunely recalled, redeemed her somewhat in the face of Mrs Livesey’s scoop.
‘That’s all well and good, but what about our boys?’ Mrs Livesey continued. ‘It’s their jobs these WOPs are taking.’ She re-adjusted the loaded bag on her arm, her cleavage rising ominously.
‘With respect,’ Mrs Cleat said, the words again stolen from Mr Gilbert, who often used them as a gentle precursor to correcting the ill-informed, such as Mrs Cleat herself, ‘I hardly think your Derek will want a job mucking out pigs on Repton’s farm. And even if he did, he wouldn’t do it for twice the money Repton’ll be paying them Eye-talians.’
Mrs Livesey pulled her chin to her neck. ‘Well, Eleanor,’ she said, ‘I knew you liked your opera singing and whatnot, but I didn’t think you were such a …’ She scanned the shelves, searching for the answer as if it might be hidden among the tins of Vim and boxes of Rinso. ‘Well, such a … a bloo
dy WOP-lover, that’s what,’ she finally gave in. ‘In the book, if you please.’
Mrs Livesey began to heave herself about when the sight of Connie, who was opening the ledger, evidently put her in mind of a more sophisticated line of attack. ‘How’s your Aunty Bea, dear? Still grafting away at the Big House?’ she asked. Her tone suggested Connie’s aunt was a manacled slave of the Reptons’ rather than their paid housekeeper. ‘I’m sure Bea Farrington’s memory isn’t as short as some people’s hereabouts.’
Mrs Livesey’s nostrils still glistened from the early walk across the fields, and the tip of a rogue canine tooth pressed onto her lower lip even when her mouth was closed. Connie was reminded of the hounds at the Hamerton Hunt: harmless creatures in the yard, but killers on the scent. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Mrs Livesey,’ she replied, although she suspected she did.
‘Poor Bea. Working alongside prisoners in the war is one thing, but having them back in peacetime to rub salt in your wounds is another. I’m surprised your Uncle Jack still lets her work up at the Big House, seeing as how them Eye-ties was the death of his own brother.’ She glanced at Mrs Cleat, smugly gauging her response to this rather clever equation. ‘Monte Cassino, wasn’t it, where Bill Farrington fell?’
Connie closed the ledger and returned it to its shelf under the counter.
‘I don’t know … that is, my aunt and uncle don’t really speak of it,’ she said. ‘Anyway, she wouldn’t see the Italians much — farmhands don’t have any call to go inside Leyton House.’
‘Give her my sympathies,’ Mrs Livesey said, as if Connie hadn’t spoken a word. She gave a last triumphant sniff in Mrs Cleat’s direction before she headed for the door, the squeak of her rubber boots and the tinkle of the bell sounding oddly discordant behind her.
Mrs Cleat, agitated, took up the broom and began to sweep the dried mud left in Mrs Livesey’s wake. ‘WOP-lover … WOP-lover?’ she argued with herself. ‘Even if I was, which I’m not, she could have at least used the proper word. Connie — what’s that word Mr Gilbert uses?’
Connie shook her head. She knew exactly the term Mr Gilbert sometimes used about himself, but she also understood the repercussions of educating Mrs Cleat.
‘Ah, that’s it,’ Mrs Cleat said, propping up the broom and appearing fortified by the efficacy of her own memory. ‘WOP-lover, indeed! Still, you can’t expect the likes of Janet Livesey to know a word like Eyetaliphile.’
Connie began to look out for them on her way to and from work, squeezing her brakes and forfeiting the thrill of coasting round the bend at the entrance to Repton’s in the hope that she might catch sight of the Italians. But a week passed and the single sign of their existence was the thin line of smoke from the chimney of the crumbling gamekeeper’s cottage. She took to stopping in the greying light after work, dismounting and pushing her bike up the hill towards Bythorn. After the strictures of Mrs Cleat’s shop, she usually enjoyed the challenge of pedalling up the rise, the perverse sense of release she felt from the pounding of her heart, the sweat breaking over her skin. But the walk allowed her more time to survey the squat, derelict building across the fields; to conjure them from the dusk, somehow bright and radiant, the light of a foreign sun in their hair, the sheen of it in their skin.
It was several weeks after Mrs Livesey’s news when Connie got off her bike at Bythorn Rise and saw a figure at the edge of the field. She recognised the taller, broader of the two Italians. He was staring at the hedgerow, standing very still. She made out a bundle of papers in his hands, a battered notebook perhaps, and saw that he was marking something in it. Unseen herself, she became lost in the act of watching him, until his head darted up, aware of her. Confronted with what she had been wanting all along, she felt exposed, somehow found-out, and she quickly got back on her bike and cycled up the rise. But when she reached the top of the hill, she couldn’t help glancing back. He was standing in the same spot, unmoving, vigilant as a nocturnal bird waiting for night to settle.
The next evening after work, the sky dimmed early with rain. She had forgotten her mackintosh, and by the time she got to the gate of the farm, the downpour had begun and she was already wet to her skin. She stopped to switch on her bike lamp, and as she did so she caught sight of him again in the gloom of the hawthorn, oblivious to the rain dripping from his fingers, or from the slick of hair flattened against his forehead. They peered at each other, the space between them still, save the liquid tick of the hedgerow. She was about to raise her hand to him when he turned his back and began to stride up the hill towards the cottage, leaving her shivering in the leached light.
‘Teaching them, that’s right.’ Mr Gilbert nodded, reaching for the Times that Mrs Cleat held rolled like a baton on the counter. ‘I’m enjoying it immensely. Purely selfish motivations, you know. It’s such an opportunity for me to practise my rickety Italian.’ Despite his pleasantries, Connie could see in Mr Gilbert’s restless stance his eagerness to be gone.
The other end of the newspaper was still pinned in Mrs Cleat’s fingers. ‘So they have no English at all, the sons?’ she asked.
‘Oh, they’re doing admirably. Their father’s been teaching them, but they need a greater vocabulary and instruction in grammar. That’s where I’ve offered to help.’
Mrs Cleat gripped tighter. ‘And Repton gives them the gamekeeper’s cottage in return for labour? He doesn’t actually pay them, I hear?’
Mr Gilbert resigned his hand from his Times and exhaled. ‘I certainly hope that isn’t the case, Mrs Cleat.’ Connie recognised this sigh, the lowered tone. She had become familiar with it at school, the way he corralled his temper, allowing rebuke to merely glimmer at the edges of his voice. After a series of thunderous village teachers all trained in the same ear-twisting, chalk-hurling method for extracting terrified rote, Mr Gilbert’s patience and enthusiasm, not yet beset with the jading of middle age, had been easy to idolise.
‘But I’ve been told on good authority they don’t have any special skills,’ Mrs Cleat persisted.
‘On the contrary. They were farmers themselves in Italy. No experience with machinery but, regardless,’ Mr Gilbert smoothed a thumb and finger over his eyebrows, ‘I believe we outlawed slavery in 1772. Such an arrangement would be rather illegal, don’t you think?’ His eye caught Connie’s and glinted conspiratorially.
Mrs Cleat straightened her shoulders, affronted. ‘Of course. Of course it would, Mr Gilbert. I’m merely repeating what others in the parish are saying.’
‘Then, with respect, perhaps it would be better not to?’ The bell clattered as he opened the door sharply. ‘Loose lips, Mrs Cleat …’
‘The war is long over, Mr Gilbert,’ she sang back to him, leaning over the counter.
‘… can still sink ships,’ he called from the pavement beyond the bay window, lifting his hat and offering them his most charming smile, as he always did. Mrs Cleat ignored it, busy digesting his meaning. The fist of one hand was still around his Times, while the other wiped the counter absently. Connie hovered nearby.
‘Oh, now look! Connie, run this up the school,’ she finally huffed. ‘Loose lips … I’m sure I don’t know what he’s implicating. These intellectuals … theorising and setting the world to rights, but they’d forget their own heads if they wasn’t screwed on!’
Connie caught up with Mr Gilbert as he was entering the school gate. He half sighed, half laughed. ‘Am I to be interrogated about them every morning, Connie, before I’m allowed my newspaper, do you think?’
‘About the Italians?’
‘Si. La famiglia Onorati.’ The foreign words rolled off his tongue fluently, luxuriously, and she felt for a second she had peeked through a door into another world.
‘So beautiful … the Italian … the sound of the words, I mean.’ She became annoyed at the heat in her cheeks.
‘Oh yes. The honoured ones …’ he said in a d
eep theatrical voice, raising his eyebrows at her. ‘It’s what it means — their name. Rather ironic, don’t you think, given what they must have seen, what they must have been through to settle for living in that bloody pigsty of Repton’s?’
She didn’t know what to say. Even now she still felt awkward when he invited her opinions, as one adult to another. Four years ago they had sat in his empty classroom, preparing scholarship papers for St Bernadette’s College in Benford. Now, thanks to Aunty Bea, all she prepared was his grocery account.
‘Do you think … I mean, have they had it that hard — the Italians?’ she asked, rather ashamed to show her ignorance to the one person who had seen her potential.
‘I suspect so. But it’s behind them now, I suppose. Nobody wants to go back to that time.’ He smiled at her. ‘War’s about the future, not the past, isn’t it?’ Yet as he tapped the newspaper to his hat in farewell, she sensed that he had no faith at all in what he’d said. She nodded her assent, but it was no more than a habit, and she was angry with herself afterwards for not asking him more.
Had the war been about the future? She stood at the gate of the school, feeling like she had lived through those years half dreaming, unconcerned with the games of grown-ups, and was now slowly awakening. She had barely any idea of what was beyond Leyton. Once, she had gone as far as Benford on the bus, simply so she could imagine rumbling through the countryside while practising conjugations from a Latin primer, jumping off at the wrought-iron gates of the Victorian school, inclining her head and laughing under the red facade with those pale-haired, doe-legged girls.
‘St Bernadette’s? That Catholic school all way over in Benford?’ Aunty Bea had asked Mr Gilbert as if he had been proposing to send her to the fire and brimstone of hell itself. She hadn’t changed out of her housedress, her cheeks ruddy from carpet-beating at the Big House, the plain silver crucifix winking on her flushed throat. In the corridor Connie had chewed at a quick until it throbbed, listening to the escalating symphony of their exchange.