by Iris Origo
When I was fourteen, however, in the last year of Mademoiselle Gonnet’s reign, I struck. I pointed out to my mother that all the things I wished to learn were being admirably taught by my classical tutor in Florence; that it was her maid who looked after my health and my clothes; and that, if she found it tedious to see my governess’s face at luncheon, I found it still more so to spend all the rest of the day in her company. Might I not in future do without a governess at all? My mother agreed, and thenceforth I lived in my schoolroom in blissful solitude.
There were, however, two persons who brought a very different note into my daily life and whom I dearly loved: my first Italian teacher, Signora Signorini, and, from babyhood, my mother’s maid Kate Leuty, whom I called Doody. Whatever governesses might come and go, Doody was always there. She had been my mother’s maid even before her marriage and had afterwards followed her everywhere—the personification of a devotion and loyalty which never abrogated her right to ‘know her own mind’; the embodiment of stability, kindness, and uncompromising British common sense. Unfailingly dressed in a neat black coat and skirt, her stocky figure stumped behind her mistress over the ranges of the Grand Canyon, through Grecian temples and Eastern bazaars, frequently carrying a small campstool or a hot-water bottle. She sat bolt upright on the low chair supplied for lesser travellers in the prow of Venetian gondolas, gazing expressionlessly across the lagoon; equally upright, and in the same black suit, crowned with a sun-helmet, she rode across the desert on a camel. When asked if she was tired, she would reply, “No, m’lady, we are here for pleasure.”
Ships’ stewards, Swiss concierges, Syrian dragomen, Arab houseboys, Italian housemaids, all instantaneously recognised her authority, and the prestige of the lady whom she served. At her bidding floors were scrubbed, tents were set up, kettles boiled, the necks of chickens were wrung. Again and again I have seen the miracle occur: the arrival at the end of a long day’s motoring at a squalid inn in North Africa or Greece, the unloading of the innumerable suitcases, cloaks and hold-alls with which we travelled, and my mother wandering off with her companions to whichever ruin we had come to see.
“No, don’t bother about the luggage. Leuty will see to things.”
An hour later, when we returned, the metamorphosis had taken place: in my mother’s room the bed was made up with her own sheets and cashmere shawls; the hot-water bottles were already in place and the tea-tray prepared; the engraved bottles and brushes were on the dressing-table; the medicine chest stood open; the guide-books and maps (and perhaps, a pocket copy of The Golden Treasury or La Divina Comedia) were on the bed-table, and the mosquito-net over the bed; an aroma of roast chicken rose from the kitchen and Condy’s Fluid from the bathroom. Another corner of a foreign field was now forever England.
To my mother Leuty awarded the mixture of deference and bluntness of the privileged English ‘upper servant’, gratifying her caprices, while plainly showing that she recognised them as such; but in real illness or grief suddenly gentle as well as efficient. My grandfather fully appreciated her quality and, in one of his letters during the war, wrote to me: ‘You must tell Leuty how grateful we are to her for her care of Mummy, and how we appreciate all she is doing. She is a real and faithful friend to us all and no family ever had a better one. Mind you tell her this for me.’ To me she invariably referred, even long after I was grown-up, as ‘the child’ (“the child needs some more flannel petticoats”; “the child’s looking white; too many parties”), under the impression, apparently, that by avoiding the use of any endearment in speech, she was concealing her complete, but never uncritical, devotion.
In all the changes of homes, of governesses, of plans, in all childish ailments and disappointments, Doody was my ‘fixed mark’. It was she who tucked me into bed every night and later came back to remove the electric torch with which I was reading under the bedclothes. It was she who bought—unthanked—my warm woollen combinations and long black stockings, who taught me to speak the truth and to wash the back of my neck. She was, besides, a most agreeable companion, with a childlike capacity, beneath her placid manner, of enjoying the minor pleasures of travel. I remember, indeed, annoying my mother in Venice, at the age of twelve, by saying (it required some courage) that, rather than look at the Carpaccios with her, I would like to spend the afternoon in walking about the merceria with Doody, buying glass beads and animals, and having an ice at a café. No disapproval was actually expressed, but I started off under a cloud, well knowing that I had shown myself ‘uncultured’.
It was with Doody that, on this and many other occasions, I spent some of the happiest hours of my childhood—secure and at ease, with no obligation to seem either better or cleverer than I really was. She discouraged, indeed, not in words, but by the mere lack of expression on her face, any form of showing off, and, later on, any airs and graces. She understood any real trouble, and wiped out, by her own disregard, any small humiliation. She ordered and put on my Confirmation dress; she inspected and appraised my governesses, my friends, and later on—with some anxiety and mistrust—my young men. Fortunately, she approved of my fiancé, Antonio (in spite of an initial national prejudice), and on my wedding-day it was she who, with an unexpected touch of poetry, wreathed my mirror with the garland of jasmine in which—so her own mother had told her—a bride should first see her face on her wedding morning. And (since my mother was ill) it was the sight of her stout, motionless figure, standing in the loggia, that was my last picture of home, as I drove away for my honeymoon.
When, six years later, a telegram reached me in Venice to tell me that, on a visit to England with my mother, she had been run over by a London bus, I caught the next train to England, but arrived too late. The thought of the hours in which she may have looked in vain for ‘the child’ are still unbearable to me. I realised then that, in all the years of my childhood and youth, I had never thought to say ‘thank you’. This is an attempt—at last—to do so.
The debt that I owe to Signora Signorini is of an entirely different nature, but hardly less great. When she first came to me she was, as I now realise, a young woman, not yet thirty, and she must once have been beautiful, but her looks were already a little faded and her youth dimmed by hard work and resignation. Her life had consisted of fourteen years in a convent-school—reading no book but those the nuns provided, never entering a theatre or a concert-hall—followed by a marriage which, after six happy years, had been obscured by her husband’s dangerous recurring attacks of acute melancholia, which made it necessary for him to be shut away at intervals in a psychiatric hospital, and for her to support her children and herself, by teaching. For five years she came to me for two afternoons a week. I read Pinocchio with her, and then Cuore, and then Le Mie Prigioni; I learned by heart, in conventional slow succession, Rondinella pellegrina and O vaghe montanine pastorelle, and eventually Il cinque maggio. In her quiet, gentle voice she dictated to me the subjects for my essays—on themes intended to develop, rather than the intelligence, the heart: Stasera Pierino è andato a letto contento di aver compiuto una buona azione—Una festa di famiglia—Chi dona ai poveri dona a Dio.1
Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon she brought her children with her—two little girls of much my own age in their best white frocks, carefully pressed and lengthened, both of them much neater and politer than I, both (as I dimly felt) more secure. I envied them, I did not quite know why. I thought it was because they went to school with other children and had their mother to themselves every evening. I think now that what they possessed was the stability of children living in a wholly homogeneous world, one in which there was a constant struggle with genteel poverty and anxiety, but none of the confusion of mind that had come to myself, a child living in a world too sophisticated for it, too varied, too rich. Through the Signorini children, I became acquainted with a world of small, frugal pleasures, long awaited: the gita by tram to Settignano, the new hair-ribbon as a prize for hard work at school, the rare treat of an ice at a café on a
Sunday evening, listening to the band, the summer holiday in a small bare villino on the slopes of the Pistoiese hills. I was much surprised to learn that one of their greatest pleasures was coming to play with me at the Villa Medici: I could not think why.
As the years went by and we grew up to different lives, I ceased to see much of the Signorini girls. But my devotion to their mother and her unfailing affection continued until her death a few years ago. It was enough to climb up the steep stairs to the flat, in which she lived with one of her married daughters, and enter the cold, over-furnished sitting-room where she sat in an armchair in the corner—a little old lady now, in a seemly black dress—to feel myself back in the schoolroom again, in a smaller, safer world.
“So Donata [my younger daughter] did well in her exam of terza media? What a consolazione for you, my dear.”
No touch of censoriousness marred her interest in what I had to tell her about my travels and my social life; to her it was all plainly ‘as good as a play’, and equally remote from anything she expected, or even desired, for herself or her daughters. La discrezione, that was her guiding virtue—saper essere discreti. Even when, in her later years, she was often bedridden with bronchitis and painful heart attacks, her demands upon life remained equally moderate. A religious woman, her piety had no touch of mysticism; a loving heart, she loved without demands. “È troppo bello per me!” she would say, stifling her cough, and trying to still her trembling hands, as I brought her a bunch of roses, a pretty dressing-jacket or a pair of fur-lined slippers; and I wish I could convey how genuine the cry was, how far removed from any false humility. She had been brought up and had lived in the true Tuscan tradition, unchanged from the Middle Ages until today—that of ‘the just mean’. Frugality, abstinence and honesty to the point of scruple, deep family affection and a sense of duty, the gentleness of those who ask nothing for themselves, the dignity of self-effacement—these were her attributes, and with them a certain dry shrewdness in her judgements and her comments, which is also peculiarly Tuscan. Kind she was always, but entirely realistic. It was a glimpse of this world and of its attitude to life that I owe to her. It would not be true to say that it has changed the course of my own life or of my behaviour, but its memory has never faded—and sometimes it has made the life of luxury seem a little thin.
Thinness, however, is not the right word to apply to the varied and entertaining world of which echoes floated up the schoolroom stairs at Villa Medici, even in the comparative segregation which (I think rightly) my mother had decreed. Gradually I began to see and hear a little more of what was going on, especially during the visits of my mother’s gay, pretty young English cousin, Irene Lawley, only ten years older than myself. She would stay with us for weeks at a time, bringing with her a breath of carefree enjoyment and fun which I found both intoxicating and upsetting. Wearing a gay and somewhat transparent dressing gown, she came to schoolroom breakfast (much to my governess’s disapproval) and distracted me from my lessons by playing the guitar; she bought one of the Palio banners at Siena and, with some of her young men, practised its complicated furlings on the lawn; she went out riding (while I gaped from the passage window) with a smart young cavalry officer in a blue cloak; she planned moonlight picnics; she produced a children’s play which I had written, and herself took part in what seemed to me an extremely daring comedy about a foreign spy, for the benefit of the Red Cross (this was in 1915). Wherever she went, there was laughter and fun, and also a host of admirers, of whom one, Charles Lister—one of the brilliant young Englishmen who, like Rupert Brooke, lost their lives in the Dardanelles—came to say goodbye to her at Villa Medici. He gave her a pair of lovebirds bought at the Fiesole fair, which eventually were handed on to me, and I regret to say, pecked each other to death.
With Irene came her enchanting mother, Constance, Lady Wenlock—whom I called ‘Aunt Concon’—one of the Edwardian ‘Souls’. The atmosphere that surrounded her, however, had no touch of Edwardian vulgarity, but belonged rather to the eighteenth century: she had the wit of a Madame de Sévigné, the grace of a Madame de Sabran. Incurably romantic, she attracted the confidence of young and old alike, even when in old age she had become so deaf that she had to carry a long ear-trumpet, trimmed with lace to match the colour of her gown; and if one wished to confide a secret to her it was necessary to follow her to a secluded rose-garden. In her clinging pale gowns of fine Indian cashmere, she flitted about the garden like an elegant, frail ghost, as silvery as the olive-trees; dawn and sunset (the only hours that she considered worth portraying in art) found her on a campstool before her easel, enhancing the view at her feet with an imaginary classical column or tempietto, producing water-colour landscapes in which the cypresses were a little blacker and the sunset rather more iridescent than in reality, and in which a few additional towers or spires adorned the distant hillsides. Later on, after my marriage, she came to stay with us in the Val d’Orcia, and would have liked to paint our maremmano oxen, but, since she attributed to them the wildness of the Indian cattle, she dared not trust herself among them. She continued, however, at home and abroad, to rise extremely early, either to paint, or to feed her roses with liquid manure from a little watering-can, curiously incongruous in her delicate hands. “Roses are gross feeders,” she would say, pinning a full-blown Crimson Glory in the soft lace fichu of her dress. Her zest for life, her passion for beauty, was never dimmed by age. On the morning of her death, at the age of eighty, she had risen to paint the dawn.
Sometimes, too, my grandparents came to Villa Medici to visit their daughter—Gran enjoying the house and garden and Gabba the walks and drives in the hills—but both of them a little bored by the constant intellectual and artistic talk, and trying to reassure themselves by repeating, “But of course Sybil always did like this sort of thing!”
They brought England with them—but indeed England was already there. Florentine society at that time was not so much cosmopolitan as made up of singularly disparate elements—an archipelago of little islands that never merged into a continent. The worlds of the various colonies—Russian, French, German, Swiss, American, and English—sometimes overlapped, but seldom fused, and the English colony itself, though the largest and most prosperous, was far from being, in its own eyes, a single unit. “They are, of course,” as E. M. Forster’s clergyman delicately expressed it, “not all equally … some are here for trade, for example.” The real gulf, however, lay not between one kind of resident and another, but between the mere tourist and the established Anglo-Florentine, who felt himself to have become as much a part of the city life as any Tuscan. Some of these residents sank roots so deep that when, at the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Consulate attempted to repatriate them, a number of obscure old ladies firmly refused to leave, saying that, after fifty years’ residence in Florence, they preferred even the risk of a concentration camp to a return to England, where they no longer had any tie or home.
The English church in Via La Marmora, Maquay’s Bank in Via Tornabuoni, Miss Penrose’s school (where their children met all the little Florentines whose parents wished them to acquire fluent English), the Anglo-American Stores in Via Cavour, Vieusseux’s Lending Library and, for the young people, the Tennis Club at the Cascine—these were their focal points. If they lived in a Florentine palazzo it was at once transformed—in spite of its great stone fireplaces and brick or marble floors—into a drawing-room in South Kensington: chintz curtains, framed water-colours, silver rose-bowls and library books, a fragrance of home-made scones and of freshly made tea (“But no Italian will warm the tea-pot properly, my dear”). If they had a villa, though they scrupulously preserved the clipped box and cypress hedges of the formal Italian garden, they yet also introduced a note of home: a Dorothy Perkins rambling among the vines and the wisteria on the pergola, a herbaceous border on the lower terrace, and comfortable wicker chairs upon the lawns. “Bisogna begonia!” (the two words pronounced to rhyme with each other) I heard Mrs. Keppel cry, as
, without bending her straight Edwardian back, she firmly prodded her alarmed Tuscan gardener with her long parasol, and then marked with it the precise spots in the beds where she wished the flowers to be planted. The next time we called, the begonias were there—as luxuriant and trim as in the beds of Sandringham.
It was these owners of other villas who were to be seen at my mother’s Sunday tea-parties, but she also ‘got done’, on the same day, such visitors as were passing through Florence. (“The Brackenburys? Oh, we’ll get them done on Sunday.”) The result was a company which seemed odd even to the eyes of a child, but I can set down very little about it. The exceptions are a few people of whom I was genuinely fond: a sweet-natured, blue-eyed young Irishwoman, Nesta de Robeck, who offered to teach me to play the piano and to whom I owe many hours of happiness and a friendship that still endures; my father’s friend, Gordon Gardiner, who would tell me long sagas about his life in the African veldt and the Australian bush, who would read aloud Ticonderoga and laugh at me for getting honey in my hair; and Patience Cockerell, my godmother, who—uncompromisingly dressed in the grey tweed skirt and amber beads which she wore in her Sussex cottage (“I have no money and don’t want to look as if I had”)—spent most of the first years after my father’s death with us, helping to furnish the villa and to plant the garden, but regarding my mother’s new ‘artistic’ friends with a somewhat quizzical eye. “Too clever for us,” she and Gordon agreed—and as it became clear that this, in future, was to be my mother’s world, they both gradually faded from the scene.
Of all the other figures at my mother’s parties, none was three-dimensional for me, though I dutifully handed them the buttered scones, and took them round the garden. I can set down a list of a few of them, but I can’t bring them to life. There was old Lady Paget from Bellosguardo, a rather frightening old lady; there was sometimes Vernon Lee, her grey hair cropped tight above an uncompromising man’s collar and tie, on her way back from a visit to our neighbour Charles Strong, up to whose villa she stumped once a week, to exchange philosophic shouts (for they were both deaf ) on the nature of the Beautiful and the Good. Sometimes the poet Herbert Trench came striding over the hills from Settignano with his lovely daughters—three silent Graces—though he preferred to come alone, to read aloud his lyrics or the long drama that he was writing about Napoleon. Carlo Placci would look in, just back from staying at Duino with Princess von Thurn and Taxis, saying that Rilke, poor fellow, was very ill again, or from Paris, where, he said, Clemenceau had told him … or perhaps (for his range was wide) from Hatfield, where Lord Salisbury … To me, of course, these were only names, but I saw that the grown-ups listened with interest, and thought that this large-nosed old gentleman must be a very important person. But then why did Mr. Berenson laugh, when the stories were repeated to him the next day, and say, “Poor old Placci—no pudding can boil in Europe without his stirring it!”