by Iris Origo
There was sometimes a small sprinkling, too, of Florentines: the mothers of my friends, correctly dressed for calling, or some more dashing young friends of Irene’s. There were dowdy, distinguished English couples of my grandparents’ generation, who had come up from the Hotel Grande Bretagne or Miss Peters’ pensione to see ‘what sort of place Sybil has settled in’; there were American friends, mostly active, industrious sightseers eager for information, with an occasional representative of ‘Old New York’; and there was also sometimes a contingent from Bloomsbury or Chelsea, critical as well as appreciative. “To think,” Mrs. Masefield exclaimed, as we paced the terrace, “that all this great wall was built by slave labour!” But the tea and the little cakes—which I handed round assiduously—were delicious, the garden was full of flowers, and my mother was the most cordial and expert of hostesses, shepherding her unamalgamable flock into small harmonious groups.
“Iris, will you show Mrs. X and Colonel Y the peonies in the border, while I give Lady Z and Signor Placci some more tea—and Irene, I think Marchese D and Conte R might like to see the view from the West terrace!”
In the end they all went down the hill again, after sunset, feeling that it had been a pleasant afternoon, if slightly disjointed, and my mother sank exhausted on to the sofa, while I thankfully ran upstairs to the schoolroom and my own story-book. I made up my mind, even then, that if I stayed on in Italy after I was grown-up, it would only be to marry an Italian. I did not wish, I thought, to go on belonging to ‘the English colony’.
Of the other ‘interesting’ people in Florence at that time, I have, unfortunately, little to tell. Those whom I now wish I had known—Norman Douglas and Gordon Craig, and later on D. H. Lawrence and the Huxleys—steered clear of villadom. They ate in cheap trattorie, spoke the highly coloured language which the Tuscans called anglo-becero, and disappeared for long intervals into unexplored, exciting regions, of which a few echoes reached us through Geoffrey Scott and Cecil Pinsent. Sometimes I drove over with my mother to Poggio Gherardo—one of the villas to which Boccaccio’s youths and ladies had fled from the great plague in 1348 and in which some of the tales of the Decameron were told—to find old Mrs. Ross reckoning up her olive crop with an eye as shrewd and vigilant as that of any Tuscan farmer, and perhaps sometimes consenting, if in a good mood, to take us into the cosy clutter of her Victorian sitting-room and tell us about how she had once taken ‘a dish of tea’ with the Miss Berrys, and had had a portrait made of her by il Signor (Watts) or had sat on the knee of Meredith, ‘my Poet’. Once or twice, later on, I was allowed to sit in a corner of Charles Loeser’s fine music-room, hung with early Cézannes (for he was one of the first to discover this painter) while the Lener Quartet was playing, and our host’s elf-like little daughter, Matilda, peeped in through the half-open door. Occasionally we visited the most beautiful, and certainly in my eyes the most romantic garden of all, that of the Villa Gamberaia, and I wandered about, hoping that I might catch a glimpse of the place’s owner, Princess Ghika, a famous beauty who, from the day that she had lost her looks, had shut herself up in complete retirement with her English companion, refusing to let anyone see her unveiled face again. Sometimes, I was told, she would come out of the house at dawn to bathe in the pools of the water-garden, or would pace the long cypress avenue at night—but all that I ever saw (and I wonder if a hopeful imagination was not responsible for even this) was a glimpse of a veiled figure at an upper window.
Of the most sharply etched, most celebrated figure of all on the Florentine stage at that time, I also have, at this point, little more to tell. The famous art critic and collector, Bernard Berenson, often came to see my mother, and fairly often, too, I went to I Tatti; but of these visits, my recollections are extremely inhibited. Not that I was not aware that I Tatti was a remarkable place and that I was fortunate to have been invited there. The great, austere library, which seemed to me to contain every book in the world, the terraced gardens sloping down the hill, and the long series of fondi d’oro in every room and passage—all these would have been fascinating, if only I could have been left by myself, uninstructed, to wander alone from one great sad-eyed Madonna to another, making up my own stories about the saints and monks, the beautiful ladies and strange beasts, the translucent landscapes in the background, and the knight riding his white horse up to a castle on the hill. But I was seldom left alone, and even on those rare occasions I was not wholly reassured. For many years I felt the house’s presiding genius to be the first object that one encountered on entering: a great Egyptian cat seated on a trecento cassone in the hall—elegant, inscrutable, irresistibly attractive. It was only when you put out your hand to stroke it, that you discovered it to be made of bronze.
When I went to the children’s parties given by Mrs. Berenson for her grandchildren imaginative plans were made for us: we were bidden to trace the little stream at the foot of the garden, the Mensola, to its source; or to seek for treasure in the music-room. But we stood about unresponsively, beneath the outstretched arms of Sassetta’s St. Francis, mutually suspicious and dumb. In vain did Mrs. Berenson, whose placid Quaker voice and ample frame should surely have been reassuring, urge us to pick up the little flags she had prepared and to prance round the room in a circle, singing.
“If a child performs the gestures of happiness,” I overheard her saying to a grown-up friend, “it becomes happy!”
Whether this would have been true in other circumstances, I cannot say, but certainly it was a very self-conscious group of children who trailed round the room at I Tatti, singing a faint lugubrious chant.
My own personal inhibition was a very simple one: I feared that at any moment Mr. Berenson himself might come in. He had never, in his frequent visits to the Villa Medici, been anything but kind to me; yet I could not feel at ease with him. The exquisiteness of his appearance in his pale grey, perfectly-cut suits, with a dark red carnation in his button-hole, the extreme quietness of his voice, the finish of his manner—these, together with all that I had heard from other people, about his destructive remarks and his encyclopaedic knowledge, were, quite simply, too much for me. When he called upon my mother at tea-time, sometimes bringing with him some of his own guests, perhaps Logan Pearsall Smith or Edith Wharton or Robert Trevelyan, I would wait, hidden at the turn of the stairs, until I heard the car drive away. When he took her out driving in the hills, and sometimes suggested that I should come too, I sat in front beside the chauffeur, only hoping that, when we reached the woods, no more would be asked of me than to unpack the picnic-basket and then slip away with my story-book. Yet on occasions such as these B.B. was a much less alarming figure than the suave host of I Tatti. All affectations cast off, he would leap up the hillside with as much speed and intentness of purpose as if he had still been the young art-student who, in 1888, first gazed upon the Italian scene—his awareness still as fresh as it was then, but enriched and sharpened by every day that had since passed. Whether he took us to see a fading fresco in some remote little country church, or merely stood in the aromatic woods of cypress and pine, looking at the serene outline of a distant hill, or, nearer by, at a happily-placed farm with its dovecot and clump of trees (“Look, a Corot,” he would say, or “a Perugino”); to be with him was to realise, once for all, what was meant by the art of looking. One day, after taking us to see some frescoes, he told the Indian tale of how the God of Bow and Arrow taught his little boy how to hit a mark. “He took him into a wood and asked him what he saw. The boy said, ‘I see a tree.’ ‘Look again’—‘I see a bird’—‘Look again’—‘I see its head’—‘Again’—‘I see its eye’—‘Then shoot!’” It was the same, B.B said, in looking. “One moment is enough, if the concentration is absolute.”
And then, if one asked him a question (though this, of course, was in later years), “Yes,” he would reply, “there are some portraits of Tartar slaves in the fresco by Lorenzetti of The Massacre of Tana in the church of San Francesco in Siena,” or “You will find
San Bernardino’s first pulpit, very small and rather worm-eaten, in a little convent-church two miles south of Montalcino.” Or “The best book on that subject is in German, but there is quite a satisfactory minor monograph in Italian—you can come and look at it tomorrow.” For his library, like his mind, was always at the disposal of anyone, however obscure, who really wanted to know.
It is one of my regrets that, in those early years, I did not learn more from him, nor, indeed, derive pleasure from his company. But just as animals reject food which is not fit for them, so children sometimes instinctively draw back from fare for which they are not yet ripe. That complex personality was still, to my dazzled eyes, undecipherable.
What I still find rather difficult to realise, and will perhaps seem incredible to the readers of this chapter, is that the life I have been describing was taking place during the years between 1914 and 1917—in short, during the First World War. But the truth was that in my mother’s ivory tower, as was the case in many other villas inhabited by foreigners on the Florentine hills, the war was only a distant rumble, an inconvenient and unpleasant noise offstage. I do not mean, of course, that there was not a great deal of political talk at my mother’s table, and still more at I Tatti, though much of it in a tone of civilised and superior detachment which to the naïve and unquestioning patriotism of fourteen, seemed very shocking. Sometimes, in the early morning, I would be woken up by the sound of tramping feet and soldiers’ songs and, running down to the terrace below, would see a squad of weary young recruits tramping down the Via Vecchia Fiesolana, and would hear their songs: Addio, mia bella, addio or Bel soldatin, che passi per la via.
Every week a long letter from my grandfather in England—containing, even though I was not yet thirteen when this correspondence began, very much the same comments on recent war news or English politics as he would have written to a friend of his own age—carried me back into a very different mental climate. He deeply regretted—for, in spite of his fair-mindedness and inter national legal experience he had remained very much an old-fashioned Englishman at heart—my being in ‘a foreign country’ at such a time, and was determined to keep me ‘in touch’, a result which he certainly achieved. The letters do not, naturally, contain much that is not now familiar, but it was all new to me: descriptions of London during the black-out, of Zeppelin raids, of relations and friends leaving for the front—and there are also many references to the courage and endurance, after Italy had come in, of the Italian troops on the Carso (‘Napoleon only thought of crossing the Alps, not of fighting there’) as well as frequent injunctions to me to realise the importance of the times in which I was living. ‘Rest assured that there has been nothing, or hardly anything in history, approaching the magnitude of this struggle between vast forces and between right and wrong. On the outcome depends the future of the world, and of that outcome, humanly speaking, you and not we should be the first fruits.’
One of his early letters contained a long description (very uncharacteristic in its show of emotion) of the retreat from Mons of the First British Expeditionary Force, composed entirely of volunteers. ‘Hopelessly outnumbered, without sleep or rest and with the discouragement of ordered retreat, they returned, checked and often defeated by overwhelming forces endeavouring fruitlessly to break their unbreakable line and shake their unbreakable courage. By their tremendous fortitude they gave the unprepared French time to organise their defence, saved Paris and paved the way for the battle of the Marne, upsetting the whole of the German plan, which nearly (how nearly) succeeded. This was about 100,000 men against nearly 800,000. I don’t believe the world has ever seen the like. In this long-drawn-out campaign it is likely to be forgotten, and I want you to remember it and to tell it to your children in after days.’
A childish essay of mine, written in 1916, ‘The World after the War’ (of which my mother must have sent him a copy) pleased him very much. ‘It was very thoughtful and well-written. Sincères felicitations. You ought now to think what the ideal terms of peace should be. If you put that clearly, you will be the only person of my acquaintance who will have done so. I say “ideal” terms, for the ideal is that which in practice is never attained.’ Later on, in 1917, he was writing, ‘Are you not gratified, my little Anglo-American granddaughter, that America is now with us? It may well be the decisive step.’
After Gallipoli, my mother must have felt, in spite of her Florentine friends, a recurrence of her wish in 1914 to ‘do something’, for she wrote to the British Red Cross, offering hospitality in her villa as well as in those of a few English and American friends, to a group of convalescent officers from the Dardanelles. They arrived, in batches of twenty, of whom about eight stayed with my mother and the others were farmed out among her friends, each group staying for about three or four weeks. This enterprise gave great satisfaction to my grandfather. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘it is a time you will never forget.’ For me, the prospect of the arrival of these soldiers was the most exciting event of the war, but it soon turned to disappointment. I do not quite know what my expectations were, but certainly nothing less than the arrival of the Argonauts themselves, with Jason at their head, would have fulfilled them. Instead I saw a number of young men in very low spirits, still suffering from dysentery or gastritis, some of them disappointed at having been sent to Italy instead of being invalided home, and all, as time went on, more than a little bored. My mother gave them excellent advice about the right diet for their intestinal troubles and was, as always, a charming and accomplished hostess, but I was already old enough to realise, with some discomfort, that they did not much enjoy her intellectual and artistic friends, but preferred to sit about on the terrace in the sun, flirting mildly with my pretty French governess or my cousin Irene, while the more dashing ones went down to Florence in the evenings, to gayer and smarter parties, where whisky and champagne were available, and some pretty girls. The one thing they did not want to talk about was the war; and not one of them, to my eyes, looked like a hero. After a few months, when the tragic enterprise of the Dardanelles came to an end, they stopped coming, and Villa Medici again became an isolated oasis.
Then, in 1917, came Caporetto, and my first glimpse of reality. One morning my teacher of natural history, Professor Vaccari—a Venetian by birth—was late for his lesson, and when he arrived, looked sad and harassed.
“I can’t stay today,” he said. “I’ve been up all night at the station with the refugees, and I must go back to them at once.”
“The refugees?”
It was then that he described to me, for the first time, what has since become common knowledge: what happens to a civilian population in times of defeat, and had just happened, that week, in his own Veneto; the evacuation of the villages after Caporetto, the exodus of bewildered country folk with their children and their cumbersome bundles, on roads already filled to overflowing by retreating troops and bombed by the enemy; the confusion and the fear, the old people and children who could not keep up, the stumbling into ditches, falling into rivers—the face of humanity in flight. Since then, we have all been familiar with this scene, if not through our own eyes, in a hundred news-reels; but then, it was new, and the man who described it was talking about his own neighbours at home.
“Can you ask your mother for some blankets,” he said, “and for some warm clothes, boots, food—anything? I’ll borrow a car and come back.”
It was the first time that—since I had helped to pack my parents’ clothes and mine for the Messina earthquake victims—someone had suggested to me that there was something which I might not talk about, but do.
When Vaccari came back I had, with the help of my mother’s car, made the rounds of her friends: the schoolroom was piled high with blankets and clothing.
“I won’t thank you,” Vaccari said briskly, “but if la mamma will allow it, I’ll take you with me.”
An hour later I was with him at the station in Florence, wrapping cold, sleepy children in blankets and helping to hand ou
t cups of coffee and milk from the Red Cross canteen, but most of the time standing bewildered in a corner, uncertain what to do next, watching train after train steam in. The families who poured out—dazed with fatigue and bewilderment—were mostly peasants from the villages along the Piave, the older women swathed in black shawls, the younger ones clutching their children, the old men (for only the old were there) wearing a shuttered, blank look, armoured against incomprehensible misfortune. Huddled on the platform in family groups with their bundles, their one thought was to stay together; all preferred to sleep where they were, rather than to be billeted in different houses. One half-crazed woman, whose child had fallen into the Adige while crossing a crowded bridge, wandered from group to group, tugging the sleeve of anyone who seemed to be in authority.