by Iris Origo
It was on that day that we found in our front hall, which lay open, like the rest of the house, to the winds and, still worse, to the flies, a welcome and moving surprise which at the time, perhaps because it seemed too personal, I did not write about in my diary. We had expected, when we left, to find our house destroyed by shell-fire, but instead found no more serious damage than a few large holes in the roof, the cutting-off of water and of light (this lasted for many months), the removal or destruction of any window-pane or door, a few bullet-holes in books and pictures, and an all-pervading stench of excrement and refuse. But on the hall-table, intact but for a few mud-stains, lay a copy of the book which, after the death of our son Gianni, I had written as a private record of his short life, illustrated by many photographs, and of which a few copies had been printed for relations and close friends. On the flyleaf a pencilled note told me that this book had been found in the woods (left there by the Moroccan troops with the Fifth Army, the Goums, who had ransacked everything they could lay hands on) by an English soldier, who ‘realising that it must be of great sentimental value’ had obtained permission to walk back many miles with it, so that we might find it when we came home. This piece of imaginative kindness, at such a moment, was so consoling as to outweigh every other loss. If, by any chance, this page should ever meet the eyes of this friend, I should like it to take him my belated, but undimmed, gratitude.
On the day of our return, Antonio, by request of the Comitato di Liberazione (a committee set up in most Italian cities by members of the Resistance before the arrival of the Allies, as a provisional local government), became the Mayor of Chianciano and, in collaboration with the representatives of the Allied Military Government, dealt with the local problems there: the refugees from the south who clamoured to be sent home at once, the lack of light, water, sugar, salt, soap, medical supplies, Diesel oil, petrol transportation. Of our own farmhouses, two were a heap of ruins, and in many others only one or two rooms had still got a roof. In one of them thirteen people were sleeping in two beds; in another the whole family slept on the stable floor. All had lost their dearly-prized furniture, their linen, their blankets, their clothes, and above all their cooking-pots, since the Goums had looted everything that the Germans had not already taken away. Everywhere the most urgent problem, as soon as the harvest was in, was to get a roof on to at least part of each farm before the winter, and this was achieved. The other most urgent problem was health, since, owing to the number of unburied corpses, both of men and beasts, and the multitude of flies, an epidemic of gastro-enteritis and dysentery had broken out, especially among the children. There was little water and no light (this lasted for the whole following winter) and the woods and fields were still strewn with mines. Yet our prevailing feeling was one of gratitude and hope. ‘Destruction and death have visited us,’ I wrote on the last page of my diary, ‘but now, there is hope in the air.’
* * *
Many questions have since been asked me about those years—some of which I have been able to answer, at least to myself. One of them is, was I much afraid? The answer is no, except for one single moment of panic. This is odd, for I have generally been quite easily frightened. As a child, I had all the usual childish fears; of strangers, of other children, of the unfamiliar and of the dark: when expecting my first baby, I incurred the contempt of Antonio’s family doctor (a bluff, kindly man who expected me to be overjoyed) by my ill-concealed dread of labour pains, which eventually I found much less bad than I had expected; after my uncle’s death in an air-crash, I was for several years terrified of flying. But during the last months before our liberation, we were really too busy, and too much interested, to be afraid. This was partly owing to the continuousness and variety of the demands upon our resourcefulness. Twenty-three refugee children, in the last months, moved into our own house and had to be fed, clothed, instructed and amused; hiding-places and food had to be found, not only for partisans and escaped POWs but also for Jews who had fled from the larger cities; German officers who came to sequestrate cars, tyres, horses and houses, etc. had to be dealt with (this was Antonio’s job, sometimes at the same moment as I was giving a map, a compass or a pair of socks to a fugitive Allied soldier on the other side of the house, or up the hill). Later on, as the front came closer, we moved down to the cottage hospital, from the farmhouse where he had been in hiding, a young partisan who was so obviously dying that we felt the risk of his discovery by the Germans to be a secondary consideration. And in the last weeks, after the food situation in Rome had become serious, there was a constant stream of people who had got lifts on army lorries to beg in the country for a little flour, oil or a sack of potatoes for hungry children or sick relatives in town. There were appeals for help from the families of men who had been taken as hostages by the Germans, or who had been condemned to be shot because their villages had sheltered or helped the partisans, or from refugee families from south of Rome, or from mothers whose sons had been taken off to Germany for Arbeitsdienst. Our problems then, as I wrote in my diary at the time, ‘arose from a continual necessity to weigh in the balance not courage and cowardice, or right and wrong, but conflicting duties and responsibilities equally urgent … Moreover these were problems which, since the local situation was often fluctuating according to changes in the military situation and the arrival of different officials, could never be solved once for all: every day each incident had to be met on its own merits. At the end of each day prudence inquired, “Have I done too much?” and enthusiasm or compassion, “Might I not, perhaps, have done more?”’
With regard to my own children, I was not unduly anxious, having a blind confidence that (if Antonio or I should be shot or deported) Schwester Marie would somehow see them through. But I did have, in connection with the younger one, Donata, one instant of blind panic. This was when, after having been turned out of our cellar and having trudged through the mined woods, with all the children and some old people, towards Montepulciano, we came to some open fields which were being shelled, and Antonio, who was carrying Donata (aged eighteen months) on his shoulders, walked ahead, to a part of the field which seemed to me to be more exposed. I ran across to him, blind with fear, saying furiously, “What are you doing with that child? Give her back to me!” He merely smiled indulgently, saying, “We’re just as safe here as anywhere else,” and walked on, while I recovered my senses. Except in hospitals, before operations, I have never been afraid since.
I have also been asked what, after twenty-five years, is my most vivid and painful memory of that time. This is a more complicated question to answer, but I think that my predominant memory of the war years, for myself and others, can be summed up in a single word: parting. Bombs, shell-fire, mines, the unpleasantness, after Mussolini’s fall, of being in an ‘Occupied’ country, the long periods of waiting, the sense of isolation—all these have left no painful mark: they were just immediate, and sometimes exciting, problems. But the parting of people who love each other and are separated, whether endured oneself or witnessed in others—mothers and sons, husbands and wives, lovers, friends—without news or only with uncertain news, with alternating fears and hopes, this belongs to the category of pain that is never wiped out, that leaves a permanent scar. ‘Ayez pitié de ceux qui s’aimaient et ont été séparés’—this was the first supplication in the prayer composed by the Abbé Perreyve and which Madame Jean de Marmol, who died in a German concentration camp, used to recite every evening with her fellow-prisoners. ‘Ayez pitié.’
These were the memories that began to haunt me, as soon as the need for immediate action came to an end and the Allied armies moved on towards Florence. By then news from English relations and friends was beginning to reach me, through Allied officers passing through Tuscany, but we were still cut off from all news of friends in Northern Italy, and when I went for the first time after our liberation to Florence (in an Allied jeep) I found my mother’s house at Fiesole, Villa Medici, very thoroughly equipped with booby-traps before the Ge
rmans had left it, while our own smaller house in the garden was still in flames. (I fell through a charred hole from the first floor on to a stone floor on the one below, but mercifully did not break my neck, and was given first aid by the young Irish officer in charge of the mine-detecting squad.)
After this, I began to work with the American Red Cross, taking medicine and clothing to villages just behind the lines, to be distributed (not without much friction) by the local Committees of Liberation. The need indeed was very great: I remember one village above Arezzo, suspected of having helped the partisans, in which no male creature between the ages of seven and seventy had been left alive: they had all been lined up one Sunday morning in the little piazza after Sunday Mass and shot. In the following year I drove up to Bologna, immediately behind the Allied troops, with the President of the Italian Red Cross, Umberto Zanotti Bianco, to act as his interpreter in the task of reorganising the local Red Cross. We found hospitals without doctors or nurses—the Fascist ones having fled and the anti-Fascist ones not yet returned. In Bologna I found, to my infinite relief, Elsa Dallolio and her ninety-two-year-old father, still alive. They had been forced to leave their country house, between the main road and the main railway of the Gothic Line, before it was totally destroyed by shells.
In those months I was forced to become aware of what, in the wave of euphoria immediately after our liberation, I had not foreseen: the mutual misunderstandings (sometimes comic but often painful) between the liberators and the liberated, in which the members of all the countries concerned demonstrated their less endearing qualities, the swift end of the temporary mutual solidarity and union produced by times of crisis, and the rise of party struggle and class hatred, the disappointments and resentments which follow upon excessive hopes. One of the ugliest features of this period—the working off of individual grudges on political pretexts—was much less evident in a country district like ours than in the towns, and we were also entirely spared such bloodshed as took place immediately after the liberation in, for instance, Bologna, where the A.M.G. was able to do little to control the mock trials and summary executions of former Fascist officials and sympathisers by Communist partisans. In the country, on the other hand, it was particularly easy to foment social discontent, since it is not difficult to inculcate new hopes in times in which any change seems possible. And once changes began, they came, all over the country, with great speed. Even while rebuilding and re-planting were still going on, Communist cells were being formed at La Foce, under the direction of the provincial Communist centre in Siena, and very soon almost all our farmers were converted to the new doctrine which promised that, if they obeyed orders, they would swiftly come to own the land upon which they worked. The first step was, as elsewhere, the formation of a commission of their representatives, le commissioni interne, to represent in each fattoria the farmers’ point of view and their requirements, of which the most immediate was the increase of the proportion of wheat allotted to the contadino from the traditional 50% to first 53% and then 57%. This was opposed by landowners’ associations all over the country on the grounds that it would not leave a sufficient margin to keep up and improve the estates—in short, that the mezzadria would no longer work. I do not propose to dwell at length on the rights and wrongs of this controversy, which raged for three or four years; it is no longer relevant; what is certain is that Mazzei’s forecast, that the mezzadria would break down on the day on which ‘the conviction of its fairness’ ceased, now proved to be true. Strikes were organised at the most crucial moments of the farmer’s year, especially during the harvest; tenants who had received notice refused to leave; and ill-feeling ran so high for several years that, if we met two or three of our contadini together, they would refuse even to greet us. We had become ‘the Enemies of the People’, the abusers of the poor. The church was no longer attended, and in the school the children’s essays stated, a little puzzled, that now all the padroni had become ‘bad’. Even the women, when they wished to consult me about their children’s health or schooling (for this they still did) would do so furtively, without telling their husbands or meeting mine. It was a painful, distressing period, in which all the evils—economic and social—that had been latent in the whole system of the mezzadria for so many centuries, came to the surface.
Often I wondered whether the root of all this dissension did not lie (as I had instinctively felt, when I first came here in my youth) in a failure in direct human communication: whether it would not have been possible, casting off the barriers of our respective inheritances of custom and class, to speak to each other more openly and simply, as we had done during the war, airing our respective grievances and opinions. But the habit of this should have been established long before; the old mutual reserve and mistrust had already sunk far too deep and were now deliberately fomented by those who wished to break up the old order. Now, when any new controversial question arose, it was merely the mouthpieces of two opposing orders, of two contrasting ways of life, who addressed each other: it was too late for individual understanding or compromise.
Moreover, though the actual question of the farmers’ percentage was eventually settled by law, the real forces at work were far more deep-seated and complex. Plans were brought forward by the Left Wing of the government for the expropriation of all large estates, which were to be converted into small holdings, purchasable by the men who lived and worked upon them—la terra ai contadini was the slogan—but the scheme did not take into account that in the regions where large private properties had been most neglected, a great deal of preliminary basic work (draining, re-afforestation, road-building, etc.) would have to be done, whether by the State or with private capital, before such holdings could produce even a bare living for their new owners, and eventually—with the exception of the remarkable work done by the Cassa del Mezzogiorno in the South—these projects, for purely economic reasons, became a dead letter. For it was becoming evident that the new trend in Italian agriculture was only one aspect of far more complex changes, not only in Italy, but in the whole economic system of the Western world. The industrial boom in the North, as well as the increasing discontent in the country (partly caused by the absence of any government measures to protect the farmer by stabilising the cost of staple food-stuffs) all contributed to an exodus from the country to the city, only comparable with that which took place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The old patriarchal life, for good or ill, was over. No young man could find a bride to take back to his father’s farm, since what girl would submit herself to the absolute rule of her mother-in-law, or cut herself for ever from the new, free life that the television had shown her? Above all, who was willing to give up independence? So one farm after another came to stand empty. Their inhabitants, in our region, did not often move (like the peasants of the South or of Sicily) to the large industrial cities of the North, but rather to Chianciano, the prosperous little watering-place nearby—where their savings sufficed to put up a small concrete house and open another pensione for summer visitors—or else to the towns with small factories in the Val di Chiana. Now, as I write (and the whole process has not taken more than ten years), only six out of our fifty-seven farms are still inhabited by their old tenants and are run a mezzadria; a few are lived in by skilled workmen, who can use the new machines: the others are slowly falling to pieces.
As far as the actual farming of the land was concerned, however, Antonio, with great resilience, swiftly readjusted to the new conditions, and at once started to reorganise the estate on an entirely different basis, making use of much more machinery and, necessarily, of much less labour. The property has been divided into three parts, of which he only attempts to cultivate the one containing the best land. Here three artificial lakes have been built, with a total capacity of 460 thousand cubic metres, and with this water more than seven hundred additional acres of land are irrigated. The fodder thus acquired has enabled him greatly to increase the stock of cattle, from which both the grey maremmano and the wh
ite chianino have been eliminated, giving place to the red and white Simmenthal, grown only for beef, not ploughing or dairy-farming. These are no longer scattered in various farms, as they used to be, but collected in three large farms with stabling in open sheds—some four hundred head in all, with four bulls. The pigs, too, have been increased, though their price, like that of beef, is of course dependent upon the fluctuations of the Common Market. In addition to the new machinery that has been purchased, tractors are hired from small local firms. The vineyards and olive-groves have been increased, and the quality of the wine and oil greatly improved. Of the rest of the property, about a third is woodland; the rest is used for grazing or lies fallow.
But meanwhile, inexorably and steadily, the population continues to decrease. The Foce school, which once had ninety pupils, now has fifteen; the church is nearly empty. On Monte Amiata some villages consist entirely of old people and small children (who will join their parents, they hope, as soon as these have got good new jobs in town). It is possible that, within a generation, the woods will again spread down towards the Orcia, as they did ten centuries ago—and already, just across the valley, a large colony of Sardinian shepherds are grazing their sheep on what used to be cultivated fields.
Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte
Sì come voi…34
Sometimes, looking back upon all these changes and on the destruction or reversal of so many things that we have spent our lives in building up, we have been tempted to wonder whether all that time and energy was wasted, whether it has all been a mistake. I do not really think so. Paternalism has now practically become a dirty word, but I doubt whether, in the Val d’Orcia of 1925, a modicum of prosperity could have been restored without the employment of some private capital and the enthusiasm and direction of a few enlightened landowners. While the consorzio di bonifica was active, all the basic work that I have described was carried out: the erosion arrested, the woods re-planted, the roads, schools and houses built. Production did increase. The valley’s inhabitants did gradually come to lead, as we had hoped, a less hard and poverty-stricken life. Workmen, who used to trudge many miles on foot before and after their day’s work, were able to buy bicycles, then Vespas and motor-bicycles, and now mostly have their own cars. Buses took the children, when their first five years of local schooling were over, to secondary schools in Chianciano or Montepulciano. Every farm had its radio or television, every girl could buy some pretty clothes. If all this led to a further step—the desire for independence and city life—this was surely an inevitable and logical consequence, one aspect of a general evolution. We are not yet detached enough to appraise it, nor to see clearly where it will lead.