A Florence Diary

by Diana Athill

  ALSO BY DIANA ATHILL

  Fiction

  An Unavoidable Delay

  Don’t Look at Me Like That

  Memoirs

  Stet

  After a Funeral

  Make Believe

  Yesterday Morning

  Somewhere Towards the End

  Life Class (omnibus)

  Alive, Alive Oh!

  Letters

  Instead of a Book

  A Florence Diary

  DIANA ATHILL

  Copyright © 2016 Diana Athill

  Published in Canada in 2016 and in the U.S. in 2017

  by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  First Published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2016.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Athill, Diana, author

  A Florence diary / Diana Athill.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0221-3 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4870-0222-0 (mobi)

  1. Athill, Diana—Diaries. 2. Women authors, English—

  20th century—Diaries. 3. Athill, Diana—Travel—Italy—Florence.

  4. Florence (Italy)—Description and travel.

  I. Title.

  PR6051.T43Z46 2016 914.5’51104 C2016-904319-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944729

  Jacket Design: Dan Mogford

  Jacket Photograph © Vincenzo Balocchi/Archivi Alinari, Firenze

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  In loving memory

  of my mother

  and of dear Pen

  INTRODUCTION

  ~ ~ ~ ~

  Holidays

  ‘Keep a diary for me,’ said my mother. So I did, the only one I ever wrote, and she preserved it. Here it is, rescued from the tattered little copybook in which I wrote it, and the sometimes near illegibility of my scrawl. My mother didn’t just read it, but even edited it a little: tiny corrections in her handwriting occur here and there. My first excursion abroad to Florence, a gift to me and my cousin Pen from my mother’s elder sister, Joyce, to celebrate the end of World War II, was an Event for her as well as for me. I, of course, was thrilled by this wonderful gift, but I’m not sure I fully recognised its significance. I only gradually came to understand how impossible it is to exaggerate the importance of holidays, those two or three weeks every year when I escaped into what felt like real life.

  That is not to say that the fifty-odd years I spent as a publisher living in London meant nothing: they were my raison d’être as well as the source of my bread and butter, but they didn’t answer my dreams. Holidays were seen by some of my friends as romantic chapters in love affairs, but not by me. My holidays left a love affair behind. For most of the time I was living with a moneyless man who drew the line at holidaying at my expense (and anyway claimed to see no point in visiting new places). What I was after was not a shared experience, but the excitement of discovery. I was hungry for the thrill of being elsewhere.

  It was this that took me abroad. Only recently did I see how much of my own country I failed to discover because to me a holiday meant foreign travel. France, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia (as it was then), the Caribbean, the USA – I fell madly in love with places in all these. I remember tears in my eyes when I realised, on leaving Trinidad, that I would probably never again hear the voice of the kiskadee – the bird whose call sounds so exactly like someone asking plaintively, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?’ In Port of Spain it called all day long, until night fell and the barking of dogs took over. And outside the city, frogs. Don’t expect much silence in the tropics.

  ‘Abroad’ was more enticing than the UK because it was more of an escape after the cruel bottling up of six years of war. Nowhere here could you wake up on a train that had stopped in the middle of the night, push a blind aside, and see a lantern carried along an unknown platform by a man talking to another in an unknown language – those voices, the tiny glimpse of foreign ordinariness giving you such a tingle of excitement. And next morning, if you were Italy-bound – mountains sailing by, and look! A white streak – a waterfall! Train journeys were more exciting than flights were going to be, and more comfortable if you could afford a bunk (only rarely did I rise to the luxury of a proper sleeper; more often I was sitting up as we did on that first journey). Just once did I experience the perfect way of travelling; driving your car onto first boat, then train, where (you were in France by now) you ate an amazingly good dinner in the station buffet before strolling to find your sleeper. Next morning, way down south, you were served breakfast on the train, then watched your car being run off its carrier, and tootled off at your leisure. You could do this going to Scotland, too – but not for long: too expensive, I suppose.

  Arrivals included the identifying of smells. All countries have their smells (France’s used to be Gauloises tobacco, drains and coffee), enjoyable simply for being theirs. (To be honest, Scotland has the best smell, and you must arrive by air to get it – but I didn’t know that at the time of my early holidays.)

  I learned to like travelling alone because you connect with strangers much better that way, but to begin with I usually went with a cousin. Cousins are the best for intimacy. Brothers and sisters are too close and friends . . . we had a good many friends, but none – and I wonder whether this is a very English thing? – none with whom we could talk about things that really mattered. Whereas with my beloved cousins – no problem! Pen, the cousin with whom I went to Florence in this diary, was the nearest to me in age. We could hardly have been more different from one another but we travelled together as comfortably as a pair of old bedroom slippers.

  She was armed with a touching naivety which made her bolder than I was in many ways. I shall never forget the amazement on the faces of a room full of Italian businessmen when, having walked the length of a street asking everyone, ‘Dov’è il Signor Amico?’ (I trailing her but busily pretending not to know her) she finally hit on his office and demanded that he give her better terms than a bank would have done for her pounds sterling. He paid up. (I can’t remember who had told Pen about him.) She also got herself shown round Bernard Berenson’s marvellous house, Villa I Tatti, which I hadn’t the nerve even to think of attempting. (Some years later Pen underwent an intense spiritual experience at Assisi, and became a Catholic – finally a very happy nun.)

  It was to another cousin that I owe my other lovely Italian holidays: my cousin Toby, who bought a house near Lucca in which I stayed for six consecutive summer holidays. It was a large but simple farmhouse converted by a citizen of Lucca sometime in the eighteen-hundreds into his country villa. With his own hand he had painted the walls of his salone with scenes from the novels of Walter Scott, adding a frieze of carefully imagined ‘family portraits’ into the bargain. It was the oddest mixture of attempted grandeur and naughtiness. Toby bought the house from two old ladies who became so flustered when asked to remove its contents that they ended by begging him to kee
p the lot, so when I opened a drawer in my favourite bedroom out fell a bundle of Latin exercises written by a little boy in 1883, and a very long ode to the opening of the first tramway in Lucca. The bathroom attached to that bedroom took a bit of getting used to, because on its window was painted an appalling but convincing red-whiskered footman, leering at whoever was in the bath.

  An astonishing thing about that house was that whenever something was needed, it turned up. Having dug out a swimming pool at the bottom of its large and beautiful garden, Toby saw that ideally there should be a stone mask out of which the water could gush into the pool. Three days later just such a mask turned up in the potting shed, and he hardly felt surprised, so often did such things happen. It was a house in which happy years were spent, and I was lucky to see so much of it.

  Naturally the charm of a place often depends on its inhabitants as well as on its beauty and intrinsic interest. Dominica, in the Eastern Caribbean, for example, an exceptionally lovely island where rainforested mountains plunge so abruptly into the sea that no road can be built to encircle it, is coloured by being Jean Rhys’s island even long after her death. She was ‘my’ author for the last fifteen years of her life – very much so, because if ever a writer needed nannying because of practical ineptitude, Jean was that writer, and like it or not you became firmly linked to her. You liked it, in fact, because however maddening Jean sometimes was, she had the charm (as well, of course, as the genius) to counteract it. So getting to know the island that had meant so much to her, meant a great deal to me, the more so because her reputation in Dominica is in the hands of Lennox Honychurch, probably the most interesting and likeable man in the whole Caribbean, who, with his mother Patricia, became the most generous of friends. Patricia had built a little house in her garden – her handsome botanical garden designed by her daughter – which she sometimes let to tourists and in which she firmly established me as a guest. It took me less than a day to feel at home.

  Indeed, I felt more than at home. I remember leaning on the counter of the local police station, waiting for my driving licence to be made valid on the island, listening to the creaking of the ceiling fan and watching the lazy circling of the flies, and being suddenly seized by the most powerful sensation of belonging: surely I had known this place all my life. And I allowed myself to imagine that a deeply buried Caribbean gene had been activated. Because Athills had, in fact, moved from Norfolk to the West Indies, probably when the once very profitable wool trade went off the boil so that young men had to seek their livings further afield. They had settled in Antigua as sugar planters, and done embarrassingly well (embarrassing not to them, but to descendants uncomfortably aware of how many slaves they must have employed). One of them, (I can’t remember how many ‘greats’ there are in our relationship) became one of the island’s leading citizens and was so pompously proud of his family that he kept a detailed record of it, which eventually came into my brother’s hands.

  My brother was interested enough to study it, and noticed something odd. The man who, it seemed, must have been our direct ancestor, disappeared. If he had died it would have been recorded: he was just gone. Had he, perhaps, blotted his copybook in some way? My sister-in-law, who enjoys family histories and has a streak of the bloodhound in her, wrote to Antigua’s chief librarian and asked if anyone existed who knew a lot about Antigua’s social history. She was sent an address and followed it up. And lo! Our man had indeed blotted his copybook. He had married his mistress, and his mistress was – shock! horror! – one-sixteenth black. You need to know a great deal about West Indian attitudes to race in the past to understand the significance of that (one would think) wholly trivial fact. Every conceivable degree of blackness, down to the invisible, carried a derogatory label (I forget the label for one-sixteenth, but it existed), and every degree was abominated and despised. So my ancestor was Unforgiveable – and was also, hurrah hurrah, the only sensible and honourable Athill in Antigua! I only wish that my teeny-weeny shadow of a black gene really was making itself felt, but fear that it is most unlikely. The feeling of ‘home’ was probably Dominica’s seductiveness at work. I’ve never met any visitor to it who has not succumbed.

  Such a feeling is not essential to the enjoyment of a place: Florence didn’t feel like home. Its great charm lay in its unlikeness to home – in its being so enchantingly ‘elsewhere’. And I am forever grateful that it was my very first ‘elsewhere’. None could be lovelier. I visited it only once more before its popularity began to make it so exhausting that other cities became preferable. I don’t know how it is that Venice, just as swamped by tourists as poor Florence, manages to shrug them off so much more successfully.*

  On my second visit I was a guest, which was interesting but deprived me of the element of freedom. I was staying with Eduardo, a cousin’s cousin who had a job with NATO, which seemed to be teaching Americans not to be uncouth when compared to Italians. He didn’t appear to be making much headway against the tide of alcohol on which the Americans were floating.

  Eduardo had rented an elegant flat from a woman to whom he was related, and was in a condition of dismay because some weeks earlier she had asked him if she might return to her flat for a few days, and she was still there, accompanied by a pregnant cocker spaniel which had been established in the dining room. The poor dog was never taken for walks and had to use the balcony as its lavatory. Even worse, the housekeeper had now reverted to answering the telephone with ‘Signora X’s residence’, not Eduardo’s name. Eduardo was much too polite to say anything about all this, except in a hushed wail to me, and I was not able to offer much encouragement. My money would have been on that woman any day.

  Eduardo was particularly anxious because he had planned, very kindly, a dinner party in my honour, and I need hardly say that the puppies began to be born in the dining room that very day – and not only did the birth begin, but it proved to be a difficult one, which meant that I was called into play because being British, surely I must know all about dogs. I managed eventually to shift the task onto the shoulders of the vet, and joined Eduardo in furiously scrubbing the floor of the balcony, where dinner would have to be served. We were able to find a vase big enough to cover the drain-hole and contain the smells.

  I was called to the dining room only twice during dinner and all the six puppies survived, but I don’t think Eduardo’s nerves ever quite recovered. The woman and her dog were still there when I left, and the last I heard of their reluctant host was that he had moved to Sicily.

  That was the only one of my many holidays which prevents me from saying they were all perfect. Apart from that one, what a record of escape, discovery, renewal and refreshing plunges into what I most wanted to experience. I marvel at my luck.

  It would be difficult – probably impossible – to convey by words on paper the reality of the places and incidents that I enjoyed so much. I can only make a few token attempts. A terrace high up in a Corfiot olive orchard, the trees huge and distorted because it was not the local habit to discipline them, a donkey braying a long way off, its voice might have been the sound of baking sunlight, and down below a sea through which that sunlight seemed to fall in a network of gold where a little old boat lay on its emerald shadow. I lay on that terrace all afternoon without wanting to move, just looking, looking . . .

  An evening, late in a Dubrovnik bar, gipsies playing. ‘The gipsies know me well’ – ‘I hate their music’ – ‘So do I, but they trust me.’ And later he said, ‘My father died – a natural death,’ and I looked round that room – so many gaunt faces – those over there despise us – and understood that very recently a ‘natural death’ had indeed been worthy of remark. It was so strange – the intensity still steaming off the violent past, the colour it was giving to an amusing flirtation in a very lovely place. ‘Look at me, dancing with an English general’s daughter!’ a Russian friend of his had crowed earlier in the evening (he was dancing with my cousin), and we had all laughed and
laughed.

  The sound – the distant sound of a steel band coming nearer and nearer through the darkness: J’ouvert, first day of Trinidad’s Carnival, sleepiness so early in the morning as the bands gathered, and then the almost incredible blaze of colour and invention going on all day, sleepiness surely forgotten for ever until at midnight the music stopped and everyone fell down. Crash bang, down they went, no longer held up by the music. And all those magical costumes littering the gutters (though some were rescued). What a day, what a day!

  In Dominica there was a place where earth bubbled. Oh yes, they said, it will blow sooner or later, look at the Boiling Lake. To do that you had to take a three-hour mountain walk, and it was a scary sight, that huge crater full of boiling whatever-it-is that was contained so precariously under our feet. A whiff of its steaming might kill you – had killed people. It did blow, long ago, changing the island’s whole shape, and the tremors people are now used to give a frightening edge of danger to its rich rainforest beauty. I bought a bag of mud at the bubbly place (for the complexion, they said, but I never tried it) and I also held a boa constrictor in my arms, and felt it squeeze me, protesting at being held – a steady and impressive sensation. Had I been smaller it would have been alarming. The man who caught the boa had broken the law, and I should have walked off with it into the forest and let it go, but chickened out at the prospect of offending him and the group of villagers surrounding us. It was not a big boa, but handsome. Though less marvellous than the thousands of fireflies filling the forest that night, weaving a silent web of glittering lust. It was the perfect silence of all that feverish activity that was uncanny, leaving us spellbound.

  In New Mexico – the champagne freshness of desert air made breathing a new joy even in Santa Fe, though that town, all adobe (or sham adobe) is so unlike other American cities that its not smelling towny is natural. It was full of lilacs in flower, and disconcertingly its streets often became rambling roads, houses standing back behind gardens. And what looked like houses might be shops, or more often galleries. We felt timid at entering them and sometimes more so once inside. The charm of Santa Fe had caused us to expect tourist bait, but here was sometimes the finest of fine art. ‘That can’t – that surely can’t be a Rembrandt,’ we would think. But it was! Because these galleries, or some of them, catered for Texan millionaires. But what was odd and pleasant was that relaxed surroundings produced relaxed people. Those running the galleries were as welcoming to two obviously unrich tourists as to any rich man. Perhaps if you serve millionaires you don’t actually see an ordinary person very often, so it is maybe quite enjoyable when one happens to walk in. Certainly we were shown some marvellous things, and had a memorable time. And in the less grand but still fine shops we bought some rings which we still liked when we got them home – something quite unusual with holiday buys.