by Angela Petch
‘It’s not so different from our own mountain weather,’ Massimo said. ‘But the countryside is so flat.’ He gazed over fields of corn waiting to be harvested, a squat, square church tower in the distance, thatched houses huddled nearby. The sky, full of billowing clouds, seemed to bear down on the horizon; there were no peaks of mountains to break up the skyline.
The truck overtook a girl on a bike and there were whistles and catcalls from the prisoners. ‘Bella ragazza,’ they shouted, waving as the truck passed her. She wobbled and put one foot down to steady herself, shaking her fist when the wheels splashed puddle water onto her legs.
‘At least the women aren’t covered from head to toe here, like in Libya,’ Salvo said.
‘But we’ll still be prisoners, remember? Maybe it would be better if they were covered up.’
It was all bravado and swagger. Massimo had little experience of women. Having enlisted at barely eighteen, the war curtailed any possible love life. Lucia was the only girl he had tried to kiss. Everybody had expected them to marry when they were older, but the outbreak of war had put an end to that plan.
The men were tipped out of the truck inside a camp holding about fifty huts arranged in rows, encircled by a low perimeter fence, a single soldier guarding the gate. In Johannesburg, the camp where Massimo had been confined temporarily had held six thousand men; there had been two rings of high fencing and an armed guard stationed every fifty metres. But even if the prisoners had wanted to flee, there’d been miles of desert to confront.
The camp was run by Major Strickland, a portly man in his late fifties. He cut a fatherly figure, but he also had an iron will. In passable Italian he gave an introductory speech as the men shuffled into lines on the makeshift football pitch in front of mixed rows of Nissen and army huts.
‘Welcome, all of you, to Suffolk. We shall get along just fine if you stick to my rules. I’m looking for men who have laboured on farms to participate in our agricultural war scheme, and anybody willing to learn if they haven’t. You’ll be taken each day by truck to work on local farms and returned here before nightfall. We have a strict curfew. Anybody who misses the truck and is found to be without their work permit will be punished. We also have a carpentry business on site, making toys and small items of furniture.
‘Each prisoner will be issued with one packet of cigarettes a week and paid five pennies a day if he chooses to stay in camp. Those who are chosen to work outside can earn more and will be known as co-operators.
‘Nobody is permitted to enter village shops or private houses, and neither are you permitted to receive money or gifts. We have a mobile shop that comes to camp regularly, and so you will be able to buy extra cigarettes or other goods from this facility. Parcels from home can be received via the Red Cross and there are strict limitations on the contents, but your families will be informed of those conditions.
‘You may write home twice a month to your families, but you will leave the envelopes unsealed for censorship purposes. Naturally you will pay postage, and you should be aware that it may take months to receive a reply.
‘Now get yourselves settled into your huts, and after a warm drink you’ll have showers and be issued with prison clothes.’ The commandant finished his speech.
The clothes they were wearing were taken from them and burned because of infestation. Their new camp uniform consisted of brown trousers and a shirt with a large red circle sewn on the back. There could be no mistaking them for ordinary civilians once they were outside the camp.
Massimo was assigned to a large farm belonging to a couple in their late fifties. Mr and Mrs Spink spoke slowly to Massimo on his first morning and were pleased when he replied in English.
‘I learn in Africa,’ he explained. ‘I use book. English in Three Months. Is very difficult but… slowly, slowly.’
In fact, it wasn’t hard for Massimo to pick up Mr Spink’s instructions. Over the following months, Massimo carried out the same work he’d done as a child in Tuscany with his father and brothers: hedging, ditching, caring for cows and sheep. He knew how to deal with foot rot and eye infections, and saved the farmer a bob or two in vet fees.
Mrs Spink was a good cook and Massimo began to fill out on her rabbit stews and pies filled with plums and apples bottled from her large orchard. There were hens scratching in the yard and occasionally she gave him a dozen eggs to take back to the camp.
‘For your breakfasts,’ she said, placing them carefully in a brown paper bag. When he took one out there and then and pierced a hole in the top of the shell to suck out the raw egg, she threw up her hands in horror. ‘My giddy aunt,’ she said, ‘how could you?’
‘Is very good.’ He patted his stomach. ‘Good for the stomach. My mother, she always give me when I little.’
‘When I was little,’ Mrs Spink corrected. ‘Rather you than me. Oh, my giddy, giddy aunt.’
‘Excuse me? Giddy? Aunt?’ Massimo asked, and she laughed.
‘Just an expression, boy. We don’t eat eggs raw in England.’
‘One day I make you pasta from your eggs,’ he said. ‘Very good. Lasagne, tagliatelle, strozzapreti.’ He brought the tips of his fingers to his mouth and made a kissing noise.
‘We’ll see,’ she said.
It was no holiday camp, but some of the guards were more tolerant than others. On Sundays, when Major Strickland granted permission, the men were sometimes allowed out for a couple of hours. On one of these free days, Massimo introduced the Spinks to Salvo. Together they took over the farm kitchen and prepared home-made tagliatelle with a sauce made from tomatoes and hare.
Mrs Spink sat in the corner of her kitchen, arms crossed over her large bosom, telling them where to find utensils, watching them as they mixed eggs and flour and rolled it out on her scrubbed pine table.
‘Oh, my giddy aunt, what are you up to?’ she asked as they cut the thin dough into ribbons and hung them to dry on her wooden clothes horse. ‘Looks like tapeworms,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t know if we’ll get my Arthur to eat that stuff.’
But eat it they both did, mopping up the delicious sauce with hunks of Mrs Spink’s home-baked bread. Salvo had produced a bottle of wine from under his shirt to accompany the meal.
‘Well, you can come again, young man,’ she said, patting her stomach.
‘Does he do farm work too?’ Arthur Spink asked Massimo, adding, ‘That be a pity,’ when Massimo told him no.
On the way back to camp, Massimo asked Salvo where he had found the wine.
‘Let’s just say I haven’t been to Mass for years, so I calculated I was owed the Communion wine I’d not taken all that time. And that amounted to a bottle, which I found in a box at the back of the chapel,’ Salvo said.
‘Let’s hope Andreucci doesn’t find out it was you. He can be a nasty piece of work.’
The foreman for the chapel construction was a conundrum, showing moments of spite followed by good humour. He still proclaimed that Il Duce, as Mussolini was known, reigned supreme and would win the war. He considered anybody working outside the camp for the inglesi as a traitor to Italy, on the side of the enemy, and he knew Salvo was friendly with Massimo. They were both classified as co-operators.
‘I think Andreucci is sometimes more worried about reprisals on his family in Livorno than being loyal to the Duce,’ Salvo said. ‘His father is high up in the Fascist party and if he got to hear about his son co-operating, there’d be big trouble.’
‘Him and most of us, I’d say,’ was Massimo’s reply. ‘Nobody really knows where anybody stands in this war. Best to keep in his good books.’
There were occasional spats in camp when a co-operator would find his clothes shoved into the latrine pit or his food spoiled by urine, but this didn’t happen often. The men were tired of war, and life in the British camp was peaceful compared to the ordeals they had been through in the Africa campaign.
At Christmas in the camp, a candelabra made from discarded food tins was lit at Midnight Mass, with c
andle stubs the men had saved. The chapel was packed with believers and non-believers alike. For an hour they sang and prayed together, feeling a connection with their loved ones back home in Italy worshipping in their own churches, sure that they in turn would be thinking of their missing brothers, husbands and sons.
After the festive period, Massimo was allowed to move permanently from the camp to a room in the stables at the Spinks’ farm. He was not the only co-operator allowed to do this. These farm labourers had to report once a week to the camp and there were still strict rules about fraternisation. ‘Makes no sense you taking up room in that truck, being fetched and carried each day,’ Mr Spink had said. ‘Waste of fuel. How about I go and talk to Major Strickland? What about your friend Salvo? Could he be persuaded to muck in, do you think? I could do with extra hands for clearing ditches.’
Salvo didn’t need to be asked twice, the lure of relative freedom easy compensation for blisters on the hands and an aching back after a day’s unaccustomed work in the open. In addition, the pair earned more. Their allowance went up and they could also earn overtime at one shilling per hour, to rise to one shilling and three pennies. Mr Spink issued them with rubber boots, and they ate three square meals a day.
Mrs Spink set about sorting spare furniture and bedding for their new lodgings in the stables. ‘You’ll make us some more of that pasta stuff, won’t you?’ she said, a smile pushing out her plump cheeks as she handed them a box containing an assortment of pans, crockery, cutlery, a kettle and tea for their breaks.
Italian Sundays became a regular feature of the unusual Spink household.
‘All we’re missing now is two young females to even up this table,’ Salvo muttered to Massimo in the Spinks’ homely farm kitchen as he served out lasagne the pair had concocted for the elderly couple.
‘In your dreams,’ Massimo replied. ‘Pass the water.’
Ten
England, 1943–46
‘I need you to take the cart and horse to South Elmham, Massimo,’ Arthur Spink said one sunny morning in late July 1943. ‘I need a dozen bales of hay delivered to The Orchards for their horses. Easy enough to find. Big place along the main street. Don’t forget your passes when you leave. And take Salvo along with you to help unload.’
It was like a feast day, the freedom of being allowed to drive through the lanes. The sun was buttery-warm on their backs and the pair stripped off their brown shirts, revealing bodies toned and muscular from hard work on the farm.
‘We could almost be back home,’ Salvo said, relishing the warmth on his bare skin. ‘All we need now is a bar for a decent espresso and a girl each on our arm.’
‘You never give up, do you? We’re not supposed to fraternise.’
‘Fraternise? Huh! With the enemy, they say. It doesn’t seem like war here. Are your signori Spink the enemy?’
Indeed, the war felt far away to the two Italians, even though Suffolk was peppered with airfields and the men frequently watched Wellingtons fly over, or Spitfires and Mustangs. They shielded their eyes as they looked up from their work, shadows of wings moving across the fields like huge birds of prey.
And then of course there was Major Strickland and his soldiers, who guarded the camp to remind them that they were prisoners, and where Salvo and Massimo now had to report regularly. But the major liked to chat to his inmates in Italian and talk about his holidays in Italy. He liked Italians. Most of his guards were older men, and relaxed. One of the younger ones had once laid down his gun and joined in with their football game, and not one of the POWs had thought to pick up the gun and use it against him.
Privately, Massimo was relieved to be away from battle and the searing conditions of the desert, where sweat had salted his shirt and his feet had been covered in blisters from sand rubbing in his boots. He shuddered to remember the stench of bloated corpses rotting fast in the biting-hot sun, rats feeding on his dead friends and a thirst that could never be slaked. Life here was better, and he blotted out thoughts of how his family might be faring with the German army occupying Tuscany. Occasionally he thought of Lucia, his pretty childhood sweetheart, and wondered how she was doing. But she hadn’t replied to his postcards and it was pointless to pine.
At the edge of the village, Salvo and Massimo stopped at a house where the front garden was arranged with a couple of tables laid with checked tablecloths and decorated with jam jars filled with poppies and forget-me-nots. TEA AND HOME-MADE CAKES was scrawled across a board leaning against the gatepost. A young woman wearing a red floral dress, her blonde hair tied up with a matching scarf, hurried out of the front door. She stopped when she saw them, before saying, ‘Well, don’t sit there gawping all day. You’re me first customers. Come on in.’
‘We’re not supposed to go into shops, remember!’ Massimo warned Salvo.
‘Let’s put our shirts back on and forget about rules,’ Salvo replied, reluctant to pierce their dream of a few moments of freedom. The red circles on the backs of their shirts would show the girl instantly that they were POWs. But their dark looks were a giveaway anyway.
The young woman watched them as they buttoned up their shirts. ‘You do speak English, I hope?’ she said slowly and deliberately.
‘Naturally,’ Massimo said.
‘Enough,’ Salvo said.
‘Well, I’ve got Victoria sponge, beetroot, parsnip, rock cakes and tea…’
The men looked at each other, bemused. ‘Parsnip?’ Massimo said.
‘That’s right,’ the woman said, ‘instead of sugar. Parsnips are sweet, so is beetroot.’
Seeing they were still lost, she beckoned them indoors. ‘I’ll show you.’
The cottage was tiny but cosy, with beams on the ceiling, a huge inglenook fireplace dominating one side of the room and two easy chairs covered in flowery material positioned on either side of the hearth. The simple style was not unlike Massimo’s home in Tramarecchia.
The young woman stood at the door while they squeezed past, Massimo brushing against her bosom by accident. His face flushed bright red and, embarrassed, he felt himself stir. She smiled at his discomfort. ‘Come in, I won’t eat you,’ she said and then she laughed. Her head tipped back, her mouth opening wide – it was a joyous sound – and a picture of his sisters, mother and aunt happily sharing gossip around the hearth flickered into his head.
At the back of the room a baby was asleep in a drawer lined with blankets and she put her finger to her lips for them to keep quiet. ‘Only just finished feeding him, little terror. Had me up half the night. Can’t seem to fill him up.’
She went through to another room and reappeared with a large trug of vegetables.
‘I use these to sweeten my cakes. Beetroot, parsnip,’ she pointed out.
Salvo and Massimo had never seen these strange vegetables before and they shrugged. ‘We try,’ Massimo said.
‘One slice of each? And two teas? Milk? I use honey instead of sugar because of the stingy rations,’ she said.
‘You have no coffee?’ Salvo asked.
‘Sorry. There’s a bleeding war on, in case you ’adn’t noticed.’ She clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Stupid me. Course you know. From the camp, ain’t you? I’m Molly.’ She held out her hand.
‘Salvatore, but Salvo easier,’ Massimo’s friend said, holding onto her hand as if reluctant to let go of her soft fingers.
Massimo introduced himself and Molly disentangled her hand from Salvo’s and placed it in Massimo’s. ‘I’ll have to call you Massi. If ’e’s got a nickname, then so must you.’
She spoke quickly and it was difficult for them to follow, but it wouldn’t have mattered what she’d said. It was enough to be in the company of pretty young woman after such a long time.
‘Make yourselves comfortable at a table outside. You’ll make the place look busy. I need to attract more custom. Won’t be long,’ she said, all but pushing them out of doors and retreating to the back of the cottage.
While they sat waiting for her to bring
their order, Massimo cast his eyes around the garden. Along the sunnier side of the cottage was a vegetable garden choked with weeds and a couple of forlorn clumps of parsley going to seed. A roof tile lay on the grass and, looking up, he could see it wouldn’t be too difficult to fix. A ladder leant against an outhouse and he went to fetch it, then, picking up the tile, he climbed the ladder carefully. ‘Support it for me, Salvo,’ he said, while he fitted the tile back onto the roof.
‘Lor’ love-a-duck!’ Molly said, coming out with a laden tray. ‘You needn’t do that. You’re supposed to be customers.’
‘Is no problem,’ Massimo said, back down from the ladder, wiping moss from his hands onto his trousers.
‘Things have got a bit out of hand,’ she said, setting cups on saucers and pouring tea onto the milk, ‘since hubby went to war.’
Neither of them liked milk with their tea, but it was standard issue in the camp. Tea was always hot and very sweet, usually served with condensed milk.
‘I do your garden one day,’ Massimo said, pointing to the plot.
‘Really?’ Molly said. ‘Ain’t it too late to sow stuff?’
‘You can put for winter,’ Massimo said. ‘I no know names: cabbage? cauliflowers? And… other things. I look dictionary.’
The baby started to cry, and she disappeared into the house.
‘You’re in there, you are,’ Salvo sniggered when she was out of earshot. ‘Soon be getting your leg over.’ He made an obscene gesture with his arm and Massimo hissed at him to shut his trap.
She reappeared with the baby in her arms. ‘Meet Denis. The hungriest baby in the whole of England.’
Salvo stretched out his arms and she passed him over. He positioned the baby against his shoulder and rubbed his back gently until Denis gave a loud belch and they all laughed. ‘He no hungry, he have… bad stomach.’
‘Wind,’ she said, ‘we say “wind”. Cor, you’re a natural. Got kids of your own, have you?’