by Annie Groves
‘Here, Mamma, drink this,’ Maria was instructing la Nonna whilst she hurried to get a small glass and pour her some of the special restorative ‘cordial’ that came all the way from ‘home’ and which was normally only served on very special occasions or when someone was in need of a tonic. ‘Rosie cara, help Bella to make us all some coffee, will you?’ Maria called back over her shoulder.
Rosie needed no second instruction. It felt so comforting to go through the routine she and Bella had learned together as little girls. Rosie could still remember how proud she had been when she had been allowed to serve la Nonna and Grandfather Grenelli the first cups of the coffee she had made all by herself.
These days there was no need for her to concentrate or worry as she ground the beans, releasing their wonderful rich dark aroma into the kitchen, and then waited for the kettle to boil. The Grenellis preferred to use an old-fashioned range rather than a modern stove, and Rosie admitted that there was something comforting about the warmth it gave out.
The giving of a medicinal cordial followed by the family gathering round the cordial drinker to offer comments on his or her condition, whilst they drank coffee was a part of Rosie’s growing up and she took comfort from it now.
When her father was at home Rosie always drank tea because she knew it was what he preferred, but secretly she preferred coffee. Here in the Grenelli household she was more Italian than English, whilst at home she was very much her father’s daughter. She had, she knew, inherited his calm temperament, and his abhorrence of any kind of flashy showiness. They shared the same sense of humour, laughing over silly jokes on the wireless on programmes such as ITMA, which had her mother complaining that they were both daft. The delicacy of Rosie’s bone structure came, her father had always claimed, from his side of the family, along with her warm smile. Rosie cherished the closeness between them, and even though she envied Bella the closeness of her loving family, Rosie wouldn’t have changed her dad for anyone.
As Maria handed her husband the coffee Rosie had just poured, he told them, ‘And Giovanna’s brother is taking them back home with him. I saw the police helping them out the back way.’ As always, Aldo barely acknowledged Maria, taking the coffee from her without bothering to thank her and then turning back to Rosie’s mother, who was still clinging fiercely to his arm, to say, ‘Don’t worry, Chrissie, there’s nothing to be afraid of now. The police have moved the rioters on.’
La Nonna muttered something to Sofia that Rosie couldn’t catch, but which caused Maria to shake her head gently.
‘Trust you not to be here when Maria needed you, Aldo,’ Sofia told her brother-in-law scornfully.
‘I couldn’t get back. We had to stay where we were for our own safety, until the police had rounded up the troublemakers. It weren’t just winders they were battering, you know,’ Aldo answered her defensively. ‘When I came up the street there was a man lying in the gutter who the mob had left for dead. Police were waiting on an ambulance to tek him to the hospital.’
‘And with you, of course, your own safety always comes before that of anyone else, especially poor Maria,’ Sofia snapped.
‘Sofia, please,’ Maria protested. ‘It is not fair to blame Aldo. He is not responsible for those who are rioting.’
‘Isn’t it time you went home, Christine?’ Sofia said to Rosie’s mother sharply. ‘You aren’t Italian, after all,’ she repeated, ‘and you’ll be safer behind your own front door.’
Again a charged look passed between her mother and Sofia, which Rosie couldn’t interpret.
Christine gave a small shrug. ‘Walk us ’ome, will you, Aldo?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t fancy walking back on me own, not with all them fellas running riot.’
A strange, almost prickly silence filled the small room, broken only when Maria bowed her head and said softly, ‘Yes, Aldo, you must go with Christine and Rosie, and make sure they get home safely. May the Blessed Virgin keep you safe, Rosie,’ she added, her words muffled against Rosie’s hair as she hugged her tightly and kissed her.
Tears burned the backs of Rosie’s eyes as she returned the hug and then followed her mother and Aldo, who was already opening the back door.
The street was now quiet, its silence making the devastation that lay before them all the more shocking. The road was scattered with broken glass and doors that had been ripped off their hinges. Rosie’s stomach lurched when she saw the bright red streaks of blood on the glass. She hoped fiercely they belonged to the men who had done the attacking and not to those who had been attacked.
‘Jesus, it looks as though bloody Hitler’s bin bombing the place,’ Rosie heard her mother whisper to Aldo, as she clung tightly to his arm. Rosie, though, hung back, reluctant to take hold of his other arm. For some reason she was unable to understand, Rosie had never felt entirely comfortable in Aldo’s company. In fact, when she witnessed the way he treated poor Maria, she couldn’t understand how her mother could make such a fuss of him and, even worse, openly flirt with him in front of Maria herself. But she knew better than to take her mother to task for her behaviour. Christine made her own rules and didn’t take kindly to being criticised, plus she had a keen temper on her when she was angered. Rosie had heard the arguments between her parents when her father had attempted to reason with her. On more than one occasion Rosie had witnessed Christine throwing whatever came to hand at her husband, including the crockery, before storming out, slamming the back door behind her and leaving Rosie and her father to pick up the broken shards.
They had almost reached their own front door, which was several doors down from the Grenellis’. Their house, unlike those of the street’s Italian families, looked uncared for, the step dusty and undonkey-stoned, and the paintwork dull instead of the bright blues, reds and yellows favoured by the Italians, which, like the window boxes of summer bedding plants in their equally rich colours they loved so much, were reminders of the warm, vibrant Mediterranean they had left behind. Stepping into the streets of Little Italy was like turning a corner into a brilliantly vivid special place where all the colours seemed brighter, the song birds sang more sweetly, the laughter echoed more happily, and even the air itself, scented with the rich smells of Italy, seemed warmer. But, best of all, the whole area, or so it seemed to Rosie, was imbued with a special atmosphere of love.
Set against this backdrop, her own home seemed unwelcomingly drab. No carefully tended window boxes of flowers adorned her mother’s windowsills, the sound of singing and laughter never wafted out onto the air from open windows, no appetising smells of delicious pasta and soups wafted from her mother’s kitchen, unless Rosie herself was making them, which wasn’t very often because her father didn’t like ‘all that foreign muck’, so when she cooked for him Rosie stuck to the traditional English dishes.
Christine modelled herself on her favourite screen actresses, like Rita Hayworth, who were known for their glamour rather than their domestic virtues, rather than on a respected Italian mamma like la Nonna.
‘Rosie, run over to Currie Street and fetch us a fish supper from Pod’s, will yer?’ Rosie heard her mother demanding. She was still leaning on Aldo’s arm and had handed him her door key, intimating that she felt too weak to unlock the door herself. But not so weak that she didn’t want her supper, Rosie reflected wryly as she hurried off towards Podestra’s, hoping that the chip shop had escaped the vengeance of the rioters.
Podestra’s fish-and-chip shop was normally only a few minutes’ walk away, but tonight, with the glass and other debris littering the streets, it took Rosie over twice as long as usual to pick her way through it in the ominous silence that hung as heavily on the air as the dust from the destruction.
Sickeningly, through one of the windows that had been broken in she could see where furniture had been smashed to pieces, the horsehair spilling out of a sofa through the deep knife cuts slashed into it, whilst a child’s hobbyhorse lay broken on the floor beside it. Despite the warmth of the evening, Rosie shivered, wondering what
had happened to the family whose home it was, and praying that they were unhurt.
Although Rosie’s mother was a Catholic, her father was staunchly Church of England, which was yet another bone of contention between her parents. Rosie had been christened as a Catholic at her mother’s insistence, but Christine was not a devout churchgoer, and sometimes Rosie suspected that her mother had only insisted on Rosie becoming Catholic to annoy Rosie’s father. It had been pious Maria who had encouraged Rosie to go to church with Bella, and who had provided the necessary white dress for Rosie’s confirmation. Rosie was obedient to the dictates of her religion and attended church every week, as well as making her confession. Her faith was a simple but strong belief in God, although war and the horrible things it was bringing sometimes tested that faith. However, because her father was of a different religion, Rosie stood slightly outside the traditional observances in the Italian community, where many of the older women went to church every day – sometimes more than once. Rosie did say her prayers every night, though, always asking God to protect those who were in peril, especially her father.
She had almost reached the chippie when three young Italians, still just boys, walked past her going in the opposite direction. Two of them were supporting the third between them, as he struggled to walk. One of the two had obviously received a head wound, and dried blood was visible on the bandage tied around it.
Rosie shivered. What was happening to people? To the city she loved? Those boys had grown up here in Liverpool. Suddenly she longed desperately for her father, with his slow reasoned way of speaking and his gentle strength. He might not be a handsome man like Aldo, nor possess the musical talent and hospitable warmth of Carlo, who drew others towards him so easily, but her father had his own special strength and Rosie loved him with a fiercely protective intensity. She hated it when her mother snapped at him and taunted him because of the limp he had developed as a young boy, when he had fallen downstairs and broken his leg so badly that he was left with it slightly shorter than its fellow, and which made it uncomfortable for him to take her dancing.
‘If you’re mekin’ for Pod’s I shouldn’t bother, it’s closed,’ a woman called out to Rosie from the other side of the street, showing her the empty bowl she had obviously intended to have filled with pease pudding.
Thanking her, Rosie regretted her own decision earlier not to stop to get herself something to eat. The larder would almost certainly be bare.
The summer light was beginning to fade from the sky, which was now streaked the colour of blood. Blackout curtains were going up in those windows that hadn’t been broken, and outside those that were, small groups of men were gathering to examine the damage and make temporary repairs. At least it was summer and rain was unlikely to hinder their efforts. The look on the victims’ faces made Rosie feel shamed of her own nationality. She wanted to go to the Italians and assure them that not everyone felt the same way as those who had rioted against them.
When she got home she found her mother in the parlour, sitting on the sofa with her feet up on a worn leather pouffe, smoking a cigarette, her hair already rolled up in rag curlers, and a scarf tied round them turban style.
‘Where’s us supper?’ Christine demanded irritably. Her lipstick had bled into the lines around her mouth, Rosie noticed absently. And there was a button unfastened on her blouse.
‘Pod’s was closed.’
‘So why the hell didn’t you go somewhere else? It’s not as though there ain’t enough ruddy chippies around here,’ Christine complained acidly.
‘Yes, and they’re all Italian-owned,’ Rosie reminded her, ashamed that her mother was only thinking of her stomach at a time like this.
‘Aye, well, they’ve only got themselves to blame,’ Christine told her. ‘That Sofia thinks she’s bin so bloody clever getting her Carlo in with that Fascist lot and her Bella enrolled at one of them language schools what they run, but you mark my words, she’ll be regretting it now.’
There had been a lot of talk in the area whilst Rosie was growing up about Mussolini and his effect on Italian politics. Being a passionate race, Liverpool’s Italian community talked as intensely and fiercely about ‘Fascismo’ as they did about everything else. Rosie knew from sitting in the Grenellis’ kitchen whilst these often heated discussions were going on that to the older generation of immigrants, Mussolini’s desire to treat them as though they were still ‘Italians’, albeit living away from their homeland, meant so much to them emotionally. They saw what Mussolini was doing as a means of uniting them, of giving them respect and status, and of preserving their Italian heritage. They couldn’t see, as their younger British-born children could, the dangers of Fascism.
Hadn’t Mussolini shown respect for their patriotism? the older men argued. Hadn’t he encouraged ‘his’ people living outside Italy to set up social clubs where the men could meet to talk about their homeland and to share their sense of what it meant to be Italian? Hadn’t their mother country sent delegations to talk to them and, thanks to them, hadn’t an Italian school been opened in Liverpool so that their children could learn their true mother tongue? If some of their non-Italian neighbours in their adopted country chose to resent what Mussolini was doing for his people, then that was their problem. For themselves, they were now doubly proud to be Italian and to know that their mother country valued them and recognised them as such.
Stubbornly these often elderly men believed that Fascism was more about an upsurge of patriotism and a love for their homeland, than about politics, which they did not really understand or want to accept.
Many of the younger men, on the other hand, especially those who worked alongside non-Italians, were concerned that in clinging so determinedly to the mother country their fathers and uncles and grandfathers were ignoring the realities of just how antagonistic towards Mussolini the English people and the British Government were, and this led to heated arguments within families when they gathered together. Rosie had seen the way Maria shook her head when they took place in her own kitchen. Sofia was fiercely proud of her Italian heritage, and determined to encourage her husband and her daughter to be equally patriotic, so easy-going Carlo was bullied into joining their local Fasci club, and Bella was sent to the Italian school in the evening for Italian lessons, even though she complained that she already spoke Italian perfectly well.
Rosie had felt slightly left out at first and a little bit hurt when Bella came back talking about the new friends she had made, but Rosie was a gentle-natured girl and she couldn’t resent her best friend’s obvious enjoyment of the fun the classes provided for too long.
It had been in 1935, after Italy invaded Abyssinia, that people had begun to realise the possible implications of Fascism. About that time Rosie could remember hearing a great deal of talk of some members of the Italian community deciding to naturalise and become British citizens. The Grenelli men hadn’t though, mainly because Sofia had been so insistent that to do so would be unpatriotic.
‘Sofia and Carlo aren’t Fascists, they’re just patriotic,’ Rosie protested.
‘Huh, that’s what Sofia might say, but there’s folk around here as thinks different.’
Rosie frowned. ‘I thought that the Grenellis were our friends, but you’re acting as though you don’t even like them. Maria’s always—’
‘Oh, Maria’s well enough,’ Christine stopped her. ‘But ruddy Sofia, she’s allus had it in for me. I’ve warned Aldo many a time not to let Sofia go dragging him into that Fascist lot with her Carlo. Well, I just hope that Aldo’s listened to what I’ve bin saying to him and not got hisself involved, now that there’s all this trouble brewing and folk taking against Italians. Did you try the chippie on Christian Street?’ Christine finished.
It was typical of her mother that it was her hunger she was thinking about and not the fact that she, Rosie, could have been in danger if there had been another outbreak of violence, Rosie accepted ruefully.
‘I’m not going back out again
tonight,’ she told her firmly. Other girls with stricter mothers might have been wary of being as outspoken as she was. She was a gentle girl, not normally argumentative, but she knew with her mother she had to stick to her guns – or risk being bullied into doing whatever it suited Christine to have her do.
‘I’ll be glad when Dad gets back,’ she added.
Since Rosie had overheard her father discussing his ship’s near miss, she had prayed extra hard, not just for her father but for all those men who had to make that perilous journey across the Atlantic to be kept safe. War was such a very dreadful thing but, as her father had told her, they had no option other than to stand up to Hitler and to fight as bravely as they could.
‘Well, if I’m not goin’ to get me supper I might as well go to bed. Pity we didn’t get a bit of sommat at number 16. We would have done an’ all if bloody Sofia hadn’t started havin’ a go at me like that.’
‘I don’t think she liked the way you were with Aldo,’ Rosie told her mother uncomfortably.
Christine dropped her cigarette, cursing as it burned a hole in the thin carpet. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have let Maria be the one to greet him first. She is his wife, after all.’
Christine gave a dismissive shrug. ‘We all know that. Old Giovanni had both Aldo and Carlo shipped over from the old country so as he could have husbands for his daughters. Mind you, it were the only way he could get them wed. Maria’s that saintly she should have been a ruddy nun, and as for Sofia, she’s got that sharp a tongue on her, the Grenellis don’t need no knife-grinder comin’ round.’
‘Mum…’ Rosie objected. It disturbed her to hear her mother running down the two women who were surely her closest friends, but she knew better than to take Christine to task when she was in this kind of mood.