My Italian Adventures

by de Burgh, Lucy; Hodge, Mary; Hastings, Max

  Needless to say, the above reflections did not occur to me in the January days of 1946, when I was busy being a trial PA and quite floundering in the welter of files and information to which I had suddenly gained access. Much water had flowed under many bridges before I began to realise just what our work really was about in relation to Italy and the Italians in general. For the time being, I was learning how the business of compensation was carried out, and that in itself was complicated enough, with the preparation, checking, investigating and assessing of claims and recommendations for higher awards for bravery. The British government has unfortunately not yet seen fit to grant the issue of higher decorations to Italians, despite the promise made over the wireless which led this to be expected and even though such awards were made by the Americans as early as 1946. Perhaps in fifty years’ time, when the Occupation has become almost a legend and the names of certain martyrs of the Partisan Movement are handed down as traditional heroes, their grandchildren’s children will receive a summons from the British Ambassador in Rome, announcing that he has an award to make on behalf of His Majesty’s Government for valour on the part of Signor So-and-so, who was tortured and finally executed by the Germans in 1944 for sheltering three British prisoners in his home in the Romagna, when it was forbidden on penalty of death to help the British. Meanwhile, some Italians are nursing a disillusionment about the good intentions of the British government, so manifest when Italian co-operation was sorely needed before and after the 1943 landings. They did not act in the hope of a decoration – their actions were spontaneous gallantry – but a decoration is worth far more than money, and not only in Italy. But in 1946 we were all still full of hope that the awards really would be allowed and given out, and there was a fund of goodwill in the country towards the Allies and towards the British in particular. I have heard of anti-British or anti-Ally demonstrations, but apart from seeing the somewhat sullen crowds in Padua a year later, I never experienced the slightest hostility from the Italian population, even though I had occasion often to be alone and in isolated places. I found them always helpful, polite, welcoming and eager to be friendly with England. They had not wanted to enter the war against us; in fact most of them had not wanted to be in the war at all. The Germans were and still are their hated enemies, and the blame for most of Italy’s misfortunes is attributed to the alliance with Hitler. England could achieve much with Anglo-Italian co-operation and much has already been achieved. All lovers of Italy hope for more.

  Meanwhile, I discovered that in spite of having lived for nearly two years in Italy, I really knew next to nothing of it or its people. True, I had seen Naples, Rome, Florence and Venice, but what did I know of the real Italy: the small mountain villages, where tiny overloaded donkeys trudged wearily up stony paths, where people wore sacking instead of shoes, bound round their feet with leather thongs, and where sometimes there was not even a road, only a mule-track, so that the inhabitants lived quite cut off from the modern mechanisation of the autostrada and the railway line? It was in these tiny hamlets or isolated farms, or in others less isolated, but equally remote from modernity, such as the Plain of Lombardy, that many of our men hid from the Nazis and Fascists, and it was here that dramas of life and death took place when innocent civilians were terrorised and sometimes brutally murdered merely for being suspected of sheltering an Allied soldier. For the Nazi guards penetrated even the most out-of-the-way mountain fastnesses or inoffensive homesteads, and no-one, except perhaps in the wildest caves, was safe from the danger of denouncement, and all too often the Fascist enemy was in the midst of the patriots. I had already come to like the Italians – and indeed who could help it? – but now I began to admire them, even more than before, when I saw their patience in adversity. Here was a courage and defiance of risk and death, which we had not encountered in our much safer country. Here the choice and clash of ideals and principles had been solved simply and unquestioningly by people, some of whom could not read or write, but whose hearts were truly great. Not long after my posting to the commission, a large cake arrived for the CO. It was sent by Emilio Azzari, the pastry-cook of Rieti, who was tortured horribly by the Germans and yet never revealed the hiding-place of several English prisoners. He was finally drugged in an attempt to break his morale, but it did not break – ‘I did not tell,’ he said simply, ‘and I never would.’ The commission managed to get him some hospital treatment for his injured leg; the Germans had beaten it with a rifle-butt and then poured acid into the wound – and for a long time it was touch and go as to whether he would be able to keep it. He came to Rome occasionally for treatment, always bright and cheerful, and he never failed to bring the CO some sweets or a rich cake baked by himself.

  I used to see other Italians in the corridors, but at first of course I did not know who were claimants and who employees, until one day when Iris, who was working as paying officer in the Rome Office, i.e. for the claimants in and around the city, asked me if I would do her work while she had a day off. I readily agreed, anxious to learn more, and we had the arrangement authorised. At first I was very much at sea and the recipient I was paying would often go into streams of voluble Italian, frequently in dialect, of which I only grasped a few words. Sometimes the recipients were profusely and touchingly grateful for the little I was giving them, even if it was only one or two thousand lire (then about thirteen or twenty-six shillings). At other times they were angry and disgusted at not getting more. I had to try to explain that this was for the most part a token payment, and that the British government was sincerely grateful for their sacrifices and support. If anyone became really obstreperous and occasionally this happened, then I would press the bell for the reception sergeant who always showed in the claimants, and ask him to eject them as politely as possible. As he was used to the various types by this time, he generally had no difficulty in making them see reason, and he would elbow them gently towards the door amid a stream of protests and a whirl of dramatic gestures, with myself as the stupefied one-women audience; for never before, in spite of Luisa, Marcello, Guglielmo, the OH and a few others, had I realised quite what vocal and rhetorical voices the majority of Italians seem to possess as a birthright. I set to work to become more fluent and rather more rhetorical myself, and was better able to hold my own, especially as Iris after a few weeks departed on Python and for a time I did the two jobs, secretarial and paying.

  I had moved out of Derek’s office, as there did not seem to be room for the two of us and anyway I wanted to be on my own. I had gone into the office opposite, which was formerly the ATS corporal’s room, but which since her release a new employee, Nancy, now occupied. After Corporal Gillingham’s departure, I had become for a time saddled with almost all the English secretarial work of the unit, apart from the indexing and translating and other routine admin work. All the investigators’ reports and correspondence seemed to find their way to me, and sometimes about five or six people would be dictating to me, or waiting to pass on work to me, at the same time. The situation was becoming impossible, and sometimes I felt that people wrote more now that they found I could be prevailed upon to type their work. Anyway, a young civilian girl, whose father had just come out to the British Embassy, had been taken on to help me; her name was Nancy and she was sixteen. She was in many ways very young, but in others she seemed quite sophisticated, or soon became so, and sometimes I wondered if I were not the young one. As she had no mother and lived on her own at the YWCA, I felt some responsibility for her, but she seemed quite happy to look after herself and well able to do so. I soon ceased to worry, deciding that after all she had her father near, and if she were in trouble he would be the one to assist her. She was a great help in the office and on the whole we got along famously. Soon afterwards, a WAAF officer came to join us, posted out from London, and the CO told Derek in no uncertain terms that we must be given another, larger, room. I was very thankful, for our office was not much bigger than a large cupboard, and dark at that, and the room became thoroughl
y crowded whenever there was a rush on, and at such times pandemonium would ensue.

  About mid-March, the CO called me into his office and told me he wished me to be his official PA from then on, that he considered me well enough acquainted with the work to take over completely, and that Captain Giles would be transferred to more active work. He said I was to move into the PA’s office proper, and take up my duties at once. In practice, it was a few days before I was actually installed there and Derek had started new work in another part of the building, but from then on the CO kept me busy with letters, interpreting, telephoning, arranging interviews and other odd jobs. He was down in Rome for a time before undertaking any more tours of inspection round the sections.

  About this time I made my first contacts through long-distance telephoning on Italian lines. The Signals Corps were not now universal, and had transferred part of their network back to the Italian civil structure, which had been repaired after the damage during the war. Thus, in order to get Verona, we would have to deal with Italians at the Central Rome Exchange, still working in conjunction with the military signals communications. But the lines were no longer secret, and therefore one was liable to get mixed up with all sorts of calls. Fortunately, we had an excellent operator in the unit, Paolo, who usually wrestled with the Central Exchange for me, but even then one could be cut off at any moment, while volumes of rapid Italian chattered away in the near, middle or far distance and one was liable at any time to find oneself talking to Genoa, Taranto, or Naples, when one was in fact trying to get GSI (b) at Caserta, or any other staff sections for that matter. Or the line would suddenly become very faint, and one had to blow out one’s lungs like a bellows and roar down the mouthpiece like a bull, enunciating every word as in a phonetic lesson. Some of my calls were in Italian on behalf of the CO, not always long-distance, but the worst time was when I mistakenly got through to the Italian civilian operators at a city exchange up north. Spelling and trying the telephone alphabet in stuttering Italian, wracking my brains for words beginning with certain letters, puffing and blowing, and gazing agonisingly at the growing number of persons waiting to speak to me in the office about business with the colonel, or turning my back on them and shouting at the window, I would desperately struggle to get to where I wanted on the phone. If ever there was a trial for patience, it was the telephone system in Italy at that time. But all the same, I could not help seeing the funny side of it all, and really enjoyed it when I was not too harassed.

  25

  Roman Carnival

  I had established a firm friend in Judy at the Hotel Continentale, and we had together made the acquaintance of the sergeant in charge of the NAAFI stores, who very obligingly supplied us when possible with anything we wanted, from cosmetics to alcohol or cigarettes. Sometimes, in the evening, he would come up to our sitting room for a chat, and used to entertain us with the gossip of the hotel. I had also got to know the maestro fairly well, who so obligingly played our requests when leading on his violin the small trio that played every evening in the dining room. And Tullio, our waiter, was a firm friend of Judy’s and mine, and brought us an ancora dolce almost whenever we asked him for it, his calf-like eyes meltingly acceding to our entreaties – I am sure he was quite amused at the ATS officers. He always looked after our table, and even when some members of the Pay Corps tried to rob us of it, he still waited on us as we ate indignantly at a side-table; and whenever possible he kept our own places for us. We won the battle in the end and retained our corner table, from whence we surveyed the room and summed up its occupants. You could do this even if you had your back to the centre, for there were mirrors on each end wall.

  Tullio had mouse-coloured wavy hair, neatly brilliantined, and was of medium height and a trifle thickset. His eyes were distinctly handsome and he had charming manners. He was very civil and we never had a cross word from him in all the time he looked after us. We rewarded him as generously as we could out of our NAAFI cigarette ration, which was still the easiest and best way of tipping. I heard about two years later from an officer who had come home, but had known him for a time in the hotel, that Tullio had a dual profession: as well as being as a waiter, he was what in polite old Italian would, I believe, be called a ‘cicisbeo’ or ‘cavaliere’ to a highly placed and wealthy Roman lady. He certainly had the right diplomatic manner for coping with women and sufficient charm to get away with almost anything.

  Shrove Tuesday fell on 5 March that year and as it happened Jonathan was down on leave from Austria, spending a few days in Rome. He asked me to spend the evening of Martedì Grasso with him, and we decided to see what the Romans did on this most popular of fiestas. The previous year I had heard stories of crockery flying out of windows and of wild jubilations, so I was quite agog with excitement.

  We began with the opera. The Rome Opera House was now in full swing again and although I have seen several famous opera houses, the one in Rome is to me the most attractive and beautiful of all. There is no gallery proper, just tier upon tier of boxes, and then seats as usual in the auditorium. The lights in the middle are extinguished before the commencement of an act, but all the boxes remain illuminated and look like several hundred arched windows, brilliantly lit up, into which one can gaze and survey the occupants, the men mostly in black and women in various colours, many wearing stylish hats, outlined against the walls behind them. Then the lights in the boxes go out, and the act begins amid an expectant stillness, broken only by the tapping of the maestro’s baton on his music stand. In those days, any performance was preceded by the playing of the national anthems of America, Britain, France and Italy. Fortunately, not all the anthems of the Allies were played, or the performance would have been lengthened by half an hour. In the interval it was customary to promenade up and down the foyers, and many interesting faces and fashions were to be seen there. In 1946, most of the seats were still reserved for the military, and on Shrove Tuesday Jonathan and I were in the stalls. It was Madama Butterfly, and the performance was superb – it made me weep, so pathetic was the final scene. On a subsequent occasion I took a small girl of nine to see Madama Butterfly. She intensely enjoyed it and was not at all abashed by the cruel tragedy she was witnessing. I prepared her during the intervals for the sad ending, thinking that she would in that way be less upset by a scene which is one of the most moving in all opera – Butterfly’s final disillusionment, her farewell to her baby and her eventual desperate suicide. But my small companion was delighted with the story, and throughout the last act she questioned me at regular intervals in a stage whisper, shrill with anticipation, ‘Is she going to die now?’ or ‘Has she killed herself yet?’ She was not at all saddened by the story, but thoroughly entertained by the opera from start to finish.

  On that occasion, I had no time for emotion, but this time I felt quite depressed at the end and was glad we had to be busy searching for a carrozza immediately afterwards to take us down to the Orso, but there were great crowds out that night and not a free cab to be found. A carrozza is an open carriage, with a turned-back hood, usually painted black, but often with red bands round the coachwork. It is drawn by one horse and in the early days of the British Occupation in Rome, when the carrozze again began to put in an appearance, only a few of them at first, the horses were pathetically under-nourished and meagre, with all their ribs visible and their hip-bones sticking out from their skinny flanks. But after about a year, they began to look better, as food for both humans and animals became more plentiful. In fact, by the time I eventually left Italy, they were nearly all well nurtured and glossy, drew freshly painted vehicles and had greatly increased in numbers. They were as popular a mode of travel as the taxi, and perhaps a little less expensive, and it was certainly far more pleasant to amble along unhurriedly, enjoying the balmy air and watching the changing architecture or the busy pavements. And at night, in an open carrozza one had the full benefit of the clear skies and the stars, as well as the neon lights illuminating the main thoroughfares or, in the qu
iet side streets and squares, the silhouettes of gateways, houses and churches – for all the world like any scene from Italian opera. I once drove past the Fontana dei Trevi in a carrozza at night. We clattered along the cobbled streets and suddenly came out on the piazza which was darkened, for it was about 11 p.m. There was scarcely a soul to be seen and the tightly shuttered houses were silent and were reflected in the motionless water of the fountain basin. The great sculptured figure of Triton was lit up by the moon, and in the moonbeams, one saw the fountain itself and the surroundings vaguely illuminated. Here and there a light glowed softly across the persiane, and occasionally the distant chords of a guitar broke the stillness. It was utterly peaceful and might well have been a scenario from Rigoletto. It hardly seemed real, and yet five minutes away lay the Via Tritone, one of the city’s main streets, brilliantly lit up with all sorts of signs, far gayer than London, and with thronged pavements, transport of all kinds and carrozze plying up and down it.