My Italian Adventures
Page 45
As a specialist on atrocities, Junior Commander Addey knew very well what the Head of the SS and his associates had done; yet when she was with Himmler’s wife and daughter after their capture, she registered only awed pity. When asked to tell about the encounter, she said:
Mrs Himmler and her daughter were ragged. I remember most the fear and hunger in their eyes. The Tommies jeered as they made them run a gauntlet to the lavatory. Mrs Himmler was so thin and frightened and so pathetic. She was laughed at and sneered at by our soldiers; when I gave her daughter some biscuits, mother and daughter both wept.
After her move from Caserta to Rome, Addey applied to join the Allied Screening Commission, notwithstanding that this required a drop in rank. As the Allied forces took over larger areas of Italy and in particular once the German forces had surrendered, the Commission was researching the fate of Allied escapees and agents in Italy and Austria and the roles of the local population in their survival or otherwise. She thought this more interesting than remaining at HQ, and a better use for her languages, for her Italian was now quite fluent.
The Commanding Officer, Colonel (Hugo) Graham de Burgh, had himself led the largest ever break-out from a prison camp, when 600 men incarcerated at Fontanellato, near Parma, had managed to avoid the Germans entraining them to Poland by escaping to the hills and breaking up into small groups. De Burgh took the route to Switzerland, surviving a hazardous trek over the Monte Rosa.
Some of the activities of the ASC are described in the current book, and there is a more detailed account in Roger Absalom’s A Strange Alliance. J/Cmdr Addey worked with the ASC until its disbandment in 1948 and the retirement of its CO, whom she married, on 14 April 1946 in the Orange Street Congregational Church.
Dr Addey was opposed to his daughter’s desire to marry Colonel de Burgh. He did not admire the ‘erste Gesellschaft’ as he jokingly referred to the nobility, but he also would say, ‘They are always ready to die for us, and I admire them for that.’ He himself passed away, exhausted from his immense efforts in the war, in 1947. In much reduced circumstances, his widow retired to a small house in Felixstowe and the daughters had to fend for themselves.
Mrs de Burgh, as we must now call her, had a short married life. After wounds, serious maltreatment in one prison camp and illness following his escape, her husband suffered from what would today be called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and was increasingly unwell. After a succession of short-term jobs, she was offered a position as a teacher in Cyprus and, once there, found a post for her husband. As she waited for him to join her, the news came that he was dead. She remained in Cyprus from 1952–55, taking her son on trips by fishing boat and local bus to Nazareth and Cana, site of Our Lord’s first miracle. She returned to teach in London (at Haverstock Hill, the ‘Eton of the Left’) and in Oxford, where she made her home and many new friends in the refugee community, through the Munzes. In 1956 she took a job in Rome at the Parioli International School (now St Michael’s School of Florence), which gave her son Hugo a free place.
As they had in England, they lived in a succession of rented rooms until she took a small flat on the Aventine Hill in 1959, next door to a German couple (formerly of the German Army Film Unit) who had hidden in Italy posing as Dutch refugees after the Nazi surrender; their two sons became Hugo’s playmates. In Italy she wasted not a single free day, taking her child by bus or third-class train all over central Italy to see the beautiful buildings and art and hear the operas, delighting in Italians’ friendship and reading deeply in Dante, Leopardi, Pirandello and the great literary geniuses of Italy who began to rival Goethe and Schiller for her affections.
Concerned for her child’s future in an impoverished country with few opportunities for foreigners, she returned to England in 1961 where she took two jobs teaching three languages. She settled near her mother, who was by then declining rapidly, in Suffolk. With the financial help of a former student of her father’s, she and her mother bought their present house in Woodbridge. Apart from three years lecturing in Oxford, she remained in Suffolk, teaching A-Level languages, tutoring at a Boys’ Borstal and giving her spare time to Save the Children Fund (for which she was later awarded an MBE) until her stroke in 2003. In September that year she had gone on one of her regular visits to see her lifelong friend Iselle Simmonot at Trouville, where she suffered first a heart attack and then a stroke. After some months in hospital in France and in St Thomas’ London she has lived first near her son’s family in Bermondsey and since then in the Royal Star and Garter, Richmond.
In 2009 a party was held for her ninetieth birthday in the Royal Star and Garter, music provided by a band of the Coldstream Guards. Aside from her sister’s children and her son’s family, present were friends – or the children and grandchildren of friends – from Ipswich, St Felix, Oxford, Cyprus and Woodbridge days.
The present book was found among many letters and papers from the war period, long forgotten during a busy subsequent life. Mary Hodge edited it down from an original manuscript of 150,000 words (now in the Imperial War Museum) and the author’s son proposed it for publication, with the essential help of the appeal chairman of the MSMT, Vanni Treves, appeal chairman of the Monte San Martino Trust. The Imperial War Museum’s head of publishing Elizabeth Bowers worked hard to arrange its publication and Jo de Vries of The History Press has brought it to fruition with enthusiasm and dispatch.
Plates
The author in 1945. (Author’s Collection)
The author (third from left) with colleagues at Latimer House Interrogation Centre. (Author’s Collection)
The parade ground: No. 7 ATS Training Centre, Guildford, 1942. (IWM Cat No: Art LD 1959)
British trucks entering the Piazza del Popolo, through the Arch of Titus Severus, in Rome, June 1944. (IWM Cat No: TR 1855)
British soldiers visit the Colosseum while on leave in Rome, June 1944. (IWM Cat No: TR 1960)
The author shopping in the market at Fiesole. (Author’s Collection, taken by Tiny Pook)
Invitation cards received by the author during her time in Italy. (Author’s Collection)
The author at Padua market, Easter leave 1946. (Author’s Collection)
The author in Naples. (Author’s Collection)
The first Allied convoy to arrive at Naples harbour. In the foreground some of the wrecked harbour installations are visible. In the background is Mount Vesuvius. (IWM Cat No: NA 7414)
An award ceremony of the Allied Screening Commission for Italian partisans. The Commanding Officer is between the flags. (Author’s Collection)
British aid to partisans in northern Italy, April–May 1945: on a field just outside Cuneo, Piedmont, near the French/Italian border, partisans wait for the containers carrying supplies to land. The French Alps are in the background. (IWM Cat No: NA 25393)
Demobilisation of the British Army in Italy, 1945: British servicemen catch trams outside Milan central railway station to travel to the Assembly Centre for Release Personnel at Eugenio barracks on the western outskirts of the city. (IWM Cat No: NA 26237)
A visit by the Allied Screening Commission to a mountain village. Note the Commanding Officer (saluting). Standing behind him are Major Gordon Lett and the author. (Author’s Collection)
The Commanding Officer of the Allied Screening Commission (right) in a mountain village. (Author’s Collection)
The author with her Commanding Officer, Venice, 1946. (Author’s Collection)
The author with Signora Boldrini. She and her husband, an architect, had risked their family to mastermind the escapes of British fugitives in Tuscany, 1947. (Author’s Collection)
Copyright
First published in 2013
The History Press
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Lucy de Burgh, 2013
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ght of Lucy de Burgh to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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978 0 7509 5306 1
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