by Angela Petch
‘For your picnic,’ he said, ‘you won’t find better than these in fancy supermarkets.’
Francesco thanked him and stood chatting for a while. Afterwards he explained to Davide that old people in this village were lonely because so many families had departed to find work elsewhere.
The first part of the walk took them over stubbly wheat fields, their feet scrunching the stalks. A hare, startled at their approach, bounded off in front of them, its large back feet stirring up dust. At the top of a steep incline they stopped to catch their breath.
‘Wow!’ said Davide. ‘I bet the moon looks just like this.’
The area was arid. Beneath them were folds of friable limestone rocks looking like a miniature Grand Canyon; cones of grey shale contorted by wind and rain into grotesque shapes. Davide slid to the base of the incline and disappeared round a cleft in one of the rocks.
‘I’m coming back here for a massive hide and seek game. It’s so brill, Babbo,’ he shouted up, popping his head round the edge of a triangular mound.
Francesco took a photo, telling his son to hurry up back as they still had a fair way to go.
They climbed steadily for another hundred metres or so until they reached the tree line. It was cooler under the canopy of beech and they stopped for a snack. The ground was very dry, ruts at the edge of the path showing signs where wild boar had searched earlier in the season for roots of orchids and wild garlic.
‘All right to continue for another hour or so?’ Francesco asked. ‘You’re doing great, by the way.’
The climb was very steep in parts and Francesco adopted a slower pace than usual. But Davide seemed game, keeping up without moaning, enjoying being on his own with his father.
‘We’re making for Monte della Zucca,’ Francesco explained. ‘A very important defensive stronghold for the German army in the last war, known as the Gothic Line. Can you imagine soldiers having to walk up here with heavy rucksacks? It’s bad enough with these light bags of ours.’
‘It’s hard to imagine lots of people up here at all. And fighting and stuff – but I bet soldiers hid in that canyon-y bit down there.’
‘Maybe. They did use mules as well to carry up heavy equipment. Stolen from local people, of course.’
The track narrowed until they were walking as if in a rut left by a plough, along a ridge where the ground fell sharply away on either side. Francesco waited to let his son pass, holding onto him as they exchanged places. ‘I’d prefer you to walk in front where I can see you,’ he said. ‘Cyclists use this path too but I wouldn’t like to wobble off and fall down there.’
‘It’s ace,’ Davide said, extending his arms like the wings of an aeroplane and making engine noises.
After scrambling over boulders and fallen trees, their roots sticking skywards like giant claws, they reached a sign detailing where former trenches and German gun positions had been located. It was nearly one o’clock and they decided to eat their picnic sitting in one of the larger bunkers on top of the mountain.
‘We’re at 1,100 metres up here,’ said Francesco. ‘There are plenty of trees now but back then there was far less vegetation on these mountains. And there is hardly any cattle compared with before. So try and picture it without all the green. It would have made an amazing viewpoint – very important strategically for controlling the roads for enemy and shooting at aircraft.’
Davide picked up a stick and mimicked gunfire, rolling over and over in the leafy undergrowth to take imaginary cover.
‘If you land on my lunch, you’ll be in deep trouble. I’ll have to lob a hand grenade at you.’ Francesco said, joining in with the fantasy game.
They mucked about for a bit, Francesco grabbing hold of Davide, clinching his head beneath his armpit, then tickling him, asking him if he wanted to surrender. Their laughter startled a pheasant in the woods and a wood pigeon flapped its wings. Eventually they decided their hunger needed to be satisfied and munched on the rest of the bread and cheese in their dug-out, happy to be quiet for a while.
Francesco peeled an apple and asked Davide what had been happening to make him so unhappy to want to run away.
‘I get fed up with everybody from school calling me names and taking the mick because they think I’m inglese…but I’m not, am I? Mamma is really Italian, although she lived in England most of her life…they’re so stupid. But don’t tell her - it’s not her fault if she’s different…’
‘Names? You mean calling you Harry Potter? But they like the stories about him, don’t they? I thought those books were all the rage. And the films - didn’t your class all go down to Sansepolcro for Celeste’s birthday to watch one?’
Davide shrugged.
‘It’s not just that.’ He was throwing handfuls of leaves into the air.
Francesco leaned forward to remove one from his hair. ‘What else, Davi?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Just stuff. Annoying things like when they hid the tights I was supposed to wear for the Palio last week and the only spare ones were those yucky girls’ ones. I felt ridiculous and people were calling me a girl.’
‘I didn’t notice.’
‘It was pants. And when we have an English lesson they think I’m showing off because I find it easy. But what am I supposed to do? Just act dumb? When I tell them we speak English at home as well as Italian, they don’t understand. They call me a clandestino, but I’m not and I hate that school. I want to leave.’
‘Do you really think it would be any easier in another school? Say if you went down the hill to Novafeltria? You wouldn’t know anybody. It might be worse.’
‘Nobody would know about Mamma living in England, would they? I wouldn’t be bullied for that.’
Francesco started to pack the remains of their picnic back into his rucksack.
‘I didn’t realise you felt like this. It’s a shame. You should be proud of who you are, not apologetic.’
‘That’s what Giselda says too but none of you know what it’s like.’
‘You’re right, I don’t but…’ Francesco paused, trying to think of the best way of approaching the subject with a ten-year-old. He sat down again with his son on the edge of the gun position and continued, ‘I brought you up here for a reason. You’re part of all this.’
Davide frowned and his father pointed to the woods. ‘Over sixty years ago the Englishman your Mamma thought was her dad was up here in these mountains fighting to help free Italy and he fell in love with your Nonna Ines who lived in the mill. Neither of us ever met her, did we? But she must have been very special. She helped the partisans by taking messages for them and carrying up food to their mountain hideaway, dressed as a boy. If the Germans had discovered what she was doing, they would have shot her. And she knew that. She was very brave. And I think she was also brave to have left these mountains to marry an Englishman and travel a thousand kilometres to take up a new life in a completely different country.’
‘What has that got to do with me?’
‘A lot, Davide. You’re descended from her. You have her blood and her courage.’
Davide frowned. ‘I’m not brave…’
‘…I think you are - or you can be. Nothing in life is straightforward. And life can be difficult. But it’s amazing too. How we face up to difficulties is what makes us into the people we are. I guarantee that people who bully or tease you are cowards. They’re ignorant and you’ve got to find a way to stand up to them.’
‘So what do I do next time they call me names?’
‘Somehow you’ve got to show them you don’t care – even if you do inside. Mamma and I will have a talk about it and we’ll see if we can come up with something.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Babbo.’
With the younger children tucked up in bed and Alba out for the evening, Francesco and Anna lay outside the stable in the dark on sun loungers, watching for shooting stars in the pinpricked sky.
‘Davide has to learn that everybody mucks about at school an
d plays tricks on each other,’ Francesco said. ‘If he’s teased then he should tease back, play some of his own tricks on them.’
‘Being teased is really hard when you’re only ten,’ Anna said. ‘It makes me want to go into school and smack Loredano hard.’
‘That wouldn’t help at all and you know it…’
‘Oh, of course I do but seeing him upset brings out the lioness in me. I don’t want anybody to hurt my babies.’
‘That’s exactly why Loredano is the way he is. He doesn’t have a lioness to protect him. His mother walked out when he was a baby and his father is always in the bar in the evening, pickled with grappa.’
‘I know, I know. But two wrongs don’t make a right. I don’t want Davide to start bullying too.’
They star gazed, enjoying the sounds of the river flowing gently below them and an owl hooting in the woods.
‘By the way,’ Francesco said. ‘A young American girl joined our research team a couple of weeks ago. She’s so excited about being in Europe, never stops taking photos on her phone of anything and everything – from the espresso cups in the bar, my battered leather briefcase, the light fittings in the office… we’ve nicknamed her Wow because she’s so enthusiastic about everything! Apparently her father is an art historian and has made her promise to do the Piero della Francesca trail. So I’ve told her she can come and stay with us some time to visit Sansepolcro and Monterchi. I should have asked you first. Sorry!’
‘That’s fine. What’s her real name?’ Anna asked, thinking it strange Francesco hadn’t mentioned her before.
‘Donna. She says she was meant to come to Italy because of her Italian name.’
They sat quietly until Anna pointed up at the sky, shouting she’d seen a shooting star and was going to make a wish.
‘Don’t tell me what it is,’ Francesco said, ‘otherwise it won’t be fulfilled.’
Anna wouldn’t have told him anyway. Her wish was to wake up feeling well again. Her trip to England and the appointment with her sister’s doctor couldn’t come soon enough, as far as she was concerned. This waiting was torture, allowing her imagination to think the worst. She’d read an article only last night in her copy of “Prima” about the warning signs of ovarian cancer. It had been described as the silent killer and her symptoms of bloating and tiredness matched, although she had no back ache.
‘I’d like all my children to have good friends from their schooldays,’ Francesco said, interrupting Anna’s gloomy fears. ‘They spend more time with them than they do with us, if you think about it. I really value my friends from back then. They understand me, know about my past, my mistakes – everything. They’ve been a great support.’
‘I’ve noticed that about Italians. In the bar down in Sansepolcro where I have my Tuesday morning cappuccino after market, there’s a gang of old men. Always round the same table, reading out bits from the “Nazione”, teasing each other, flirting with the pretty waitress. They have nicknames for each other like Capo or Rotondo. Lately, one of them looks as if he’s on his last legs and they tend to mother him. After he’s left, they sit in a huddle and share ideas on how they can help. It’s really sweet.’
‘It’s normal.’
‘Maybe for you. But I went to a stuffy all girls’ convent. I’ve lost touch with my school friends.’ She sat up, bubbling with an idea. ‘We should do something really fun for Davide - hold a party! Invite his whole class. Hire a bouncy castle…’
‘English genius, you are! Look – another falling star! I can make a wish now too.’ He leant over from his lounger to kiss her and the plastic arm of his chair snapped, causing him to fall onto the terrace slabs.
Anna jumped up, kneeling down to tend to him. He grabbed her, tickling her but she pulled away.
Just at that moment Alba returned from her evening out. ‘Behave, you two,’ she said with a huge grin on her face. ‘Get a room! You’re so juvenile.’
Francesco couldn’t help thinking that a chance would be a fine thing.
Chapter 16
My Diary - A week of reliving the transumanza, by Davide Starnucci
SUNDAY EVENING
I am the head of the family because Babbo has gone away.
In the past, he would have left for five months and Mamma says we’d probably all be sitting around with “long faces”. But I’m quite excited about this week. (Babbo is only away for one week, on a university conference in Camerino.)
Alba has gone with him, to compare Camerino with Newcastle University, to see where she’d prefer to go and study next year.
So, it’s only me, the annoying twins and Mamma.
Babbo suggested keeping a diary for my school project and Mamma came up with this whole week idea. She says reality TV shows are very popular in England and she remembers seeing one about a family that pretended they were living through World War II. That lasted a month but one week will be quite enough for me.
Paper was expensive and scarce in the 1920s and so the fact I’m writing in this exercise book is not really accurate. It’s going to be hard to stick to doing everything they would have done then. Before he left, Babbo had told me two stories to do with paper. One was how a father tore up the pages from his son’s school book to make roll-ups. The other was about a peasant who worked for a really hard master (a latifondista) who made his worker get up really early every morning before starting work. He had to walk ten kilometres to and from the local town to buy a daily newspaper for his boss. It was a big chore and he moaned about it to a friend who suggested buying ten papers at a time to save nine more daily walks. When the landowner complained he was reading the same one each day, the peasant told him the news never changed much anyway. The peasant couldn’t read because he left school young to work on the land. Most peasants went to school just to learn how to write their name for when they had to sign legal documents.
The first thing I did as head of the house was to put a tablecloth over our TV and unplug it as well as the music centre and radio.
When I told the twins and Mamma the girls moaned a lot, saying it was a pants idea and it wasn’t their project, so why did they have to be punished? I wound them up by saying pants wasn’t a saying in those days and they’d have to think of something better. So they started on their stupid, secret language stuff: “ants in pants”, “don’t get antsy with us” and other rubbish talk. Mamma told them off. ‘We’re doing this as a family’, she said.
Emilia argued back by saying Alba had got out of it nicely and Rosanna said, ‘And Babbo too.’
Anyway, they calmed down in the end and Mamma got us all kneading dough to make bread for breakfast. It was good fun slapping it round on the kitchen table. We made rolls and pizza bases and that’s what we had for supper.
Mamma said, ‘We’ll use the oven for tonight but in the 1920s there wasn’t any electricity here. We’d have used the old bread oven once a week, like one that used to be next to the mill. We knocked it down because it wasn’t safe anymore.’
PLAN FOR ANOTHER DAY: There’s still an old bread oven up in the village of San Patrignano and I’m going to ask Aunty Teresa if she’ll show me how to light it.
MONDAY
It rained all through the night and all day long. Noisy thunderstorms and lightning which made the twins squeal and hide their heads under the settee cushions but I kind of like thunder - it sounds like rockets blasting off.
This morning we put buckets and containers outside on the patio to catch the rain because Babbo and Mamma had already explained there’d have been no taps or showers or washing machines in those days. Water was precious and was usually fetched in buckets each day from wells or natural springs but we would have been luckier than most because of living down by the river.
I don’t mind not having a shower for a week but Mamma says she’ll miss her long hot soaks with bubble-bath and a glass of wine.
It was AMAZING how much water we collected in the buckets by the time the storms were over. There were a few leave
s, dead ants and even a big scorpion floating around (which, as the man of the house, I had to remove). I had fun chasing Emilia round for a bit with one. She’s scared of scorpions too.
The river was REALLY full after all the rain and the kind of cappuccino colour it always is after a downpour. It rushed by noisily and there were lots of branches and even a whole tree or two whizzing past in the fast current.
I remembered Babbo telling me how in the past, when most ordinary people didn’t have land or trees of their own to cut down for firewood, they would hurry to the river as soon as water levels in the river had gone down after a storm. They were allowed to collect all the driftwood from the river bed and everybody had their own markers to put on top of their pile so there wouldn’t be any arguments. If they cut down trees in the landowners’ forests, they were severely punished and could even be evicted from their houses. Not many people owned their own homes in those days.
Tonight I’ve decided to tear up a strip off an old red tablecloth Mamma said I could use. I know there won’t be anybody else rushing down to collect wood because most people round here use pellets in their stoves which they buy in the shops, but at least we can try and do something authentic (Mamma told me to write that word). And she also told me the Forestry Guards don’t allow anybody to remove wood or anything from the river nowadays.
The twins have only promised to help ‘cos Mamma said they could make gingerbread men after. (It’s not very Italian but I suppose we’re not a completely Italian family anyway - and we all love gingerbread). I don’t think I could cope with controlling the twins without Mamma helping me.