A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (14 page)

While I was doing this I noticed a bold, good-looking girl. She was different from the others. They were all brown or black haired; but she was an ash blonde with blue eyes and she was very slim which made her seem taller than she was. She looked more like a Scandinavian than an Italian to me, but with more fire. Whatever she was she smiled at me.

Then the doctor arrived. For the last time I descended the ladder and said goodbye to the farmer and his wife who cried. They were the first people in the whole district to take the risk of helping us. Then I hopped across the yard to the Fiat.

As I was getting into it the girl came up and leant over the top of the open door.

‘I vill com to see you in the
ospedale,’
she said, in fractured English. She had a deep middle-European voice. ‘Wonce I have seen you in the
orjanotrofio
and you vaved and the
soldati
went pom pom. Ve vill have lessons in languages,’ she said. ‘Your language and my language.’ And she smiled again. Then someone shut the door and we drove away. ‘If iu uont tu enter dhe steiscen iu mast haev e plaetfom tikit,’ Wanda said.
‘Se vuole entrare nella stazione deve avere un biglietto.’

I was lying in a bed in the
Ospedale Peracchi
on the outskirts of Fontanellato, only a few hundred yards from the
orfanotrofio
. I had now been free for three days. It seemed much longer. Wanda was seated on a chair which one of the
suore
, the nuns who were also expert nurses, had placed in a corner of the room, as far away from me as possible. Equally discreetly, the door had been left wide open. Both of us were armed with phrase books, she with a large Italian/English version, I with the English/Italian booklet which I had salvaged on my way out of the
orfanotrofio
. With their help we were making heavy weather of one another’s languages, and it was not fair of her to change subjects like this.

Up to now we had been reading useful phrases to one another from the chapters on ‘Trams and Buses’. ‘Last stop.
Ool ghet aut ‘Kwah-lee ow-toh-bus vann-oh ah Toh-reen-oh?
Which buses go to Turin?’ I ruffled through the pages of my book which was so small that it looked as if it had been printed for a midget, until I found a section headed ‘At the Station –
Alla Stazione’
, and said,
‘Oh per-soh eel mee-oh beel-yet-oh
. I have lost my ticket.’ To which she replied, severely, ‘Iu haev misleid iur tikit. Iu caant continiu iur geerni anless iu ricaver it.
Lei ha smarrito il suo biglietto. Non può proseguire il suo viaggio se non lo trova.’

‘Nohn vawr-ray-ee cohn-teen-u-ar loh
. I don’t want to continue it,’ I said. I enunciated this, and all the other phrases, with such painstaking slowness that I sounded like a run-down gramophone.

‘Iu hev mist dhe train.
È partito il treno,’
she said, triumphantly, like one of the OK people in the orphanage with a royal flush poker.

‘Grahts-ee-ay. Lay ay stah-toh jehn-tee-lay
. Thank you very much. Most kind of you.’

‘Rieli nathing,’ she said, airily. ‘Ai em ounli tu glaed if ai kaen help iu.
Proprio nulla, per me è un vero piacerepoterla aiutare.’

She shut her book and looked at me with an air of despair which, to me, was very beautiful.

‘Hurrock,’ she said (this is what my name sounded like on her lips).

‘You will never learn
italiano
like this. You spik and then you forget. First you must learn
la grammatica
. I have learned English
grammatica
, so also must you learn Italian. And you must learn
presto
, queekly, queekly. Here, you see, I have written for you a
grammatica
with
aggettivi, come se dice?
Adjectives! Adjectives!
Che lingua!
Also auxiliary verbs and verbs,
regolari
and
irregolari
. You will learn all these, please, by tomorrow.’

‘I can’t learn all this by tomorrow.’

‘You
vill,’
she said, ‘or I shall not kom more. I shall teach to some-onels. The
superiora
says I can kom ven I vish. If you vont me to kom you must vork.’

She consulted her book. ‘Hueer dheers e uil dheers e ui.
Proverbio. Dove c’è la volonta c’è la via.’

‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ I said. ‘That’s a proverb. I want you to come to see me more than anything.’

‘Then learn your
grammatica
,’ she said, consulting her superior phrase book.
‘Far presto!
Luk slipi!’

Every afternoon Wanda visited me in the
ospedale
. We sat together in the back garden, hidden from the outside world by one of the projecting wings of the building and a hedge, under the benevolent but constant chaperonage of the
superiora
and her attendant
suore
who were never far away. Centuries of invasion of their country by foreign soldiery, and the concomitant outrages which had been inflicted on them had made the members of female religious orders particularly adept in protecting not only their own virtues, but that of those temporarily committed to their charge.

She used to tell me the latest news about my friends. How some people had already set off towards the line; others were thinking of going to Switzerland; how one officer whose identity I never discovered had been hidden in the
castello
of a local
principessa
who had been so impressed by his girlish face that she had the brilliant idea of dressing him as a young woman of fashion and putting him on a train to Switzerland. This she had done but, unfortunately, he had looked so desirable on the train that some soldiers had ‘interfered’ with him, as the
News of the World
used to put it, and discovered the truth, although one of them got punched hard on the nose in the process of doing so.

Wanda herself was in favour of my going to Switzerland – she had none of my optimism about the Allies’ capacity to advance rapidly up Italy – crossing from somewhere near the head of the Val d’Aosta with a party which was being organized by the pipe-smoking interpreter; but I hated the idea of going to Switzerland and perhaps spending the winter not imprisoned but interned which seemed to me the same thing, perhaps locked up in a hotel on the shores of some drab Swiss lake, watching the rain beating down into it. Her other plan, which seemed more cheerful and sensible than going to Switzerland, was that I should become gardener’s boy at the castle of that same
principessa
who had sent the transvestite officer on his last journey.

In the garden we worked away, teaching one another our respective languages. After our initial, disastrous, but diverting attempt to do it with phrase books, we went back to the beginnings. Wanda made me start at the bottom, conjugating verbs and struggling with pronouns. Fortunately for me she already had a sound knowledge of grammar and was far ahead.

I concentrated on teaching her new words, the way to pronounce the ones she already knew and some colloquial expressions. But as the days went by, listening to her, I found myself increasingly reluctant to destroy her rich, inimitable idiom, and her strangely melancholy accent which to me was a triple distillation of the essence of middle Europe. It seemed monstrous to graft on to this vigorous stem my own diluted version of English, originally learned in a London suburb and further watered down by school teachers and the BBC.

‘Questo e un sasso
. Dis is a ston,’ she would say, picking up a piece of gravel from one of the paths. ‘I strait it avay,’ throwing it over her shoulder. She also employed a remarkable word of her own invention ‘to squitch’. This could be used to describe any kind of operation from corking a bottle of wine to mending a piece of complicated machinery. ‘You just squitch it in,’ she said, as I tried to replace the winder which had come off her dilapidated wrist-watch.

It would have been tedious if we had confined ourselves to studying one another’s languages; but, as well, we had long, rambling conversations about our lives. She told me about her family. They were Yugoslavs, Slovenes from the Carso, the great, windswept limestone plateau which extends inland from the Gulf of Trieste at the head of. the Adriatic towards Ljubljana, territory which had been ceded to Italy after the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919. Her father had been a schoolmaster in a Slovene village in the Carso called Stanjel until the provisions of the peace treaty moved the Italian frontier with Slovenia twenty-five miles inland from the Adriatic, when it was re-named San Daniele del Carso by the Italians. Much later, in the early thirties, Mussolini decided to break down the strong nationalistic spirit which still existed in those parts of Slovenia which had been ceded to Italy. He forbade the use of the Slovene language and Slovenian teachers were deported to Italy. Among them was Wanda’s father. He was of the same age as the
colonello
at the
orfanotrofio
but his background was entirely different. He scarcely knew any Italian at all, his second language being German, the official language of the Empire (he had served in the Austrian Army in the First World War) but now he was sent to Fontanellato to teach in the school there where, for some years knowing little of the language, he experienced great difficulty in correcting his pupils’ essays. He was a liberal of the old sort and detested Fascists and Fascism. Wanda told me that her family had never been allowed to return to their country and that her mother cried very often when she thought of her home, although the local people at Fontanellato, who had originally called them
Tedeschi
, Germans, were now very friendly. She herself was an accountant and she worked in the
Banca d’Agricoltura
in the village.

When Wanda was not at the
ospedale
she was either working at the bank or else taking supplies to the other prisoners in the surrounding country. Fortunately, the weather was still good. Meanwhile, I got on with the ‘prep’ which she had set me; but without her I found the garden a rather creepy, shut-away place. Occasionally a low-flying German aircraft roared overhead; almost equally loud were the roars of out-patients who were having their teeth extracted without the aid of painkillers, by Giulio, a local man who not only acted as
infirmiere
but also stood in as a dental surgeon in urgent cases in the absence of the real dentist who only visited Fontanellato once a week.

Every day the news got worse. On the twelfth of September Radio Roma broadcast the news that Mussolini had been rescued by German parachutists. The station was now in the hands of the Germans, and temporarily at least, it seemed more reliable and less euphoric than the BBC which, according to Wanda who had heard it, had actually broadcast on the same day the sound of the bells of St Paul’s ringing out in rejoicing at the invasion of Italy.

On the thirteenth and fourteenth the news from Salerno was really awful. Rome announced that the Germans were launching massive counter-attacks on the beachhead, and this was confirmed by the BBC. By the sixteenth the news was better. The counter-attack seemed to have lost its steam; but on that day an order was broadcast that all Italian officers, NCOs and men were to present themselves forthwith in uniforms at the nearest German headquarters. No one but a lunatic would have obeyed such an order, and, in fact scarcely anyone did; but what was more serious was another announcement to the effect that anyone sheltering or feeding prisoners of war would be dealt with under martial law, and I had visions of the
superiora
going before a firing squad as Nurse Cavell had done. It was obvious that I could not stay in the
ospedale
any longer and, for the first time I realized what Wanda had been trying to din into me, that a knowledge of Italian was going to be essential if I was to avoid being recaptured.

On or about the sixteenth the
Gazzetta di Parma
, Italy’s oldest newspaper, which had enjoyed a very brief period of editorial freedom after the Armistice, before once again being muzzled, published a statement by the Commandant of the SS in Parma. Full of gruesome bonhomie, he conveyed his felicitations to the population and especially to members of the Fascist organisations, and then went on to speak of a new period of prosperity in store for the Italian people. Next to this absolutely crazy announcement there was a notice to the effect that a curfew was imposed on the inhabitants of the entire Province from ten p.m. onwards, and that anyone who disregarded it was liable to be shot.

The next day, the seventeenth of September, while we were having what was to be our last language lesson together, I told Wanda that I must leave the
ospedale
.

‘You are right,’ she said. ‘If you had not suggested it yourself I was going to tell you. I am worried for you but I am much more worried for the
superiora
. There are Germans everywhere now. But it will have to be tomorrow. My father and the doctor will arrange something. They are great friends.’

I was worried for everyone who was helping me. All I had to lose was my freedom; their lives were in danger. I was particularly worried about Wanda and all the other women and girls quartering the country round about on their bicycles bringing food every day to the prisoners who were still hiding among the vines wondering, like me, what was the best thing to do.

Our relationship had changed a great deal since we had first met. It had progressed far beyond the stage of giving one another language lessons. I had begun by thinking her a very good-looking girl and being flattered that she should take any notice of me. Then I had begun to admire her courage and determination; now I was in love with her.