by Mary Contini
‘Don’t you think we should look for a place in the city?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Zio Bennie liked to encourage newcomers to open shops in other towns and villages, partly to spread the competition and also to protect his own patch. It suited him if Cesidio took the Cockenzie shop. ‘Try this first. See how you get on, then we’ll see. I’ll keep looking for you.’
Emidio was having doubts as well. The shop at Elm Row was making hardly any money; there was so little to sell. This business was not as easy as they had all made out.
‘Zio Benny, do you really think we should stay? Why don’t we all go back to Italy and try again. We could sell our cheese in the market in Torino. Remember, Alfonso?’
‘It’s no use, Emidio, believe me. Things are still unsettled in Italy. There’s huge unemployment now that the army has been disbanded, and there are strikes across the whole country. Who knows what will happen now that the war is over?
‘I think we’ll have a better chance if we work hard here. If we save everything then in ten years or so we can afford to go back in a position of strength.’
Cesidio agreed. ‘Inflation is running riot. You get seven lire for a day’s work in a factory but it costs seventy lire to feed your family. You think things are tight here. This is paradiso, believe me. There’s no way we can go back to working in the old ways. Those days are really gone.’
Giovanni spoke up, trying to calm them down. ‘Senti, ragazzi, don’t you see the opportunity you have here? If you go back you’ll end up a slave of a big company, making cars for Fiat or clothes for a sweat factory in Naples. Going back on the land waiting for the wolves to attack the sheep will never satisfy you now.
‘Remember we’ve learned to look after ourselves now, we’re used to making our own decisions. Here at least we can do that, è vero, Alfonso?’
Alfonso agreed. ‘Think it through. The sums are obvious. If we work here and save, we can change sterling for lire in ten years, then we can go home well-off. I’m for staying.
‘We’ve not fought for nothing. We have proved our allegiance to both countries. We’re all valued ex-combattenti. We’re respected by our own Government as well as the Government here. You’ll see, we’ll reap the benefits.’
Alfonso had spent the last six months working in the artillery stores. He had had dealings with the big companies in Turin and Milan that had made fortunes supplying the war machine, companies like Fiat who were now one of the major employers in the North. He had seen the food shortages, seventy-five-hour weeks and strikes. He had heard of anti-communist riots and street warfare. There was no way he was going back to Italy until things had settled and there was a strong government.
It was agreed. Cesidio would go down the coast. They would keep helping each other with loans so that they were not dependent on banks and interest. The opportunities ahead of them were there for the taking.
Maria came in from the flat across the road with some of the pastone she knew Alfonso liked. The children were with her, now aged six, five and four. They loved to sit with their uncles and watch them play cards.
The conversation changed to more relaxed homely matters as Alfonso poured some wine for his friends. Emidio put a few more logs on the fire and took the cards down from the mantelpiece. He needed to take the eights, nines and tens from the British pack so that they could play scopa, so he called the children over to play a game where they pointed to a card every time he dealt one of the offending numbers.
‘Eight! Otto!’
‘Ten! Dieci!’ They squealed with delight every time they recognised a number.
‘Sette Bello! Sette Bello! Scopa!’ shouted Vittorio, picking up the seven of diamonds, using the winning word that he had heard the men shout out when they lifted all the cards from the table and scored two points.
The men all cheered. ‘Bravo, Vittorio!’ He was going to be smart this little Vittorio Fortunato.
Alfonso lifted up his son and sat him on the table so that he could clap his hands and shout out ‘Scopa! Scopa!’ to his heart’s content.
He smoothed his son’s hair. ‘This is what we are working for, boys: a safer future for our children. For us the die is already cast. We have their future to build, the future of Italia and Scotland.’
Maria sat on her husband’s lap. ‘You should have been here when the Carabinieri came during the war. They were playing in the big concert hall; what is it called, Zio Benny?’
‘The Usher Hall.’
‘They were in full uniform, magnificent with their cloaks and their wide hats with wild feathers and dazzling medals. We watched them march up the Mound and the crowds cheered and clapped as they played our wonderful music.
‘Alfonso, you should have seen your children! They’re Italian through and through! They were shouting “Viva l’Italia!” and all the Scottish people were laughing.’
‘I had no idea that the Carabinieri came here. They inspired us so much at the front, kept our spirits up.’ Alfonso was thoughtful.
Emidio spoke up. ‘Alfonso did you fight with the storm troopers, the Arditi? We came across them in the second winter. They saved our skin many a time.’
‘Yes, Emidio. What brave men! Mad as well, I think. They were fearless. Without them, and help from the British and French battalions, we would have had it. Things could have turned out very differently.’
Benedetto had not been called up. He had felt left out but had followed the war eagerly, desperate for every bit of news, keeping newspaper cuttings of anything written about the Italian front.
‘Alfonso, I spoke to some of the Carabinieri. They told me a story about the whole army singing in the face of the enemy. Is that true?’ Benny lifted Vittorio from the table as he spoke. He had heard about a magnificent night when the war had stood still for a moment, for Italy.
‘Yes. I was there; it was after the battle at Monte Santo. I’ll never forget it.’
‘Me too,’ Cesidio remembered.
‘And me,’ Emidio said.
‘What happened?’ Maria had not heard any of the men talk about the war before.
‘I remember exactly. The eleventh battle of Isonzo. Over fifty divisions fought, Cadorna was our General. Do you remember, boys?’
‘How can we forget?’ Cesidio would never forget.
Alfonso continued. ‘It was the night of 26 August, two years ago. We were fighting between Gorizia and Trieste, in the north-east. It was terrible terrain, terrible. We fought man to man, face to face with the enemy.’
He paused. ‘It was impossible. Freezing cold. Ice. Ice everywhere. Imagine, so high, ice even in August; they were the worst ice and rock faces we had to climb in the whole campaign. You’ve no idea. We just battled on and on, every step agony.
‘The Arditi fought alongside us. They took the hardest ridges. When we could do no more, were finished, they carried on, led us forward.
‘Most of them were boys from the South, young mountain men like us. And a lot of Siciliani; a lot of Siciliani. They fight like madmen.’ He laughed. ‘No thought for their own skins, blindly loyal to their leaders.’
Benedetto was engrossed.
‘What happened?’
‘Eventually, I don’t know how they did it, our second army took the Bainsizza Plateau, which is north-west of Gorizia, and pushed the Austrians back. It was a great success, a great boost to our morale. We had been pulling and pushing like a bloody tug-of-war up and down the mountains.
Alfonso in soldier’s uniform, c. 1917
‘You know, you have to understand. From day to day we never knew what was happening along the front; if the enemy was above us or below us; if we were getting ammunition; if we were getting any supplies. This time, I don’t know why, the news that our Tricolore was flying on the summit of Monte Santo swept all along the mountain ridges like a dancing flame.
‘We had lost so many, hundreds of thousands, Madonna mia, so many. In one hour five of my men died before my eyes; knocked down like flies. But, even s
o, this time it felt as if we had made a huge advance. This time it seemed as if it was worthwhile. We had saved Italy from being overrun by the Austrians. My men had not died in vain. Not this time.
‘I can’t explain it. The victory was intoxicating. We were drunk with relief. It was as if for two years we had fought and resisted the Austrians sweeping down into our land, down the staircase of the Alps into Italy. Two years of living with death, of walking with the Devil, and finally a victory. Finalmente!’
Cesidio (2nd left, standing) in soldier’s uniform, c. 1917
Alfonso stopped. He was lost in his own thoughts, oblivious of his wife, still on his lap, oblivious of his friends, who were listening captivated, oblivious of his children sitting at his feet.
He lowered his voice as if whispering to an angel, reminding himself that he had not forgotten his fallen comrades.
‘The sky was clear. The moon was high, a strange violet glow bounced off the mountain tops. Now and then a flair or shot would ring out, a defeated Austrian’s final barefaced act of defiance against us.
‘We were silent. We were terrified that these fiends would start back at us again, starting it all over again, robbing us of our moment of victory. We leant against the mountainside, looking towards Heaven, rejoicing that our country was protected for another day, thanking our God.’
He looked up, remembering that the other men were listening.
‘Ragazzi, you remember when in Fontitune we used to call across the mountains using the echo to carry our message for miles? That night the mountains carried news of our victory and a requiem for our fallen heroes. Out of the blue, and startling us all in the quiet, we heard the opening clash of symbols of the Marcia Reale.
‘It was coming from the white walls of the convent on the summit of the Monte Santo, ruined by gunfire but still standing like a monument to the dead. It was the Divisional Band of the four Italian regiments that had taken the mountain. After a moment of stunned silence, soldiers answered the call to salute our country.
‘One after another, hundreds upon tens of hundreds of men sang out the words of our National Anthem.
‘A colonel from somewhere called out an echo: “Soldati, attenzione!”
‘Others repeated it, as did I when it reached my ears, cupping my hand to make my call travel as far as it could around the mountains; calling so that no Italian soldier dying in agony or lying deserted on a ridge would not hear and be consoled.
‘It’s true, Zio Benny, it was beautiful. We each stood to attention, one after the next. We echoed our response to the booming of the music from the mountain above us.
‘Viva l’Italia! Viva il Re! Viva i Soldati!
‘Like the swelling of a great ocean, again and again rebounding from the mountain-sides, and in the face of the cowed Austrian army, we called out a salute to our country and to our king. We prayed to the Gods with our cry of victory.
‘I’ve never experienced anything like it. A wave of pride, of love and sorrow, of elated joy, swept over us all.’
He shook his head and swallowed, his emotion choking him. He gently pushed Maria to the floor beside her children. He looked at her.
‘To fight through the horror, to go forward through hell itself, you have to strip your heart of love or you would surely die of sorrow alone. But the music made us alive again, resurrected us from the living death. Then we wept. We cried. To a man, we shouted and cheered.
‘The band played on: the “Hymn of Garibaldi”, the “Hymn of Mameli”, the fighting songs of triumph.
‘Gradually the music faded away. We stood enchanted, spellbound. Then in a breathless magnificent communal cry of ecstasy, a final huge cheer rang out across the hills. Every last one of us called out to God to save Italia and save our souls.’
Emidio and Cesidio had also been there; they understood. Quietly they hummed the tune, a hymn to those who had fought with them, those who had died with them.
Cesidio (1st left, standing) with a group of soldiers, c. 1917
‘Le ragazze di Trieste,
Cantan’ tutte con adore,
O Italia, O Italia del mio cuore,
Tu ci vieni a liberar!’
They wept together, remembering the sufferings and losses of the last four years.
‘Do you know, we heard that Toscanini himself had climbed up to the Convento to conduct the band and it was he who had inspired the intensity and beauty of the music?’
Giovanni began the opening bars of the Marcia Reale and there, in the back shop of the confectioner in Easter Road, they sang the Italian National Anthem:
‘Red from the hearts that were pierced for thee,
White as thy mountains are white,
Green as the spring of thy soul everlasting,
whose life-blood is light.’
Alien’s Order, 1920
With Maria and her children sitting among them, they laid to rest some of the horrors of the war, pushing to the depths of their souls the disastrous defeat of Caporetto that followed this moment of salvation barely three months later. They felt proud that they had fought with the Italians, the British and the French to preserve peace in Europe.
Therefore Alfonso found it hard to understand when, a year later, they all received notice from the Edinburgh City Police that they and their families had to register under the 1920 Aliens Order and that they would now be under police surveillance and be deported if they broke the law.
13
Cockenzie
1921–1922
Cockenzie lay ten miles to the east of Edinburgh, an old fishing village on the Firth of Forth. The café was in a great location, right in the middle of the village, between the Auld Kirk and the Thorntree Inn.
Every morning the warm smell of freshly baked bread came wafting across the street from the bakery at the Co-op. Twice a day the milk cart came round with warm milk. Children ran out, barefoot in the summer, with a jug to be filled and a few pennies to buy butter or eggs. Beef and lamb sold at Harkes the butcher was raised in the fields behind the village. There was even a local slaughter-house at the harbour at Port Seton, the adjoining village five minutes’ walk away.
Behind his grocery shop in Elcho Place, Dan Buchanan made oil-skins for the fishermen. The ‘bomb’ skins were put through a process of dipping in yellow oil until they were stiff and waterproof. The fishermen wore them over their heads like a strange yellow cloak over their all-in-one knitted undergarments and their heavy cotton trews and crew-neck sweaters.
Stewart’s, the boot-maker’s store, was opposite the café. It was a small cupboard-like shop, lined with boots, sheets of leather and all manner of tools and nails. Mr Stewart sat in his den with the door open, tapping away with his hammer, high on the smell of leather, polish and glue.
The harbour and boatbuilding yard were at the west end of the village, alongside the Salt Pans. Here sea water was boiled in twelve-metre metal pans, the steam leaving the surrounding walls pearly white. The salt that was scraped off was used for curing and preserving the fish. Lying between the harbour and the café was the Boat Shore, a natural harbour in the rocks widening to a sandy cove.
The big trawlers, with coal-fired engines, went to sea for days on end, returning to harbour with huge catches of haddock and cod. In the summer, when they were following the herring, the boats were away for weeks, fishing as far south as Lowestoft and Yarmouth. The smaller sail-boats went out nightly in the Firth of Forth, often landing their catch at the Boat Shore to avoid harbour taxes.
If the weather was bad and the boats couldn’t go out, there was no catch; the whole community suffered.
Map of coastal route between Edinburgh and Cockenzie
The fishing families lived in low whitewashed cottages along the shore, their front doors opening directly on to the beach. The fishwives sat on their doorsteps baiting the lines with clams, coiling them into baskets layered with grass so that their men could cast the lines without catching the hooks.
Poorer families li
ved in a decaying block of flats rented from the Fishermen’s Society. Each room-and-kitchen housed a family of six or more, the dozen families sharing an outside privy. They took turns weekly to boil water and scrub their clothes by hand in the communal washhouse.
The flats were right on the shore. On a wild night, when the tide was high and the sea was rough, the waves would wash up, crashing terrifyingly against the back of the building. The wind would whirl around, shaking the foundations to the core.
On the ground floor of the flats was the Cockenzie Café. The shop was split into two, selling ice cream and confectionery on the left side of a wooden partition, fried fish and chips on the other.
Fisherwomen at the Boat Shore, Cockenzie, c. 1920
The Italian man who had taken over the shop had been the subject of much local interest. Now that news of his wife and two children had arrived, the local women were disconcerted. They didn’t know what to expect; they’d never had a foreign woman living among them.
They didn’t have long to find out. The day after she arrived, early in the morning, Cesidio took Marietta and his two children to the Boat Shore. It was a bright, clear morning. Four boats were waiting in the shallows. The water was calm, the waves lapping against the sand.
A dozen or so fishwives were already there. They made a colourful sight in ankle-length, striped woollen skirts, covered with long ‘peenies’, aprons, full-sleeved blouses buttoned modestly at their throats. Hand-knitted shawls thrown over their shoulders, and brightly patterned head scarves tied over their heads and round their necks, protected them from the wind.
They looked across at Cesidio. ‘Morning, Sis.’
