by Annie Hawes
We soon discover, though, that it is best to leave this unusual machine on the San Pietro side of the crossroads when going to Diano – whose tidy townsfolk may not have much idea of hippydom and its outmodedness either, but can certainly recognize a scruffy old banger when they see one.
In San Pietro though, people are less fussy about these things. They simply smile knowingly into their moustaches as we grind and roar our way up and down the village in our miniature tank. As well as keeping us dry, the Morris is just what we need for transporting those unwieldy objects which won’t fit on a motorino. Thirty-kilo gas bottles, in particular, essential for our new cooking arrangements, are particularly tricky to deal with on two wheels for us novices who can’t even balance a dog on our footplates. Especially when cornering. And there is a world of difference between knowing that Signor Ugo-the-grocer of San Pietro is, as our friends claim, legally obliged to bring our gas bottles up to our house, and actually having the nerve to ask him to do it. First, there is the state of our road; then, there are his well-known fearful satirical looks.
Why the gas? Till now, convinced that, apart from the bonfire, there was no other way of cooking in our far-flung outpost – how could we possibly get gas connected up here? – we have been laboriously lighting our wood-stove to cook supper, arguing about whose turn it is to go in and sweat over the thing. Our most advanced bit of technology is a wee camping gas-burner for quick tea- and coffee-making. Now we’ve discovered, thanks to Giacò, that mains gas is unheard of here anyway. Everyone’s gas comes from gas bottles, even in downtown Diano. Not pioneers in the wild at all, then, just daft and ignorant. Giacò has brought us a strange new Italian cooking device, a little four-ring gas-hob with no oven under it, which runs off these behemoth bottles. We go on and on about how brilliant our hob is, while Giacò watches us bemused. The ovenless hob is, it turns out, a perfectly ordinary thing round here. People don’t expect to have an oven at all except in winter, when they light their wood-burning stoves, with oven attached, to keep the house warm; the oven being more of a handy spin-off than a kitchen essential. Roast meats, lasagne, vegetables al forno, are all winter food, stuff you cook once the stove has to be alight anyway: otherwise you have those beehive-shaped outdoor ovens with just the one compartment for fire and food together, which in olden times you fired up once a week for your bread, slipping in a couple of pizzas for that night’s dinner as you went; and, of course, avoiding turning your home into a Turkish bath in the process.
Giacò delivers our goods, which include four real beds – one each and two for guests – of a useable length from some secret and more modern stock than the stuff he keeps on display in his yard. He also sees and notes Pompeo’s beautiful priestly marble sink and draining-board. In years to come, once his eye has been trained up to the kind of stuff that appeals to the cultured Germans who by then are beginning to move into the area in appreciable numbers, he will put huge amounts of energy into trying to buy this from us, offering us any amount of lovely modern ceramic double-sinks as part of the bargain. As yet, though, he hasn’t understood any of this funny foreign stuff. He too is very worried, now he’s seen where we’re living, about our being so far away from humans. We have the motorini, only five minutes to the village on them, and now a car, too, we point out. Giacò just laughs darkly. Why don’t we get ourselves a proper Ape? Where are we going to get spare parts for that thing? In this matter Giacò is prophetic. Within the year the Morris will break down, and we will have to go to enormous lengths to get a spare part from England: a spare part which, when it finally arrives, turns out to be a kind of large wooden bead with a hole in it, which causes much guffawing in the Sulking Café when Gianni the mechanic shows it around.
Next time the car gives up on us, though, a couple of years on, it will end up causing a terrible scandal in the village: no laughing matter. We push it from where it broke down – luckily on the flat road to Diano Marina – to a nice wide space behind some trees, between Luigi’s bar and the olive mill, where we just leave it for several months, it being hot and summery and the motorini being perfectly adequate for our needs at that moment. It sits quietly waiting for our next visit to England when we will get the next lot of absurd spare parts.
By autumn, when we finally go to check what’s needed, all the tyres bar one are completely flat: when I open the door I discover that the panel on the driver’s side has developed a large and horribly lively wasps’ nest.
When we get back, spring by now, bearing a packet of grommets or some such needment, it is only to find that the Morris has vanished completely. The good people of San Pietro have decided in our absence, after some deep debate at the Comune, naturally, that we have permanently abandoned our decrepit machine. And if we haven’t abandoned it, we ought to have done, for the sake of our own health and safety, not to mention that of other road users.
Who needs MOT tests when you have a workers and peasants democracy instead? The Morris has been officially towed away into the riverbed – another favourite method of rubbish disposal of the period, and a useful spot for the larger items that are too far from the top of a mountain to be thrown off – where it sits sadly, snuggled up to a couple of old fridges and a washing machine, just visible from the road to Diano Marina between the tall waving clumps of bamboo. We are highly embarrassed at having irresponsibly left such an eyesore lying about for so long, not to mention having made the Comune go to the trouble and expense of removing it. We leave it where it is and replace it with a more sensible but almost as decrepit four-wheel-drive Fiat, found for us by Gianni the mechanic. At least, as he points out, you can get spare parts for that.
Two or three years later, the Morris is still sitting discreetly behind its screen of canes in the riverbed, along with its companion pieces. So far, no winter rains have produced a torrente torrential enough to dislodge it and carry it away to sea, the destiny the elected representatives of San Pietro presumably had in mind for it. We haven’t given it much thought in all this time: now, though, we meet a bunch of New Age hippy Germans down in Diano Marina who are very excited about the wonderful old English car that’s just lying in the riverbed near San Pietro. They want to tow it away and restore it. But being a law-abiding Germanic type of grunge person, they certainly wouldn’t consider doing this without the owner’s permission. We, they have spotted, are English – do we know whose it is? We admit shamefacedly that we do: it is ours. Now we are embarrassed all over again. These moral and eco-friendly youths are clearly horrified at our irresponsibility. Fancy going around carelessly throwing our old cars into other people’s rivers!
Can they have it, then? they say, doing their best to keep the Green disapproval out of their voices. Of course, say we.
A couple of weeks later we are a little disturbed to see that they have unwittingly towed it back to its old home, the space between the bar and the mill. It is even more of an eyesore after its long and weedy sojourn in the riverbed. A month later, it is still there. Two months later, ditto. The youths have taken it from its resting-place in the river and then, it seems, decided it wasn’t worth repairing and gone back to Germany. We are mortified. What must the Comune be thinking of us? Will they believe we didn’t do this on purpose? Not unless – fingers crossed – someone spotted the German saboteurs, entirely unconnected with us, who perpetrated the awful deed.
It turns out, oddly, to be against the law to use a private car to tow another one in this otherwise carefree land, and we have to get our lorry-driving friends in to remove the Morris bodily. It makes its last journey, this time to a proper scrapyard, in style, poised elegantly on the back of Paletta’s truck: and our souls are cleansed.
It may have taken San Pietro a while to catch up with the indestructibility of modern domestic materials, but once they have spotted the problem, they are very quick on the ball: at heart a deeply ecologically conscious people. In fact, river and mountain dumping made perfect sense until recently, well into the 1970s; pretty much all ordina
ry household stuff here was still perfectly throwable into rivers or burnable without causing any problem. An iron woodstove or bedstead was about the most un-biodegradable thing anyone was likely to own, and even that would rust away in the end, if not carried off by the torrente to add its dollop of harmless iron oxide to the Mediterranean deeps. Even when we first got here, shopping still came in brown paper bags or bits of newspaper, and carriers were rare and precious; while basketwork containers were more common than plastic crates and packs. Glass, of course, still isn’t something to be lightly thrown away – you need all the bottles and jars you can get for the wine and the oil and the preserves.
Local eco-consciousness isn’t really too surprising: after all, it’s hard to find anyone in this country, even among those born and bred in the big cities, who doesn’t still have family in the countryside, their own campagna somewhere or other supplying them with home-grown victuals – making pollution and degradation of the land much more personal matters than we landless British can imagine. Messing up the ecosystem may have an immediate practical effect on your oil and wine and whatever else you’ll be getting from the country cousins this year to fill your larder.
This connection to the land has also saved Italians from the more awful excesses of mass-produced food manufacturing. Could the British sausage ever have been degraded and perverted to the meatless ground-up-gristle-and-fat state we are familiar with if everyone had had relatives in the country who occasionally sent them a pound of the real home-made thing? I think not. Could tomato producers have fobbed us off with things that may look remarkably like tomatoes but are virtually taste free? No. You need a good century of no access to the original item to reduce consumers to the sorry state of ignorance that will induce them to accept such stuff. Here, where everyone has the home-made original to compare it with, even the factory-made food is a hundred times better than our own.
Not long after the removal of the Morris to its last resting place, the Comune of San Pietro will officially recognize the fact that modern rubbish is no longer biodegradable, and the river will be cleansed, its bed cleared out with the help of a pair of large bulldozers, and clumps of flowering mimosa trees and Mediterranean pines will be planted to screen it from view. It will, necessarily, always be a bit of a weed-filled eyesore: it has to be left immensely wide to cope with the freak storms which every few years send millions of gallons of rainwater hurtling down from the hills in a matter of hours, carrying with it tons of collapsed terrace walling, along with the odd uprooted tree and whole oceans of mud and rocks – stuff that would inundate the lower-lying parts of the village if the riverbed was to be narrowed.
Now, years before any such thing is seen in England, a row of those bell-shaped green plastic recycling-domes will appear by the river where once our Morris languished: one for glass, one for paper, one for tin cans, and even one each for used batteries and medical supplies. The smoking horror at the top of the ridge will still be there for a while yet, though its worst excesses will soon be curbed. We’re not too bothered by it for now – it is a useful landmark in these labyrinthine hills, a great help when we go on our foolish getting-lost-in-the-hills walking extravaganzas, and for first-time guests trying to find our house. Head for the ridge with the column of smoke coming from it: find the fire and you’re almost home. Our path leads off the next hairpin bend to the right.
Franco’s lime now lives in our earth closet, in one of Pompeo’s galvanized buckets along with a big wooden ladle; you sprinkle it on dry, a heaped ladleful per visit, and it turns out to keep stinks at bay most impressively. Although we’d infinitely prefer a proper non-worrying water closet, it’s nothing like as bad as we’d expected; and it does seem to be true that the level in the closet remains constant – maybe we’ll really never have to dig another one?
Recently, official confirmation of the role of lime in local hygiene has removed our last doubts in the matter. Sitting one afternoon at the level-crossing in a great crowd of bodies and bikes, waiting with brother Rob for the Trans-Europe Express to pass by and let us back out of Diano Marina, we find, once the usual big blur of thundering train has whizzed past, that the gates remain closed. What are we waiting for now? Craning along the line, we eventually see what appears to be a Fiat 600 heading very slowly along the tracks towards us. As it draws nearer, we see that it really is a Fiat 600, one mounted on a set of train wheels. Not just someone who’s lost their way, then. Its bodywork has been cut right off at the back end, and while one man in an official-looking cap drives, another stands, knotted hanky on head, shovelling white powder from a sack at his feet into a large sieve contraption protruding from the rear of the conveyance, whence it trickles gently, sprinkling the track behind. We look quizzically at our nearest companions in the crowd waiting to get across the rails.
Calce, says someone. Lime, to neutralize the danger of germs and pong from all those flying Trans-European toilets, which flush their cargoes straight on to the line as they pass through town. Ugh. Can this be true? Will it work?
Robert says it will. In the early days of our Great British Parliament, he tells us, when the River Thames was still an open sewer, the ceiling-high curtains of Westminster would be dipped in lime during the summer months to keep at bay the pollution and sickness rising from the noxious horrors which in those far-off days floated about in the waters below. Ugh again.
In view of all this pedigree, and the fact that there’s still lots of Franco’s sackful left, we decide to investigate its advertised paint-and-filler-type properties next. Over the months we have concluded that, beautiful though our drystone walls may be, for the inside of a house they are too uncleanable: not only does earth-dust trickle faintly from them but there are just too many cracks and crevices inside the house for Things to nest in. If what we’ve been told of its virtues is true, lime should solve all this in one go. Brother Robert doesn’t believe a word of it: we should get some proper civilized Polyfilla and do the job well, if it’s worth doing. Fine plan; but as yet no one’s felt the need for such stuff in this country, where the concept of DIY is still unknown. Everyone does things themselves – of course they do, this is a land of renaissance men, of peasants who can turn their hand to anything – but they don’t expect special make-it-easy products for the non-professional. In fact, I’m not sure they know they aren’t professionals. It will be a good ten years before we hear talk of DIY – or ‘Fai-da-te’ – round here, before handyperson products appear in the hardware shops. For now, we have the local classics to choose from: cement mortar, limewash, or a strange crumbly white plaster called French stucco. Lime it is then.
Down in San Peo one-eyed Mariuccia, renaissance woman, shows us the right kind of glue to mix our lime with, something that’s sold by the kilo, and insists that we buy an enormous and absurd-looking paintbrush, more like a soft broom with its handle cut short. We goggle at this ridiculous item which must have been made by those backward mountain folk, but buy it anyway, as well as a pair of normal English-style paintbrushes, so as not to hurt her feelings. Naturally her brush turns out to be the essential tool for applying the thick-yet-sloppy gloop we’ve mixed up in a bucket following her instructions. Gloop which, as predicted by Franco, really does fill and paint at the same time when applied with the right implement. The proper big flappy brush drops a great load of the stuff on to the wall at once, a pint at a go, which gets sucked into the crevices by itself as you swirl your square-foot of soft bristles about, sending myriads of unattractive creatures scuttling for cover, smoothing out the lumpy, irregular stones and filling the earthy gashes and spider-holes between them so thoroughly that the walls look almost plastered. With the more normal-looking brushes you can’t pick up anything like enough of the lime. It would take you the rest of your life to finish the job. We discard the useless things in disgust after a frustrating five minutes, and now have to go all the way back down to the village to buy another pair of truncated-broom things. By the end of the day our upstairs kitchen/liv
ing room is magically transformed. Pure white and no more creepy things. Wonderful. Perfect. If only Franco was here we would hug him. How could we have doubted his wisdom, or his lime?
*
The Diano boys, like Mariuccia, also find the presence of a male in our household most comforting. In fact, they have developed an annoying tendency to address all their remarks to our brother Rob, even though he can’t understand what they’re saying since he doesn’t speak more than two words of Italian, and we sisters have to translate it all anyway. Now, they tell us to tell him, as if it was all nothing to do with us, is the time to get on with concreting our downstairs floor, damp-proofing it as we go, and building the partition walls to create our bathroom and our two bedrooms below. Now that sweltering high summer weather is here, we have discovered that it is a good ten degrees cooler down there at night, half-built into the earth as it was by the great foresight of Pompeo’s forebears, and we’ve moved our beds down here well away from the oven-like upstairs, which we have kindly left to the brother. Who, having as little training in such matters as he does in the language, will doubtless never guess at the superior sleeping conditions below stairs from which he is excluded. Least said…
Still, as everyone points out, we can’t go on sleeping down there with nothing but a dirty old earthen floor. So Ciccio, Paletta, and Mimmo the master-builder sweep Rob off in a wave of manly lorry-driving camaraderie which knows no linguistic barriers, while we move our beds out under the roofed-over bit of the patio, and hang our mosquito nets for protection. Sunday morning, and a wave of wild activity begins. Wheelbarrows of gravel, sacks of cement, hillocks of sand sprout all around our home, while more and more boys and young men whose faces we only vaguely know, protégés, it appears, of Ciccio, Paletta and Mimmo, appear and heave everything along our winding path. They mix and shout all afternoon to the accompaniment of a large ghetto blaster which roars out football commentaries hour after hour. Nobody wants paying: they all, apparently, meet up anyway on a Sunday to listen to the football – there being a countrywide ban on live TV transmission of Sunday matches, aimed at keeping stadium attendances up – and they may as well have something to do while they listen, they say. Our house and lands are the ideal Sunday afternoon spot, plenty of room for everyone and no parents around to complain about noise and chaos. Of course: we’d forgotten that they all had to live at home till they got married. As the concrete goes down and we start getting to know our crowd of helpful youths, it is borne in upon us that Iron John is alive and well and living in Liguria. No shortage of role models for young males here. Paletta, Mimmo and Ciccio each have their own band of youthful followers. Paletta’s collection is the largest: he was a footballing hero in his early twenties, played for the Imperia team in regional matches until he ruined a knee, and is still famous throughout the province for a string of spectacular match-saving goals. We are pleased to see that, although football may win for charisma, serious building skills (Mimmo), and cooking and jazz (Ciccio, my favourite) also attract their fair share of aficionados. Rob has attached himself to the cooking and music department, gyrating and shovelling with the foodies’ gang. Perhaps there is hope for his cuisine yet.
