by Annie Hawes
Lucy and I meanwhile are sitting on the patio sipping our wine with Domenico and watching the firefighting helicopters as they arrive up here from the sea and dump hissing smoking splodges of water on to the hillsides. On the ridge opposite us is a vasca, one of the huge round rainwater tanks people have built to collect extra water supplies, and another pilot, amazingly skilful, is hovering over this thing, dipping his dangling bucket contraption into it, and then flying off in a great arc up the valley, a curving rainbow of water drops cutting across the whole width of the sky as he loops past within feet of us and heads off up into the smoke.
The precious fresh water from the vasca will only be used for saving cultivated land, says Domenico, and the sea water goes on wilderness areas. Salt water will contaminate the land for seven years, so you don’t want to drop it anywhere people are trying to grow things. Not unless you absolutely have to. The helicopters don’t drop the water on to the heart of the fire, as we’d imagined, but round the edges to contain it while it burns itself out. If things get really bad, though, if they can’t contain it, they will have to bring in the Canadians.
What Canadians? I ask. Domenico, winding me up outrageously, says that this is some extra-skilful type of pilot trained in Vietnam to incredible accuracy at salt-water bombing. I’m not entirely sure about this, not recalling any Canadian involvement in Vietnam, but before I can make further enquiries a red-faced puffing brother appears round the bend behind the rock, convinced that we ought to be evacuating the house immediately. From down by the sea it looks terrible. No, says Domenico, there’s no danger yet. The fire’s a good two kilometres away. The only thing we have to fear are flying sparks – they might just catch on the wild land above the house. Much better stay here so we can keep an eye, put them out straight away if they do. It’s a pity, he says, that we haven’t paid more attention to our Cleaning up there. Then we’d have nothing to worry about.
In a life-threatening situation, mutual understanding can make great strides. This, we suddenly see, is what has been annoying Nino. This is why he thinks we deserve to have our house burnt to the ground. Dirt is not just untidy: it is a fire hazard. Domenico, like Nino, has been hinting about all the Dirt above our house, off and on, for some years now; we have been gaily ignoring him. Worse still, we have been making mindless jokes about the local Compulsive Cleaning Disorder, the apparently senseless San Pietro hatred of all plant life that isn’t edible. We never go up on the steep wild bit above the house, nothing cultivated grows there, so the idea of bothering to clear it has always seemed absurd. Just keeping the olive terraces in order is work enough, and we have so far not caught on to the idea that the Cleaning was at all connected with fire hazards.
Domenico has trouble believing we could be this thick. If one person’s olives catch, so will everyone else’s around. Which means, if you have to replant, fifteen years before the next decent crop. Plenty of time to go hungry. And there’s a hefty fine these days, he adds, for anyone whose Dirty Land has caused other people’s olives to burn.
We look nervously up at our Filth. No one’s got any olive trees up above here, though, have they? we say anxiously. Just to the sides of the house and below. Domenico agrees. But, he points out helpfully, there’s no reason why fire shouldn’t go downhill or sideways. It’s all a question of wind. And he shows us how the fire will start, first creeping low among the tangles of dried grasses, then spreading up the bushes and the clumps of broom – there are certainly plenty of those, we’ve never even contemplated getting rid of them, you never know when you might suddenly need a large number of tomato-ties – and on to the lower branches of the scrub oaks above the house, two of which, we see now, are actually touching the uphill side of the roof. Close to the downhill side of which, oh horror, dangle several fat branches of our two tallest olive trees. From whence, once they’d got going, the entire hillside of olives could catch fire.
We leap up, panic-stricken. We’ll start sawing the branches off those oak trees straight away. And collect up all our buckets, just in case. And a hosepipe to run from our water tank – no, that won’t be any use if the fire’s uphill, there’ll be no pressure… Jim, wild-eyed, is already rushing about collecting anything that can hold water… four buckets, two big bowls, a giant saucepan…
Domenico, watching these proceedings, begins to realize the full depths of our ignorance. Haven’t we ever seen a forest fire?
No, we haven’t, we say, poised for action. We come from a country where it rains all the time, no olive trees, no vineyards, no forest fires. Like Holland.
Ah, sì, sì, says Domenico in his usual disbelieving way. He doesn’t seem to have noticed anything about Holland except its culinary inadequacies. Maybe he went there in a heatwave or something? And he’s staying infuriatingly calm.
Well, a few buckets of water aren’t going to be any use to you, he says. If a living, sappy tree was to go up, the blaze would be so huge and so hot that it would catch the house anyway with just a filo di vento, a thread of wind. It’s not a question of individual branches. We’d need to chop the nearest half-dozen trees right down.
Should we start doing that, then? we ask, raring to do something, anything, wondering if he might be persuaded to lend us his chainsaw, seeing that it’s an emergency and we’ve got a large strong brother to hand. But we’ve got the whole thing arse-about-face. The point is to stop the fire getting a hold at ground level in the first place. You want it to rush past fast and low, never get enough heat going or enough height to catch a tree. Chopped-down trees lying about the place would fuel the fire, not hinder it, wouldn’t they?
The dumbos stand agawp. It doesn’t seem as amusing to us as it does, apparently, to Domenico.
I gaze horror-struck at the newly menacing hillside behind the house. There are enormous quantities of thick, clumpy and mostly tinder-dry grass, gorse, broom, and everything else growing thickly up the hill. It will take days to get rid of it all, I say, grabbing the sickles from their nail.
Yes, maybe, says Domenico non-committally. We are getting our come-uppance for years of laziness and Dirt, and our evil neighbour is enjoying himself like nobody’s business. We scramble up the hillside and start chopping away; within minutes sweat is pouring from us in such quantities that there’s no point even trying to wipe it away. The sun is unbearably intense on our heads; it has been so hot every day for the last week that it has reduced us to total lethargy from eleven in the morning to six at night. Except when totally immersed in water. On top of that, it is the mad-dog time of day, and normally only fear of death could make me, for one, step out from the cool shade of our patio roof. But fear of death – or at the very least, of homelessness and responsibility for destroying the livelihood of half of San Pietro, which is almost as bad – is exactly what’s happening.
As our sweat-and-sickle torture proceeds, a roaring gale suddenly starts up at our rear, attacking from the seaward side. Not, fortunately, the Towering Inferno yet, but a smaller cousin of the bucketing helicopters, now hovering just above our heads. We stop work. Someone in a red boiler suit, holding a megaphone in one hand, leans right out of the machine and stares piercingly at us. Domenico waves; the man waves back; it flies off again.
What was that about? we ask, once we can hear ourselves speak again.
The fire-spotting helicopter, says Domenico. The water-dropping pilot, it seems, will have reported back to fire-fighting base that a bunch of apparently able-bodied people were hanging around doing nothing to help with the fire. The megaphone was to be used to tell us to get our arses into gear, and go up to join the firebreak cutters. But the pilot knows Domenico; and women and tourists are both useless for fire-fighting purposes. He has flown off to hunt for a better class of shirker.
Domenico goes off up to some of the nearest and tallest broom-bushes and cuts half-a-dozen long tufty headed branches off them, witches’ broomsticks, which he stacks neatly by our door. This is not mere Cleaning: these are the best things for beating o
ut a fire, he says, if the worst really comes to the worst.
Now, unimpressed by our technique with a sickle, he insists on joining in. This is great; all we need is for him to have a heart attack brought on by having to help clear up our ignorant foreign Dirt. He stops our wild flailing around with the sickles, puts Jim on machete duty, doing the larger bushier things, and shows us how to do the job systematically, throwing each armful of brush down on to the bare, safe patio outside the house as we go. Then he gets on silently and apparently effortlessly with the task, clearing twice as much as us in half the time.
Next to arrive at this scene of fear, sweat and self-loathing are Antonietta and Pompeo. Antonietta has got a lift up in the Guardia Forestale jeep to hunt for her husband. She lives in fear of Domenico’s heart giving out one day while he’s up on the land. He might lie there for hours, no one would be there to save him, and she wouldn’t be any the wiser until he didn’t turn up at suppertime. What if the forest fire had brought on an attack…? She is very annoyed with Domenico for not coming straight down once he’d seen the fire wasn’t threatening their own trees – how was she to know he was all right? And she doesn’t look at all pleased to see him exerting himself so violently on our behalf. He was supposed to come back home as soon as he’d checked, give her the news and finish off some jobs around the house…
Pompeo nods wisely over our fire precautions. We are doing right – at last – though there’s nothing to worry about really, the fire is a good way away, on the other side of a dirt-track which will act as a firebreak. Anyway, he says, if it really starts to look as though the fire is heading this way, and you haven’t had time to finish clearing, you’ll just have to do a controlled fire in a strip all the way round the house, and the flames will have nothing left to catch on, so the fire will hopefully go right past.
Just start our own forest fire! Great. Fighting fire with fire… another one of those sayings you don’t bother to think about. Lucy now remembers, helpfully, that in Little House on the Prairie the father does just as Pompeo’s suggesting; takes out the petrol can and burns a great ring around the house as fire sweeps across the wide grasslands towards his home and kiddywinks. It was all right for him, I say. If only all we had to deal with was a nice flat prairie! We, on the other hand, already melting in the heat, would be clinging to steep wobbly rocky land by our toes and fingertips. The thought of trying to start and put out fires with no hosepipe on this terrain is terrifying, however many broom branches we may have ready to hand.
There is a moment’s excitement when Jim pauses long enough from his sweaty labours to recognize Pompeo as one of the men on the beach with the megaphone; while Pompeo recognizes Jim as the German speaking an unusual dialect – did he learn his Italian in Venice? – who wanted to come and fight the fire. Seeing Jim in the right company, he is now prepared to make use of him, and gets ready to load him into his Guardia Forestale jeep. Jim tries to leave the machete behind. No, you’ll need that, says Pompeo. Poor Jim hasn’t escaped ground-clearing then. His sisters are greatly relieved that women don’t have to go and chop brush right in the teeth of forest fires, or go down in history as cowards and weaklings.
Domenico is most frustrated, though. Alone among women when all Real Men are away at the front! Even daft blond turisti like our brother, and people of advanced years like Pompeo. We’d never believe Pompeo was almost ten years older than him, would we? he says gloomily. We try pointing out that he’s probably saved our lives, or at least our home, with his useful advice. No use. But Antonietta will have none of his nonsense; she stands him up, brushes him down, and whisks him offback home to finish mending the kitchen shutters.
As darkness descends an eerie red glow illuminates the valley inland and behind us. Jim, the returning hero, reports that the fire’s more or less under control and everyone says we can rest safe in our beds tonight. It’s nowhere near any of the villages: it hasn’t got anyone’s olive trees. So far, so good. We don’t have to finish the vile perpendicular sickling job in the dark then. Or light absurdly dangerous fires round our precious home.
Moreover, after Jim’s afternoon of fire-fighting, he has become a serious man-about-village: he has been adopted by the Sulking Café company, and initiated into the mysteries of scopa, the favourite card game down at the bar. Even Hebe and Giacinta, the two women-dressed-as-men, whose names we now know but who have still never spoken much more than a gruff ‘Salve!’ to us, have smiled and chatted to this brother, insisting that he must come to the festa this weekend at Diano Borello: if he does, they have promised to crown his glory by dancing with him.
In the middle of the night I wake up for no identifiable reason. Some unusual background noise is going on – a fridge-freezer vibrating, the central heating boiler, something like that. No. There is no electricity – ergo no central heating or fridge-freezer. The muted roaring noise has to be coming from outside.
I open the shutters. Not only is the roaring now immense, but there is a horrible lively crackling behind it. Inland, much too low for it to be the sky, much too late for it to be the sunset, all is a lurid red. I rush to wake the others and we trail out wrapped in our sheets to inspect the hillside to the landward of us. It’s impossible to tell how near the fire is, though. The red glow illuminates all sorts of ridges and folds in the hillside which are never usually visible even by day because of the thick covering of fluffy olive trees. But individual treetrunks are standing out on what seems to be the nearest fold, black against the red glow: the fire is at the same level as us, and the noise is scarily loud.
As we are wondering whether to evacuate to be on the safe side – maybe it’s somehow got across the firebreak-road? – we hear above the deep roar of the fire the higher-pitched sound of some large vehicle grinding through a series of gear changes at the end of our path. We run like the wind in our nightwear, sheets flapping, to find out what’s going on.
There on the road, battling to get round the hairpin bend, is a real red fire engine. It is pulling a huge trailer of water with thousands of metres of hose wound round it, and having to manoeuvre back and forth to get round our tight narrow curve. The planes can’t fly at night, the firemen say, and this time the olives are in serious danger. They’ve come from Imperia. There are already three engines up the hill, coming at the incendio from different directions. Although they can’t be sure, the fire doesn’t seem so much to have spread as to have started in another place. They fear someone has done it on purpose. There is a firebug at large.
We follow in their wake round the hairpin bend and up on to the ridge to find what looks like a scene from the Russian Revolution. Half the village is clustered on the road a little way up the hill, coats bundled on over nightwear, all outlined against the glowing red and clutching sharp glinting curved implements. Several muffled cadres wielding sickles and machetes rush up to our Jim and greet him like a long-lost brother. The weapons are waved for emphasis; you would think that not fire-fighting but vengeance was uppermost in the minds of the gathering. Fingers stab furiously; angry blades slice the air. Who can have done this, and why? Hunters wanting less cover for game once the season starts? Would-be property developers wanting to get land re-zoned? Madmen? Someone wanting to collect on their insurance?
Fire can only get a really good hold on uncleared fascie; there is strong feeling in this gathering against people who don’t Clean at least once a year out of consideration for the lives and property of others. Even if they’re not bothering to harvest their trees, they should have some sense of social responsibility. We keep our heads down. Nino seems to be looking accusingly in our direction. Oh God, he’s heading this way! But he only wants to show us that you can see the lie of the land from up here, and our house is in no danger; the fire’s still several folds in the hill away, much farther than it seemed. And luckily it’s going uphill, towards wilderness, not down towards villages and olives. The firemen at last agree that this is so, and we trail wearily off back to our beds.
&n
bsp; When morning comes, the scent of woodsmoke is still strong on the air. The red glow has vanished, but up at the head of the valley there are still wisps of smoke, and the hillside is no longer coloured straw-and-green, but black. All the vegetation on it has been reduced to charcoal. We decide to go down to the village for breakfast, get a brioche at Signor Ugo’s and take it to Maria and Luigi’s to eat with our cappuccino while we catch up on the latest news. (This is normal procedure; since they don’t sell breakfast supplies in the bar, no one takes offence at you bringing your own snacks to go with their coffees.) Although the place is packed out, not one game of cards is in progress; a sign of serious agitation. Even irregulars like Sergio and Franco (at opposite ends of the bar, and studiously ignoring one another) have come down to catch up on the news.
The fire really has started in two places. Definitely a very odd coincidence. The majority verdict is for the firebug theory. And, says Maria, the Canadians are being brought in this afternoon. They don’t think they can get it all under control without them. Ace pilots from Vietnam? Who told you that?
Luigi, kindly soul, does his best not to laugh at us. But Giacò, in his favourite breakfast position at the bar, immensely and loudly enjoys Domenico’s joke at my expense. His many kilos still quivering with suppressed laughter, he tells us that a canadese, really a Canadair, is a plane which can dip its belly into the sea in mid-flight, and fill itself with thousands of gallons of water that it dumps right on the heart of the fire. For good measure he adds the tale of how a scuba diver was sucked up into one of these things as it swooped down to reload, and then dumped back out into the middle of a forest fire. Some weeks later the mysterious burnt and blackened body of a person who’d died by drowning was found halfway up a mountain. Fortunately, I’ve since been told this story so many times, from so many locations around the world, that I am now (almost) sure it is a complete fabrication.
