by Iris Origo
As proud as a spaniel who has retrieved his bird, I would settle down happily upon the hearth-rug, while my mother read aloud to me what she, too, had found in the course of the day, secure for an hour in the most delightful, and rarest, form of family affection—a real kinship of the mind. I would not then have exchanged her companionship for that of any child of my own age. Indeed I felt a bitter disappointment whenever a visitor’s arrival would break into the precious hour, and would sit in a corner of the room with my own book, apparently demure and absorbed, inwardly seething with resentment.
The initiation into the art of travel was not without its discomforts. I was then an acutely self-conscious schoolgirl, anxious above all to be inconspicuous in public, and this, in my mother’s company, was seldom possible. We would generally start, if going by train, with a triumphal procession down the station platform, my mother not infrequently in an invalid chair and accompanied by a bevy of affectionate friends and servants, all encumbered (in addition to the suitcases borne by the porters) with hold-alls and tea-baskets, cameras and guide-books, rugs, parasols, and reading matter for a week. On entering the sleeping-car, my mother’s bed had to be made up with her own pillows and rugs and fine Jaeger sheets (“all sheets in trains are damp”) and the little brown cupboard of our washstand was filled with smelling-salts and lavender-water, face-cream and sympathol, and an array of pills; the conductor had to be coaxed to fill her hot-water bottle, and the dining-car man to bring the menu.
“No, I could not possibly touch any of this, but perhaps a very fine breast of chicken, lightly grilled, and a bottle of cold Vichy water.” And then, to me, “Darling, I’m sure I smelled a cigar. Would you mind explaining to the man—no, not in the next carriage, I think it must be three or four doors off—that I am very delicate …”
I did mind. I minded so much that I would stand outside the offender’s compartment praying for an accident before I had to go in.
“I am so sorry, but my Mother …” “Scusi tanto, ma mia Madre …” “Verzeihen Sie …” “Veuillez m’excuser …”
Sometimes my interlocutor was nice about it, and sometimes not. If he went on smoking, I would hurry back to our compartment, shut the door, hand my mother a book, and retreat in silent prayer that she would not notice, but in vain. A few minutes later:
“Darling,—I don’t think you can have explained yourself properly. Would you call the conductor?”
I wished that I were dead.
Travel by car, too, had its embarrassing moments. The sight of a cypress avenue leading to a fine villa, or the mere mention of its existence in a guide-book was, to my mother, irresistible.
“Tell him to turn in, darling, we’ve just time before tea.”
“But we don’t know them, Mummy!”
“Never mind, people are always glad to show their house, if it’s a nice one.”
And a moment later the astonished owners, sitting at ease in their loggia or on the lawn—Papa sometimes with his coat off, Mamma at her knitting—would see an English lady in the height of fashion, but swathed in a dust-coat, rapidly descending from a large Lancia, followed by a plump, self-conscious schoolgirl carrying Baedeker, the Guide Bleu or Mrs. Wharton’s Italian Villas.
“I know you won’t mind us glancing around for just a moment—such a delightful façade! And my daughter tells me that the frescoes in the hall are by Veronese, or at least his school. Yes, look, Iris” (for by then we were in the hall) “that balustrade is very characteristic, with the Negro boy looking over it—but surely that wall has been touched up a good deal? It is really delightful of you”—this to our dazed host, who had meanwhile caught up with us—“to let us see your charming room—and I see you have a little formal garden on the other side—rather like Maser, only of course on a smaller scale. Now do tell me”—confidentially—“what other villas of interest are there in this neighbourhood?”
Sometimes this technique was entirely successful. Our host, swept off his feet, would begin a lively discussion of the local works of art and we would all end up, with his wife and daughters, in a semi-circle on the lawn. But sometimes we encountered only blank stares and stiff manners.
“Not very agreeable people,” my mother would say, as I miserably climbed in beside her and we drove on. “And the garden disappointing, too. The Italian taste for palms is really very misplaced.”
To the morbid self-consciousness of adolescence this was misery. Yet I should be giving a very false impression of my journeys with my mother if I implied that they consisted of nothing but discomfort. The same driving energy which sometimes embarrassed me, also caused us to discover and visit many places of singular beauty: hermitages on mountain-tops (up which, all illness cast aside, she leapt with the grace and speed of a chamois), remote oases in the desert, exquisite half-vanished mosaics in crumbling chapels, or the arch of a ruined Roman bridge at the end of a lonely valley. All these sights were enhanced and illuminated not only by the depth and variety of the information she offered, but by a capacity for enjoyment which was irresistibly contagious. For in all this there was no pose at all. The persistence, as ruthless as a child’s, which brought us to these places, sprang from a child’s single-mindedness, but also from a love of beauty and an imaginative and informed historical sense which neither illness nor, later on, advancing years, could ever quench.
In following her swift steps and her darting, clear, inquiring mind I have often been reminded of Madame de Charrière’s remark, “After all, it is necessary, is it not, to know where Archimedes placed his lever!” To my mother, too, it was always necessary to see, to know, to understand. She belonged to the great tradition of eighteenth-century travellers—enterprising, courageous, arrogant, totally immune to criticism or ridicule, carrying their own world with them.
Perhaps the most suitable vehicle for her would have been Byron’s travelling-coach, drawn by six horses and furnished with a complete library, but she would certainly have been at home, too, on Lady Hester Stanhope’s white camel. And I have no doubt whatever that, if we had been in Istanbul at the end of the eighteenth century, it would have been my fate to endure, together with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s daughter, the first vaccination against smallpox in Western Europe.
It was perhaps in a Venetian gondola, belonging to the palaces lent to her by friends on various different occasions, that she found the mode of progression most suited to her in our own time, lying back on the black cushions, with a parasol over her head and a guide-book open in her hand.
“Tell him not to miss San Zenobio,” she would say to me, “there’s a small Bellini Madonna over the third altar on the right, and an unfinished Tiepolo sketch in the sacristy.”
The information was always accurate; the picture, church or palazzo always worth seeing. Then, as the evening approached, she would tell the gondoliers to row us out across the lagoon, sometimes as far as the island where Byron used to visit the Armenian monks or to the cypresses of S. Francesco del Deserto. There, tied up against a pylon, we would eat our evening meal, with the water lapping against the boat and the last breath of wind dying away with the sunset; then we would slowly row back under the stars, sometimes meeting or overtaking the great fruit-barges rowing out from the mainland with their cargo of ripe figs and peaches, cucumbers and water melons, for the morning market.
It was at such times that I knew—the anxieties and embarrassments of the day forgotten—that I was lucky to be with her. Indeed even the mildest afternoon picnic or a day’s excursion into the Mugello or the Casentino could acquire, in her company, a flavour of adventure.
“Look, darling,” she would say, poking me in the back as I sat beside the chauffeur, “I see a nice little road winding up that crag—and yes—I think there’s a chapel at the top. Tell Valentino to turn up there.”
Resignedly, Valentino would stop the car and ask a passing contadino if it was indeed a road, or only a cart-track.
“He says that no car has ever been up there before, Si
gnora Contessa.”
“Well, never mind, I expect we’ll get up there somehow.”
Very often we did, to a wonderful view, and if instead we got stuck, Valentino would carry the tea-basket to a chestnut wood or beside a stream, where we would sit contentedly drinking tea, munching biscuits and reading aloud until a yoke of oxen, detached from their plough, had pulled the car back upon the road again.
The discomfort of these incidents has long since faded; the love of new sights, and the awareness that a little persistence may lead to hidden treasures, has remained.
As I became a little older, our journeys took us further afield—to Sicily and Greece, to Algeria and Tunisia, where we even spent a night in Tebessa, to see the Roman ruins, in the most primitive of rest-houses. When sufficiently interested by new and strange sights, all my mother’s love of comfort and invalidism fell away from her. Riding all day on a camel across the desert, driven by Greek drivers at whirlwind speed down the steep winding roads of the Peloponnesus, briskly pacing around the walls of Constantinople, she never missed a sight nor turned a hair.
It was on one of these journeys, motoring in North Africa, that I saw two scenes which, after half a century, are still imprinted on my memory, though I cannot remember the name of the place where the first one occurred. I only recollect leaving the clean, characterless French rest-house on the outskirts of a Tunisian oasis, in which my mother was lying down during the heat of the day, and, turning down between some tall palm-trees to a group of mud-huts, suddenly coming upon a coal-black scarecrow of an old man, dressed only in a lion-skin on his shoulders. He was performing, for a fascinated circle of Arab spectators, a ‘lion dance’—a mimicry of a lion stalking and killing his prey—and the dance reached a paroxysm of excitement at the final moment of the kill. To the circle of watching Arabs the half-naked, possessed dancer was plainly as alien and barbarous a savage as he was to myself, nor have I any idea of how he came to be there. At the end, he fell to the ground slobbering and writhing in something very like an epileptic fit. His audience, returning to their huts, left him writhing there in the dust, while I went back to the cool white hall of the rest-house, where a French colonial officer in a trim uniform and his wife in black high-heeled shoes were still sitting, as I had left them, on cane-backed chairs, peacefully sipping their coffee.
The second scene took place outside the walls of the sacred Algerian city of Kairouan, a few days before the beginning of Ramadan. The desert tribesmen were already gathering for the great annual festival and, squatting round a fire, soon after sunset, some of them were listening to a story-teller. I could not of course understand what he was saying, but this was hardly necessary. Every phase of the story, every dramatic moment, was reflected in the bearded faces of the listeners—taut with apprehension as some crisis approached, quivering with sensual delight over a love-scene or with cruelty and blood-lust at the climax of a fight, rising to their feet to shake their fists and interrupt the narrator with hoarse comments and cries, shaking with Gargantuan laughter over some Rabelaisian episode. This, I thought—as more and more listeners came from their tents or camels to join the circle, the firelight accentuating the lights and shadows on every face, the story-teller’s voice quickened by his audience’s response—this is how Homer must have told the story of Polyphemus or of the stealing of Helen; this is how men must have listened to the tales of the quarrels of the gods before the camp-fires of Troy, and, in a later day, to the story of Tristan and Iseult and of Childe Roland’s horn. Every written word is only a thin substitute for this, and perhaps it is man’s desire to return to it that has brought about the success of the radio and of television: the need to have beauty and terror and laughter brought to us, not by books, but by a human voice.
The strangest of these journeys, however, and the one most clearly imprinted on my memory, did not take place in any exotic setting. It was a voyage across the Atlantic when I was twelve years old, in the first week of August, 1914.
For about a week beforehand, in London, the grown-ups had been talking in corners (“No, not just now dear, no, Doody can’t finish the packing.”) We were going to the United States, to stay with my grandmother by the sea in Maine, at North East Harbour, and though of course there always used to be a fuss before a long journey, it was not quite this sort of fuss. Usually it was about clothes and luggage and comfortable enough seats (“Are you sure that we are facing the engine and that it is an outside cabin?”) and about not catching cold two days before leaving (“You started chicken-pox just before we left for Greece, and whooping-cough when I had planned to go to Sicily.”) But now the grown-up conversations, or rather the scraps of them overheard, were full of new words and phrases: ‘Sarajevo’, ‘the tinder-box of Europe’, ‘the Archduke’. (I knew about archangels, but what was an archduke?) It soon became plain to me that some unusual event had gone into the way of our plans; that my grown-up cousin Irene Lawley, who had never been to America before, was determined to go; that my grandfather, although he never interfered, did not approve; and that my mother, although she hardly ever let anything get in her way, was perturbed and perplexed. (“But, Irene, if it should happen, and we can’t get back?”)
But what was ‘it’? It is not surprising that I did not know, since the grown-ups, for all their talk, did not really know either, even though Mummy had of course all sorts of important friends ‘connected’ with this or that department in the Foreign Office and the War Office and the Admiralty and the House—‘Tommy’ and ‘Eddy’ and ‘Henry’ and ‘Jack’—for England was still ruled, as indeed it continued to be for some time longer, by a family party. (I remember reading, many years later, a book basing its attack on the Conservative Party on a family tree showing how many members of the House and the Cabinet were closely related to each other, and wondering why the author had bothered to set down what one had always known.) And the ‘Tommies’ and ‘Eddies’ looked in, on their way back from their offices in their black coats and striped trousers, rather tired; and some of them said, very emphatically, “My dear, don’t start. It may come at any moment.” Others said with equal firmness, “My dear, of course you can go. There’s nothing in it.”
Since both Mummy and Irene liked the second piece of advice better, we went.
We sailed on August 2nd, bound for Quebec, and the first two days were spent in a pleasant travellers’ limbo—while, in our wake, the lamps of Europe were going out. Then, on August 4th, all passengers were summoned to the main saloon and the Captain read aloud the news he had just received by radio: Germany had invaded Belgium; France and England had come to her defence; Europe was at war.
The thing that was peculiar about this announcement—though of course I did not realise this at the time—was its starkness. No rhetoric, no propaganda, not even any details: just the grim bare fact that peace was over, war had begun. For four days, we sailed across a grey sea, between two continents, with this knowledge, and I think there was no-one on board for whom it did not take on a heroic stature. Then, with the first tug that steamed down the St. Lawrence to meet us, and the scramble on deck for the first papers, rhetoric came on board: ‘Brave little Belgium’, ‘a Scrap of Paper’. But then those phrases, worn later on to a paper thinness, still carried with them a genuine impact, a true emotion.
After landing, an anti-climax: for one young passenger at least, the strife in Europe faded again into the distance, compared with her acute awareness of hardly less acrimonious, though always polite, dissension at home. My mother’s one thought was, how quickly we could get back to Europe; my grandmother’s, how to keep me in America. The pull of their two strong wills, with myself as their object, taught me what my later experience confirmed, that a major war also often arouses many small family conflicts, no less deadly. In this particular one, my mother was victorious. We sailed back to London from New York a fortnight after our arrival, on the last ship carrying civilians for many months.
During the second half of the voyage a strict
black-out was observed; there was boat-drill, and a considerable sense of tension. In so far as I remember, no-one mentioned the word submarine in my presence, and everyone was very hearty at deck-tennis and shuffle-board. My mother and Irene were the only women on board and I the only child; all the other passengers were men, of widely varying professions and classes, but almost all very young, hurrying home from remote regions of America and Canada, to volunteer. No news reached us during the voyage. On the last evening—the portholes shuttered and sealed, the decks dark—the Captain gathered all passengers together for dinner. For the first time in my life I tasted champagne; for the first time I felt what it was to be in the company of a large number of people, all dominated by a similar but unexpressed emotion. At the meal’s end, the Captain, a quiet, laconic Scotsman, made a short, matter-of-fact speech. We were expected to dock, he said, next morning at eight. He requested passengers to have their baggage ready by six. He thanked them for their discipline and cheerfulness during the voyage and gave thanks to Almighty God for our safe arrival. He hoped that some of us might some day meet again. And then: “God Save the King.” The recollection of the intensity of emotion beneath those reticent words, and the silence of the listeners, has remained with me all my life; it broke out, at last, in the national anthem. Within a few weeks, every man present that night was in the front line; very few of them, at the end of the year, were still alive.
After that, the War was always there. Not in my life, because I had no father or brother at the front, but always just behind the door, like the fog of which the damp and the smell were always creeping in through the ill-shut windows. We spent that autumn in London, in a small, dark flat in Sloane Street, because, my mother said, “One really must do something.” (The something ended by being the equipping of a Red Cross Unit for Albania.)
