Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  The new school at La Foce, with the Casa dei Bambini in the background

  By the time that all these buildings were completed, in 1934, we had been at La Foce for ten years: it had become our home. During those years our financial position had been suddenly changed by the death of a distant American cousin, whom I had never seen and of whom I had only heard as an eccentric elderly miser, who, having gone to live abroad ‘to disoblige his family’, had spent his last years in a yacht off the coast of the Isle of Wight, amusing himself (so the legend said) by throwing red-hot coppers into the boat of such solicitous relations as attempted to visit him. He did, however, go to London twice a year to visit his broker—and to some purpose, since the sum which was eventually divided among his surviving cousins was extremely substantial, and enabled us to carry out all the work I have described above much more speedily and thoroughly than would otherwise have been possible.

  I shall, however, always be glad that this money did not come to us at once, and that we were obliged, in the first years of our marriage, to count every penny and make some personal sacrifice. Not only did this save us from many mistakes, but it gave a certain basic reality to our efforts. We felt this even at the time—indeed, on the evening on which the news of our change of fortune reached us, Antonio and I were walking up and down the pergola at the end of the day’s work, discussing whether or not his birthday present to me should be a handsome but expensive umbrella which we had seen in a Florentine shop. I pointed out that it would be a great extravagance, since I would certainly lose it; he retorted that I might learn to be more careful—the discussion being only brought to an end by the cable’s arrival. When we had read it and had assimilated its contents, it was with real regret in his voice that Antonio said: ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever argue about buying an umbrella again!’

  * * *

  Meanwhile—for I have now reached the years between 1935 and 1940—the clouds were gathering all over Europe, and even in our secluded life at La Foce it became impossible not to observe, read, listen and speculate. I read Mein Kampf; I read (as well as hearing) Mussolini’s speeches; I read Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks22 (at that time a very enlightening book to me) and, later on, Fromm’s Escape from Freedom.23 I began at last to read the daily papers and to join the wide captive audience, all the world over, listening to confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box. Not enough has been said, I think, in accounts of our times (since one is always apt to disregard what has come to be taken for granted) about the psychological changes brought about in uninformed civilians by the mere existence of the radio. Never before in history had so many ears been battered by so many voices. Gradually, as I sat before our radio in the library at La Foce, trying to reconcile their messages and sift the small kernel of truth, these voices became for me the true echo of our times. Previously, non-combatants had been, for the most part, only aware of what the Press of their own country told them, or what they saw with their own eyes. Now, we were all constantly exposed to these confusing, overwhelming waves, from friends and enemies alike. Far more than the whistle and crash of falling shells later on, or the dull roar of bomber formations overhead, this cacophony represents my personal nightmare of the years before and during the war. Hitler’s voice with its hysterical screams and the roars of applause that greeted them; Dollfuss’s voice, shortly before his assassination, followed by the promise of his personal friend Mussolini, to support the independence of Austria24 and then, two years later, at the time of the Anschluss, that same friend’s exclamation: “What obligations have we towards Austria? None!”25 Anthony Eden’s voice, urging the League of Nations, if Italy invaded Abyssinia, to a policy of sanctions, and Mussolini’s retort, “L’Italia farà da se!”26 A voice from France, announcing the murder of the Rosselli brothers. Churchill’s voice, declaring that “it is not only Czechoslovakia which is menaced, but also the freedom of the democracy of all nations”—and, only a few weeks later, Neville Chamberlain proclaiming “Peace with honour … peace in our time.”27 Starace’s voice, announcing the decision of the Fascist Grand Council to leave the League of Nations. The voices of soldiers and children, singing the songs of the time:

  Dell’Italia nei confini

  Son rinati gli Italiani

  Li ha rifatti Mussolini

  Per la guerra di domani

  and

  Duce, Duce, chi non saprà morir?28

  It is difficult to convey the cumulative impact of these voices, as we sat alone in the library of our isolated country house day after day, and the increasing sense that they brought of inevitable, imminent catastrophe, of the Juggernaut approach of war.

  During those years I was still paying frequent visits to England, and there I naturally met, both some ardent supporters of the pacifist movement, in particular its leader, Max Plowman, a man of such transparent goodness and good faith as almost—but not entirely—to convert me to his views, and the writers and journalists who had volunteered to fight in Spain against Franco, and had returned with varying degrees of disillusionment. (I still think George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia the best account of that confused and disturbing time.) I also, through Lilian Bowes Lyon and some Quaker friends, was able to share the efforts of some people who, already then, were devoting their energies to enabling a few Jewish scholars, old people and children, to make their escape from Germany before it was too late. In particular, there was a little school in Kent—largely run by means of Quaker contributions—in which Jewish refugee children from Germany (and soon also from Austria and Czechoslovakia) were brought up in a new-found security and serenity, as citizens of the United Europe of the future.29 Some of them, I remember, gave a highly spirited performance of The Magic Flute in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral.

  A good many of these children—especially those living as guests in well-meaning but wholly alien, ultra-British families—were almost ill with homesickness and, among the older ones, with anxiety for their parents and their brothers and sisters who had not come with them. I have never been able to forget the description given to me by one of the Quaker workers in Germany of the agony of mind of the parents obliged to make a choice, when they were told (as was sometimes necessary) that only one child from each family could go. Should it be the most brilliant or the most vulnerable? the one most fitted, or least likely, to survive? Which, if it were one’s own child, would one choose?

  The passage from the world of friends concerned with such activities and ideas, and the atmosphere still prevailing in Italy became, whenever I came home, increasingly confusing and distressing. I have a disproportionately vivid memory of a telephone conversation with a woman whom I scarcely knew. She and I had been asked to send a nominal invitation to an old Czechoslovak professor and his wife, which would enable them to get a transit visa through Italy and thus escape from Prague and rejoin their sons in England. “I suppose you’ve done nothing about this preposterous request?” she asked. “Did you have a telegram, too?” I said I had. “I can’t think what came over the woman! She’s my husband’s cousin, not mine; I don’t know her and never want to. Why, she might have got us into trouble!” I said that I thought that was hardly likely, and that it really was a hard case: the professor and his wife were old and ill, longing to join their sons, their only chance, but that, in any case, she need take no further trouble over it. “Trouble! I should think not, indeed! I sent back a pretty firm wire. I have no sympathy with such people. Why didn’t they get out months ago, when their sons ran away? And I don’t believe they’re really Catholics: the name doesn’t sound like it!” An unpleasant undertone in her voice made me cautious. “Well, anyway, I won’t lift a finger to help such people. Those are the cases that get taken up by interfering, hysterical Englishwomen, like that woman who says she’s a friend of yours.” I said that Lilian Bowes Lyon was one of my greatest friends, and rang off. But a few minutes later the telephone rang again; this time the woman’s voice was sharp with curiosity. “You didn’t
say what you are doing about it! Now remember, this isn’t a neutral country. You’ve no right to risk getting your husband into trouble. Why, it’s the sort of thing one would hardly do for a member of one’s own family!” Swallowing my anger—which was the sharper for being mixed with a mean little twinge of uneasiness—I hedged, and then, having rung off, sat on the edge of my bed, trembling. The ugly trivial conversation seemed to have a disproportionate importance: it seemed to symbolise all the cowardly, self-protective, arrogant cruelty of the world—our world.

  In August, 1939, I drove up with Antonio to Switzerland, for what proved to be our last trip abroad for six years, in order to attend the concerts conducted by Bruno Walter and Toscanini in Lucerne. The day of our arrival was over-shadowed by a typical tragedy of our times. Bruno Walter’s daughter, who had married a young Bavarian Nazi some years before, had moved to Switzerland after the intensification of the Jewish persecution, and was visited there occasionally by her husband. Gradually they had drifted apart, but on the preceding day, he had flown down to Zürich to meet her, and to make a last effort to persuade her to return to Germany with him. When she refused (her sister was in a concentration camp, and many others of her relations and friends were dead or imprisoned) he shot her with his revolver, and then himself.

  On that evening the concert was conducted, in Bruno Walter’s stead, by Toscanini, and the programme concluded with Götterdämmerung. The audience filed out in a grim, sad silence, and when we got back to the hotel the late evening news announced the Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and Russia. We all realised its implications.

  The next morning, the hotel emptied swiftly—the guests leaving hurriedly for their respective countries. I put through a last telephone call to England, then climbed into the car and drove off with Antonio towards the Italian frontier. My diary30 brings back very vividly my feelings on that day as, after driving up the green, trim little Swiss valleys and lunching on truite au bleu at Martigny, we climbed up the Simplon pass and crossed the frontier. There, sitting beside the customs office, we watched an Italian car which had driven up a few minutes before, being turned back and sent home again.

  “No more Italians jaunting abroad now!” said the carabiniere with a friendly grin, as he handed back our passports. “Come in, and stay in!”

  The pole of the barrier swung slowly back behind us. I realised that I had made my choice.

  But even after this, it was curiously difficult to persuade the Italian man-in-the-street that war, real war, was coming. “You’ll see,” said a taxi-driver, “the Duce will stop at the last moment. He has never made a mistake yet.” We spent a few days in Florence, hanging about waiting for news, and hearing nothing but wild rumours—that an Italian division had been sent from Bologna to Nüremberg—why Nüremberg? That the Duce had had a stroke—that the mysterious passenger that landed in England was Mussolini himself, no, Beck, no, Grandi. There was not even the faintest pretence of martial ardour. ‘It is,’ as a young officer of our acquaintance wrote to his mother, ‘a nonchalant and cold vigil.’

  When we got home, we found that two of the fattoria employees had been called up, and several of the farmers’ sons. They were all very upset, but still did not realise that it was anything worse than Abyssinia or Spain. “We’ve had enough of this,” was the refrain, “ora basta. We only ask to be left alone.” We walked from farm to farm on a still, lovely summer’s evening; the grapes ripening, the oxen ploughing. Still blindly they believed: ‘It won’t come to a real war: the Duce will get us out of it somehow.’

  Two days later we went round the farms again. Everywhere the older people came hurrying out to meet us, everywhere the same question: “What do you say, sor padrone? Will there be war?” From each family, by now, at least one man had been called up: “My Cecco went yesterday; Assunta’s Beppe had his card this morning. Madonnina bona, what’s going to happen? Who’s going to work the farm?”

  On September 3, Antonio and I drove up to visit some friends in a village in the Apennines, and in the villages on the way we saw little groups of recruits and women in tears. Then, as we reached our friends’ house, one of the sons came down to meet us: “Chamberlain’s speech is just over. War is declared.” An hour later the speech was repeated, and all the evening we sat beside the radio, listening to one country after another: Europe moving towards war. I found myself remembering, as many people of my generation must have remembered in England, Grey’s famous phrase in 1914, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.’ When would they be lit again?

  After the invasion of Poland—overcome by an almost unbearable sense of frustration at my own inaction and uselessness—I went to Rome to see whether there was any organisation whatever in which I could do some form of war work. But I found all doors securely closed. ‘The country’s delicate position—the Vatican’s delicate position …’ I did meet the head of the Polish Institute in Rome, who had been in his youth one of Pilsudski’s legionaries, a tragic and embittered figure, but there was nothing I could do in Italy to help his compatriots, and when an American Relief Mission—headed by Senator Walcott, who had worked with President Hoover on a similar mission some twenty years before—came to the American Embassy in Rome, on their way to Warsaw, I implored the Ambassador31 to ask them to take me with them in any capacity whatsoever. In the same week I discovered that, after seven years of childlessness, I was pregnant. Reluctantly, and feeling more and more useless and cut off, I went back to La Foce.

  During the next months—until on June 10, 1940, German pressure caused Italy, too, to enter the war—I found much comfort in seeing, at Montepulciano, the small group of anti-Fascists who gathered together in the house of our friend and neighbour, Margherita Bracci. Her husband was an old friend and brother-officer of my husband’s, and Margherita herself—the daughter of the historian and writer, Francesco Papafava—belonged to an old Paduan family which had always preserved a fine tradition of Liberal thought and feeling. Many of their friends, in the early years of Fascism, had been imprisoned or sent into exile, while most of those who were still in Italy had retired from public life or (often at great personal sacrifice) had resigned from their jobs, and were living in a closed, semi-conspiratorial circle, seeing only the small group of people who shared their opinions and hopes, often embittered and factious, but firmly clinging to their principles and determined to come to no compromise with any aspect of the regime they hated and despised, and which, they were convinced, would lead their country to destruction.

  It was with these friends, and with a few others like them in Rome, that I could speak most freely; and yet I remember sometimes coming away from an evening in their company, during which the conversation had the heightened intensity peculiar to minorities under authoritarian governments, with a sense of discouragement. ‘One feels,’ I wrote after one of these occasions, ‘yes, these are enlightened, high-principled, courageous people, but they are not, as yet, of any importance. It is not through them that any change will come.’

  I think now that I was mistaken. If I felt a certain sense of unreality in these conversations, it was of course not because this handful of people was not yet able to change the course of events: it was rather because many of them, in their allegiance to an already old-fashioned form of Liberalism, did not see the Fascism they rejected as the glorification of the bourgeoisie which it had already become, but rather naïvely took it at its own face value as a true revolutionary movement, and were also still cut off from the other new political trends in the country which, after the Liberation, swiftly took on a definite shape. All the same, the conversations that then seemed to me unrealistic or sterile were a token that all over Italy there were still men and women whom Fascism had not numbed into conformity. It was they who kept alive the clandestine anti-Fascist press, who kept in touch with foreign books and (when possible) foreign friends, and who fostered the increasing pressure of public opinion which paved the way for the fall of Fascism. Some of them, later on, played an ac
tive part in the Resistance movement, others exerted an influence in Court circles at the time of the first negotiations with the Allies, and yet others—when Mussolini had formed the ‘Republic of Salò’ in the north—made their way to the south and joined the Allied forces or formed part of the temporary government in the south or the Committees of Liberation in their respective cities. But I now think that their most important action was in those early, unrewarding years, when many of them lay in prison in Lipari or were confined to remote mountain villages, but still kept alive an incorruptible, unswerving vision of freedom.

  Meanwhile, day by day, it was becoming clearer that Italy’s entry into the conflict could not be delayed much longer. After the Brenner meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, the invasion of Norway and that of Belgium and Holland, Italy’s solidarity with the Axis was no longer a matter of choice. I succeeded, with some difficulty, in obtaining visas for Switzerland for my mother and step-father, and was entrusted with the valuables and belongings of some other English people who were leaving or who feared to be sent to concentration camps. On June 7, 1940, the first outer sign of war reached the Val d’Orcia: a formation of 35 Allied bombers flew over us, heading south. On the 10th, we woke to the news that the Germans were within 40 miles of Paris. At midday an order came from the Fascio of Chianciano to summon all our farmers at five that evening to listen to a speech by the Duce. We installed our radio in the loggia in front of the house, which gives on to the garden, and they all slowly filed in. By five o’clock we were all there: Antonio and myself and Schwester Marie Blaser, the children’s Swiss nurse, Flavia and Gogo della Gherardesca, who were staying with us, the fattore and all his employees, the school-teachers, the household, and about eighty contadini and workmen. “Attenzione!” brayed the loud-speaker, “Attenzione!” I looked at the listening faces, grave, expectant, anxious. “At six o’clock the Duce will speak to the assembled Italian people from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia.” Then the Marcia Reale, and the Fascist song, Giovinezza. Nearly an hour more to wait. The tense faces relaxed, the crowd broke up into little groups. The older men stood under the ilex tree, talking in low voices; some settled down on the loggia steps: some had brought a loaf of bread or a flask of wine and passed it round; one group sat in a circle on the gravel, playing cards. Antonio and the keepers talked about the young partridges and the twin calves born that morning. I joined the school-teachers, to discuss how many evacuated children we could put up, if necessary, in the schools. I went indoors again: a bowl of delphiniums and lupins took me back for a moment to an English garden. A whiff of jasmine blew in through the window. It was all curiously unreal. Then again: “Attenzione, attenzione!” The men got to their feet, coming closer. We heard the shouts of the crowd in Piazza Venezia, the cheering and the bands and then (presumably because the scene was also being relayed to a German station) a harsh, guttural voice speaking German. At the foreign, unpopular sound the men’s faces became blank and faintly hostile. Antonio made a joke (I couldn’t hear what) and they all laughed. Then deafening cheers from the radio, presumably as Mussolini appeared on the balcony—and then his unmistakable voice: “Combattenti di terra, di mare, dell’aria, Blackshirts of the Revolution and of the Legions, men and women of Italy, of the Empire and of Albania, listen. An hour marked by destiny is crossing our country’s sky: the hour of an irrevocable decision. The Italian declaration of war has already been handed to the ambassadors of Great Britain and France … People of Italy, hasten to arms and show your tenacity, your courage and your valour.”