Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  I glanced again at the listening faces. They wore the closed, blank look that is the last defence of those who cannot argue or oppose. Impossible to tell how much they had taken in or what they felt—except that it was not enthusiasm. The speech went on, touching the same old themes: Italy’s imprisonment in the Mediterranean, sanctions, the war of the poor against the rich, of the young against the decadent. Mussolini affirmed, too, that Italy had done “all that was possible to avert the storm”. But somehow none of it carried. The speaker’s voice was loud, strained; the applause, even from Piazza Venezia, sounded forced, very different from that which had greeted recent speeches about Abyssinia or even at the time of Munich. Then at last it was over; there was a silence. Antonio said, “Saluto al Re! Viva l’Italia!” The men reacted automatically, limply. We heard their feet crunching on the gravel as they left, in silence, and we went back into the house and stood looking at each other. “Well, it’s come,” said Antonio. “I’m going out to look at the wheat.” But who will be there for the harvest?

  It was really only then, I think, that I fully faced the problem of divided loyalties which confronts every woman whose marriage has placed her in a country at war with her own. (In my case, within two months, the countries of both my parents.) As to behaviour, of course, the matter is very simple: she should obey the laws of her husband’s country and keep quiet. But in feelings and principles? In a land which was itself swayed by so many different currents of opinion, was it indeed necessary to identify oneself with the majority? I decided that, for the time being, all that was demanded of me was to try to keep as steady as possible, to close my ears to alarming rumours and my heart to nostalgia and dismay. ‘If England is invaded tomorrow’, I wrote then, ‘I shall certainly not know how much of what I hear is true. All that I can try to do is to foster within myself something that is not merely fear, resentment or bewilderment. Perhaps it might be useful to try to clear my mind by setting down, as truthfully and simply as I can, the tiny facet of the world’s events which I myself, in the months ahead, shall encounter at first hand. It will not be, I know, an unprejudiced account; and my prejudices will probably have many causes that I cannot at present even foresee; but at least it may help me to preserve a thread of serenity and hope.’

  This was the starting-point of a detailed diary which I kept during the next few months (until my work in Rome left me no free time), and then began again in 1943–44, when the war came to La Foce, and of which the latter part was published later on, entitled War in Val d’Orcia.

  It was the first months that were the hardest. A few weeks after Italy’s entry into the war, having been seized by premature labour pains, I went down to our nearest station, Chiusi, to catch the first train to Rome. The trains were all, of course, overflowing with troops, but the kind owner of the station bar, an old friend, tried to reassure me by pointing out that the next one passing through still had a dining-car: “If necessary, the baby can be born there.” I was not much attracted by this prospect, but agreed that it would be preferable to standing in the passage. My baby, however, was so considerate as to delay its arrival, and when at last we reached Rome, we were whisked off, in almost embarrassing comfort and splendour, in the American Embassy’s car to the beautiful house and solicitous care of my godfather who, though his wife and staff had already gone home, was still waiting for orders from Washington to leave himself. I ended, indeed, by considerably overstaying my welcome, since the baby delayed for three more weeks, and the Ambassador was obliged to leave before I had moved to the nursing-home in which, on August 1, my daughter Benedetta was born.

  It was a strange period of waiting, knowing that one was about to bring a new life into such a very unstable world. The Roman summer, with the streets half-empty and the black-out at night, was more beautiful than I had ever seen it, and we would dine out at night under the ilex trees of the Villa Taverna, shimmering with fireflies, sometimes hearing the sirens and distant bursts of gunfire of the, as yet, most unalarming air-raids, and wondering each evening what the next day would bring. On July 8 the return of seven hundred Italians from London, headed by the Italian Ambassador Bastianini, in the Monarch of Bermuda (a ship described by the travellers as both filthy and ill-equipped) gave rise to a fresh wave of anti-English feeling. At a lunch party a few days later I heard, in impotent exasperation and disbelief, Bastianini describing the decadence and softness which had overtaken the English people (as exemplified by il weekend inglese). They had lost, he declared, any capacity for patriotism and self-sacrifice (this had been Ribbentrop’s mistake, too) and would never be able to stand up against a German attack. “Non vi sono più rimaste che le qualità che non rendono.”32 “But surely they still have some courage?” one guest enquired. “Anche il coraggio, da sola, è una qualità che non rende.”33 At the end our hostess rose, saying brightly, “Yes, you must be right, England is done for.”

  Had I trusted myself to speak, I could have supplied at least one small piece of evidence that did not point in the same direction. In the preceding weeks, when it was becoming plain that the invasion was a real danger and the radio had said that some English children were being sent away from danger areas to stay with friends in America, I asked my relations there whether they, too, would find a temporary home for some children of close English friends. They at once sent the warmest of invitations; but when I transmitted it, the parents, in each case, refused. ‘It is not a reasoned refusal, perhaps,’ wrote one father, ‘but the feeling that we can’t leave this country even vicariously proceeds out of some mysterious depths and is beyond the reach of reason. Though there are cogent reasons for removing children from any sort of danger of coming into contact with war, it must also be admitted that we think we are going to win.’ And in a later letter he added, ‘I know you entirely understand that our refusal has nothing to do with the very happy life that I know they would lead there, and I think it would be selfish merely to fear separation. It comes nearer, perhaps, to being an act of faith.’

  A good many other people, I think, felt as he did, and, as the menace of invasion receded and the long years of war dragged on, I do not think there was one parent who regretted his choice; while I have often seen, after the return of the children who did go—happy as they were with their American hosts and deeply as they remained devoted to them—that they yet felt as if they had somehow been cheated of something more important than even security or happiness.

  During my week in the nursing-home I listened to the news of the Battle of Britain on the little radio concealed under my pillow, and read and re-read the last letters from England which still reached me. (‘We have been’, wrote my aunt from London, ‘like Brünnhilde, in a circle of fire, but nothing to upset one.’) Then I went back to La Foce and, within a few months, was so fortunate as to find, in spite of my Anglo-American origins and my non-adherence to the Fascist party, a job in the Prisoners of War office of the Italian Red Cross in Rome, where I worked for the next two years.

  This office, which came to perform a large and important role, operated within an extremely cumbersome and complicated framework. Its President was an old Italian general, Generale Clerici; its Secretary-General was Elsa Dallolio, the founder of the Italian Branch of the International Social Service, whose work was amalgamated with that for prisoners of war; and its staff consisted, on the one hand, of Red Cross military personnel, rightly considered unfit for active service, and on the other of an awkward mixture of civilian volunteers and regular employees. The volunteers, of whom I was one, were well-meaning, untrained, and very unevenly efficient; the professional secretaries and typists knew their jobs but (with a few notable exceptions) kept strictly to their regular office hours; the military staff had no knowledge of any language but their own, and were unaccustomed to any form of office work. That this strange amalgam of human beings should have managed to do any work at all; that, roughly speaking, the organisation of the camps of the Allied prisoners of war in Italy did work; that the men rec
eived their mail and their parcels and that, on the other hand, news of the Italian troops in Allied hands did reach their families, was a tribute to the devoted work of the heads of the various sections, and of a few people who worked immediately with them, particularly of Conte Umberto Morra, the head of the section for Allied POWs who was also the Italian representative on the Commission of the International Red Cross which inspected the Allied prisoners’ camps in Italy, and of Elsa Dallolio herself. Umberto’s tact and humour were as useful in these tasks as his thorough knowledge of the English language and of the English character, while it was Elsa who, without ever moving from the big table weighed down with files in her little office, somehow managed to keep the whole creaking machinery in constant motion, with the minimum of friction, strain or fuss. Permanently overworked, harassed by a hundred major and minor problems, torn by an intense personal compassion for the human suffering involved, she yet managed to preserve an atmosphere of quiet, humorous serenity, which steadied everyone who saw her; and whenever there was a disagreeable or painful task to be done, it was she—at an inner cost which she kept to herself—who took it on. What she said to the weeping, hysterical women who, after days or weeks of waiting, were at last called up to her office to receive some news—sometimes the worst, sometimes merely the announcement that they must go on waiting—I have never known. But day after day, I have seen them come out again, sometimes weeping still, but no longer despairing.

  The building in which we worked—a sequestrated school—was ill-furnished, unheated, and very unsuited to its new purpose. The working hours were from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., but most of the heads of sections and some of the volunteers would come back again for the afternoon, to sort and censor the mail, and to go on deciphering and translating the interminable lists of Italian dead, wounded or missing which would arrive after any major Allied advance, such as that in North Africa. I can still see the wide entrance halls packed with the silent, anxious mob of wives and mothers, waiting for the news that we were feverishly deciphering upstairs. Names and birthplaces dictated by illiterate Sardinian or Calabrian peasant-boys to overworked Allied officials with only a slight knowledge of Italian, or none, often arrived in so incomprehensible a form that we had to ask for them to be repeated. And when, on the same list, some thirty Luigi Rossis (the Italian equivalent of John Smith) appeared—some dead, some missing and some captured—it was not until the most careful checking of their birthplaces, dates of birth and parents’ names, that any news whatever could be given out.

  At one time, I was working in the section for the Italian dead and wounded in which, in addition to the lists, our main task was the reading and translating of the hospital chaplains’ letters which accompanied the meagre little parcels of personal effects returned with his identity disk to a dead soldier’s family: the children’s photographs, the wedding group, the first Communion medal; sometimes a creased letter to ‘mio amato sposo’ or ‘mio caro papà’; a postcard of his home town, a rosary, a good-luck charm. The chaplains’ letters were then translated and the little parcel was sent off, with a brief letter of condolence, to the soldier’s family. Never could I get accustomed to writing those stereotyped letters; never could I teach myself not to imagine the faces of those who would read them.

  I worked in this office (with brief week-ends at La Foce, when possible) for nearly two years until, in the autumn of 1942, I was again pregnant and had to go back to La Foce. There, to my surprise, I found plenty to do, but I do not propose to describe this period in any detail here, since I have already done so in War in Val d’Orcia.

  When I got home, I realised that there was scarcely a farm on the place which had not got some of its men fighting, in Africa, Russia or Greece, or else interned in some remote prisoners’ camp. Their wives and mothers hurried to meet me, asking why those who had been sent to Russia had never written, or those stranded in Greece and deported to Germany were always asking for food. What could I tell them? I helped them to fill in the post-card forms for their replies, or the requests for news through the International Red Cross in Geneva and to address their pathetic parcels of home-baked biscuits, cheese and ham, well knowing how unlikely it was that any answer would come back. I tried to give an encouraging answer to their question, “But when will it all come to an end?” Then we settled down, like many others, to listen to the radio, to surmise, and to wait.

  One good thing that this period brought about was unforeseen: a closer relationship with our tenants and our neighbours. The men of the Val d’Orcia had paid lip-service to Fascism in so far as its laws were favourable to agriculture; and when, in spite of their conviction that the Duce would somehow keep them out of the war, they discovered that they, too, were to be involved, their surprise was very soon coloured by an indignation which turned into a more positive, active resentment, embracing both the Fascists and the Germans, and producing a kind of local solidarity, a drawing together to meet common dangers and common needs.

  After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, the country people enjoyed a few hours of hope for peace, but it soon became clear that the Fascists had only left us in the hands of harder and tougher masters, the Germans. It was then that at La Foce (as, I expect, in many other country places) we drew together into a tight little community, like a small rural society in time of war in the Middle Ages. For food we were almost entirely self-supporting (not only for ourselves, but for the twenty-three refugee children from Turin and Genoa who had come to live in the Casa dei Bambini); for fuel we used, besides the small rations of lignite, our own wood and the kernels of our olives. We made our own soap, spun our own wool, and occasionally, in secret, killed a calf and had its hide tanned for leather. We ran our car, until the Germans took it away, on charcoal from our woods. Then, after the armistice of September 8, when the Val d’Orcia was suddenly filled with liberated Allied prisoners of war who were trying to avoid the Germans and rejoin their own armies, as well as with Italian soldiers from disbanded regiments who were making their way back to their own homes, innumerable problems brought us all still closer together. It was the inhabitants in the more remote farms (our house was too close to the main road and too frequently inspected by the Germans, to be a safe hiding-place) who housed and fed the Allied prisoners on the run, with a courage and generosity beyond all praise. When, later on, groups of partisans, including some Allied prisoners of war, came to live in our woods and in some of the farms up the hill, they were joined by local young men who wished to avoid being called up to fight on the German side. It was our ox-carts which took up wheat and wine to them; it was the local cobbler who (without asking any questions) re-soled the boots of the Allied soldiers on their way south; it was one of our foremen who, when the Germans came in a lorry to capture some Allied ex-prisoners working in a field, gave them the pre-arranged signal to scatter and escape; it was the partisans living in one of our farms on the edge of a beech-wood at the top of the hill who, when a threatening article in a local paper pointed me out by name as a person who should be deported to Germany, suggested that I should go into hiding with them. For several months, I slept with a small suitcase beside my bed, ready to start, and a back-door open towards the woods.

  So, at last, the old barriers of tradition and class were broken down, and we were held together by the same difficulties, fears, expectations and hopes. ‘Together’, as I then wrote in my diary ‘we planned how to hide the oil, the hams and the cheeses, so that the Germans should not find them; together we found shelter for the fugitives who knocked at our door—whether Italians, Allies or Jews, soldiers or civilians—together we watched the first bombs fall on the bridges of the Val d’Orcia, and listened hopefully for the rumours of landings in Tuscany which never came.’ And together—when the Germans had turned us out of the cellar which had become our air-raid shelter and had obliged us to walk to Montepulciano with all the refugee children and our own, as well as three new-born babies—we came home, after the Allies’ arrival, to bury the corpses in the woods
and farms, to reap the harvest, to remove the mines still concealed in the woods and fields and in our own front garden, and to rebuild the shattered farms.