by Tom Carver
*
By February 1943 – three months after Richard’s disappearance – Monty still had no idea what had happened to his stepson beyond the fact that he’d been captured. The lack of news was causing considerable concern in the family. As they tried to find out from the Red Cross what had happened, it opened up an old dispute about who was Richard’s next of kin. Was it his elder brother John, who was his closest blood relative, or Monty, who was his only legal parent?
On 20th February 1943 on the eve of the battle of Medenine, Monty wrote indignantly to the Reynoldses, David’s guardians: “It is complete nonsense the way everyone goes on about next-of-kin to Dick Carver. As his step-father I am legally his next-of-kin. In any case it is far better that I should handle it, as my name will probably get things done much quicker than anyone else. So you carry on doing it all, and tell everyone else it is my order that you should do it.”
By now Monty had pushed Rommel back through Egypt and Libya and was close to cornering him at Tunis. After failing to break out of the Eighth Army encirclement at Medenine, Rommel resigned his post at the head of the fabled Deutsches Afrika Korps on 10th March 1943 and left Africa, never to return. The DAK surrendered two months later.
By the end of April the tunnel was down about ten feet and had reached the foundations, but to their disappointment they found the doorway had been bricked up on the inside. Just then it was announced that PG38 was to be broken up. The prisoners decided to leave the tunnel intact just in case there were further arrivals.
As they were emptying the last of the Red Cross boxes of earth in the attic, one of the men, trying to compress the soil, stamped too hard.
That afternoon the ceiling began to show enormous cracks and suddenly whilst I was watching a section of about 50 feet gave way and came down with a colossal bang! Everyone thought it was a terrific joke except the Italians who hoped they had got through our six months term without any “unpleasant” incidents.
They told the comandante that the earth came from an old tunnel dug by the previous group of New Zealand prisoners before the comandante had arrived. When he asked why the soil looked so new, they told him that the attic was airtight and had kept it remarkably fresh. He demanded proof that this had not come from a new excavation so all the earth was carried back downstairs and packed into the New Zealanders’ tunnel in the commandante’s presence. It just about fitted and honour was satisfied.
On 28th May, two days after Richard’s 29th birthday, the entire camp was marched to the railway station back down the hill they had come up six months earlier. Richard was glad to be on the move once more but he knew that he was unlikely ever to have such a pleasant internment as he had had at Poppi in the Tuscan countryside. As they chugged slowly north in the prison train through the hot Italian countryside, the prisoners discussed the war and what it all meant. An invasion of Italy could not be far off. From Tunis, the Allies could reach Sicily easily. Soon they would be free.
Outside Florence they sat for several hours in a siding as the sun roasted the metal roofs of the carriages. The windows had been sealed shut to prevent escapes and the blinds pulled down. A guard walked through the crowded compartments with a large metal container of water. Each prisoner was allocated one ladleful. In the late afternoon they moved off once more. Finally, long after dark, the train slowed to a stop, the doors were flung open and they were ordered out onto the empty platform of a large station. The signs said Bologna. They had been in the carriages for sixteen hours.
The prisoners were divided up. The officers were ordered into the station’s main waiting room where they lay on the floor under close guard. The lower ranks were taken away to another train. At first light the officer group was split again: the more junior officers were put on one train, which someone said was destined for Modena. The rest, including Richard, were pushed back aboard the train that they had arrived in.
This time the journey was much shorter. It was still well before midday when they pulled into a little station called Castelguelfo, outside the town of Fontanellato in Northern Italy. Waiting for them on the platform was a tall Italian officer in his late forties surrounded by Carabinieri and a detachment of guards from the Alpini Regiment, Italy’s well-respected mountain troops. “I am Colonnello Eugenio Vicedomini, the commandant of PG49,” the officer said in heavily accented English. “And this is Capitano Camino, my chief interpreter.”
He nodded at a diminutive figure standing next to him. The two groups – the Italian prison guards and the English officers – eyed each other warily. Richard could see, from the way that Vicedomini held himself and the smart turn-out of his troops, that he was a professional career soldier and not a conscript.
We marched the four miles to the camp along the hot and dusty road. The countryside appeared quite pleasant though very flat; but we were disappointed when we got to the camp. We had been led to expect a small select senior officers’ camp and judging by the name of the station, we thought it might be in the ancient Castello of the Guelphs. What we found was an enormous red-brick orphanage building surrounded by much wire and with hundreds of faces looking out of the windows.
5.
THE FIRST TIME I heard the name Fontanellato was in August 1972, when I was eleven. The previous Easter, my mother had had a near-fatal bout of appendicitis. Her appendix was so swollen that when the doctor removed it in an emergency operation, he asked if he could keep it as a specimen to show his students. When she finally emerged from hospital, she lay at home for several months before suggesting that we should splash out on a family holiday to Italy and Greece to help her recuperate.
We crossed the Channel in the rain, the stench of diesel and the roll of the car ferry making me vomit. It was the first time I had ever left England. Our car was a green Morris Marina possessed by a malevolent spirit. To get it started in the winter my father would have to put its spark plugs in the kitchen stove to dry out, then give the alternator a gentle massage to coax it into cooperating with the spark plugs. All the way across the Channel, my father fretted about whether it would start when we reached the other side. He was terrified of “a scene”, as he called it. But when we docked in Calais, the Marina, wilful as ever, confounded everyone’s expectations by starting like a Jaguar first time. We rolled smoothly onto foreign soil, creaking under the weight of the tents and cooking apparatus that were lashed to the roof with rope and covered by my father’s army canvas.
As we moved down through France slower than Hitler’s panzer divisions had done, the four of us – my parents, my older sister Lizzy and I – tried to adjust to the novel experience of being together. My mother read to me stories from Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and John Buchan – my parents’ heroes. Imprisoned in the back seat, my sister and I elbowed each other and bickered.
We entered the Grand St Bernard tunnel that separated France from Italy, still arguing, and in a foul mood. But something about the click-click of the concrete road inside the tunnel, the mesmerising flicker of the tunnel lights and the cool alpine air on our faces lifted our spirits. It was as if someone had sucked all the friction out of the car in the darkness; we emerged into daylight feeling as if we were starting a new holiday. By the customs post, my father stretched his long legs in the Italian sunshine. He took off his cravat and changed behind the car from his trousers into a pair of long khaki shorts, left over from his days in the desert. This unconscious gesture suggested that this was a place where he felt at home. This wasn’t simply a holiday for him as it was for the rest of us; it was a reunion with a period of happiness in his life. He was back on Italian soil.
That night we pitched our tent on a flat stretch of grass that was surrounded on three sides by a clear green river. The air was full of the calming sound of water flowing over pebbles. After we had finally finished wrestling with the rope stays and wooden pegs of my father’s ancient Indian army tent, we raced into the shallows and then cooked sausages over an open fire by the light of a tilley lamp.
&nbs
p; Italy was much more foreign than anything I’d ever known: the people, the taste of the tomatoes, the intensity of the sun; even the little bits of Italian history that my sister read out from her Baedeker guidebook I realised were very different from the damp, clanking kings and knights of England. We meandered down through Lombardy and Tuscany. In Assisi we walked around, gasping for air in the heat. Such interest as I had in St Francis, which was never more than mild, evaporated as the leather strap of my Box Brownie cut into my neck.
“Only the English are stupid enough to walk in this,” moaned my sister outside the duomo. “The Italians are all having their siestas.”
We wandered back into the coolness of the duomo to seek relief from the scalding pavements. I longed for a gelato but knew my request would be turned down. Just then my mother announced that we were going to drive on to a place called Fontanellato.
“Where’s that?” I said without enthusiasm, assuming it to be yet another medieval town. “It’s where I was imprisoned in the war,” said my father simply.
This was the first time that I can recall being told my father had been a prisoner of war, yet the news did not sink in immediately. Monty was still alive and it had been little more than a year since my father had taken me to see the film Patton; I just assumed that whatever my father had done could not compare to Monty’s triumphs.
*
We stood outside the large brick building staring up. The place seemed grim and austere after the grandeur of Assisi. It had an appropriately forbidding air for a POW camp, but I was disappointed to see no sign of barbed wire or watchtowers. My father knocked on the door. A small porthole opened to reveal the face of a nun in a wimple. She explained that the building was a convent. When she finally understood my father’s rusty Italian, she ushered us in.
I sat on a hard bench, drinking cold lemonade provided by the nuns, watching my father and mother walk up and down the corridors. “We were given a very intensive tour by a short stout nun, Dick spreading his fingers and bending over her in his efforts at Italian” was how my mother described it in her journal. The dormitories where the POWs slept had been replaced by nuns’ cells. Only the refectory in the basement was as my father remembered it.
“This was where we ate,” he explained, “and where we put on plays. We put on a very good production of Blithe Spirit here” – a fact which seemed a little curious to me, that you could have a play in a prisoner-of-war camp.
He wanted to find the place where he had hidden his chocolate.
“Every time I received a Red Cross parcel,” my father explained, “I would save the chocolate and hide it behind a loose brick in the back of one of the disused fireplaces, ready to use when I escaped. Unfortunately, when I did escape everything happened so fast I didn’t have time to retrieve my chocolate.”
We found the room but the fireplace had been cemented over, with his chocolate inside. We wandered out of the back of the convent into a large vegetable garden. My father explained that this had once been their exercise yard – a large muddy field with a stream running through the middle. He pointed out where the barbed wire and the watchtowers had stood and showed us the spot where the Italian commandant had cut the wire to let them out.
It didn’t make much sense – why would the camp commandant be letting the prisoners go? I preferred to imagine Sergeant Harry Trotter of the Special Boat Squadron, one of my favourite characters in my “war mags”, wriggling under the wire as the searchlights swept the air above his head. But, nonetheless, I found myself being drawn into the story. This was a different father to the quiet, somewhat reserved figure I had grown up with.
After saying goodbye to the nuns, we got back into the car and drove a short distance down a country lane.
“I think it’s over there,” said my father.
He stopped the car and we all got out. He strode off through a field of vines while my mother and sister stood together in the shade waiting. I trotted after him. He was clearly excited and on the verge of discovering something and I wanted to know what he was going to produce next. At the far end of the vineyard was a wood with a large dry riverbed in the bottom. It was thick with brambles and saplings that criss-crossed over each other.
“Lie down there,” he suggested, “and you can pretend to be me.”
I burrowed under the canopy of undergrowth. Above me I could see his dim outline dressed in a faded blue Airtex shirt and old army khaki shorts; his white knees unaccustomed to the light of day above a pair of long army socks held up by garters. Even by the standards of the 1970s, he looked old-fashioned.
“When Vicedomini the commandant cut the wire, he told us that the Germans would soon arrive to take over the camp. We had two hours to get away. There were 600 of us. Instead of running away as fast as we could, we decided to stick together and hide close to the camp. So we lay in this riverbed as quietly as possible for two days and nights. We hoped that the Germans would never think of looking for us here. We could hear them driving around and around as they searched for us – sometimes they came down this road right past the wood but they never saw us.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes. I prayed that they would not find out where we were.”
“Were there many of them?”
“Quite a few – we could see several trucks with soldiers sitting in the back and there were also motorcyclists with sidecars that raced around the roads.”
“Did you have anything to eat?”
“We had a few Red Cross supplies – though not my chocolate.” He chuckled. “Luckily the local people turned out to be friendly and several of the local farmers brought us cheese and milk and bread when it was dark.”
I lay on the flinty soil imagining German bombers circling slowly overhead like vultures and soldiers all around me with their faces pressed down into the earth, waiting in silence, their ears picking up the engines of the motorbikes passing by only a few yards away on the dusty road.
I tried to regulate my breathing so that it could not be heard. A farmer’s truck backfired in one of the fields nearby and I jumped.
“It was frightening,” my father continued. “We felt very disorientated; we’d been let out of the camp but we were still in enemy territory and the Germans were moving into Italy in force to fight Monty and the Eighth Army.
“Was Monty nearby?”
“No. He had landed in Sicily in the south so he was several hundred miles away.”
“What happened to the Italian commandant who let you out?”
My father glanced down at me.
“The Germans did not treat him well. He was heavily punished for what he had done. But we were always very grateful to him. The Germans never captured a single prisoner that day.”
Staring up at him, I could see how proud he felt. For the first time in my life, my father began to come into focus; here was a man who had survived imprisonment and somehow escaped – not even Monty could lay claim to that.
6.
RICHARD ARRIVED AT Fontanellato prison camp PG49 on 30th May 1943. Six months had passed since he had been taken prisoner. In that time, Monty had succeeded, with the help of the Americans, in retaking the whole of North Africa. The Eighth Army had advanced 2,000 miles from El Alamein to Tunis, where the Germans had finally surrendered, handing over 275,000 prisoners of war.
PG49 sat on its own, just outside the town, surrounded by flat fields of vines and corn. It had been built originally as an orphanage. Beyond a weak attempt at a classical façade around the front door, it was void of any architectural pretence. The square block-like appearance with rows of small windows had no doubt been intended to instil awe into the child runaways and illegitimates that it had been built to hold as an orphanage. Two 12-foot high barbed-wire fences ran around the perimeter. There were a total of eight wooden watchtowers, one on each corner and one halfway down each side. Each contained two guards and a machine gun, designed so that every section of the fence was visible by a minimum of two towe
rs. At the back of the building on the north side lay a small grass exercise area surrounded by more fences and watchtowers.
The English officers were marched up the front steps into an echoing atrium which reached three stories up to the roof. Long corridors with marble floors gave off left and right, and around the top of the atrium ran a type of minstrels’ gallery full of faces staring down at the new arrivals.
The Caribs’ search was fairly thorough but I smuggled in everything I wanted to. We felt very much like arriving at school again for the first time. Hundreds of inquisitive people wanted to know our “dope” and all about us, and we had to learn the ways of the place. We were met by the acting Senior British Officer, Major Williams, and Adjutant Phillips and Major Pyman.
Upstairs they were shown dozens of small dormitories. There was the smell of fresh paint and Richard was relieved to see that each room had electric lighting and all the windows had glass in them. Each bed had sheets, two blankets and its own individual locker for stowing possessions.
We were told we had to divide up into rooms of six and unfortunately we didn’t find it possible to do this on the spur of the moment without causing a certain amount of ill-feeling. However, in the end I got in with Dennis Gibbs, Hugh Mainwaring, Peter Bragg, “Fanny” Fane-Hervey and Pop Morrison and one couldn’t ask for a better lot of chaps.
Hugh Mainwaring was the officer Richard had been captured with in the desert and Fanny Fane-Hervey and Pop Morrison were both veterans from Poppi.
