by Tom Carver
Out the front, facing them across the quiet tree-lined Via IV Novembre was an older, much more distinguished-looking building. The Santuario Madonna del Rosario was a Dominican convent built around a wooden Madonna, whose miraculous powers were believed to have brought a dead child back to life in 1628. Behind its large baroque façade lay a huge complex of cloisters, dormitories and chapels. Every day the bells of the convent’s campanile recorded the progress of the day for nuns and prisoners alike. The nuns washed the clothes of the prisoners in return for receiving scarce necessities like soap from the Red Cross parcels. Occasionally the prisoners would glimpse the nuns in the windows of the convent and from time to time, a prisoner would find a little note hidden inside his clothes bestowing the blessings of the Madonna del Rosario on the wearer. They discovered that they were in northern Italy, between Parma and Milan.
“We’re less than 200 kilometres from the Swiss border,” someone noted hopefully. Only one POW had ever been taken to the local town of Fontanellato; he reported seeing farmers’ stalls set up in the arches at the foot of the huge castle of Rocca Sanvitale, and a memorial to those who had died in the First World War with a surprisingly long list of names of the dead.
The total number in PG49 was 500 officers and 100 other ranks. There was a roll call at around 7am which sometimes took over an hour to complete, and another in the evening. In between, the day was largely their own. “We settled down slowly, not liking the rowdy jostling life after our quiet retreat at Poppi.”
But Poppi had at least acclimatised him to life in prison. Richard could immediately recognise the ones who had come straight from the front. They wandered the corridors with a dazed expression, still living in the frenetic shock of battle, unable to focus on the present. The emptiness of the days was a form of torture for many of them. Life in prison was like an interminable Saturday afternoon, said one prisoner, each dusty hour marked by the bells of the convent campanile. The newly captured found it hard to cope with the abrupt decline in their status from being in the privileged position of an officer in Britain’s imperial army to a prisoner with no command over anything.
No one had any idea when the war was going to end and no control over its course; they had a nagging sense that they had “let the side down”. The war was still raging all around but they were no longer a part of it – it was hard not to feel a failure in some way and the gung-ho language of the camp often masked depression. On bad nights, the dormitories echoed with the muffled screams of men reliving their battles. There was the rear gunner who seemed condemned to return to his bale-out in his dreams. Night after night he relived the sight of his co-pilot falling past him without a parachute, his face contorted in panic. Then there was the submariner, whose vessel had been hit by a German torpedo and who had been the last man to make it out of the emergency hatch, leaving his companions to drown in the dark, oily water that sluiced greedily through the opening.
On one of his first mornings in the exercise yard, Richard watched two figures walking around pulling pieces of wood on strings behind them, occasionally pausing to talk to each other.
“You entered Prancer for that show up in Cheltenham last weekend,” said one. “I heard the prize money was pretty decent…”
“Tried to, but the judges ruled that he was too old.”
“How could they say that? Seems the symbol of virility to me. What is he? A poodle/Lab cross?”
PG49, converted from an old orphanage, at Fontanellato
Richard watched the two men stare down at the piece of wood with Prancer painted on the top.
“No, all poodle. Won every cup south of the Thames in his day.”
There was a strange array of clothing on display in the exercise yard, everyone doing their best to defy the ban on civilian clothes. Those who had been inside the longest had woollen scarves and pullovers and even civilian trousers that had been shipped to them from England before the ban came in. Some prisoners who had been shot down or captured at sea had arrived at camp without any uniform, and had cobbled together an eccentric array of night gowns, old farming clothes and army uniform. The only unifying feature was the red patch of cloth that everyone had to have sewn onto their backs to show that they were prisoners.
*
Contact with home was patchy. Richard was allowed to send one letter a month. A reply would take two or three months. Sometimes, he would get five or six letters at once for no good reason. Occasionally, a prisoner would receive a letter from someone who was dead, like the light from a distant star that has since vanished. Richard always made a point of asking for books. Since the camp had only been in existence for six months, the prison library was small. And every book was censored by both the British and the Italians; the British wanted to make sure that nothing was being sent that might help the enemy, and the Italian guards tore off the front and back covers in case they hid a map or some other aid for escaping.
The POWs believed, because of the Italian army’s weak performance in the desert, that somehow the Italians would be ineffectual prison wardens. But in fact, the carabinieri and Alpini soldiers who guarded Italian POW camps were considerably more efficient at their job than their German counterparts. There were fewer successful escapes from POW camps in Italy than from those in Nazi Germany, and of the POWs who did get out, very few made it home. Of the 602 escape attempts recorded in Italy before the Armistice was signed, only six individuals are known to have managed a “home run” all the way back to the UK.
Moreover, the Italians managed to guard their prisoners without resorting to the systematic brutality that was endemic in German camps. At PG49, Richard soon realised that they were particularly fortunate to have Colonnello Vicedomini as their commandant. Eugenio Vicedomini had fought alongside the British in the First World War when Italy and Britain had been on the same side against Germany. Like many career officers in Mussolini’s army, he regarded Italy’s alliance with Hitler and the Nazis as a disaster for his country. Guarding prisoners was a job that enabled him to maintain his allegiance to the army that he had sworn to serve without compromising his integrity. He conducted himself with humanity and compassion.
One day, a prisoner had seized a fleeting opportunity to escape and had managed to get out of the camp only to be stopped by a carabiniere who stepped out unexpectedly from behind a tree. In less than ten minutes the POW was back inside the camp in Vicedomini’s office. If anything was likely to enrage a camp commandant, it was an escape attempt, but Vicedomini showed no anger, only concern.
“Tenente Comyn,” said the elderly colonnello to the POW, “my sentries on the wire might have shot you. And then what would your mother have said?”
The layout of the camp at Fontanellato, drawn by Richard in his notebook
Lieutenant Comyn was so surprised by the commandant’s reaction, he had no reply. He was given the minimum punishment of 28 days in solitary. But such stories of compassion only seemed to irritate some prisoners. They were furious at being POWs, which they saw as a badge of shame and they took it out on the guards, trying to provoke them into more extreme responses which might somehow atone for the humiliation of being held captive. Vicedomini would not be drawn in, however, and persisted in treating the British officers more like equals than prisoners.
He arranged for every prisoner to receive two glasses of wine a day. At midday in time for lunch, the guards delivered an aperitif of vermouth and in the early evening they handed out a ration of the local vino lavorato to accompany their dinner. Keen to have some control over the distribution of alcohol among the men, the SBO (Senior British Officer) Colonel de Burgh asked the Italians not to give the wine out individually. Instead, he invited a gregarious RAF pilot called Tommy Pitman to establish a POW bar on the minstrels’ gallery that ran along the top of the atrium where the camp allocation of wine was delivered every day.
A drawing of the exercise field at Fontanellato, from Richard’s notebook
In lieu of their daily wine ration, eac
h prisoner was given a “chit” which they could cash in at the bar. Since the wine was pretty much a constant, the chits quickly became a form of camp currency that could be used to purchase other rarer commodities like chocolate or cigarettes. The more abstemious you were the richer you became.
“Tommy’s Bar” was open for two hours at lunchtime and two hours in the evening. On one side of the bar the prisoners would lean over the banisters and jeer at their friends in the entrance hall twenty feet below, sometimes throwing down the empty ration tins that were used as wine glasses onto the heads of the passers-by like school-boys. On the other side of the bar they would lounge against the windows and look out into the street. As the weather improved, the girls of Fontanellato began to take their evening passeggiata on the road. With their men either conscripted into the army or in hiding dodging the conscription, the girls gravitated towards the POW camp as one of the few places where they could flirt, albeit at long range. Showing off their brown legs beneath cotton farm dresses, they would stroll slowly past the camp fence, as if on a catwalk, arm in arm either with each other or with their mothers or grandmothers. The guards in the watchtowers would turn their backs on the camp to talk to them, while behind them the occupants of Tommy’s Bar looked on from a distance.
It wasn’t usually long before one of the prisoners, fired up by the vino lavorato, would yell a crude invitation. The NCO in charge of the guards, under pressure to defend his womenfolk from slander, would scream at his men, who would turn around and loose off several rounds in the direction of the windows. This would provoke more taunts and insults from the prisoners and in turn more shots. Sometimes a prisoner who felt a bullet singe his ear would go too far and yell something about the NCO’s mother, and then an order would be yelled in the guardroom below, followed by the crash of boots up the marble stairs. Tommy would be told to close up the bar and the Italians would retreat, grumbling about how the British couldn’t handle their drink.
Like any new boy, Richard worked hard to learn the traditions of PG49. Once he’d got over the shock of how big it was compared to Poppi, he realised that being in a larger camp had several advantages. Here was a chance to spend one’s day immersed in ancient Rome, or learning Italian, playing bridge or simply sunbathing in the deckchairs at the end of the exercise field. He joined in the sporting competitions in the exercise yard. The rugby seven-a-side was dominated by the South Africans, who beat all-comers. The football league that Richard took part in carried betting on the side, organised by an indefatigable RAF pilot called Bill Rainford, known to everyone as Rainy.
Marcus the dentist held his surgeries on the touchline, hoping the games would provide some mildly distracting anaesthetic as the patients’ teeth were wrenched out with primitive pliers and without painkillers. A small muddy stream ran through the middle of the exercise yard and was home to four fluffy goslings stolen from a nearby pond by one of the guards. When a game was on, they liked to run in and out of the legs of the players, scuttling back to safety when it got too rough.
Richard discovered that Rainy, who had been shot down in a Blenheim bomber on the first day of the war, also ran something called “Opportunities Ltd”, which claimed to offer “every service except escape”. For a fee, Rainy would procure additional cigarettes and chocolate for his clients, find someone to do another officer’s duty in the kitchens, rescue dropped objects from the dark, scuttling rat colonies in the gabinetti, procure front-row seats for popular shows and run errands. Another business was “Rack and Ruin”, which offered a mending and repair service and was run by Jack Clarke, a quiet engineer from the Midlands.
*
As Richard found his feet, he began to enjoy the camp life. To anyone who’d grown up in an all-male boarding school, the routines and the tribalism of PG49 were very familiar. Richard noticed that there was a clique of Old Etonians and Harrovians, who had as little contact as possible with the rest of the camp – a motley collection of minor aristocrats, gentlemen soldiers, amateur jockeys and sons of lairds who were apparently just filling in the time until they inherited their titles. He was both fascinated and horrified by the air of mild indifference and bemusement with which they viewed the fortunes of war, as if it was someone else’s game in which they had been invited to play as guests. They were never to be found crowded around the secret radio listening to the BBC, unless there was a chance it might carry some snippet about some “scrape” that one of their own was involved in.
They moved together as a single herd and spoke a language almost unintelligible to anyone else, sprinkled with names and references to incidents and connections that only members of their class would understand: what Randolph Churchill’s fag at Eton was called, how Claude Lascelles had lost the tip of his little finger, what happened during the hunting party of ’24 on the Duke of Buccleuch’s Yorkshire estate and the incident at Asprey’s that led to the Montagu-Tessington affair.
The only thing they seemed to take seriously was the shallow gene pool in which their families had swum for generations, governed by codes that had outlasted many previous wars and disturbances. They acknowledged other prisoners only if one of their clan needed something that could increase their comfort, and then they purchased or charmed their way to possession. Even the camp’s SBO, Colonel Hugh de Burgh, was excluded from their ranks because he was an artillery officer without an estate or title to his name.
After dinner each night, those that belonged to White’s Club in London met in the basement to play baccarat for sizeable stakes that they honoured by signing instructions that were sent on to their banks in St James’s. They opened books on running races between prisoners. Each “owner” would train his stable of runners, feeding them extra rations at mealtimes and timing them on the gallops round the exercise yard imagining they were with their beloved racehorses back at Newmarket.
One day, Eric Newby, the author, running in one of the races, miscalculated the number of laps and slowed down, thinking he had finished. A disappointed White’s Club member approached him afterwards. “You didn’t pull the race, Eric, did you?” he asked. Newby looked at him, bemused. He had no idea how much was at stake.
Richard was delighted to discover there was a flourishing drama group and he revelled in the opportunity to dress up, and to take off the uniform that he had worn continuously since university. The group’s repertoire was limited by what the players could get hold of. Besides Blithe Spirit, Richard took part in Shaw’s Pygmalion and a weak attempt at Somerset Maugham’s The Circle. Each show was treated with the ceremony of an opening night: the SBO, Colonel de Burgh, would walk in with his staff and take his place like the Royal Party on the only line of chairs at the front, while everyone else sat on upturned Red Cross boxes behind.
Once a week Colonnello Vicedomini allowed all prisoners not in solitary confinement to go on escorted walks through the countryside. They would march out at 7am before the heat of the day set in, 120 at a time, flanked by their carabinieri guards. It seems remarkable that no one attempted to escape during these excursions – perhaps for fear of jeopardising the treat for others. This walk was one of the greatest privileges imaginable for a prisoner, a chance to re-establish contact with the outside world and let the senses break out of the unchanging scenes and smells that surrounded them 24 hours a day. They marched in boisterous formation three abreast through the poplar-lined lanes, inhaling the smells from barns full of ripening wheels of parmesan, and staring at farmyards of pigs and chickens and fields of sugar beet and vines. Italians were told to stay out of sight when the prisoners went past.
Once, a group of prisoners increased the pace to try to outmarch the guards. Soon they were marching 140 paces to the minute and the guards were screaming at them to halt. After that the marches were conducted at a funereal pace for several weeks as punishment, but to Richard’s relief they weren’t stopped.
The greatest hardship at the camp was malnutrition and a permanent feeling of hunger. Everyone at Fontanellato was suppos
ed to receive one Red Cross parcel a week, consisting of tins of biscuits, cheese, chocolate, jam, oats, dried eggs and meat. One of the prisoners, a Belgian lieutenant called Leon Blanchaert, was a talented cook, so instead of distributing the Red Cross food parcels individually, it was decided that all food parcels should be pooled and handed over to the kitchens under Blanchaert’s supervision.
Lieutenant Blanchaert did his best to make the meals interesting and filling but there was never enough and almost as soon as each meal ended, the hunger would return. The thought of food crowded out every other appetite including sex. However, in summer, the Italians provided a bit more fresh fruit and vegetables, which raised the vitamin levels and revived the men’s interest in sex. Since the village girls were out of reach, the only options were sex between prisoners or masturbation. Each night there would be a few furtive attempts at masturbating under the bedcovers. Through the un-curtained windows, the searchlights from the watchtowers would graze the beds, catching the undulating blankets in a white stage light.
Under British law homosexuality was illegal and was even more heavily demonised within the army since it was widely believed to sap the fighting spirit. However the only known account of a gay love affair in a Second World War British POW camp was actually written by two prisoners who fell in love in PG49. Though nominally a work of fiction, The Cage by Dan Billany and David Dowie describes Fontanellato in great detail, including the walks in the country, Tommy’s Bar and Bill Rainford’s “Opportunities Ltd”.
Most of the book is an account of the unrequited love that “Alan” feels for the much more glamorous “David”. Every evening Alan stands in the bar, leaning over the balustrade watching David playing cards below:
“Looking down into the hall from the balcony I can see the table, the four heads, the cards, and a glass of vino by each hand. Quietness, steadiness, mutual understanding. Cigarette-smoke floating. Interest and humour on their faces, looking at their cards and at each other. The lamp-light on his gold-brown hair. Heedless. Touch his hair with the invisible shaft of my glance. The only contact. Back now and lie flat on my bed, beside his empty bed. Press my locked hands tight over my eyes. But I can’t shut my thoughts out…”
