by Tom Carver
We waited our turn outside. There was room for only a couple of people at a time in each caravan. Inside, I could see two American veterans were leaning over Monty’s desk and scrutinising the chinagraph battle lines on the map.
“Fascinating,” I heard one say to his colleague. “Take a look at this. You can see from these markings that Monty was planning to advance two entire divisions by sea.”
“Why on earth would he have done that?” said the other.
“Perhaps he had a plan to outflank Rommel with an amphibious landing.”
“Monty was a more cunning general than I’ve given him credit for.”
Over their shoulder, I could see the faint outlines of my impulsive ten-year-old scribbles into the Mediterranean. As we were leaving the museum I told my father the story of what I had done and he gave a deep snorting laugh.
*
One morning in December 1995, a package arrived for my father in the post. I placed it beside him on the breakfast table. He put down his copy of The Times and pulled out the tiny mother-of-pearl penknife that he always carried and slit open the crumpled brown paper wrapping.
Inside was a video cassette and a card from an address in Switzerland. In formal, somewhat halting English, the writer explained that he had located my father’s address through the British embassy in Geneva and wished my father a rapid return to health. It was signed by an Antonio Lannutti.
“I wasn’t aware I had been ill,” my father said, blinking his eyebrows up and down at me in amusement.
He picked up the video. It was void of all markings. By the way he looked at it, turning it over slowly in his large hands, I could tell that he had no idea what its purpose was so I spent the morning buying a video recorder at the electrical store in the village, then lying on my stomach on his old Amman rugs trying to make the brightly coloured wires of the appliance fit the sockets of his ancient television.
“It will allow you to record programmes on TV,” I said to help him to justify what he clearly thought was a large and superfluous expense.
“Oh good,” he said gamely, “you must show me how I do that,” though we both knew that he would never show enough interest to learn. By lunchtime I had managed to make it work. We sat in the curtained gloom of an English afternoon, the December rain tapping at the windows, and I pressed play. The video opened with a slight jerk, a susurration in the darkness. Then an old lady, dressed in a widow’s black and Italian-looking, appeared. She sat staring into the camera, her eyes fogged by cataracts, saying nothing. She seemed toothless and of enormous age.
“This lady sitting here is the lady who cooked all your meals when you used to go up to the house. This is Maria, the mother of the boy Alfonso,” said an unseen voice in English with a thick Italian accent. It meant nothing to me then.
The film jumped to a collapsed farmhouse and a track, steep and chalky, falling down into the underwater shadows of a wood in summer. Three figures were walking downhill, one of them going partly sideways to prevent himself from stumbling on the loose chalk. With their jerseys tied around their waists, they looked as if they were on a day hike. The film could have been made anytime in the last 50 years. One of the men, balding, with a warm friendly smile, introduced himself as Antonio Lannutti, the author of the letter. He explained that he was a relative of the De Gregorio family.
“Mr Carver,” he said, “this is the track the Germans were going down on the morning that they stole the pig.”
I looked over at my father for an explanation. He was leaning forward in his chair studying the TV screen closely. From nowhere a video had appeared of a memory more than 50 years old. One of the other men, slightly older than Antonio, set off half walking, half running down the track, followed by the camera. Waving vigorously at the thick canopy of sycamore and oak saplings beside the track, he halted at a bend, while the camera continued moving up and down as the camera operator caught his breath.
The man told the cameraman to aim at the undergrowth and a figure swam into focus from the shadows – it was a boy, no more than seventeen or eighteen, who was attempting to burrow his body under the brambles. The man lunged off the track and grabbed the boy’s leg, pulling him out into the sunlight.
The man talked rapidly in Italian as the balding Antonio explained what was going on.
“This is Alfonso who found you that day… they were looking for a place to ambush the Germans and to kill them so that they could get their pig.”
“And this,” he said, pointing to the youth lying awkwardly in the brambles, “is my son, Gino. He is lying in the exact spot where Alfonso tripped over you and Jim. You were shaking with fear.”
Alfonso grinned proudly at the camera while Gino, his son, stood up, looking a little sheepish.
“‘Who are you?’ I said to you that day. And Jim and you replied, ‘We are English prisoners of war.’ Mr Carver, do you remember?”
My father had sunk back in his chair, verging on tears. For 50 years, this family in Italy had held tightly to the memory of Richard and what had happened in the war. He mattered to them, and this was their appeal to him for contact. They were determined not to let this one small grain of memory dissolve in the vast sea of war experiences.
I tried to piece together what I knew. This man, now standing in his shirtsleeves with his thick sunburnt farmer’s arms crossed across his chest, was the fourteen-year-old Alfonso who first found Jim and Richard in the bushes. But it was only much later that I came to realise that Maria, the blind woman at the beginning, was the person who had negotiated with the German commander for the pig’s release.
The video went to black once more and then a moment later, Alfonso reappeared, scrambling up what looked like a small rock face. He sat beside a rock and pointed inside a large hole.
“This is where you and Jim lived for those weeks,” said Antonio. “It must have been very cold for you in there, I think.”
It was the entrance to the cave. I stared into the black mouth, trying to place my father there, imagining him drying his socks on the bushes outside which Antonio was now absently swishing with a birch. Alfonso pointed to the top of the crag.
“And this is where the Germans stood that day,” Antonio translated, trying to keep up with Alfonso’s excited commentary, “and they urged you and Jim to surrender. You see it was very close to where you were. You were almost touching them.”
Until that afternoon, this strange story of the family of three brothers in the farmhouse with the pig and the cave in the woods had always had the quality of a family fairy tale, which happened too long ago to be able to be fully verified. But that day the worlds of myth and the everyday fused together. Here was the family that my father had told me about. Somewhere in the Apennines, these places and these people actually existed.
The final images on the film were of the family cemetery – the headstones of the De Gregorio parents and below them their three sons: Giovanni, Antonio and Donato. Antonio’s had the date of 27th November 1943, the day he died from his injuries in the British bombing raid. The camera pans to Donato’s. The photo on his headstone is the same as the one in my father’s diary. I grab the remote and freeze the image. The date on his headstone says 1976. So all during the 60s – when my father thought he was dead – he was actually alive and living in Italy.
I pointed out the date to my father.
“He was probably living in Naples the day that we drove through on our holiday in 1972,” I said.
“Huh, I thought he’d died much earlier than that,” was all he said.
Alfonso peered into the camera, as if hoping to find my father somewhere inside its cogs and lens. “I hope you enjoyed all these little bits of wartime from Italy, Mr Carver,” said Antonio. Then the image on the screen went black for the final time and my father reached for a pen and wrote carefully on the video’s spine: “The old farm at Gessopalena and the cave where I hid behind German lines in Italy in Dec ’43. Sent me by a Signor Lanotti Dec ’95.”
He sucked in his breath and held it for a second, then sank back into his chair. I watched him, waiting for him to speak. I could see he was struggling to decide what to say. He was clearly moved, but now that it was over he seemed unsurprised, as if it was what he had expected all along.
“Would you like some more tea?” he asked.
*
My father dutifully wrote to Antonio Lannutti in Geneva, thanking him for the gift. Mr Lannutti wrote back immediately, relieved and delighted that it had reached its destination. The following year Mr Lannutti turned up on my father’s doorstep. He explained that he and his wife, who turned out to be from Essex, were on a motoring holiday in England, visiting her relatives. My father invited them to lunch.
After that, the Lannuttis called on my father every summer for several years. He put them on his Christmas card list and wrote back whenever they wrote to him. They invited him to visit Gessopalena and Alfonso, who was still living in Gessopalena, but he didn’t take them up. I do not know why. Perhaps it was because there was no Donato any more, or perhaps, by entertaining the Lannuttis for lunch, he felt he had closed the loop.
Eventually the visits by the Lannuttis dried up and my father stopped writing Christmas cards. In 2003 he made one final trip to Italy, to Fontanellato for the 60th anniversary of the escape. By then he was 89 and he found the trip exhausting. Nine “old contemptibles” were all that were left out of a camp of 600. In the exercise yard at the back, they cut a ribbon at midday as a bugler played, and walked out in a ragged line, a red triangle of cloth pinned to their jackets in memory of the POW flashes they’d had to wear on their backs. A farmer told Richard how he remembered being sent as a boy with his sister to give baskets of bread and grapes to the prisoners in the overgrown ditch.
The video stayed on top of his television, its little white label greying in the English light. It took on the same ornamental status as Aunt Bulley’s china: he showed no interest in it yet he didn’t throw it away. In time, I came to understand that my father wore all his experiences lightly. He was not someone who had much interest in returning to the past and dwelling on it. He lived in the present – it was one of his appealing qualities that he still showed such a strong interest in the world around him, even in his late eighties. Yet for myself I found that I needed to know more. Every so often in America, I fretted that Alfonso might soon die, and then the last direct connection to what had happened would be lost for ever.
18.
MAY 2007 AND my father is close to dying. He is 93. I have spent the last twelve months shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic from my home in Washington, trying to have as much time as possible in his presence.
I realise that I have been doing much the same for the last two decades; returning at the end of each trip I made into some foreign continent to the house by the sea to sit in the garden with him.
It’s 2am. I enter his bedroom and he opens his eyes, studying me from inside the weak circle of light emitted by his bedside lamp.
“Where have you been?” he asks.
“Nowhere.”
“I’m not dead yet, you know,” he says, managing a smile before falling back into sleep.
I enjoy my vigils by his bed; I like the intimacy that darkness brings, the way that the hours stretch out after midnight, punctuated only by an occasional car passing by on the road outside.
Richard Carver in his last years
“I am stuck,” he mutters in his sleep. “I can’t see him… I wish this mist would lift.”
He twitches as if he’s trying to dodge something, though his old bones won’t allow him to move very far. He lives in a form of twilight with memories rising to the surface of his mind like twigs in a muddy river stirred up by a storm.
The days exhaust him. He seldom moves outside the house now. The carers can no longer cope with him and his house; getting him up from a chair takes twenty minutes and two people. His world has been reduced to two rooms: his bedroom and the dining room, where he sits all day. The other rooms of the house feel cold andneglected. Mice run freely through the kitchen and his bedroom. Large chunks of plaster, their cracks covered uselessly by sellotape, are breaking off like ice floes and falling on the furniture. Despite the tartan rug over his knees and the gas fire on full, he complains of feeling cold.
It is time for him to leave. The pages of his W.H. Smith’s calendar which until last summer were full of lunches, army reunions, house groups, church events and lectures, are now blank white spaces. His friends are either dead or too ill themselves to visit.
There is a nursing home near my sister’s farm in southern Scotland which has agreed to take him. It was once the main pub in my sister’s village; I remember seeing the fishermen, tanked up with Tartan beer, surging out the door. Ghostly figures now sit in the room that used to be the public bar without speaking all day.
In his little bedroom my sisters have hung the oar he won at Cambridge and a painting of Quetta done by Betty in 1936 to help him feel at home. He lasts the remainder of the spring there, eating bananas with a fork and watching the sheep moving slowly across the damp hills. Then in July, he is taken to the local hospital, suffering from pneumonia.
On the last day that I see my father, he is propped up in his hospital bed, drinking tea through a straw. We sit together in a companionable silence, looking out at the fat cow-soaked hills of Dumfries. He slips noiselessly in and out of sleep, clutching his tea. His face is as still as a death mask when he’s sleeping, as if he is halfway to death already. I hold his bony hand and can just make out his flickering pulse. He wakes confused as if he had been away for a long time, though it was only a few seconds. Then his eyes find me.
“Ah Tom,” he says softly to himself. I smile, hoping this might be the start of a conversation, but he drifts off once more.
I watch the nurses help the old lady drink her tea in the next-door bed. She pecks at it like a bird.
“Where’s Jude?” my father says suddenly. “He’ll cheer me up.” I’m thrilled that he remembers my son’s name; wherever he’s going I hope he will carry some memory of his seven-year-old grandson with him.
Bored with looking at his books, Jude has wandered out into the corridor where he’s playing a game with his two-year-old sister, letting her waddle down towards the nurses’ station before chasing after her. Each time he catches her, she gurgles with delight.
Hearing his name called, he returns and stands a little anxiously at the foot of my father’s bed, reluctant to go any closer, as if death is infectious. I remember being summoned to say goodbye to Monty when he was dying and my father telling me to stand at the end of his bed so that Monty could see me. I was surprised how small his bedroom was.
“What are you going to do when you grow up?” Monty had asked me one last time, that famous brisk voice now hoarse and frayed.
“Be a soldier, sir,” I’d said and felt my father exhale beside me, relieved that I hadn’t said anything inappropriate. I was fifteen by then so could easily have done so. Monty nodded – it was what he was expecting to hear.
“What are you going to do with your life?” is what my father asks of Jude. It is a gentler, open-ended question. I look at my son and wonder what will come out.
“Be a soldier,” he says unexpectedly. Dad blinks at him but says nothing. He seems rather surprised.
EPILOGUE
MY FATHER DIED on 24th July 2007. He left behind many mysteries – not least the fate of the De Gregorios. I felt a debt of gratitude needed to be repaid which my father, normally so scrupulous, had either overlooked or failed to understand. For a year it gnawed at me, until, as much for myself as for my father, I started to investigate whether there were any De Gregorios still alive. I discovered that only Alfonso remained – the boy whose pig was stolen by the Germans.
With the help of Antonio Lannutti and his British wife Barbara, the couple who had sent the video, I arranged to visit Alfonso in August with my wife and children. From Rome airport, w
e drove due east. Within a couple of hours, we were in a land of deep shadows and giant upheavals of rock and forest.
“It is a very upset landscape,” Antonio had warned on the phone.
Small towns clung to the escarpments as if they had been blown against the rockface like pieces of litter. I thought of Jim and Richard scrambling down these slopes in the darkness, terrified of stumbling into some hidden German trench. Even in the heat of a July day, the air felt cool.
Early the next morning, Antonio and Barbara came to meet us at our hotel. Antonio was now completely bald but otherwise looked exactly the same as he had done on the video fifteen years earlier. Barbara, his wife, still carried the traces of an English upbringing in her voice.
We set off in two cars, crossed the Sangro and skirted around the village of Roccascalegna, which the Germans had occupied as their headquarters. Soon we were travelling through small woods and uneven fields on a road that looked like it had been recently created.
“This is the road to Gessopalena the Germans were pushing the pig down that morning,” said Antonio. “For a long time it was just a track, exactly as it used to be when your father was here, but two months ago they tarmaked it.”
As the road crossed a small stream at the bottom of the valley, a man stepped out of the shade of an oak tree. It was Alfonso. He had wiry sandy hair and a weathered face and still had the look of a young boy. It was easy to see in his hopeful smile the fourteen-year-old so eager that day to do something brave to impress his mother. He carried a long-handled machete over one shoulder and wore blue shorts and thick boots with short socks. He looked doubtfully at my children in their flip-flops and tee-shirts, then hugged each of them in turn.
“I wish your father was here to see this,” he said with Antonio translating. His Italian had a thick Abruzzo burr.
