by Tom Carver
After a swig of water, Alfonso led us into the wood to find the cave. He started confidently at first, using his machete to clear a straight line through the brambles. After fifteen minutes he paused, looked around, then moved off on a new bearing. Then he stopped again.
“No wonder the Germans couldn’t find it,” said Jude.
“Don’t worry,” said Antonio gallantly, holding back a branch for us to pass, “Alfonso grew up in these woods, he knows exactly where it is.”
After 40 minutes of circling around, there was still no sign of any cave. We broke into smaller groups and fanned out in different directions until eventually Alfonso called out that he had found it and we clambered up to where he was standing.
The place fitted my father’s description. Several huge boulders, heaped on top of each other, a slit between the lowest two. In my father’s sketches you could clearly see him and Jim being able to stand in the entrance but now the gap was less than three feet. A large amount of earth and rubble had filled in the hole, raising the floor of the cave.
“There was a landslide in this area some years ago,” said Alfonso. “Before that, you used to be able to see the reeds from the stream that your father and Jim had used as bedding. They were still lying on the floor of the cave.”
I was not sure what I hoped to find – some evidence perhaps of his presence. I noticed a rock sticking up through the landslipped earth whose contours looked softer than the others – maybe that was the one my father used as a pillow. I tried to imagine them outside, leaning back against the boulders, my father trying hard to engage the taciturn Jim in conversation as they dried their clothes on the bushes.
The author, with Antonio Lannutti, and Alfonso, the ‘fourteen-year-old boy’ who found Richard in the bushes in 1943
On the way back, we reached the road almost immediately. It turned out the cave was only 100 yards from where we had started. We walked up the track to the ruins of the farmhouse. The air was full of the smell of wild sage and lavender.
Alfonso described how they had lived in three rooms with their animals stabled below so that their heat warmed the house. The roof had collapsed and wild roses now curled around the fallen roof beams and broken walls where Jim and Richard had sat and listened to Donato’s stories about Naples.
We drove back to Alfonso’s apartment for lunch. Part of the village was completely abandoned. The wind whispered over the cobbles, pushing around eddies of dust and litter. Alfonso explained that this was the old village of Gessopalena, where no one had lived since the war ended. “The Germans blew up everything when they left, leaving it like this,” he said.
We found Alfonso’s wife Maria in the garage of their apartment. She was short with vivid brown eyes and a warm smile. She wore a plastic apron over her large chest, and was laying out strips of homemade pasta on top of her freezer. She showed us how to make spaghetti alla chitarra by pushing the pasta over several thin wires which cut it into long thin strips.
“In the old days, they used the strings of a guitar, hence the name chitarra.”
Then she led us upstairs to the dining room, where the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle against the kitchen stove. Our children overwhelmed the small rooms. Exhausted by the heat and the expedition to the cave, Felix, the eldest, asked if he lie down on their bed, while Maya and Jude collapsed onto their couch. Two-year-old Poppy discovered their bidet and washed her fat little feet with squeals of delight. I asked Maria whether they had children and she wiped her hands on her apron anxiously.
“God did not will it,” Alfonso said.
They had first met when they were still at school during the war, probably about the time that Alfonso had stumbled across my father. They fell in love but their parents did not approve of their relationship as they had not arranged it, and did their best to keep them apart. Maria was sent to Canada to live with a distant cousin while Alfonso stayed in Gessopalena. He would write, promising to come to Canada, but it was a long time before he summoned up the courage to defy his mother. He finally joined Maria in Montreal in the 1970s.
“But by then we were too old to conceive,” she said simply.
They lived there for eleven years, Alfonso working as a foreman in warehouses, until eventually they returned to Gessopalena to look after the parents who had sought to keep them apart.
Alfonso took off his shirt and sat down at the table in his trousers and his white canottiere singlet as Maria started to bring in the food. The room had few ornaments except for a reproduction oil painting of a night-time scene at a port and a huge glass candelabra above the table. Before leaving America, I had made a photograph album of pictures of my father, my family, his sketches of the cave from his journal and his photograph of Donato which I gave to them. Alfonso smiled at the pictures, and remembered Donato singing “O Sole Mio” in the kitchen when Jim and my father came in for supper, just as my father described it.
“Donato became very fond of your father. They were good friends,” he said.
I imagined Richard joining in, hesitantly at first, held back by his reserve and his lack of confidence in his Italian but then, urged on by Donato, singing with greater and greater gusto. It was an image of great happiness.
The limoncello came out and Poppy started to motor in and out of the kitchen helping herself to Maria’s sweet-cakes. The moment had come to say something.
I stood up and raised my glass to drink a toast.
“Thank you,” I said solemnly, “for saving my father’s life. I wish that he was here to thank you himself.”
Alfonso got unsteadily to his feet in return. Standing in his white singlet, he raised his glass too.
“If your father had not been so tall and if his feet had not stuck out of the bush, I would not have tripped over them,” Alfonso said, gripping the back of his chair to steady himself. “Let’s go for a drive – there is something I want to show you.”
We drove out of Gessopalena away from Roccascalegna. After twenty minutes of sharp twists and turns through a pine forest, we turned off down a track. The sign under an old olive tree said Sant’Agata. At the end stood a broken farmhouse much like the others that lay strewn across the landscape, with bindweed curling up the walls and wild grasses billowing in the wind between the stones. It was a quiet, calm place. Beyond the farmhouse the land dropped away in a steep slope and facing us across a great void of air was the huge flank of the Majella ridge.
On a small stone memorial in front of the house was a date: “21st January 1944”. There then followed a list of 43 names, many of whom appeared to be women from the same few families: Luzio, Gonna, Cionne.
“A few days before this date,” explained Alfonso, “someone killed four Germans who had stolen a cow. The Germans operated a system of decimation like the Romans: ten civilians executed for every one of their soldiers. For some reason they decided on this remote farmhouse which was packed with refugees. They banged on the door and demanded to be let in. When the terrified occupants refused, blockading the door, the Germans took it to be an admission of guilt.
“The officer ordered his soldiers to climb up onto the roof and pour petrol down the chimney. As the farmhouse burned, the soldiers stood in the fields listening to the screams coming from inside. One child survived. She was eight years old, and crouched in the corner as her family died. She is still alive today and lives nearby, but luckily her mind has forgotten the experience.
“If I had not tripped over your father’s foot that day, and we had killed the German soldiers instead of rescuing your father and Jim,” said Alfonso, “this is what would have happened to all of us. We would not be here now. It wasn’t us who saved his life – it was he who saved ours.”
I realised how much the family had grown to love my father. The efforts that they made to stay in touch – the letters from Donato, the video that they made, Antonio’s visits to England to have lunch with him – were enormous. It should have been the other way around. I had come here, as muc
h to try to find my father as to represent him: this man who had seemed so straightforward, but who had receded out of reach each time I tried to touch him.
My father had successfully navigated the battlefield and its horrors only to lose his way later in the mundane tasks of peace. He had enjoyed the excitement and the danger of being on the run and he had felt alive in this countryside with such close proximity to death. I realised then why he had never boasted of what he had done – because he had not found it hard to do. It was ordinary life that he struggled to understand.
But why did he never return to say thank you? He came back to Italy in 1950 on his honeymoon and again in 1972 with me and my sister. When I read my mother’s account of that holiday, I discovered with dismay that the two of them had even come back here to look for the cave but had failed to stop to find the De Gregorios.
This occured at the end of the holiday after my sister had gone on to Turkey and I had been deposited on a plane back to prep school in England. My parents drove back home on their own. They travelled up the Adriatic coast and my mother’s diary describes how they drove to Roccascalegna to search for the cave on Tuesday 21st September 1972.
Early bathe and drove to Sangro and up into the hills to find cave. Had lunch by sea and sand dunes and then on to Rocascalanir and walked down overgrown paths to rocky stream where Dick searched and found his cave.
Photos taken and walked back to find Donato’s broken hut, drive in vain and getting dark, had desperate search for a camp site; at last found a level place high up above coast and fell into bed, supperless.
No mention of wanting to find the de Gregorios. The most charitable explanation I could come up with was that my father believed Donato to be dead and saw no purpose in contacting the rest of the family. The photos have since been lost.
We returned to Alfonso’s apartment and sat silently under the fan with another round of limoncello; the failure of my father to reach out weighed on me. I could see how much Alfonso longed to have had the chance to see with his own eyes that my father had survived. To see him standing in front of him now would be to know that the sacrifice they had made as a family had not been in vain.
The family had waited 53 years – half a century – before making the video, hoping, I suppose, that he might turn up one day. I could tell that my arrival had not fully closed the gap.
“I am heartbroken that my father never returned to Gessopalena to find you,” I said rather lamely. “He was old and –”
“But he did,” interrupted Alfonso.
I looked at him, not understanding.
“He did come back to try to find us. Maria and I were in the village the summer that your parents came by in 1972.”
I was stunned. I had no idea that Alfonso even knew we’d come to Italy that year.
“After going to the cave, your parents went up to the farmhouse. When they found that it was in ruins, they drove up here to Gessopalena to look for us.”
“How do you know this, Alfonso?”
“Well, they asked the first person they saw in the street, ‘Do you know where Alfonso De Gregorio lives?’ Unfortunately, this person happened to be my younger cousin. He was a taxi driver at the time and he knew that we were in the village that day but he lied, telling your parents that we were still living in Canada.
“You see, he didn’t want them to go straight to me because he was hoping to earn a bit of money driving your parents around in his taxi. Back then we used to get a number of British – and Germans – coming to look at the places where they had been in the war, and my cousin would make money showing them around. But as soon as your parents heard that I was not here, they decided there was no point in staying and they drove away.”
I gulped at my limoncello.
“When I heard what had happened,” continued Alfonso, “I was so angry I never spoke to my cousin again. From that day to this I have not talked to him. In 35 years.”
Back at the hotel, I opened my mother’s red Woolworth’s notebook and found the entry for that day. I realised that I had misread her faded pencil scrawl: “walked back to find Donato’s broken hut” was actually “walked back to find Donato’s brother”.
I felt some relief – and even greater disappointment for Alfonso. My father had made one attempt to connect. I imagined my parents standing in the main street of Gessopalena asking directions, my father in his old khaki shorts and my mother with her faded floppy hat, the kind that cricket umpires used to wear, both so transparently British. Gessopalena was not on any tourist map; the entire village must have recognised their purpose immediately. They had been within a few hundred yards of Alfonso’s house.
*
Shortly after that summer, I had a vivid dream about my father. In it, my brother, sister and I were on a bicycling holiday in Italy when we stopped to get a drink of water in a small mountain village. As we were standing admiring the view, our tour guide said there was an English lecturer living nearby who had an interesting story to tell about the area. A local boy was sent to find him and when he appeared, we saw that the man was Dad. He was dressed immaculately in a pinstripe suit and looked fit and well.
“Where are you living?” we asked him. We assumed he was at home in England. He was younger than I could ever remember seeing him, even in my childhood. He seemed very content.
“I am back in the cave,” he replied. I wondered how he could look so smart while he was living in a cave.
“Why?” I asked.
“I needed to pay off some debts,” he replied and smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My father is the central figure of this book, but it was my mother who played the leading role in my childhood. She endured the war and had to battle against a number of private losses and sorrows, yet the unconditional love and attention that she showed to her six children and stepchildren never wavered. Any talent I have as a parent with my children is due to the example that she set. She was a remarkable woman and I feel very privileged to have been her son.
I owe a debt of thanks to several people without whom this book would not have got off the ground: to Katty, my wife, who provided continuous encouragement and support; to Rebecca Nicolson, my dear friend and publisher, and to my two editors, Aurea Carpenter and Sarah Blake, a distinguished author in her own right. The persistent efforts that Antonio Lannutti made down the years to maintain the link between his family, the De Gregorios, and mine were remarkable. He is a source of fascinating stories and a delightful travelling companion.
My siblings, Rex, Chris, Kate, Alice and Liz, have all been supportive of this project, for which I’m very grateful.
This book is a personal history, the main sources for which were my father’s own diaries and accounts, letters in the author’s possession, my own notes and diaries and the memories of the De Gregorio family. I am deeply indebted to the unpublished first-hand account that Lt Colonel Tony MacDonnell, the “Gloomy Dean”, wrote of his escape in Italy and which he subsequently gave to my father. Tony MacDonnell appears not to have left any direct descendants; I have tried to locate his surviving relatives without success but perhaps this book will restore the connection.
David Montgomery, 2nd Viscount Montgomery of El Alamein, generously allowed letters written by his father to be quoted. Nigel Hamilton, the author of the three official biographies of Monty, pointed me in the direction of several key documents and provided some useful hints on writing about a subject on which he is a world authority. I am grateful to Roderick Suddaby, the Keeper of the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, for sharing his time and his encyclopaedic knowledge about Monty and POW issues. The museum contains a number of letters in the Montgomery collection that mention my father. The Army Personnel Centre in Glasgow was very efficient in providing copies of my father’s service file.
The account of Jimmy Jones’ crash in the desert comes from James Holland’s ‘Second World War Forum’, which contains a first-person description by Jimmy Jones. Detai
ls about MI9’s activities came from the MI9 War Office Records in the National Archives and the semi-official history of MI9 entitled MI9, Escape & Evasion 1939-1945 by M.R.D. Foot and J.M. Langley, which also happens to be one of the few books written about that branch of Military Intelligence.
Camp PG49 at Fontanellato is mentioned in a number of accounts written by former POWs. The most comprehensive is Home by Christmas by Ian English and the thinly fictionalised The Cage by Dan Billany and David Dowie. I am also indebted to the classic Love & War in the Apennines by Eric Newby, who was interned at Fontanellato at the same time as my father. The POW papers held by the Monte San Martino Trust were a useful source and two former PG49 prisoners, Anthony Laing and Jack Clarke, provided a detailed description of their time in the camp and subsequent adventures to the Birmingham Post.
Finally, I owe a debt of thanks to Clara Bingham, Alex Cadell, Jay Carney and Claire Shipman for reading early drafts; Martina Bagnoli and Giuseppe Zampaglione for their guidance; Nancy Delston for showing me how to understand my father; Pietro Schechter for great friendship and the support of a fellow writer; Lucian Robinson my researcher; and Alex and David for providing a place to stay in Italy. Any errors are of course my own.
A NOTE ON THE MONTE SAN MARTINO TRUST
The Monte San Martino Trust was founded by former POWs to repay some of their debt to the Italian families who guided them to safety in the war and to honour their bravery and compassion. For twenty years the Trust has provided bursaries to young Italians to give them a chance to study in the UK. Many of the students are descendants of the contadini families who assisted the POWs. The Trust serves as a repository of manuscripts of former POWs and organises “freedom trails” for the children and grandchildren of the POWs to walk the routes that the POWs took while on the run through the stunning landscape of the Apennines. It can be contacted at www.msmtrust.org.uk
