by Iris Origo
When Iris came to publish War in Val d’Orcia in 1947 it was an immediate best-seller in England. The climax of the family’s flight to safety, under fire, has ensured the book’s prominence as a page-turning and dramatic memoir of wartime jeopardy.
But Iris Origo’s diary is so much more than that. ‘It will, I think, be obvious that I love Italy and its people,’ she writes in her preface. In these pages, Iris was proud to reclaim something of Italy’s reputation. She wanted the world to see her adopted compatriots as brave, loyal, merciful and generous—not as the cowards and traitors they had so often been painted. She ends on an insistent note of hope. Dreadful things have happened, dead bodies are strewn across the Tuscan hillsides. And yet despite the devastation—small acts of kindness accumulate. Courage continues to affirm. Relationships can, perhaps, be built between people of different nations, faiths and colours. Ordinary people can and do show heroic qualities. Iris Origo’s optimistic message about international understanding is as applicable today as it was more than seventy years ago, and the Val d’Orcia is green with life. There, the potent imagery of the cypress avenue gives shape and meaning to humankind’s eternal journey on the uphill path towards a better world.
VIRGINIA NICHOLSON
* A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi—Poet, Romantic and Radical and The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli are also published by Pushkin Press.
The garden and view of Monte Amiata from the house today
PREFACE
The following are the conditions under which this diary has been written:
We live on a large farm in southern Tuscany—twelve miles from the station and five from the nearest village. The country is wild and lonely, the climate harsh. Our house stands on a hillside, looking down over a wide and beautiful valley, beyond which rises Monte Amiata, wooded with chestnuts and beeches. Nearer by, on this side of the valley, lie slopes of cultivated land: wheat, olives and vines, but among them still stand some ridges of dust-coloured clay hillocks, the crete senesi—as bare and colourless as elephants’ backs, as mountains of the moon. The wide river-bed in the valley holds a rushing stream in the rainy season, but during the summer a mere trickle, in a wide desert of stones. And then, when the wheat ripens and the alfalfa has been cut, the last patches of green disappear from the landscape. The whole valley becomes dust-coloured—a land without mercy, without shade. If you sit under an olive-tree you are not shaded; the leaves are like little flickering tongues of fire. At evening and morning the distant hills are misty and blue, but under one’s feet the dry earth is hard. The cry of the cicadas shrills in the noonday. One can only wait—anxiously, thirstily—for the September rains, when the whole countryside comes to life again. Then the vintage comes, the ox-carts are piled high with purple and yellow grapes. The farm houses and the trees around them are hung with the last vestiges of the harvest: the orange cobs of the Indian corn, hanging to dry, gay and fantastic as a Russian ballet décor. Then there is the autumn ploughing, and one last harvest before the winter: that of the olives. The fruits turn from green to red, from red to the ripeness of dark purple; they are gathered and pressed, and pressed again; their oil is stored in great jars, fit for Ali Baba, and their kernels serve us for fuel. And now we wait for the winter, and with it comes the north wind, the tramontana, sweeping across the bare uplands. It drives the farmer indoors; it buffeted and tore the escaping prisoners of war and partisans until they had perforce to take shelter, for months on end, in the stables of the farms.
These farms—fifty-seven of them in number, in seven thousand acres, and housing some six hundred souls—are widely scattered. Each of them, however, is closely in touch with the central farm, the fattoria—where stand (beside our villa) the agent’s house, the granaries, the cellars, the oil-presses and the dairy, workshops and laundry. The villa is an unpretentious sixteenth-century house, outlined with red brick, with a loggia on the front garden of cypress and ilex, and another formal garden, with a fountain and box-edged flowerbeds, facing the valley. When this diary began our house contained my husband, myself and our household; our little girl, Benedetta, was born in 1940, and another, Donata, in 1943, and with Benedetta came her Swiss nurse, Schwester Marie. In the fattoria live the fattore—whose position somewhat resembles that of the Scotch factor—his wife and two children, and two young assistants of the fattore—to whom, in 1943, were added two refugee boys of fifteen. The carpenter, the keeper, two bricklayers and several workmen all live, with their families, nearby. Two hundred yards away are the ambulatorio—something between a welfare clinic and a cottage hospital—the school with its two teachers and their families, and the nursery-school—while a little farther off there is the dopolavoro, or men’s institute, with the local shop. The Casa dei Bambini, once a nursery-school for the farm-children, became in January 1943 a home for twenty-three refugee children from Turin and Genoa whose homes had been destroyed by bombs. They are cared for by the nursery-school teacher, Signorina Berettini, and by the district nurse, Signorina Guidetti, who lives above the ambulatorio. The Castelluccio—an old castle, about a mile away—houses the parish priest (above the church, which is within the castle walls) and two keepers with their families—and, for six months in 1943, fifty British prisoners of war and their escort.
On the other side of our house, on a southern slope looking down over the valley, stand, between tall cypresses, the little cemetery and chapel which we built in 1933. Our eldest child—Gianni—is buried there, and many of the farmers—and now there is a section given up to those who have been killed here during the war.
The whole does not exactly constitute a village, for there is only one shop; but it forms a complete, self-supporting little world. The land (like practically all the land in Tuscany) is worked according to the mezzadria system—a profit-sharing compact which has been in use in Tuscany since the thirteenth century. The compacts—patti colonici—between owner and husbandman today are almost identical with those drawn up six centuries ago. Now, as then, the landowner builds the farm house and keeps it in repair; he supplies the money to buy half of what is needed to cultivate and improve the land; he pays for half of the stock of cattle. When harvest comes, owner and farmer share the crops. Like many traditional systems handed down from father to son, the mezzadria compact is both very complicated and very elastic. There has always been plenty of healthy grumbling on both sides—and in recent times this grumbling has been fomented and formulated by political agitators. Yet certainly the mezzadria has suited the nature of the people and of the soil; it has worked. The interests of the landowner and farmer are fundamentally the same, and in general their relationship has been a satisfactory one. It is not quite that of landlord and tenant, nor certainly that of employer and employee—it is more intimate than the former, more friendly than the latter. It is a partnership.
During the war our little community, always largely self-contained, became almost entirely so, held together by a bond of common interests, anxieties, fears and hopes. Together we planned how to hide the oil, the hams and the cheeses, so that the Germans would not find them; together we found shelter and clothes for the fugitives who knocked at our door—whether Italians or Allies, soldiers or civilians—together we watched the first bombs fall on the Val d’Orcia bridges, and listened hopefully to the rumours of landings in Tuscany which never came. And together, when the Germans had turned us out, we returned—after the Allies’ arrival—to reap the harvest, to start clearing the mines and rebuilding the shattered farms.
Daily life, throughout the war, was much easier than in the towns. For food we were almost wholly self-supporting. We baked our own bread with our own flour—of which one-and-a-half quintals per person was assigned to us; the rest went to the government stores, the ammassi. We had our own chickens, turkeys, geese, rabbits, vegetables, fruit, milk and honey. We made our own hams and sausages (being allowed to kill one pig a year for the villa and one for the fattoria, while each farm also kille
d its own). We made cheese out of sheep’s milk and occasionally, in secret, we killed a calf and succeeded in getting its hide tanned for leather. For fuel we used, besides a small ration of lignite, our own wood and the kernels of our olives. We made our own soap with a residue of kitchen fats, potato-peel and soda.
As the war went on, everything, naturally, became scarcer. In 1944 first the Germans and then the Goums took away or killed thirty per cent of our cattle, six hundred of our sheep, and all our chickens and turkeys, and the Germans burned out our beehives. Milk and meat became scarce that winter, and eggs, chicken or honey non-existent.
Owing to the lack of sugar, we had to give up making most sorts of jam—except of grapes and of the little Montepulciano plums, sweet enough to keep without sugar. But we still had plenty of flour and maize, and some ham and sausages (buried underground, to save them from the Germans), as well as our own vegetables, and so got through the winter very well—even with the children’s extra twenty-three mouths to feed.
The problem of clothing, however, was not so easily solved. In the autumn and winter of 1943, when a constant stream of fugitives—Italian disbanded soldiers and Allied prisoners of war—was passing through our property, all in need of clothes, I was still able to buy (mostly on barrows in the Florence markets) a supply of blankets, trousers, shirts and socks, though never sufficient for the demand. Boots, however, were an almost insoluble problem. We bought some ‘black-market’ leather and made as many as we could—and also made leather tops to wooden clogs. Our own refugee children also had boots made at home, and jerseys and stockings made of our own sheep’s wool, spun on the farm. With the same wool we made babies’ jackets for the numerous babies who were born during that winter in the Montepulciano hospital, where many expectant mothers were sent when their homes in Livorno and Grosseto were destroyed by bombing—and we also made babies’ clothes and nappies out of old sheets and curtain-linings, and slippers out of strips of felt and carpet. But the increasing scarcity of thread was a fresh difficulty, and in the summer of 1944, before leaving, the Germans took away all that I had left, as well as all the children’s winter clothes—so that we had to begin at the beginning again.
•
The experiences recorded in this diary have been in no way exceptional: thousands of other Italians have had similar ones, and many have had far worse. Indeed, the events here described are, as the reader will see, singularly undramatic and unheroic. Although in the last months of the German occupation the shadow of the Gestapo was never far away, and their spies and punitive expeditions did several times reach this valley, our anxieties were far less intense, far less continuous, than those borne by the people who hid Allied prisoners and partisans in their houses in the very heart of Rome or Milan, who concealed munitions or transmitted information, to whom every telephone call was a peril, every footstep on the stairs a menace. Nor did any active fighting or destruction of enemy property by the partisans of this district compare with that achieved by the partisans of the north, in Piemonte or Lombardy. No, our problems (and those of our neighbours) were of a different nature: they arose from a continual necessity to weigh, not between courage and cowardice or between right and wrong, but between conflicting duties and responsibilities, equally urgent. Every day the need for deciding between them would arise: the request for a lodging of a POW would have to be weighed against the danger to the farm which sheltered him, the dressing of a partisan’s wound against the risk to the nurse and to the other patients in her charge, the pleas of the starving townsfolk who, in the last weeks before the liberation of Rome, came all the way from the city to beg for food, against the needs of the children and partisans whom we must go on feeding here. And when some hot-headed partisans would shoot at a carabiniere behind a hedge, or disarm two German soldiers in a village pub, disappearing themselves into the woods and leaving the helpless villagers at the mercy of German reprisals, it was our unpleasing task to attempt to point out the consequences of these methods, or (subsequently) to try to protect the villagers therefrom. Moreover, these were problems which—since the local situation was continually changing, with the arrival of different officials, and with the fluctuations of the military situation—could never be solved: every day each incident had to be met on its own merits. This became, in the long run, distinctly fatiguing, since it was impossible not to conduct a perpetual cross-examination of one’s own conscience. At the end of each day prudence inquired, ‘Have I done too much?’—and enthusiasm or compassion, ‘Might I not, perhaps, have done more?’
What, it may be asked, under such circumstances, was the motive underlying the generous help given to the hunted Allied prisoners of war by the Italian countryfolk, often at the risk of their own lives, from the Garigliano to the Po, from the mountains of Piemonte and the Abruzzi to the fishing-villages of Liguria and Emilia? It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute it to any political—or even patriotic—motive. There was, it is true, a certain amount of anti-German and anti-Fascist feeling, especially among those peasants whose sons had been in the army against their will, or else were still attempting to avoid conscription by the Fascist Republican Army. But the true motive was a far simpler one: it has been described by an Italian partisan as ‘the simplest of all ties between one man and another; the tie that arises between the man who asks for what he needs, and the man who comes to his aid as best he can. No unnecessary emotion or pose’.* And an English officer, himself an escaped prisoner of war, who owes his life to the help given him in this manner, has expressed his views in almost identical words: ‘The peasants’ native sympathy with the under-dog and the outcast asserted itself. Simple Christianity impelled them to befriend those complete strangers, feed them, clothe them, and help them on their way … All over Italy this miracle was to be seen, the simple dignity of humble people who saw in the escaped prisoners not representatives of a power to be withstood or placated, but individuals in need of their help.’†
Of the 70,000 Allied POWs at large in Italy on September 8th, 1943, nearly half escaped, either crossing the frontier to Switzerland or France, or eventually rejoining their own troops in Italy; and each one of these escapes implies the complicity of a long chain of humble, courageous helpers throughout the length of the country. ‘I can only say,’ wrote General O’Connor to me, ‘that the Italian peasants and others behind the line were magnificent. They could not have done more for us. They hid us, escorted us, gave us money, clothes and food—all the time taking tremendous risks … We English owe a great debt of gratitude to those Italians whose help alone made it possible for us to live, and finally to escape.’‡
There is a passage in The Pool of Vishnu in which L. H. Myers, in attacking certain forms of self-protective egotism, maintains that they are not natural to men, but produced by the structure of organised society. ‘If one sees,’ he says, ‘a man struggling at the bottom of a well, one’s natural impulse is to pull him out. If a man is starving, one’s natural impulse is to share one’s food with him. Surely it is only on second thoughts that we don’t do these things? Society seems to me to be like an organised system of rather mean second-thoughts.’ During those crucial months of shared apprehension and danger, when the structure of society did not seem very important, that ‘organised system of mean second-thoughts’ also, mercifully, disappeared into the background. For a short time all men returned to the most primitive traditions of ungrudging hospitality, uncalculating brotherhood. At most, some old peasant-woman, whose son was a prisoner in a faraway camp in India or Australia, might say—as she prepared a bowl of soup or made the bed for the foreigner in her house—‘Perhaps someone will do the same for my boy.’
•
The actual keeping of the diary was not always an easy matter. During the first months, when a search of the house did not seem likely (though always possible), it usually lay among the pages of the children’s picture-books; since I believed that the nursery bookshelf would probably be one of the last places to be searched
. Later on, most of it (together with various propaganda leaflets and my jewellery) was buried in tin boxes in the garden. But the current pages were naturally always in the process of being written—even up to the end, with the Germans in the house, and (since even in times of danger the careless remain careless) were apt to be lying about in undesirable places. During the most eventful periods, too, it was often difficult to find time to write at all. Some passages were hurriedly scribbled at night, others with twenty children in the room—and some in the cellar, during the shelling.
But I felt at the time, and feel now, that any interest this diary might have would come from its being an immediate, first-hand account. I put down each day’s events as they occurred, as simply and truthfully as I could, and (though I did report stories and rumours that reached us, since they were part of the queer mental colouring of our daily life) I tried not to make statements of which I had not had first-hand knowledge. And now, on re-reading, I have refrained from ‘touching up’ the photograph, from changing the colour of events in the light of subsequent knowledge.
I have tried to avoid political bias and national prejudice. But we are all affected, far more deeply than we know—not by the theories, but by the mental climate of the world in which we live. Even our reactions against it show that we are not immune. I have no doubt that to those living in a different climate and seeing the same events from a different peep-hole, many of my judgments will appear mistaken, naive, prejudiced and even wrong. Most certainly I have swallowed propaganda without realising it; but may I be permitted to ask my readers—are they quite certain that they have never done so, too?
