Mamma Mia... That's Life!

by Valerie Barona

  “I’m very, very busy and can only come once a week for an hour. Do you think you can do it?”

  Was he joking? No, he wasn’t. I answered in equally succinct Italian:

  “If I had a magic wand, then yes, it would be possible. As it is, I can only rely on my teaching skills, and in my opinion it’s unrealistic to think someone can learn a foreign language and be competent enough to speak it fluently in four hours.”

  “Are you telling me you can’t do it?” he asked, angrily. I doubt if anyone before me had denied him anything.

  “I’m saying that I think it’s a physical impossibility.”

  “Goodbye.” The communication was cut off abruptly.

  “Goodbye to you,” I murmured to myself.

  *

  “’Ello! Valerii? Is me. I come to you now?”

  I loved hearing my students speak English to me over the phone – even if their grammar wasn’t always correct. One of the most common questions was:

  “When I learn to speak like you?”

  I usually reminded them that I did have a thirty year start over them.

  For the time being, my life revolved around English lessons, looking after the family and trying to adapt as best I could to an Anglo-Italian existence with a very much needed dose of English humour.

  9

  Don’t Ask Mum!

  If anyone had told me that village life with its laid back traditional ways would present numerous problems in my role as a mother, I would have laughed. I hadn’t bargained for an on-going battle which involved overcoming discrepancies in everyday life regarding the upbringing of my children, namely: the language, food, and routine. The fact that I spoke English to my children – all the time – had caused a certain amount of disapproval in the beginning but I felt confident that it would soon be accepted and would no longer raise eyebrows. Unfortunately, the criticisms continued, but such comments fell on deaf ears. I was determined that Alex and Elisa would be able to communicate with their English relatives. Likewise, giving them a taste of English food encouraged a certain amount of head shaking and clucking.

  Bedtime was another hurdle. As babies, I had had to contend with adults remarking on my strict regime but as the children got older, they realised that their friends didn’t have to follow such a strict routine.

  “Time for bed.”

  Alex and Elisa looked at each other and groaned.

  “It’s not fair,” Alex said. “She sends us to bed when we’re not tired and wakes us up when we’re asleep.”

  Elisa nodded her head in agreement. It was a hard life having an English mum in an Italian mountain village.

  “Nobody else goes to bed as early as us, you know,” Alex was in argumentative mode. “I asked my friends,” he added for emphasis.

  “Bed!” I would not be moved.

  Changing into their pyjamas, their stony expressions left me in no doubt about what they were thinking: their friends staying up to watch television. It just wasn’t fair.

  “Can I look at a book for a while?” Alex had no intention of going to sleep – yet.

  “If you want to. I’ll come and turn the light out when Elisa is settled.”

  Alex smiled to himself. That would give him plenty of time if Elisa went through her nightly routine of putting all her dolls and cuddly toys under the duvet before squeezing herself inbetween them.

  Alex chose his favourite book and snuggled into bed. He’d asked Nanna if he could bring the Noddy books back with him and she’d been only too delighted to let him. At six years old, he had yet to learn to read Italian properly, let alone English, but he loved the illustrations of Enid Blyton’s characters: Noddy was his favourite as was Big Ears and Mr Plod. He liked making up the stories himself, although I had read them to him so often that he knew them all off by heart.

  “Time to switch out the light.” My head loomed over him.

  “Why is it always time to do something I don’t want to do?”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older,” I answered, giving him a peck on the cheek.

  Unlike his friends’ mothers, Alex could never sway his mum. ‘Must be cos she’s English,’ he thought to himself.

  The scuola elementare at Piussogno presented me with another dilemma. The school had a total number of nine children, and one teacher who taught all five classes together. On the other hand, in the next village, at Mantello, a larger population meant more students and there were five separate classes each with their own teacher. Naturally, I wanted to send Alex there. However, if I chose the latter, then the school in Piussogno risked closing down. The parents held a meeting and I explained that I intended sending Alex to Mantello because I considered he would have a better chance of learning in a class with children his own age. I also let it be known that if the school didn’t close down in the very near future it would have to eventually because there were so few births these days. I ignored criticisms regarding my lack of loyalty to Piussogno, arguing that I only wanted to give the best education to my children. I would not be moved and fortunately, Michele supported me in my decision. Alex, and later Elisa, made new friends and spent the next five years, very happily at school, at Mantello. Just for the record, within a couple of years, the school in Piussogno closed down.

  *

  Whereas in the disco days my husband was always around, just before Alex started first school in September, Michele began working away in his ‘new’ job as a builder which meant that he wasn’t at home to help with homework. Not that it worried me because I hadn’t anticipated any more headaches.

  Alex found himself in a class of eleven which to me was on a par with private education. The children called the teachers by their first name and it seemed very strange to me to hear them call out:

  “Maestra Petra!” (teacher Petra)

  We had a meeting with the teachers the first week and somehow, despite being the only foreigner present, I managed to be voted Parent Rep.

  “Being class rep just involves attending a meeting with us every so often and highlighting any problems that arise. I’m sure you’ll find these meetings very interesting as they will give you an insight as to what is going on in the school,” the teacher explained to me, enthusiastically.

  “I’m sure I will,” I answered, weakly.

  Although I had to admit that the staff impressed me with their enthusiasm which they inevitably transmitted to their students, I was sorry there was no lesson devoted to music and movement in the curriculum, especially for the first year, but at least they had singing lessons and were taught rhythm.

  At the end of the first fortnight at school, Alex came home with a frown instead of his usual smile.

  “That’s the last time I’m asking you, Mummy to help me with my homework!” he announced, as we sat down for lunch.

  “What’s the matter?” I queried, quite concerned now.

  “Well, you know Maestra Petra said we had to ask our parents to help us with our homework?” he waited for me to nod before continuing.

  “You got it wrong and I was the only one who made a mistake!”

  I felt like saying that he was the only one with an English mum, but I didn’t.

  Instead, I enquired as to what exactly I’d got wrong. He explained patiently that it was to do with animals and their young. Then I remembered. The teacher had given them the name of the adult and they had to write the equivalent for the baby:

  e.g. gatto – gattino, cane – cagnolino.

  When Alex came to mucca, I automatically said mucchina. Unfortunately, he hadn’t insisted on Papà checking his work, having complete faith in his mother and this had been a big mistake …

  At school that morning, when he read out his work, there had been great hilarity when he came to the cow. I had no idea that the word calf, in Italian changed
completely. I had still to encounter: vitello. Alex looked at me accusingly.

  “I’ll never ask you to help me again. Never, never!” he said with feeling… and he was true to his word. From then on he always worked alone.

  Not even the teacher could rectify the situation. Alex made it quite clear to her too, that he intended working at home alone. In future, I was only allowed to look through his exercise books to see what he was doing in class and nothing more. My lesson from that was: when in doubt – look it up in the dictionary.

  *

  In the first year at Mantello, Elisa found herself in a class of four and had practically one-to-one teaching.

  “How did you like school?” I asked her after her first day.

  “Mummy, I love it!” she smiled up at me. “And I told the children in my class I’m Anglo-Italian,” she added, importantly.

  I had told Alex and Elisa they were Anglo-Italian as soon as they were old enough to speak.

  “What does that mean?” Elisa had asked at the time.

  “It means you’ve got an English mother and an Italian father,” I explained.

  She came home very excited one day.

  “I learnt a new song at school today, listen, it’s like this:

  ‘Appy beerday, toh yo,

  ‘Appy beerday, toh yo

  ‘Appy beerday, toh yo

  ‘Appy beerday, toh yo!”

  She sang it to the tune of Happy Birthday so I imagined it to be a variation of it.

  “That’s lovely,” I told her. “It’s just like the song we sing in English, isn’t it?”

  Her face broke into a disarming smile as she realised it was an Italian adaptation of the familiar song sung at birthdays.

  Elisa’s teacher was a supply teacher, so at the end of the first school year they said goodbye to her. For the following four years she had a new teacher and two new companions. Like her brother, she loved primary school. In a class of six, three boys and three girls, there was quite a family atmosphere. The teacher, with his grey hair and kindly manner, was more like a knowledgeable grandfather figure than a teacher. Maestro Matteo took great delight in giving his pupils a problem to solve over lunch. Sometimes it was to test maths, other times it dealt with social difficulties, often there was no straightforward answer but it made you think and discuss the various options. If I saw him in the playground during break time, on my way back from the shops, I’d often reproach him that mealtimes were becoming too academic for me and I invariably ended up with a headache. Laughing, he promised to send the children home with another even more complicated puzzle. His pupils adored him and it was reciprocal. When he organised the school trip, he invited parents to go along, too. We all accepted the invitation and spent an enjoyable day together, ending it at a local restaurant.

  Maestro Matteo was due to retire when the class was in its fourth year but we managed to persuade him to wait until our children went to middle school. They all benefited from his style of teaching and many years later when Elisa attended senior school, she remembered his lessons. For her, and many other students, he will always be their Maestro Matteo.

  Both Alex and Elisa had a very happy and privileged elementary education.

  The only disagreements we had were when I didn’t allow them to miss school during the grape harvest because I considered their education to be more important. I still let them help out once they’d finished their homework but for them, it wasn’t the same thing.

  “All the other children stay home to help with vendemmia,” Alex told me and, as usual, Elisa nodded in agreement, but I was adamant.

  “I’m pretty sure that you weren’t the only two children at school today,” I replied, trying not to smile.

  “Non è giusto! Andiamo, Ellie.” And with a great sense of unity, my children marched off together.

  As well as giving them an English upbringing, I also hoped to instil in them a love of the place where I was born. I knew I’d reached my goal when they had to describe their casa at primary school and first Alex then Elisa had asked which home: the English one or the Italian one? Yes!

  10

  A Tutu and New Friends

  When Elisa was six and started primary school, she decided she’d like to go to ballet lessons, so I asked Nanda and she told me about a good ballet school at Morbegno where Sofia had gone with her friend. I enrolled Elisa immediately and she couldn’t wait to start. Chatting to her in English as I helped her change into her leotard, it came as no surprise to find another mother staring at me. It happened the next time, too, but I refused to speak Italian to my daughter.

  “I’m sorry, if I’m staring, but it’s so nice to listen to you,” she said in perfect English.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I answered, completely taken aback. “No problem.” Now I was the one staring.

  We went for a coffee while the girls had their lesson and she introduced herself as Gaetana and explained why she spoke English so well.

  “I met my husband, he’s also Italian, in London and we lived there until our daughter, Luana was six. We decided to come back to Morbegno so that she could go to school here. You know, I really miss speaking English.”

  She turned out to be an affable rebel and we hit it off straightaway and so did the girls. She fulfilled the void that Kathy had left, a few years earlier, when she went back to the UK to live. I needed someone to speak to in English, someone who could identify with life in England and she understood perfectly. She talked me through various Baker Moments and together we laughed at certain episodes which incensed me at the time.

  “Don’t be silly,” she’d say, “don’t think about it. Come on, I have to go to the library.” And off we’d go.

  The girls enjoyed their ballet lessons and couldn’t wait to perform at the annual ballet show held in a local theatre.

  “I can’t believe it’s so late,” I said to Michele when I told him it was going to start at 9pm. “I think it should be much earlier for the little ones like Elisa and Luana.”

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be too excited to feel tired.” He was right. When Gaetana and I popped behind stage to make sure everything was under control before the curtain went up, they couldn’t have been more awake. Leaving them happily chatting, we found our seats and settled down for the performance. As the little ones danced onto the stage, the audience ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ in unison. Some parents jumped up and waved, a few shouted out the names of their daughters, while others snapped away with their cameras.

  “You couldn’t do that in England,” I whispered to Gaetana.

  “No, you’d be asked, very politely, to be quiet,” she replied.

  This happened to be the first of many ballet shows held at Morbegno and at Sondrio. Both Elisa and Luana had main parts, often sharing the same role, as they got older. As well as ballet shows, they also took exams with the Royal Academy until it became too expensive for the ballet school. When possible, the teacher took her dancing pupils to Milan to see ballets such as Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker Suite. On one occasion, Elisa came home ecstatic to think she’d met and actually spoken to Carla Fracci, Italy’s famous veteran ballerina. Unlike her idol, Elisa’s dancing career ended in 1997, when she had to have a minor operation on her foot. From then on, she concentrated on disco dancing.

  *

  Another good friend who I saw on a regular basis was Emily. Whenever I had a free afternoon, I drove up the winding road to Cercino to see her. I enjoyed sitting outside in the shade talking about Poole and hearing her talk about her life in Spain. Whereas in England the topic of conversation always involved the weather, here, sooner or later, we found ourselves discussing food. Emily loved cooking and often explained a recipe to me but funnily enough, my dish never had the same look or taste as hers. Her piatto forte was naturally Paella. Alex and Elisa knew they would
have a feast when she and her husband invited us for a meal. Their two children were a lot older than ours but the thought of good food outweighed the lack of playmates. I have to admit that even her picnics made history.

  One Sunday, we arranged to go out for the day with them. We set off early and nine hours later, we were able to say that we had passed through four states – Livigno, Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein. Alex and Elisa couldn’t wait to tell their teachers and school friends the next day but they’d also been suitably impressed by the picnic. Whereas we usually made do with a rug to sit on to eat our ham rolls, fruit and cold drinks with a flask of coffee, Emily and Nino suggested driving until we found a proper picnic area with trestle tables and benches to sit on. Emily then extracted a superb hamper containing a cold chicken, salad, pickles, cold meats, a selection of cheeses, fruit and an assortment of cakes. Not to mention the miniature cylinder gas stove used for camping that she and her husband brought out so we could drink an espresso afterwards. I shook my head in disbelief – no way could I compete with such efficiency. Alex and Elisa’s expressions said it all.

  *

  Although I had been living in Piussogno for several years now and had become friends with other mothers, I still felt different and knew that the locals noted everything I did. The ten minute walk to Mantello, the next village which boasted a butcher, a baker, a bank, a chemist, a grocer, and a post office, could sometimes take well over an hour depending on who I met on route. I was and would always be the Inglesina or the English girl. I learned in time that the villagers weren’t being intrusive but were genuinely interested in what went on around them – especially if it had anything to do with the Inglesina.

  11

  A Baton and a Flashing Blue Light

  “Do you know, I saw them again at the last minute coming back from Morbegno?”

  “Chi?” Michele put his paper down.

  “The Polizia … or was it the Carabinìeri? Anyway, they stopped the car in front of me.”