Italy – April, 1944
Edward slept fitfully that first night in the hayloft: the pain of his shoulder, the noise of the oxen below and the mice scurrying nearby, as well as the discomfort of lying on straw on a hard wooden floor, ensured that the hours passed slowly.
For much of the night it was pitch black and he was unable to see anything at all – not even his hand in front of his face. The farm and the mountains lay in utter darkness, and he couldn’t help imagining things – that there was someone else in the loft, that rats would soon start nibbling his feet; even that the place was haunted. Eventually he dozed off, only to wake again, disorientated, until a dull sense of dread descended on him as he remembered where he was and how his fortunes had so dramatically changed. Staring wide-eyed into the inky blackness, he thought about the squadron and the house on the seafront at Termoli. News of him being shot down would have been quickly digested and then that would have been it. One of the flight commanders would be given temporary command of the squadron and they would all have drunk as much as usual – if not more – in the mess. By morning, Edward would rarely be mentioned again until he reappeared. It wasn’t callousness, it was just the way everyone coped. Out of sight, out of mind.
Until I reappear, he thought, then reconsidered: rather, if I reappear. It dawned on him that he could not have been much further from friendly lines if he had planned it. The front was several hundred miles to the south, while Switzerland was probably the same again to the north. How was he ever going to manage to reach either? The doctor had spoken as though he had a choice, but really, it didn’t seem that way to him; not lying there in the darkness of that barn. The Allied offensive would be launched soon – the moment the rain stopped and the ground hardened. With any luck they would advance swiftly, either as far north as he was now or at least close the gap. Waiting for a while, he reasoned to himself, was the best course of action. And yet, what of these people, these mountain folk in whose barn he was now lying? Would they let him stay? For a week or two, it seemed – after all, Carla had promised to teach him Italian. That was something worth waiting around for too. Her simple beauty, the kindness she had already shown him; she was bewitching.
Round and round went these thoughts, over and over, never progressing further until at last he must have drifted back to sleep.
It was raining when he awoke once more – he could hear the rain drumming hard on the tiles above him, dripping in places and running off the roof onto the yard below. The first grey light of dawn cast a faint light across the barn. For a while he watched the loft lighten further until he was jolted to his senses by the sound of a door opening and voices out in the yard. It was just after six and the farm was wakening.
With his good arm he hoisted himself onto his feet and, crouching, walked over to a narrow slit in the wall, from where he could watch the yard and the comings and goings of the house. The rain had stopped, but it was overcast and looked as though it might start again at any minute. A girl he’d not seen the previous day crossed the yard. She looked, he guessed, about twenty or so, clearly the daughter of the middle-aged woman he had met in the kitchen: the same small features and narrow face, long black hair loosely gathered behind. Like Carla and Christina, she wore work clothes: an old and tatty dress, woollen cardigan and men’s boots.
Just below him she suddenly looked up directly at him and said, ‘Buongiorno, Signore Pilote.’ Edward immediately shrunk back, but then leaning his face back to the slit, lifted a hand and said, ‘Buongiorno,’ in turn.
Below him, he heard the girl feeding the oxen and the cow. She hummed softly between words of encouragement to the beasts. Occasionally, one or other of them lowed gently and Edward could hear their hooves moving on the hard floor. When eventually the girl walked back across the yard, she looked up at him again and smiling asked, ‘Ha dormito bene?’ Did you sleep well?
‘Er, si, si, grazie.’
The smell of woodsmoke now wafted across the yard and Edward watched the smoke drift out of the chimney, and heard the faint chatter coming from the kitchen: the farmer, Orfeo, his wife, and at least two girls, who often seemed to talk at the same time. Edward wondered what they thought about having an escaped Allied airman in their hayloft, and whether, after a night’s sleep, they had changed their mind about letting him stay with them. He also wondered whether they might bring him some food; he was beginning to feel hungry.
Edward looked at the farm. Both the main house and its buildings were clearly old, but to him the place seemed to be on the verge of collapse. Where it had been rendered, the plasterwork was crumbling. Underneath, the cement between the brick and stonework also looked as though it needed urgent attention. The terracotta roof tiles were a mismatch of different hues, and there were heavy stones dotted over the roof, which, he later discovered, were acting as weights to keep the tiles in place. The walls of the barn were also beginning to spread outwards, while the amount of woodworm made him wonder how the place was still standing at all.
He wondered what lay beyond. Hurrying there the previous afternoon, he had been so concerned about being caught and about doing as the girls had bidden, that he now realised he had taken in little of the surrounding countryside. He was unsure if he would even be able to retrace his steps on his own. Miraculously, his maps had stayed stuffed in his boots during his brief time baling out of his Spitfire, and so he shuffled back to the pile of hay where he had slept and took them from underneath his flying jacket, and spread them out on the dusty wooden floor. Following the line of his journey south of Bologna, he found the fork in the river: the Reno snaking south on one side, the Setta on the other. In between was a triangle of mountains; this, he realised, was where he was now. He remembered seeing these mountains rising from the river valley where he had been hit. The high ground climbed steeply to begin with, then levelled off on a kind of high plain; it was on this plain that he had landed, but he could recall seeing several mountain peaks bursting up through the undulating high ground, standing sentinel over this hidden countryside. They were not enormous peaks: rather like the mountains in Wales he remembered from a boyhood camp with the Scouts. On his map were marked Monte Luna, Monte Torrone and Monte Amato, and further south, a dozen more.
Footsteps in the yard made him stop and hurry back over to the window slit. It was Carla and Christina. Glancing at his watch he saw it was now nearly eight o’clock in the morning. To his disappointment, both girls disappeared straight into the farmhouse without even a glance in his direction, but then a few minutes later, Carla reappeared with a bowl and some bread and crossed the yard to the hayloft.
The door creaked as she pushed it open. ‘Buongiorno, Eduardo,’ she smiled. ‘Ecco a la prima calzione per lui.’
Edward thanked her, gratefully drinking the hot dark liquid in the bowl. ‘Caffe,’ she told him, ‘di ghianda.’ Edward nodded but was unsure of the word. ‘Lei guarda mia carta,’ he said, showing her his maps. ‘Er, dove il podere?’ he asked. ‘Dove sto?’ Where am I?
He watched her as she leant over and looked at the maps intently. Her brow furrowed; Edward stared at the smooth skin of her face, so close to his. ‘Bologna,’ she said at last to herself, placing a finger lightly on the city. ‘Ah, Monte Luna!’ she said, then pointing to the high ground rising above the farm, explained that the farm was on the slopes beneath the mountain. The mountain of the moon. ‘Qui,’ she said, eyeing him and then the map. ‘Qui. Pian del Castagna. Il podere chiama Pian del Castagna.’ So that’s the name of the farm, thought Edward.
She left him again soon after, and he examined his map once more. The farm was nestled on a small narrow plain on the western slope of the mountain. There were villages nearby – further below, overlooking the Reno River, where he had been hit the day before, and to the east, the far side of Monte Luna; but Pian del Castagna was, he now realised, an ideal place to hide. Hidden from the Reno Valley below and from the other mountain villages to the east of Monte Luna, it was isolated and, it seemed
, reached only by the narrow path on which he had arrived the day before. Moreover, its isolated nature was enhanced by another mountain rising from the high plain directly to the south – this, he now saw, was Monte Torrone. Where he’d come down had been a narrow strip of the high plain between these two mountains. He’d been fortunate, very fortunate indeed.
Edward lay back down on the hay, and wondered what lay in store. There was much to think about; and many questions that remained unanswered. There was, though, little he could do. Chance had delivered him safely into the hands of these people, and it seemed they were willing to help him; he would have to put his trust in them, hope for the best, and above all, be patient.
A week passed, then two. It rained most days, which pleased Edward because it meant Carla would visit him for longer. She was a patient teacher, but once he became more accustomed to the local dialect, he discovered he knew a lot more of the language than he had first realised. He learnt quickly and could soon understand what was being said to him, even if he struggled harder to speak much himself. This surprised him; he’d never been much good at French at school, but then, he reasoned, he had had no incentive. As a schoolboy, it had seemed incomprehensible to him that he would ever want to speak the language. Nor had his teachers been exactly inspirational. Now, however, he realised his very survival could depend on his ability to speak Italian; moreover, he wanted to be able to talk to the people he was living with – it frustrated him terribly to begin with, as a stranger in unfamiliar surroundings, when he was unable to understand what was being said. But most of all, he wished he could talk properly to Carla, to know everything about her.
During the long nights in the barn, he found himself thinking about her, yearning for her next visit. He sometimes wondered why: he barely knew her, after all. But sitting in the barn together, her laughing and smiling when he said something right, or remembered a particularly difficult phrase, filled him with a joy he’d forgotten could exist. They were moments of intimacy, it seemed to him; moments when he once again could forget about the war. The world shrunk. There were just the two of them sitting there in the dusty barn; there were no Germans, or fascist militia, or partisans.
Even when Carla was not with him – and that was much of the time – he worked hard learning words and verbs and testing himself over and over. Anyway, apart from the doctor – who visited him one more time – there was no-one with whom he could speak English. If he wished to communicate, he had to do so in Italian. At mealtimes, he joined the rest of the family and listened carefully to the frenetic gabble that flowed around the table, and sure enough, with every passing day he found he could understand more. Gradually, he began to learn more about the place and the people who lived there.
During his first few days there, Carla had taken him all around the farm. At one end of the barn, above the chicken house, was a stone oven. Later, he asked her what this was for.
‘To keep the chickens warm in winter,’ she told him. ‘Then they lay more eggs. More eggs to eat and more to hatch.’ In the yard were two water troughs hacked out of an old tree trunk. Behind the house, in the orchard, there was also a well, the only water supply. At mealtimes, food was limited, with barely enough to go around. There was almost no sugar, and no salt: both were severely rationed and prohibitively expensive on the black market, and although the Casalinis lived on a farm with animals and crops, so small were the profits, and so irregular the harvest on this high, mountainous, clay soil, careful planning had to be maintained all the year round to ensure they never ran out of food altogether.
The day started early. Edward was always awoken at first light by voices in the yard. Inside the main house, the stove and fire were lit, while outside the animals were fed and the cow milked. An hour or more later, the household sat down for a breakfast of acorn coffee – the caffe di ghianda Carla had brought him that first morning – and warm milk. Lunch was usually eaten in the fields and tended to be bread, cheese and wine. There was scarcely more at supper, when everyone once again sat around the table: sausage, perhaps, maybe some chicken and potatoes or a dish of pasta.
And they all worked hard, from dawn until dusk. There were the oxen and the cow to milk, the sheep to tend, constant repairs, washing, cooking, cleaning, collecting wood, chopping wood, building fires, keeping the stove alight. As soon as he was able, Edward began to help too: small chores that did not require too much physical effort; and he enjoyed it, chopping kindling as he recited his verbs, or feeding the animals.
There was no electricity, and no running water: all water had to be drawn from the well behind the farmhouse. There was an outside toilet, but this was just a bucket, to be slopped out twice a day. Edward had a bowl with him in the loft of the barn – a vaso da notte – which he would bring down every morning. The farm depended entirely on the household and the two oxen for labour. There was no machinery, nor even carthorses.
The way of life up there seemed to Edward to belong to a bygone age. Almost everything about the lives of the Casalini family was different from the family life Edward had known as a boy. Theirs was an existence that had barely changed in a thousand years: they were part of a rural peasant community, isolated from the modern world, and one that had never been exposed to the revolutions in land and machinery that had so changed the way of farming life in Britain two centuries before. It amazed him; Edward had simply had no idea people still lived in such a way. The difference with the farms in Surrey, or even Cornwall, was marked. When he had been there nearly a week, Orfeo began making a new plough in the barn below. The single blade was still all right, he explained to Edward, but the wooden frame was not. The only way Orfeo could get a new one was to make it himself.
With his good arm, Edward helped as much he could, steadying pieces of wood as Orfeo sawed and passing him tools, glad to be able to do something of use, however small.
‘You’re a good carpenter,’ Edward told him; that much was obvious, but he was keen to talk and practise his Italian.
Orfeo grinned. ‘I have to be. Farmers up here have to do everything, not just plough the land and cut the corn.’ He paused, wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve. Some inches shorter than Edward, he was lean, but with strong, muscular forearms. His dark hair was thinning, and his face, lined from long months out of doors, was nut brown. Like his father, the old man Arturo, Orfeo had a moustache, black but flecked with grey. Tufts of hair already sprouted from his ears and his chin was blackened with several days’ growth of beard. Despite this rough appearance, his eyes were kindly and he was quick to smile, revealing darkened, widely spaced teeth. His voice, too, was soft – quite gentle. ‘With luck,’ he added, ‘this plough will last ten years at least.’
Edward watched the process, fascinated. It would take a while to finish, Orfeo explained – such things took several days’ work – but Edward could see the form the plough was taking. It reminded him of pictures of Iron Age ploughs he had seen in his history books at school.
The farm was called Pian del Castagna – the chestnut plain – and the family had worked the land there for many generations. Orfeo’s father, Arturo, had lived and worked there all his life, so had his father and his father’s father. They were contadini, sharecroppers, part of a centuries-old feudal system. The landowner, Edward discovered – the padrone – owned nearly every farm around the mountain, and there were many. Orfeo never saw the padrone. ‘He lives in some castle near Florence,’ he told Edward, but most weeks the agent came by on horseback. Half of everything they grew and produced at Pian del Castagna, half of every lire they made, was handed over to the agent. Most of the contadini in the area could neither read nor write, but Orfeo proudly told Edward that he had made sure he could do both, and had ensured his family were the same. ‘Otherwise, those agents will have you every time,’ he said. ‘If you can’t read or write, you’ll always end up owing more than you think. But not me – they can’t pull that trick on me.’
Everyone in the household was expected t
o work on the farm or in the house, or both. Orfeo and Eleva, his wife, had a son, Franco, but he was in Russia. They had not heard from him for over six months. There was a photograph of him in the kitchen, on the dark oak dresser. A good-looking boy, a split of both parents and taking the best of their features. He was rarely mentioned, but Edward often saw them glance wistfully at his picture.
Instead, Orfeo depended on the women in his family; he and Eleva had only managed the one son. As Edward discovered, the women of the house had always been expected to work, but not in the fields in the way that they did now. ‘It’s the war,’ Orfeo shrugged. There was just one daughter, Nella – the girl Edward had seen cross the yard on his first morning. Twenty-one, she lived in the house with her parents and grandfather, as did another girl of the same age called Rosa. A round-faced girl, with thick, light brown hair, Rosa was one of Eleva’s nieces, the daughter of her sister, who lived in Bologna. Rosa’s mother had sent her to Pian del Castagna once the Allies began bombing Bologna. Rosa was a shy, diffident girl. She spoke little at mealtimes. Nella told Edward that Rosa missed the city. ‘She wants to go back. She likes having soft hands, not hands covered in dirt and scratches.’ Nella, on the other hand, had inherited her mother’s looks, but her father’s character: like Orfeo, she was always affable and quick to laugh. Everyone called him ‘Eduardo,’ except Nella; to her, Edward was always ‘Il Pilote,’ or ‘Signor Spitfire.’ He did not mind; he rather liked it.
Nella was engaged to be married, to a man from Saragano, the village that lay below them on the lower slopes overlooking the Reno. He was older than her and still away at war. He’d been in Greece and she worried about him and why he had not returned. Every time the postman arrived on his bicycle and ringing his bell, she rushed out to him, but on the three occasions there had been any mail since Edward’s arrival, there had been nothing for her. ‘One day he’ll be back,’ Nella told him. ‘One day. And then we will be married at last.’
A Pair of Silver Wings Page 30
