What the Traveller Saw

The following morning, having spent some hours swimming about in the Mediterranean, and failing to re-join the submarine, with Mount Etna, our first Italian volcano, smoking away overhead, we were picked up by the first Italian fishermen we had ever seen who were sufficiently kindly, having saved our lives, to make unthinkable the idea of banging them on the head and trying to get to Malta in their boat.

And as we chugged into the harbour of Catania I had my first sight of an Italian city beside the sea, as I had always imagined it would be, just as Rex Whistler might have painted it, with baroque domes and Renaissance palazzi, all golden in the early morning sun.

We were hurried off the boat and up through narrow streets to a Fascist headquarters with a picture of II Duce on the wall where, minus our trousers, which we had lost at sea, we met our first Blackshirts. They consigned us to a fortress in the moat of which one of their number, more excited than the rest, said we would be shot at dawn the following day. In spite of not knowing until some time later that this fate had befallen a previous party, we believed him. But we weren’t shot. Instead we were taken to Rome and kept prisoners in the barracks of a posh cavalry regiment. Here we tasted our first, real Italian food. It came from the officers’ mess and was delicious, pasta and peperoni, and our first Italian wine. From the window of my room, which was high up under the eaves and very hot, all I could see of Rome was an officer exercising a charger of the tan in a courtyard. A whole decade was to pass before I would again visit Rome in August.

In the spring of 1943, about nine months after I was captured, a number of us were sent to a rather superior prison camp situated in what is known as the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the River Po flows on its way from its source in the Cottian Alps on the French frontier to the Adriatic. This camp was in a disused orphanage on the edge of a large village called Fontanellato, which is now very close to the Autostrada del Sole, and the nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road that runs through the pianura in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.

There, once a week, parties of us were allowed to go for route marches in the surrounding country under a general parole that we would not try to escape, but we were nevertheless still heavily guarded. The route chosen deliberately avoided villages.

We walked along flat, dusty roads on which we rarely saw a motor car, only cyclists and carts drawn by oxen; past wheat fields, fields where what resembled miniature forests of maize (Indian corn) were growing, in which I longed to hide myself and make my escape. We marched along the foot of high, grass-grown embankments, known as argine, built to protect the land from the torrents that at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the nearby River Po, and also from the Po itself, a powerful, dangerous and unpredictable stream.

We also saw fields of tomato plants that when ripe would be used to make salsa di pomodoro, sugar beet, groves of poplars, the trunks of which, soaring up overhead, were like the pillars in a cathedral, endless rows of vines which produced the naturally fizzy red wine known as Lambrusco. And we saw rambling, red-tiled farmhouses, some of them very large, with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese and the inevitable savage dog on a running wire. And there were barns, sometimes with open doors, through which we could see big, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semidarkness. We were permanently hungry and it was strange to think that, apart from the meals I had been served in the cavalry barracks in Rome, I had never eaten a proper Italian meal in Italy – all the food I had eaten in the prison camps had been cooked by British cooks.

On these walks we saw very few people, probably they were ordered to make themselves scarce. Most of those we did see were contadini, bent double working in the fields and all wearing straw hats with huge brims to protect themselves from the fearful heat of the sun. Sometimes they waved but because of these hats it was difficult to know who waved, men or women or both. Others, women and girls mostly, seen momentarily through half-closed green shutters on the upper floors of the farmhouses, also waved a bit apprehensively. No one was obviously unfriendly. And in all these expanses of pianura there was not a tractor to be seen.

Our presence in the orphanage provoked lively interest among the inhabitants of our village, Fontanellato, and as the local cemetery was located alongside the orphanage large numbers of them, most of them women, both old and young (the young men were mostly in the armed forces), some of them on bicycles, took more numerous opportunities to pay their respects to the dead than they had done before we arrived on the scene. In fact I first saw the girl I was subsequently to marry on her way to the cemetery with a group of friends, all of them on bikes. I waved to her from one of the windows overlooking the main road. She waved back and I was shot at by a sentry who was careful to miss, which was a warning against looking out of those particular windows.

On 8 September 1943 the Italian government asked for an armistice. On the following day we all broke out of the orphanage with the connivance of the Italian commandant and took to the countryside to avoid being sent to Germany, which we did by a hair’s-breadth.

It was an extraordinary situation. Up to this moment, apart from various interrogators and members of the camp staff with whom we came in contact, few if any of us had ever spoken to an Italian since we had been captured. Now, suddenly, we found ourselves more or less surrounded by the sort of people we had seen working in the fields and riding bikes up the road to the cemetery, most of whom seemed anxious to help us, not, most of them, for any political motive, but because, as they told us, they too had sons and brothers away at the war, many of whom had not been heard of for a long time.

So far as I was concerned the first Italians I now met appeared in the following order: an Italian soldier who led me out of the camp on a mule because I had sprained my ankle and couldn’t walk (he then went off with it – ‘Vado a casa,’ he said, ‘I’m going home’); next were a farmer and his wife who hid me in their barn for that first night, who had a son and a daughter; then there was the girl to whom I had waved, by sheer coincidence, who brought me clothes, including one of her father’s suits – he was the village schoolmaster; there was a Sicilian doctor, a great friend of the schoolmaster, who arranged for me to be hidden in the maternity ward of the local hospital; then there was its mother superior and various nuns, an elderly male nurse called Giulio who looked and sounded a bit like a walrus, and Maria, a mongoloid child, a permanent member resident in this ospedale, who was immensely strong, highly affectionate and used to prove it by going through the motions of strangling me with one of her pigtails, creeping up behind me like a miniature Italian version of an Indian thug.

Until now my fellow prisoners and I had thought of Italians, rather arrogantly, more or less as figures of fun.

We were arrogant because this was one of the few ways in which we could vent our spleen at having been captured, and at the same time keep up our spirits, which were really very low. Before the armistice it is believed that, in spite of innumerable attempts to do so, only two allied prisoners of war actually succeeded in escaping from Italy. This was because Italians of all sorts and conditions were, and are, extraordinarily observant, and all the ingenious subterfuges, disguises and false documents which might have satisfied a German or an English official were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to satisfy even the most myopic Italian ticket collector. It was not only officials. The kind of inspection an allied escaper was subjected to by other travellers in an Italian train compartment would usually be enough to finish him off.

Now, all of a sudden, these same Italians were risking their lives for us, and as I was passed from one helper to the next I began to feel rather like a fragile parcel on its way to some distant delivery point.

It was in this fashion that I arrived at a lonely farmhouse high up in the Apennines, more or less midway between Parma and La Spezia, the Italian naval base on the Ligurian Sea.

There, almost 2500 feet up on what was soon to become, with the onset of winter, the cold, northern face of this 800-mile-long mountain range that forms the backbone of Italy, I found myself suddenly transported, as if by magic, to a way of life that I had never imagined existed in Western Europe, and one that had changed hardly at all for fifty years or more. And there I worked for a farming family who had little enough to eat themselves, in this the third year of the war for Italy, without me to feed, and who lived in the constant, very real, fear of being betrayed by informers for having sheltered me and of being either sent to Germany as forced labourers, or shot.

The people who lived in these remote mountain communities were fighting to survive in an inhospitable terrain. They had always been short-handed. Even before the war, to make ends meet, many of these mountain men had gone off to work in the industrial areas of northern Italy, France and Switzerland, and even further afield, leaving their wives and children and the aged to fend for themselves as best they could, returning home at rare intervals. Some worked as itinerant knife grinders, others as navvies employed on such superhuman tasks as excavating railway tunnels. Some, more fortunate, had found their way to London where, having found their feet in the catering business, they had been able to send for their wives and families and open little cafés. Some of these men were interned at the beginning of the war and were subsequently drowned when the Arandora Star, the ship that was taking them and other internees to Canada, was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

Now many of the young men of these Apennine families were away at the war, many of them with the Giulia division of the Alpini which was now on the Russian front. The only able-bodied men were deserters who had left their units after the armistice, like my friend with the mule at Fontanellato. Like me, they too were on the run, not only from the Germans but also the Fascists, who, after their initial reverse, were making an altogether too rapid recovery.

Up there in the mountains no one except prisoners of war and the deserters, who had to keep an ear open for what was going on, was really interested in the war. For them it was an inexplicable calamity that had deprived many of them of their sons. Few of them were even nominally Fascists, those few that were still practising were, unfortunately, hyperactive.

The villages were collections of grey stone farmhouses huddled together for mutual protection from the elements above a labyrinth of narrow passages which led to the stalle, the cowsheds, and barns. These houses were roofed with stone slabs split from the same limestone with which the houses were built.

Apart from the few principal routes, which wound their way up through the Apennines and across the main ridge at one or other of the few passes that could be crossed by motor vehicles, there were few proper roads. Communication between villages was by rough tracks which had probably existed since the beginning of recorded time. Those who used them computed distances by the number of hours it took to reach one’s destination, rather than the number of kilometres that had to be covered.

Whenever a road or a track crossed a ridge or reached some other high point there would invariably be a little wayside shrine, usually with the Virgin depicted on a small, Carrara marble slab, of a sort that often dated back to the mid-eighteenth century.

Up there in the mountains, no woman whatever her age thought anything of making a three-hour journey downhill on foot to deliver a consignment of cheese to a weekly market, often carrying it in a first-war Alpini rucksack, and then climbing, loaded with purchases, all the way up again. Pack mules were used to carry heavier loads. Hay and firewood were brought down from the upper meadows and the forests on wooden sledges drawn by cows or bullocks. The only wheeled vehicles were handcarts.

Families lived by growing crops, mostly grain, potatoes and other vegetables, and by milking their cows. They also gathered chestnuts – the flour was a staple food but more so on the warmer, south-facing flanks of the mountains – and also edible mushrooms, such as boletus edulis, otherwise porcini, a delicacy which commanded high prices and sometimes grew in very large quantities. There were no vines. Vines couldn’t exist on this side of the range much above 220 metres, and there were no olives. So olive oil had to be bought. When the snow came in November/December many of the higher farms were often cut off from the outside world for quite long periods, except for those with skis. In this pre-plastic age which endured up here until many years after the war, ploughs were of wood and iron, harrows were made from the trunks of trees, digging was done with a long-handled spade called a vanga, nothing like an English spade, which had a triangular blade and a metal projection at right angles to it so that the user could exert more pressure and dig deeper.

Clods were broken up with a two-pronged mattock, called a zappa. In a field of any size the work of zappatura was hard for a lone operator because up in the mountains the earth was mostly adhesive clay that used to stick on the prongs of the zappa. Crops were cut with scythes and sickles.

When working, most of the men wore battered felt hats and what had once been their best Sunday suits. Sometimes they were of corduroy which their wives had repaired so many times, using whatever materials came to hand, that they often resembled patchwork quilts. And under their shirts they wore thick vests, with the natural oil still in the wool, which the women had knitted using wool they had spun themselves.

It was commonplace to see women spinning in the fields while looking after the animals, carrying a wooden spindle tapered at either end and with a perforated stone at the middle of it, to the top of which the woollen yarn was attached, and with the rest of it rolled round a distaff, a piece of wood which they carried tucked under one arm. Until they became old, or widowed, or both, when they dressed in deepest black from head to toe, women and girls for everyday wore dark skirts about the length of a kilt and aprons to protect them when working, blouses, hand-knitted vests, except in hot weather, thick, hand-knitted socks to match, heavy, nailed mountain boots and coloured head scarves. In this society men didn’t go to church much. Religion was for women. Among their men it was reserved usually for feast days and for death.

For them, and for me, life in those days when not working outside revolved around the kitchen, the largest, most important room in the house. There was no equivalent to a British front parlour. The fireplace was a blackened cave in which heavy copper cooking pots hung suspended in the chimney by long chains. And there was a cast-iron wood-burning stove with a long silver stove pipe rising from it then executing a right-angled bend before disappearing into one of the walls.

At that time the staple food was homemade bread, baked in an outside oven, using flour which was kept in a piece of furniture known as a madia. This had a detachable board on top which was used to make pasta – a great standby was a thick vegetable soup made with beans and pasta – and there was polenta, made with chestnut flour or maize. There was cheese and very rough wine, and for breakfast bread and milk and acorn coffee. Sugar was a black-market commodity; worst of all was the shortage of salt.

After the evening meal they all enjoyed sitting round the fire telling and listening to stories. At that time there were still storytellers whose stories dated back to medieval times, when the Saracens infested the coasts of Italy, stories which had been passed down by word of mouth.

Parma in the winter of 1944, when I was recaptured, was a city of the dead, like the rest of Italy, gelid, without heat, or hope, the Allies bogged down hundreds of miles to the south. It was also a city of terror, under the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the last of the Fascists, all of whom I had seen fleetingly on the way to be imprisoned in the Cittadella, the huge, star-shaped fortress on what were then the outskirts of the city, and when the gates finally closed on me I knew that, for the foreseeable future at least, it was the end of my new-found friendship with Italy.

Across the Oxus KABUL-MOSCOW-VIENNA, 1956

THE CHEAPEST WAY to get back to Western Europe from Afghanistan in 1956, as I discovered after my unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Hindu Kush, was to fly Aeroflot. I therefore paid a visit to their Kabul offices, which at that time were located in a large, non-committal-looking private house fitted with several doors, none of which opened when I either rang bells or banged on them. After a long interval in which I could distinguish the voices of a man and a woman in what sounded like intimate conversation somewhere inside the building, one of the doors did open and I was led into the office of the manager, a Mr Scholkonogov, an assertive monoglot Russian in a bright blue suit, for whom one of his aides, a crop-haired gentleman, all smiles, interpreted.

I told Mr Scholkonogov that I wanted to fly to Venice.

‘Why?’ he asked.

It seemed a strange question for the manager of an airline to ask a potential passenger, but at this time I was unused to Russians.

‘Because my wife and children are in Venice,’ I said. It was no good complicating matters by telling him that they were, in fact, in a village between Trieste and Monfalcone.

‘Better you fly to Tirana,’ he said, with the air of someone who had already made up his mind that that was where I was going whether I wanted to or not.

‘But Tirana’s in Albania, it’s miles from Venice,’ I said. With a man like this unless I watched my step I would probably end up in Siberia. Happily this was not his intention. He was a nice man, trying to look after my interests. ‘Better you go to Tirana because Tirana is much cheaper fare; but if Tirana no good, go to Vienna. Vienna for you still very cheap.’

‘How cheap?’

‘Very cheap. You buy Afghanis [the Afghan currency] on the black market with English pounds at 150 Afghanis to the pound. Then you buy a ticket from me in roubles at a very good rate of exchange’ – I forget what it was – ‘and the entire journey Kabul – Vienna by Moscow will cost you …’ – at this point there was a halt in the conversation during which he got out an abacus and went to work on it, eventually coming up with a figure – ‘8650 Afghanis, £51. Good for 6000 kilometres. Why not go to England?’ – more work on the abacus – ‘That will cost you only 10,000 Afghanis, £8 more, and we will both come with you. We have always wished to see England.’

‘I can’t do that, I’ve got a wife and children waiting for me in Venice.’

‘Mr Scholkonogov asks me to tell you that wives and children are nothing but trouble,’ the interpreter said as I prepared to set off for the Bazaar right away, apprehensive that the black market in sterling might suddenly collapse. ‘He will telephone our Embassy and tell Mr Oleynik there that it is all right as far as we are concerned for a visa to be issued for you. You should have no difficulty, but go there at once before what Mr Scholkonogov says to Mr Oleynik is forgotten.’

The plane was an Ilyushin 12, a Russian version of a Dakota. The windows were fitted with lace curtains and the headrests with antimacassars, the only concessions to luxury in this otherwise austere machine. The effect was curious. All that was lacking was an aspidistra. It remained less than half full all the way to Moscow, in spite of people getting on and off, which would scarcely be the case today.

The stewardesses were monolithic. They gave us sweets with the air of schoolmistresses providing the most disagreeable of their pupils with some undreamed-of treat, but no sooner had we put them in our mouths and begun sucking them than we were told to put on our oxygen masks – there was no such thing as one of those mindless, preliminary demonstrations which all too often send the recipients of this vital information to sleep – so we had either to swallow them or spit them out.

Now we were off, on the crossing of the Hindu Kush. Sadly I looked down on snow-covered summits that I now knew, in my heart of hearts, I would never conquer. And then we had to put on our masks in earnest.

With the mountains behind us we were over the Oxus, seeing dense jungle, momentarily, and coming in to land at Termez, on its right bank, in Russian Uzbekistan, where we were out of sight of the river, which I longed to see, a magic one to all explorers.

From Termez we flew northwards to Tashkent, over the Zeravshan and Turkestan Ranges, and over Samarkand, all of which I identified using the Oxford University Economic Atlas of the USSR, which I had bought in the Bazaar at Kabul.

There, in a fearfully gloomy small hotel – who was I to complain where bed and board was part of the £51 ticket? – we dined interminably in the restaurant of the hotel. It took more than an hour for the first course to arrive from the time we sat down at our various tables. The other guests were mostly emancipated male Uzbeks – no Uzbek women were present – all of whom were dressed in Western clothes, although some of them still wore their characteristic, embroidered skull caps. They were more at ease in their suits than they were with the Western cutlery with which they had been provided. More happy, as I would have been, given gristly lumps of mutton to deal with, to have picked them up and tackled them by hand, instead they stuck their forks vertically into them with one hand, while they sawed away with their knives at an angle of forty-five degrees to the meat with the other, so that the effect of numbers of them doing this at once was like the string section of a large orchestra playing away out of tune, on miniature versions of the double bass or cello.

What was by now only relatively modern Tashkent had been built soon after the Trans-Caspian railway reached what was then the Tashkent Oasis in 1898. It was already in the process of being knocked down and replaced by even more gimcrack structures. Later it was to be flattened by an earthquake. Most of the old Uzbek houses in the parts I was able to visit had either been razed to the ground or were in the process of being demolished. Any Uzbeks who retained anything of their native garb, apart from the skull cap, were very old indeed. Walking about the city in this fashion, gazing more or less open-mouthed at everything, I was very soon taken into custody by two plain-clothed policemen, who demanded from me the piece of paper giving the name of my hotel and my room number and on receiving it speedily returned me to it.

Early the following morning we flew northwestwards, following the line of the Syr Darya river and the railway from Tashkent to Moscow, a line on which I had always longed to travel. To the east the milk-chocolate-coloured expanses of the Betpak-Dala Steppe, stamping ground of nomad hordes, stretched away in the direction of Lake Balkhash, four hundred miles or so to the east, while immediately below the river wriggled through what appeared to be desert like an endless, greyish green snake.

Then we landed at Dzhusaly, about a hundred miles east of the Aral Sea, on a military airfield out of sight of the river, out of sight of everything except an endless nothingness of steppe. A searing wind was blowing and the air was filled with the high-pitched screamings of Soviet jet fighters warming up for a practice sweep over those parts of Kazakhstan which today are some of the most secret and difficult-to-get-at areas of the USSR. Then we took off again, seeing the Aral Sea shimmering in the sun, on a short trip to Aralsk at its northern end, where we took on more fuel, after which we crossed the southern outliers of the Urals and were in Europe. At Uralsk we ran into a big electric storm and there the pilot altered course to fly north of what was the normal route, which would have taken us straight across the Volga to Penza, but still flying parallel to it. From now on, we flew very low over endless forest.