Eric Newby (1919 to 2006) was a much-loved travel writer, author of such British travel classics as ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ (1958) and ‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ (1966). In 1971 he published this classic wartime memoir.
It describes how:
- serving in the Special Boat Section, he was captured during an operation off the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was then held at prisoner of war camps, first in Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later at Fontanellato, near Parma
- after the Italians made peace with the Allies in September 1943, he escaped from the camp by the simple expedient of walking through the now-unguarded gates
- he was helped to hide for 6 months from the occupying Germans in the Apennine mountains, initially by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, her father the schoolteacher, a doctor, and then by a whole succession of colourful villagers and characters
Newby would later marry Wanda and she became the lifelong companion of his travels and adventures.
Newby’s core quality is a wonderful, self-mocking sense of humour; every turn of events is an opportunity for an amused, ironic remark or insight. Add to this his great way with natural descriptions of landscapes and weather, and then his acute descriptions of the many people he meets through the course of his adventure, and it makes for an extremely interesting, sometimes dramatic, but above all charming book.
The 298-page book is divided into 17 chapters.
1. Operation Whynot
Very detailed description of the secret small-scale operation during which Newby was captured on 12 August 1942, in the Bay of Catania off Sicily. He and five other members of M Detachment of the Special Boat Service had been taken into the bay by submarine (the Una commanded by Pat Norman, p.15), then manhandled inflatable canoes into the sea and rowed quietly to the beach. The plan was to attack a German airfield four miles south of Catania and take out as many of the 50 to 60 Junkers 88 bombers parked there as possible. The mission was lent urgency because a massive fleet of merchant ships had just entered the Mediterranean with the aim of sailing to British-held Malta to provide vital supplies to the besieged island (p.16).
They actually made it to the airfield when they encountered an Italian patrol, shots were fired, at which the airport alarm and all its floodlights went on. Now way they could cover the half mile to where loads of Ju 88s were lined up so they aborted, ran back to the beach, through the barbed wire, reclaimed their canoes and headed back out to sea.
But they completely missed the rendezvous point with the submarine (which, turned out, not only turned up and waited, but came back at the same time for several days in the hope of meeting them). Instead the seas got rough, the canoes swamped and sank and they were all pitched into the freezing water, clinging to various bits of wreckage.
Thus they were in very poor shape when they were discovered by a small Sicilian fishing fleet and dragged aboard the little fishing smacks about 8am. Newby’s attitude, tone of voice and wry humour are established on the opening page:
I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness that we did… (p.13)
The most Newby aspect of the entire account is that one of his party brought along their pet dog from Malta (in the submarine, not on the actual airfield mission), a dachshund named Socks who disappeared for long period, returning bloated with food and her long underbelly soaked in oil which she invariably rubbed all over Newby’s uniform when he jumped up to lick him.
The fishermen handed the captured Brits over to the Italian army, who put them in prison, interrogated them etc, till a German officer arrived and insisted they be properly fed and given dry clothes. Eventually they were shipped over to the mainland and taken under armed escort to a POW barracks in Rome.
Newby found Rome beautiful. He quite liked being alone in a cell. This was his first time in Europe. He was just twenty-two years old (p.34).
2. Grand Illusion
Cut to a year later (September 1943) and Newby is being held in what had been built as an orphanage or orfanotrofio attached to a convent, but was still not finished when war broke out. It was a three-storey building so unstable that if anyone jumped up and down the entire facade wobbled. It was in a village called Fontenallato.
The Italian guards are relaxed, the food is OK and supplemented by Red Cross parcels and stuff bought off the black market. There’s cheap if risky liquor available. Newby tells a typical story about the first lieutenant-colonel who became senior officer and hosted a big party on his first night, with lots of illegal booze. Finally he declared the party over, rose, and opened the door to a tall cupboard, striding inside as if into his bedroom. Because, when he pulled the door shut behind him, he wedged his thick coat in it, it took the others some time to free him, by which time he was fast asleep and sleeping.
The prisoners were forbidden to look out of any of the windows facing into the road into the village. If they did so the Italian guards fired at them, and the walls opposite the windows were studded with bullet holes.
For some reason local pretty young women made a point of promenading past the prison, to the great joy of the young men inside who risked death by bullet to get a sight. This leads to the subject of sex and Newby points out that most of the men were probably too undernourished to perform. In the absence of women there was always masturbation, which he describes as ‘pull our puddings’, something difficult to do in a dormitory of 26 men, packed close and illuminated by searchlights, although some of them revived the ancient skills of subterfuge perfected at boarding school.
To my surprise there’s an extended passage which expresses considerable dislike for the public school senior ranks who dominated life in the prison. Newby calls them ‘the OK people’, who’d all been to the same schools, were members of the same clubs in London, were officers in the best regiments, knew each other’s families and treated all outsiders like muck (pages 47 to 49). The passage includes bitter memories of privileged boys being pushed in prams in Hyde Park or hogging all the toys at Hamleys (‘Go away,’ he said, ‘It’s my rocking horse.’) The ‘OK people’ i.e. the nobs, rarely if ever read, or discuss anything except each other’s fabulous families, but they do gamble – on anything, for any stakes.
The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense…there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been. (p.55)
All the prisoners mock and joked about the ‘Itis’ (Newby’s spelling of what, according to the internet should be spelled ‘Eyeties’ i.e. slang abbreviation for Italians) but really it just channeled and controlled their frustration at being locked up.
In fact Newby philosophically comments that the prisoners were in fact more ‘free’ than they ever would be again, free from money, worries about careers, free from having to work, for responsibility for dependents and so on.
(The chapter is titled ‘Grand Illusion’ because a new commanding officer arrives who instils discipline and makes it resemble the prisoner of war camp in the 1937 French movie La Grande Illusion.)
3. Armistizio
On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was dismissed from power by King Victor Emmanuel. He was arrested, imprisoned and moved from place to place. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister. On 3 September 1943 Badoglio agreed to an Armistice between Italy and the Allies. The formal announcement was made on the radio five days later and plunged Italy into chaos. The complicated diplomatic and military manoeuvres are laid out on the Wikipedia Armistice of Cassibile article.
The only impact this made on the orfanotrofio was the guards stopped shooting through the windows and their daily escorted exercise marches came to an end. That evening the entire camp held a massive party with booze bought and smuggled in on the black market.
There was a couple of days of wild rumours that the Allies were landing in northern Italy leading to massive breakthroughs and that the war would be over in a week. In fact it was to last nearly two years more. What happened is the Germans turned on their former allies and seized positions all across Italy.
4. The Ninth of September
Their Italian captors let the entire camp population leave. They just walked out the door. All except Newby who hobbled. Just a few days earlier he’d managed to trip and fall down the grand staircase at the centre of the orfanotrofio and break his ankle. Now, as everyone walks out the building and through the previously guarded wire fences, Newby has to hobble, supported by two reluctant paratroopers. They’re only too happy to hand him over to a (small) horse secured for him by a British orderly and named Mora. Characteristically: a) Newby has never ridden a horse before (unlike the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ OK people inside the camp) b) he’s terrified of horse and c) the landscape is criss-crossed by irrigation ditches so terrible terrain for a horse to cross.
Pretty quickly the horse goes front legs into a ditch pitching Newby over its neck. I was surprised that his class consciousness surfaces even here.
‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have stuck a lit cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. (p.64)
He’s still in the general procession of escaping prisoners, looking like a troop of lunatics he once came across in Surrey. Later they discover that:
some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp, had fired a few rounds in the air, the Italian soldiers had capitulated immediately, the colonello had been arrested and the Germans had taken him away as a souvenir of their visit. (p.66)
The senior British officer in the column of escaping prisoners tells Newby that he can’t spare the men to help him hobble along and so he’s arranged for him to stay with a local farmer while the column heads off. So Newby is hidden in the hayloft of the first of a long line of Italian peasants. He hears the distant roar of traffic and wonders if it’s Germans on the Via Emilia (the modern A1 that runs between Piacenza in the north-west to Parma to the south-east). In the evening the farmer and his wife give him a hearty meal of home-made pasta and cheese and wine, the first of many flavours of the real, rustic Italy which Newby was to come to love.
An Italian translator from the orfanotrofio turns up and shares the latest news that the Germans are approaching in force from the north. Looks like the Great Liberation will be pushed back a bit.
5. Interlude in an Ospedale
Next day an Italian doctor comes and tells him he needs to go to hospital to have his ankle fixed. So Newby changes into Italian farmer clothes given him by his hosts and drives off in the doctor’s car. But not before one of the many land girls who had begun to arrive at the farm takes his notice, mainly because she’s blonde not dark-haired, and then comes over to the car to promise to visit him in hospital. It is Wanda, his future wife.
So he is driven back into Fontanellato and admitted to the Ospedale Perachi only a few hundred yards from the orfanotrofio. Wanda comes to visit, introduces herself and sets about giving him hilariously bad Italian lessons in her heavy Slovak accent. She pronounces his name ‘Hurrock’ (p.73).
She was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a blue cotton skirt. She was brown, she was slim, she had good legs, she had ash-blonde hair and blue eyes and she had a fine nose. When she smiled she looked saucy, when she didn’t she looked serious. (p.76)
Newby describes the staff at the hospital, strong nurses with no false modesty about stripping him and putting him into regulations pyjamas, a formidable matron, a silent consultant.
That evening German bombers drop leaflets telling the population the capitulation of their country is a disgrace and the Germans are coming to provide freedom and security. Wanda had told him he was right next door to the maternity wing of the hospital and the screams of a woman giving birth keep him up till late.
For some time life in the hospital is peaceful and quiet. Wanda comes every afternoon for more bad Italian lessons and gossip about how his former prisoners are doing. She thinks he should head north to Switzerland.
Wanda describes how Slovenia was annexed by Mussolini in the 1920s who forbade the use of the Slovenian language and deported all Slovenian teachers to Italy (p.80).
The radio gives the news: on 12 September Mussolini was rescued from prison by German paratroopers. 14 September news that the Germans had launched a fierce counter-offensive against the Allied landings at Salerno (as described by where . 16 September all Italian officers and men were ordered to present themselves in uniform at the nearest German headquarters.
The newspapers carry a threatening announcement from the head of the SS who has now taken control of Parma, just 20 km to the south.
6. Back to Nature
Newby realises he has to get away. But he’s left it late and now two carabinieri have been stationed outside his hospital room to guard him.
With one of his meals come detailed instructions on how to escape. he had been pretending to have diarrhoea and keep having to go to the toilet until his guards stopped paying attention. That evening he squeezes through the toilet window, shimmies down a drainpipe and goes stumbling and hopping across fields to the rendezvous point a kilometre away. Here he is collected by the doctor who has been treating him and another middle-aged man. It is Wanda’s father. They refer to each other as dottore and maestro, respectively.
We set off at a terrific rate on a road which had all the qualities necessary to produce a fatal accident. (p.90)
They drive for miles before giving him a full set of clothes, a knife and dumping him in a wood telling him he’ll be found by a middle-aged man named Giovanni. They tell him he’s near the river Po, then drive off, leaving him to stumble into the wood armed with a sleeping bag and a bottle of mosquito repellent.
7. Down by the Riverside
After a rough night in the woods, Newby blunders down to the river and has a revelatory view of the mighty River Po. Back in the woods he falls asleep and is roughly woken by Giovanni who takes him to a rock overlooking the river and treats him to home-made soup and pasta, slices of unsmoked ham and home-made wine. Giovanni explains the geography of the Po, its regular flooding, its shifting estuary.
Wanda arrives by bicycle and brings bad news. Field Marshall Kesselring has set up his base in the castle at Fontenallato. If he’d remained at the hospital he would have been sent to a POW camp in Germany. Worse, some British escapees were found and arrested at a farm and one of them had kept a diary including the names of everyone who had helped him. Idiot. Cretin.
Giovanni and Wanda’s father dig a kind of grave for Newby, line it, make him lie in it, then cover it with planks and soil, leaving a breathing hole, for him to hide in that night. Next morning he’s woken and dug out and still stiff from being cooped up Newby stumbles to the doctor’s car.
Newby discovers he’s not the only passenger as there’s an ancient man, bent over, dressed all in black, who appears to be deaf and spends a lot of the journey quietly chuckling to himself, ‘Heh, heh, heh’ (p.108).
The doctor drives them along a country road till it joins the Via Emilia only to discover a vast armoured column is driving along it. Trying to look Italian in his Italian clothes, Newby is bricking it as the doctor overtakes the column slowly and sensibly.
Eventually they outdistance the column, drive along open roads and arrive in the city of Parma where the Fiat promptly breaks down and the doctor spends some time under the bonnet fixing it. Despite some German traffic cops being about nobody interferes with them, the car is fixed, and they drive through Parma towards the mountains.
8. Haven in a Storm
The doctor drops Newby with the Baruffas, farmers in the foothills of the mountains, telling him he’ll be safe there. It’s all smiles and handshakes but the minute the doctor has driven off Senor Baruffa tells him he must leave. Now. Straightaway. They are terrified of reprisals. They tell him he must go to the farm of Zanoni, further up the valley beyond the mill. And with that, throw him out into the farm courtyard just as a ferocious rainstorm starts.
Newby trudges up along the cobbled track that leads beside the overflowing stream as the storm howls around him and brings him to the bubbling frothing watermill. From there a path leads further up the hill to a house which was more like a stone hut built against the mountainside. He knocks and enters a dark and smelly cowshed to find Signor Zanoni. This dirt-poor farmer takes him into the main ‘house’, more like a cavern, feeds him and lets him sleep in the only bed.
It’s the dark and stormy evening of 25 September 1943 and Newby spends the night in the most comfortable bed he’s ever slept in, before or since (p.118).
Next morning Zanoni informs him that the Germans have installed a new Fascist government in Italy and it is offering 1,800 lire for the capture of Allied prisoners. That’s about £25 at contemporary rates, a fortune for these peasants. Then again he explains the typical Italian attitude which is not to try too hard; most of the country’s officials know the Allies will eventually win the war at which point there’ll be a reckoning for anyone who gave away hiding soldiers.
The thin signora beings him coffee made from acorns and their own home-cured ham but he realises these people are very poor and making a real sacrifice. He has to leave soon. It’s a Sunday and all through the day neighbours drop in for a chat and socialise and he has to remain deathly silent upstairs.
9. Appointment at the Pian del Sotto
Next day he tells kindly Zanzoni that he really must leave, he wants to stay somewhere he can earn his keep through labour. After running through possible candidates Zanoni’s wife suggests old Luigi who lives up on the Pian del Sotto.
So Zanzoni takes him a long roundabout walk through old oak forest, cutting his way through the dense brambles, heading further up to the treeline and to a three-storey concrete house, the Pian del Sotto, owned by Luigi. He’s in the kitchen with his flat-chested wife Agata, Rita the skinny daughter, an Amazon woman helper Dolores, and a chunky young labourer Armando. Zazoni negotiates terms in heavy dialect. Eventually Luigi agrees to take him on as an unskilled labourer, given room and board.
Kindly old Zanzoni says he’ll tell Giovanni back in the plain that he’s OK and with that turns and leaves. Luigi immediately tells Newby to start clearing the fields he can see from the house of all their rocks and stones.
10. Life on the Pian del Sotto
A warm-hearted, humorous description of the very basic life with Luigi’s peasant family, up at 6 for coffee and dried bread before the back-breaking work of the day begins. The crushing boredom of spending all day excavating stones from fields, loading them into the cart, dragging the cart to a cliff and tipping then over the edge. At 10am the merenda when everyone has woken up and is lively. It is here that the women in the household discuss their dreams and interpret them with the use of a popular guide.
Dinner after which the conversation, strangely enough, turns to London, or what they call la citè d’la fumarassa, which they all know is packed with peasouper fogs, streets clogged with hansom cabs, and the gruesome murders of Jack the Ripper solved by Sherlock Holmes.
A feature of the house is the ferocious, angry demented hound, Nero, which barks like mad and makes a lunge for Newby every time he goes in or out of the house. He takes to throwing the contents of his chamber pot at it every morning.
11. Encounter with a Member of the Master Race
One of the girls brings a letter back from the village written by Wanda and addressed to ‘Enrica’ which tells him in code that her father and Giovanni have been arrested, and warning him not to go on any long journeys i.e. not to try and escape north to Switzerland.
Sunday comes and while the rest of the family head down the mountain to villages, Newby chooses to spend the day hiking higher up the mountain, discovering the circular areas of soil cleared by the seasonal charcoal burners. It’s a wonderful walk beautifully described up – especially a couple of pages itemising all the different types of funghi he sees about which he knows absolutely nothing – through the thinning tree cover and then out onto a steep downland of cropped grass and across to an immense cliff. The sun is out, it’s warm and mazy and he lies down and falls asleep in the meadow.
He’s awoken by a German soldier in uniform. After he gets over the shock he realises the German means him no harm. In fact he is an eccentric figure, a keen butterfly collector who has got a rare day off and come up to the meadows armed with a butterfly net. He speaks good English and quickly spots that Newby is English. He introduces himself as Oberleutnant Frick, Education officer. He offers Newby a cool quality bottle of beer from Munich and speaks quite candidly, saying it is horrible to be hated simply for being German. He advises Newby to spend the winter where he is rather than head south where the fighting is going to become very hard. When Newby asks him about the fighting in Italy Frick says they can hold the Allies till the spring, probably the summer, but it is not here the war will be won or lost, it is in Russia where German losses are catastrophic. Then he shakes hands, makes a formal goodbye and runs off to catch butterflies.
When Newby arrives back at the house he discovers the arrival of the Oberleutnant created a mass panic among the villages, many of which conceal not Allied POWs but deserters, who all promptly headed for the hills. Then Newby produces the backpack full of fungi which he had collected up the hill, leading the women to scream at him to take the poisonous ones off the table, and Luigi to tick him off for collecting fungi which, it turns out, belongs to an old farmer who’s paid the commune for the right to pick them from a certain part of the wood, which is therefore his fungaia. The women cook the edible ones and they all enjoy them for dinner.
Newby’s decided not to head south, after what the German told him. He asks when the snow comes and Luigi says the first snow comes in November but the Big Snow comes at the end of December and then people can only get about on skis. Also he says, as the others go quiet, that’s when, wherever he’s hiding, ‘they’ will come and arrest him.
12. The Great Paura
Paura means fear as in ‘Ho paura’ meaning I’m afraid.
After a week or so Newby finally completes the task of clearing the rocks from the fields. The last massive boulders are removed by building fires next to or on them, then pouring icy water over then so they crack and explore and the fragments can be cleared.
One day as he’s heading to the primitive outside toilet Nero finally breaks his chain and comes bounding after him. Newby flees for a barn with hay piled against it and is scrabbling to climb the bales when two huge hands appear and yank him by his overalls up into the hayloft. It is the Amazonian landgirl Dolores and she promptly tells him to kiss her. Then to touch her. She had been working in the hot loft and had taken her jumper off to reveal a light slip. The reader can imagine the rest. They would have proceeded to sex is Agata hadn’t delivered one of her deafening yells to the menfolk to come and sort Nero out, which curtailed that adventure.
But a couple of days later the girls doll themselves up for a ballo down in the village and insist that Newby have a wash, shave, put on clean clothes and accompany them, which he reluctantly does, descending the steep cobbled path to the village with Rita and Dolores on each arm.
The ballo is in the hot kitchen of a village farm, music provided by old men playing a violin and an accordion and a drunken Dolores is coming on very strong when there’s a cry of ‘Germans! Germans!’ and the place empties in seconds.
Newby makes his way sideways, across fields and up towards the house and sees the entire village and the main path alive with torches. He climbs the ‘cliff’ which is made of clay and has gotten soft in the evening’s rain, and sees torches at the Pian del Sotto and is terrified that Luigi and Agata have been arrested or shot. He had always hidden a backpack ready to be grabbed at any moment and now he digs it out and then squats under the trees in the rain.
Some time later Luigi appears. He explains that it was a really big raid, a ‘sweep’ of the hills and villages looking for deserters. They knew he was here, a spy had blabbed, but Luigi and Agata lied and the searchers believed them. Now Luigi tells him he must climb through the woods to the meadows where he fell asleep and Frick found him, and go even higher till he encounters the lonely shepherd known as Abram. He shakes his hand, thanks him for clearing the rocks, and walks away, leaving Newby alone in the night in the rain.
13. Interlude in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
So Newby climbs up through the woods, beyond the tree line and up the meadows, all the while feeling guilty that he ought to be heading south to try and hook up with ‘his people’ i.e. the Allied armies. Except he’s gotten used to living up here in the mountains which has taken the edge off his courage and motivation. It’s foggy. He hears the flock of sheep before he sees it and then looming out of the mist the big shepherd, Abramo, who ironically shows him his castello (a sheepfold made of stones linked by branches) and palazzo (a shepherd’s hut). Newby is actually in a bad way, soaked through and shivering, so Abramo dries him in front of the fire and gives him new clothes, plus generous helpings of home-made gin.
Newby is out of it for several days while the gentle giant cares for him. Once he’s on the mend, Abramo shares hare stew and home-made cheese. After a couple of days a small boy arrives with instructions to take him back down to the village which he does with an agility and speed Newby can’t keep up with.
He’s taken to a house he hasn’t seen before, a splendid medieval building, in which a committee of six men announce that, since their own sons are far away in prisons or fighting at the front or on the run, they will look after him as if he was their own son and look after him through the coming winter which otherwise he won’t survive. they are going to build him a secret dwelling.
14. A Cave of One’s Own
After a wonderful meal and then a heavy night drinking with the men, at 4am the next morning they head up into the hills accompanied by a mule carrying equipment and corrugated iron. They select one of many clefts in the cliff and then, with deep expertise, build a cabin, built back into the cliff overhand, with stone and wooden walls and a sloping ceiling so it’s invisible. The man who supervises the work is tall and handsome with a nose like an eagle’s beak, named Francesco (p.220). Then they go inside, make a fire, have a round of drinks, give him instructions about not going out during daylight, shake hands and leave. It is Wednesday 27 October 1943.
Newby calls it his cave. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe’s fort by way of the cabin in the snowy woods Johnny Frizel builds for Edward Leithen in John Buchan’s Sick Heart River.
Newby can stand upright nowhere except by the (remarkably efficient) fire. Every day a messenger from the village comes, using the agreed password Brindisi, sometimes children but often black-dressed old grandmothers who brought sausage or eggs or soup and milk and acorn coffee. Extraordinary kindness and generosity.
Then he gets a message to go, two nights hence, on 16 November, to go to a hut he knows, a long convoluted journey through the impenetrable forest in the pouring rain, and here he meets Signor Zanoni who has brought Wanda. Hugs, kisses and lots of news. The Italian campaign is going badly, the Allies are stuck below Rome. The Germans have tightened control over Italy. Food is tightly rationed, petrol is becoming rare, she uses a bicycle.
In an earlier message he had learned that the doctor and Wanda’s father, the two men who got him out of the hospital, had both been arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned. Now she tells him the doctor faked appendicitis and then absconded from the hospital he was sent to is somewhere in the mountains, while her father got a job as an interpreter, having fought for the Austrians in the Great War.
There’s rumours of submarines picking up scattered groups of POWs and soldiers on the run off the coast which she’ll try to confirm. Then it’s time to go, they have last kisses and then he’s on his own in a cold hut and he bursts into tears.
15. Journey to the End of the Known World
Before she left Wanda had suggested Newby hike up out of the cleft he’s in, along a ridge to the spine or crinale of the mighty Apennines with a view to familiarising himself with the route and looking down over the mountains to the plains and the sea where, maybe, a mythical submarine might one day pick him up. She leaves him a densely detailed and almost indecipherable map.
Luckily the next visitor from the village with provisions happens to be Francesco, extremely intelligent and very experienced, who first tries to dissuade him from making the journey, and then gives him a very detailed account of what so look for.
Next morning at 5am Newby sets out with a backpack for the epic journey. There’s lots and lots of circumstantial description of the landscape and the route which, I think, you have to be a particular kind of person to enjoy. Takes him 11 hours to trek from the cave to the spine of the mountains. The view north is spectacular, he can see the Alps ranging east towards the Dolomites. But closer to hand he can see paths leading up from the plain to a crossing over the mountain, paths which are jam-packed with peasants struggling uphill bent under huge loads, bringing goods to trade and barter, which really brings home the deleterious impact of total war on ordinary impoverished people.
By now it’s getting dark and he retraces his steps to spend the night in an empty shepherd’s hut, well built to withstand the fierce winds.
Next morning there’s a dense fog and he can barely see 20 yards. This is why he gets lost. From the central spine of the Apennines countless ridges run off in both directions. In the fog he takes the wrong ridge heading north (i.e. back towards his valley, the villages and the cave) and has gone some way before he realises it as this new ridge starts descending far earlier than it ought. He ought to have retraced his steps back up to the spine and taken the correct ridge but, being tired and making poor decisions, instead he decides to descend the side of the ridge, into the river valley, and go up the other side onto ‘his’ ridge. What he hadn’t bargained for is the monstrous jungle of brambles growing under the trees. Huge entangled jungles of brambles twenty feet long with no paths or trails. He tries to cut his way through but loses his knife, tries to use his rucksack as a shield but it gets torn, his clothes are torn to pieces he is covered with cuts and bleeding all over by the time he emerges at a cliff looking down into the little stream at the bottom of the valley. Further dangerous teetering along the cliff edge before it becomes low enough for him to manoeuvre via rotting trees down to the valley floor. He wades along the freezing stream until the path up the other side becomes clear and sets about staggering up the other side.
As it begins to get dark he spies a hut on the hillside and makes for it, completely oblivious of security. An old man comes out to greet him well before he gets there and to his amazement it is the same deaf old man who sat in the back of the dottore’s car on that car journey to Parma and up into the foothills. A coincidence of Buchanesque proportions which makes you stop and wonder whether it’s made up, at which point you start to wonder how much of the account has been, well, embroidered if not plain invented.
The bent old deaf man welcomes him into his strange house, an Aladdin’s cave full of weird and wonderful contraptions which the man has obviously made himself, all the time keeping up a running commentary, in Italian, to himself.
Once they’ve eaten home-made chestnut polenta and a bitter salad, the old man sets off telling long rambling folk stories heedless of whether Newby is listening or not. In fact he nods off during the second one.
Next morning the old man shows him his extraordinary forge in which every implement is home made. He then gives him lunch and, just as Newby is about to broach the subject of moving on, the man puts on his coat, whistles for his dog, and sets off up the side of the valley
Two hours later they reach the top of the ridge and Newby recognises where he is. He tries to thank the man, who can’t hear him, and is wondering whether to shake his hand, when he turns and leaves.
A few hours later Newby is descending through the labyrinth of forest when he senses something is wrong. As he approaches his cave he sees there is smoke rising from the chimney. He hides his rucksack and lifts the rough sacking which forms the door. To his surprise he hears a posh English voice and is astonished to discover it is James, one of his friends from back at the orfanotrofio.
16. Gathering Darkness
James is a god friend, tall, burly with a ruddy complexion and a Roman nose, great at games, honest and sound. As he tells the stories of his hiding out Newby is a bit downcast to realise that James’s story is very like his i.e. his has not been such a unique adventure after all.
Francesco comes calling, tells Newby off for trying to cut through the forest from the wrong ridge, then tells him a lot more about the mysterious old man of the mountain who’s named Aurelio and is a legendary craftsman and storyteller.
Newby was to spend many weeks of November and December in the cave with James. The leaves fall off the trees making the passage of people to and from the cave more conspicuous. Then the snow comes. They amuse themselves reading passages from Surtees and Gibbon but are forced to spend all day inside, choking from the smoke from the fire. James develops impetigo, Newby gets a bad cough.
Then they are visited by three earnest young men with rusty guns who tell them they are forming a bande of partisans. They have a crack-brained scheme to blow up a petrol dump three days march away on the Via Emilia. James and Newby give a detailed analysis of why this is a dreadful idea but feel duty bound to help. The local people have put themselves out so much to help them it feels shameful and churlish not to act when asked. Luckily the three young zealots fail to turn up at the rendezvous they fix for a few nights later and they never see them again.
Then, a few days after the really heavy snowfall has blanketed the forest, freezing the stream where they get their water, Francesco arrives with bad news. The milizia are coming to capture them at 8pm that evening. They must leave the cave right away.
17. Beginning of the End
So they pack a bag – Francesco has brought them a sack of rice and 20 loaves of bread – and tramp through the thick snow up out of the forest to the hut of the shepherd Abramo, who we met several chapters ago. Here they say goodbye to Francesco and are handed over to a young guide, Alfredo, who takes them down into the next valley, freezing cold wind, stopping for cigarettes and once a fire and a meal, before carrying on, fording a river, on the run, carrying heavy bags in freezing conditions.
They climb again until they come across a group of charcoal burners, existing in a primitive baracca, all quite black with the smoke of their work. Newby had never met people quite so degraded and immiserated.
Alfredo hands them over to one of the charcoal burners, turns and goes back the way he came. The burner takes them onto a hut where they were meant to rendezvous with a bande i.e. partisans, but it is empty and abandoned, so they press on, the charcoal burner leaving them.
Almost at the end of their tethers they come across a haystore built into a slope of the mountain, force open the door and pass out. Hours later they are woken by a little boy asking who they are, who returns in a bit with a middle-aged man who is almost blind. To their inexpressible gratitude he says he will look after and feed them.
And so this man, Amadeo, looks after them, getting the barn made habitable with beds and a fireplace, and sending his children with food every day. In return he regularly comes and sits with them and asks questions about the great world which Newby and James do their best to answer.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day James and Newby are invited down to the village to festivities at the houses of various villagers, stuffed full of local food and then given the best Christmas present ever, a hot bath in half a wine barrel. And then Newby receives an unexpected bonus, a slip of paper with the simple message, ‘Kisses, Wanda’.
About noon on 29 December they are captured. The barn is surrounded by evil-looking troops from the Fascist militia, they are marched down the hillside and loaded into a waiting lorry, and taken off to a second period of captivity.
Epilogue
Surprisingly, Newby doesn’t describe anything about his second incarceration or his second liberation, not a thing. Instead he jumps to 1956 when he and Wanda, now married with two children, return to the scenes of his escapades. In fact the pair had worked in 1946 for a charity which sought to reward families who had helped Allied soldiers on the run. But it’s the later 1956 trip which Newby makes into a big set-piece, with him and Wanda revisiting the houses of everyone who helped them, and shaking hands and having reunions. Some of the old houses have fallen down, the charcoal burners have gone, everyone uses methane gas now. Electricity lines drape the valleys, roads penetrate higher, the sound of petrol-driven tractors from the valley, no more driving cattle-led ploughs like Armando did.
Right at the very end, old Francesco who helped him survive in the cave, takes Newby to one side and says he knows the identities of the man who betrayed them in his village, and the woman who betrayed them in the haybarn village. He assures him that both did it to protect their villages and their people and turned down the cash rewards the milizia offered. Does he want to know who they were? And Newby’s last word is ‘No’. There have been enough recriminations and vendettas. It was a long time ago. Forgive and forget.
Thoughts
What an amazing book, what incredible experiences, and what a moving tribute to the kindness and generosity of human nature. It made me overflow with feelings of gratitude and respect. What a wonderfully life-affirming book.
Newby and God
In the final passages where James comes to stay in the cave, Newby describes his friend’s straightforward Christian faith and contrasts it with his own more heterodox views:
James used to read out bits of the Bible, usually some bloodthirsty piece of Old Testament military history which he thought appropriate and would amuse me. He was a conventional Christian. Just as he had before the war, he used to go to church every Sunday in the orfanotrofio, and it would never have occurred to him not to do so. It was not just lip service to the established religion. He believed in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. I believed in God, and had done ever since I had been a sailor in a sailing ship before the war; but the God I believed in was neither beneficent nor hostile. As he was everything how could he be? And if he was everything how could he be moved by prayer? If it was a question of life and death you died when the time came for you to do so, peacefully or horribly. My time had not yet come when the foot of an upper topsail had flicked me off the yard, a hundred and thirty feet above the Southern Ocean in 1939; or that night in the Bay of Catania, or the following one in the fortress where they told us that we were going to be shot; but it could be any time. It might be quite soon now.
At one time I prayed that a bomb would not fall on the people in England I loved; but it seemed almost impertinent; better, if anything, to pray that bombs would cease to fall on anyone. To me prayer had no efficacy as a preservative, at the most it was a profession of love, a remembrance, a reminder that there had been a past and might be a future, and perhaps this was its vale. At this time, whether I was right or wrong, I felt clearer in my mind about these things than I have ever done since. (pages 274 to 275)
This is very eloquent but it’s not Christianity, is it, surely it’s stoicism? Surely the belief that the universe is equivalent to a God who is everywhere, and that our destinies are foreordained, without any reference to the Trinity, Christ or the resurrection, is textbook stoicism? See:
Newby’s humour
Newby is a charming narrator, a lovely man with an endearingly self-deprecating sense of humour.
I had a fatal aptitude for being good at interviews, the results of which I invariably regretted subsequently, almost as much as the interviewers. (p.127)
After what seemed an eternity the conversation rumbled to a close, rather like a train of goods wagons coming to rest in a marshalling yard. (p.134)
Credit
Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby was published in 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.
Books & Boots 