Neither of us had flown direct to Europe before, and Dad barely slept on the plane. I had Halcyon, but even so my head was well out of touch with my fingers by the time I tried to write, having finally got to bed in the hotel, although the litre of Cassino wine we’d drunk with dinner didn’t help.
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The day we flew out I still had a lot of work to do, and after tidying up a bit I got home to bed about 10.30. Ken rang to ensure I had all my computer bits and pieces. He said you could tell I’d been married for 25 years — away for six weeks and still at work. Only two weeks, I said, not that it makes any difference.
Packing seemed to take most of the morning. Brian and Jan turned up to say good-bye and stayed for a friendly lunch. Then off to the airport via Royal Oak to look at Adrienne’s graduation photos.
The nice girl at the check-in counter pointed out that Dad, with a British passport, didn’t have a visa for our stop-over on the way back via Sydney — our first problem. Then we did the usual Airport MacDonalds thing, which is becoming a family tradition, and I bought pillows, presents for Olympia’s family and the like, and it was time to board. It was quickly apparent that all of this was new to Dad — the customs procedure, the security measures and the interminable queuing. He was an enthusiastic socialiser, startling our neighbours in line with unanswerable comments, the responses to which he couldn’t hear, saying Io sordo in Italian and pointing to his hearing aid.
When we got to Italy he started saying “I’m deaf” in English. I’m the same — perhaps we all are — practising my phrases convincingly until reality gets my tongue. On the plane he was restless. A young girl from Devon was next to him, and clearly wanted to talk to him rather less than he wanted to converse with her.
I’d thought that the airline food might be a problem to him, but it certainly wasn’t. The Qantas meal was the first of several that all went the same way in fairly short order. He thought the Alitalia meals were a little peculiar but promised well for Italy.
No, the main problem was being unable to smoke, and he wasn’t the only one. I warned him that he couldn’t smoke trans-Tasman, and that Australian airports were “smoke-free” — I happened to know that, I said — and since Australian regulations treated the Sydney-Melbourne leg as an internal flight, you couldn’t smoke on that either. So his first fag would have to wait until we left the ground at Melbourne about 8 hours away. Well, when finally the No Smoking light went off in the skies out from Melbourne the entire fumatore compartment was on its feet, lighting up wholesale and adjusting the ventilation to blow its smoke in someone else’s face, mainly mine. And the same again after every meal for the next twenty-two hours. Actually there were subversive fag-ends and fugitive puffers in every toilet and toilet bowl I saw in Australia, but I never told Dad, thinking if I gave him an inch he’d take a mile. When the big fight came his big complaint was that he couldn’t smoke in the hotel room.
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The flight was fairly uneventful. I was very mindful of my health after swollen legs and lethargy in Bombay a few years earlier. But I had a glass of red wine with most meals, and I had every meal. I set my clock to Roman time and determined to stay awake until the Italian evening before popping my Halcyon and going to sleep.
In fact I was asleep by “late afternoon” and the Bangkok stopover was in “the middle of the night”, which rather spoilt things, but once we’d eaten again after leaving Bangkok I took the tab and slept soundly until waking up again with nearly half the eleven hour flight still to run. Next time, I decided, I’ll take two, but in the event I felt fresh enough to function when we reached Fiumicino. Quite well in fact.
Although Dad had slept very little he was still operating beyond my expectations, if definitely on his reserve tank by the time we landed. We’d been told on the plane that there was no arrival documentation to complete and the sombre uniform at passport control hardly looked at us or the passports we handed him, and recorded nothing, and we took the green lane unchallenged.
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The Avis booth was a telephone and a sign directing us to a minibus outside. We found this and were deposited into an alley of rental car companies under a flyover — and into the middle of a lengthy argument between a sullenly determined American who’d made the rental car deal of the century at Modena and a totally unapproachable young Roman woman equally determined that it was all a mistake. After he’d left with his Wizard Card and future business we were briskly seen to by his adversary. Our car, she said, was a Rover. We were impressed.
It wasn’t the smallest car in Italy, which would be very small indeed, but it wasn’t large, and it was certainly bare of most creature comforts. It was also a little wider than it seemed from my (unaccustomed) side of the car, and twice I clipped another vehicle with the off-side mirror. The first time Dad didn’t notice, but the second time concentrated his mind.
We got onto the Autostrada and, thinking we had to turn right, promptly did so, taking us north instead of south. It was an unconscionable time before we had the opportunity to turn round. This involved leaving and then returning to the Autostrada, both of which involved us in a 1200 lire transaction. The first of these enabled us to change a Lit. 100,000 note, but Dad felt the second proved the Italians hadn’t slipped any rungs on the commercial ladder since the war.
The toll booths were a problem. Our second 1200 lire took us successfully to the Rome ring road and then to the Appian Way (Route 7, I think, approximately the width of Glengarry Road, where we live, but without shoulders). When we decided to rejoin the Autostrada near Frosinone we came to a booth in which there was no-one to take our money. Instead I was faced with a fairly substantial facade with no apparent function. We had been warned by a friend of Ray’s to always take a ticket unless we wanted to be charged enormous sums for traveling the entire length of Italy, and while this was doubtless sound advice — and although next time it was hard to imagine how we could have possibly got it wrong — in the end, with a stream of impatient Italians revving and honking behind us we made a break for it, planning to do our Non Capsico act if anyone asked for our ticket.
We were duly asked, of course, when we exited near Cassino, by a distinguished looking chap with spectacles on the end of an amused nose who looked like he should be conducting at La Scala or at the very least writing criticism for La Stampa (this is not an informed allusion) and who clearly thought we must have leapt from some over-bridge in order to reach him without the appropriate biglietto. After quizzing us a bit in English, and so putting paid to my Non Capsico defence, his pay display popped up 79,000 lire, which chilled my blood, but he was happy to settle for only 7,500 — eight dollars odd. We paid, he shook his head wearily and we drove off.
In the meantime, our run south had been eventful in other ways. We missed the turnoff to see the lake at Castel Gandolfo, which did not impress Dad, but it was still an attractive drive down the ancient road. We stopped for gelato at Velletri (I had my first caffe) and continued south over the flat lands, getting badly lost again somewhere round Cisterna. Not only did we get lost, but I misunderstood how and where, and we ended up miles off course in some village in the foothills. And not only that, but in the course of the consequential U-turns (I explained to Dad that I spent several weeks a year driving from maps, and that U-turns were an inevitable part of the process, and anyway you couldn’t simply stop in the road while you read the signs) I turned right into a side road, and then left back on to the main road — and onto the wrong side of the road at that. The car that almost ran into us looked considerably more frightened than us. I was too bemused to be scared — and then too preoccupied by the car that almost ran us down from the other direction, as we pulled apologetically onto our — and his — side of the road.
As I say, this, plus the two clips of passing cars with the offside mirror, certainly persuaded Dad that there was some justification for his keeping me up to the mark.
It was getting late to be dicing with death, especially since we had no idea how to find our hotel, and insufficient paroli to ask, so we decided to abandon driving via Terracina (on the coast, where the New Zealand contingent was staying) and head straight for Cassino by way of Frosinone and the Autostrada. In the event the hotel appeared right before us, a gloomy shadow with a green neon sign under the graveyard grey rock of Monte Cassino. We checked in and immediately went out again for dinner.
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The entire country-side had seemed to be peppered with Ristoranti, but in Cassino, at least where we looked, they were few and far between. We eventually found a pizzeria on one of the main streets, and entered. Dad started a hopeless conversation based around the fact that we were from Nuova Zealanda, and before I could even check the menu he’d ordered Pizza. He was devoid of suggestions when asked which one, so I ordered Quattro Stagione to be on the safe side. It was fine, too (although Agostino later shrugged his shoulders dubiously) with genuine, thin, crisp bread dough, tomato salsa and mozzarella, and segments of prosciutto, funghi and the rest — not much of the advertised anchovy though. Dad had little more than a mouthful and announced it was off limits for the duration, and anything with tomato in it was too acid and would make him throw up. But he was determined to renew his acquaintance with vino rosso, so we polished off our carafe of the local red, drove back to the hotel and headed straight to bed.
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Dad had been gut-shot at Sidi Resegh and suffered ever since from digestive issues, getting through them with the help of a bland diet, antacid and Gaviscon. The occasional public expressions of this were bouts of what Anthony Burgess called eructation. At times this could be impressive, reminding me of a boy called Lou at school who had mastered the other end of the alimentary canal and could fart-trumpet on demand. As in so many other ways, age has lent compassion, understanding and tribulations of our own.
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As Mum had warned, he snored more or less continually the whole night, or so it seemed to me, but, least I appear to complain, on the second night things got worse. It was the end of our first full day and we were firing on all cylinders after a reasonable amount of vino. I got sick of comments about muck on the food and smoking and God knows what else, so we settled in for a very familiar fight. To be fair, his food wasn’t good — the agnello had certainly, as he put it, borne agnelli of its own — but in any case we ended up barely talking after an exhausting argument. His stomach was upset — is always more or less so, meaning he can abide practically nothing “fancy” in the way of food, and there is practically nothing available that fits his definition.
He spent almost the entire night in the throes of eructation with occasional breaks of snoring. Like him I slept very little, and our neighbours, two amiable Americans called Lafayette and Lafayette Junior (call me Fate, he said), were also kept awake, or so they told us in the morning. We had an interconnecting door. Fate was at my door, I thought, and I heard it not. I wondered, should he have knocked? Like us they were pilgrims, not tourists.
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But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. On the Monday we’d had breakfast in the hotel (included in the price of 145,000 lire) — not bad either: fruit and yoghurt, croissants and beautiful bread rolls, pretty good white butter, jams, marmalade and honey (even if in those ghastly little packets), caffe latte for me, té caldo for Dad, sensa limone. Dad found the rolls difficult to chew. From then on, whenever possible he preferred croissants for breakfast, with butter and orange marmalade.
We drove up Monte Cassino in the morning through the hairpin bends of the Via Serpentina, the lower ones of which had been the scene of heavy combat in which the New Zealanders had played a part. There were at least thirty tour buses in the parking area. We didn’t go inside but instead oriented ourselves with Monte Trocchio, which confronts Montecassino to the south-east, and where Dad had been stationed for much of the campaign), the Rapido river, running to the east through the town below us, and the Liri Valley to the west, up which the New Zealanders had eventually pursued the retreating Germans.
We drove part way down again to Hangman’s Hill, as we thought, where parties of Rajputs and Gurkhas slaughtered and were slaughtered contesting the feature with the Germans. In fact this was entirely wrong. Hangman’s Hill was to the west and much higher: this place was Rocca Janula, or Castle Hill, a substantial walled fort built to defend the monastery, and captured by a New Zealand Company in a remarkable attack. The place had been left in its ruined state, and floodlit, but the lights had long since been vandalised and a litter of plastic and paper and cans ruled the approach paths. [It was restored in the 2000s ~ Ian]
The Abbey seen from the ruins of Rocca Janula (Castle Hill)
We drove down town and had prosciutto sandwiches and drinks at a bar in town, returned to the hotel to regroup and then drove to Formia and Gaeta on the coast, more or less parallel to the front, then on to Terracina, further north. This was where the New Zealand party was to stay. We had considered moving to the same hotel, but the drive was well over an hour and Dad wasn’t keen anyway. It rained almost all the way there and back, although we did get a walk round the little boat harbour at Terracina.
The drive along the coast, through tunnels and round sprawling headlands from Gaeta, was spectacular, but in the towns the ristorantes and bars and apartments and hotels featured far above the dull yellow sand of the beaches. The shape of the hills and the sweeping road reminded me a little of Kaikoura, but the colours were quite different, brick yellow rather than grey green, full of sunlight rather than the shadowy coolness, apparent if not real, which one feels driving down the Kaikoura coast. And it felt ancient, endlessly worked over, even though the hills for all I knew were quite untouched. I saw men digging in the earth of Pompei a day or two later and wondered at it’s brown bone antiquity.
Well, we returned to the Hotel and Dad was certainly tired, but exuberant with wine, and he sounded off on most things. I was tired and impatient too, so we had that argument about which I feel, still, self-righteous in a petty way. It did, however, make Dad easier to live with. And he went most unhappy to bed (me too – writing this diary actually) and as I say rhythmically burped and occasionally snored most of the night, sick as a dog.