Next morning Dad and I woke weary, worn out before the day could lay a finger on us. Although Olympia had died, Dad still wanted to go and find the Russos’ old house at the foot of Trocchio, where he’d been billeted, and look up her husband Agostino. He’d told me again, bitterly, the night before, that if he’d known she was dead he wouldn’t have come.
We drove along the near side of Monte Trocchio looking for Casa Russo. We couldn’t find it and Dad wondered if the road had been moved. We asked a silver-haired Italian in a field, who didn’t seem to know the name or the house, then drove back and forth until the feeling grew more certain that a particular house was indeed the one. If so it had sprouted an upstairs deck on three sides, trees and an elaborate fence since Heather and I saw it in 1980 — and been built around and overlooked by houses. But, although the small windows looked like they might have been remodelled, the central door was the same.
Olympia had stubbornly walked to that door, not run, heading back after looking for food as the Germans lobbed mortars at her. The blasts had followed her up the road as the gunners tried to get her range. From its shelter Dad had yelled at her to hurry, dragged her into his arms behind the stone walls as she came within reach — it was anxiety, he said, but he also loved her — and at that instant the last shell landed on the very doorstep, and at the top of the stairs a soldier’s wrist was broken by the flying shrapnel. From here Dad, Olympia and Firenze had walked down to the railway line (wrecked by the Tedeschi) to fetch railway sleepers for fuel. The girls had refused to let him carry them — it was women’s work. One day he and Olympia had settled in for a snog upstairs, but little Julia had come in and raised the alarm. Olympia was sewing a button on his discarded shirt by the time Mama got up the stairs.
And from here Dad and his mates had walked round the end of Trocchio to watch the bombing of Montecassino, and later the town.
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The New Zealand machine gunners had been established at the foot of Trocchio facing the Germans on Cassino. I was impressed by the range — Cassino was about 5km away — but Dad was keener to tell of the night the neighbouring Americans asked the Kiwis to stop firing because it encouraged the Germans to shoot back.
The terrain in this region was ideal for defence, which was why the Germans had selected it — grim hills overlooking confined, vulnerable valleys right across the mountainous spine of Italy to the Adriatic. Difficult for tanks and armoured cars after the mobile war of North Africa. Here they were confined to the beleaguered roads.
When the Germans decided to establish a defensive line through Cassino they forced the evacuation of the town, blew up buildings to improve their fields of fire and reinforced others with dug-in tanks and gun positions. The Rapido was dammed and the high defensive positions strengthened with machine gun and mortar emplacements, mine fields and wire entanglements strung with boobytraps. Although most of the civilians fled, some chanced their luck and stayed, including Olympia’s family (Mama and Papa Roscilli, three vulnerable girls and a boy), who preferred their endangered but thick-walled home, soon requisitioned by the Kiwis, to life as refugees in vice-ridden Naples. Behind Trocchio, Agostino’s family had fled but left the boy cowering in their cellar to care for the place as best he could.
So the Allies’ grind up Italy had brought them to exactly this place, and Dad to the Roscilli’s, with their advance positions facing Monte Cassino from before Monte Trocchio, and their observation posts above them in the bitter January cold and wet. East and West the line stretched across the peninsula between the Garigliano and the Sangro rivers.
In a sense my father was lucky to be where he was — a brave, somewhat manic, but oh so insignificant, signalman given a cushy job by the Brigadier running communications behind the lines for Div Cav, rather than up front with the infantry battalions as he’d been until Alamein. He saved my life, Dad said.
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Driving in a loop round Trocchio brought us back to Route 6, which then as now linked Rome with Naples. The straight-ahead drive, northwest past Trocchio and up to the Allied front line on the outskirts of Cassino, had been called the Mad Mile because its entire length was under fire from Monastery Hill. But instead of driving back to Cassino, we went East and found the road to the village of Cervaro, which had been Freyberg’s headquarters, and featured in Agostino’s address, which we had from an exchange of letters before we left.
By now Dad was positive Agostino had moved since either of us had visited — he with Mum in 1969, Heather and I in 1980 — and I thought so too. In fact I’d been sure Heather and I had walked from the railway station in Cassino, which goes to show how unreliable memories are, even if they’re all we have. Dad went into a ristorante with Agostino’s letter to ask for directions, and the host rang and arranged for us to meet up with him at another place three kilometres away, back on Route 6.
He was waiting in his red ’76 vintage Fiat when we arrived, the same car he’d had when we called fourteen years earlier, his appearance still that of the cheerful, clannish, sceptical peasant, grey whiskers on a strong tanned face. Dad got in with him and we drove to the road where the Roscilli clan lived. We stopped first at the house his daughter Ada was building with the aid of her husband’s Parisian earnings (he’s an economic consultant) and the favourable exchange rate. It was a mansion, three levels of tiled magnificence looking up to Monte Trocchio’s forbidding slopes — a tall, open two-story entrance hall, three bathrooms, two kitchens, four bedrooms, and a separate flat, it seemed, downstairs. And outside, elaborate patios and verandahs, tiled terraces and a high-walled garden. Downstairs in the garage two workmen ate lunch and talked pidgin English to us, sucking on their teeth and shaking burnt fingers at proud Agostino over the near million dollar cost.
We took our photos and drove a little further down the road to the house where his son Franco had lived for the last twenty years. He was on his way out to work at Fiat but we were invited to eat. His wife Angelina went immediately to cook. Franco’s house had looked huge and opulent in 1980, compared to Ambler Avenue and our company house in the Solomons, but now, compared to Ada’s palace, it was ordinary. Still, the two dining tables, end to end, would have seated thirty people or more.
The tables were covered in clear plastic and Angelina draped one end with a cloth on which to serve lunch. The low-ceilinged room had been lined in knotted wood by Franco and a cousin. In the corner was a massive black TV and, in front of it, between the table and the front wall, were two armchairs, side by side.
Franco served us white vermouth and we talked, awkwardly of course, but we drowned that in glasses of red wine and Agostino’s good humour. Ada rang as we spoke and was told we were there. Franco told her to va bene and came back to us. The red wine was Agostino’s, darker and headier than the almost purple, but still light, vino del paese we had been drinking. It was good, as was the cheese flavoured penne.
Dad was almost out of it with exhaustion by then, but he ate and drank his share only to wilt when it was followed by Angelina’s pane di casa cooked in a bread oven under the stairs, roasted chicken (Agostino’s again), melanzane (egg plant) baked with olive oil, tomato, parmesan and salt, and lettuce salad. We drank most of a second bottle of the wine and chatted while we looked at a photo album of the grand-children’s first christening — brought out after I told them what we did for a living.
At the time we thought Agostino asked us if we would like to stay. We told him we would be delighted, but on Thursday, not today, as we were going to Pompeii in the morning. In fact when we actually turned up on Thursday he seemed surprised to see us. Luckily we had bought a bottle of Baileys for his bar so we used the present as an excuse for calling in, left after a friendly chat and checked into another Hotel — a cheaper one this time, having been impressed by the Forum’s bill that morning.
Who’s to know. Anyway, tomorrow — we said at the time — we’re going to Naples and Pompeii. Angelina asked us to lunch on Saturday (we got it right this time) and we thanked her and left for Agostino’s place, which was just across the road. This was just like Hikurangi a generation earlier, when Dad’s sister Evelyn and her husband had bought next door to her parents. The boundary was unfenced and my grandparents had been mortified, years later, to see a garage put up between them, and talk of a fence.
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Agostino had been a worker at a ball-bearing factory, although retired with a pension for years. But he was a true countryman at heart, a peasant — detestable, urbanite term — suspicious, familial, anticlerical in his case. A subsistence farmer with an urban paypacket. His son Franco was an executive at the local Fiat plant but the peasant seeped from his every pore, too. Franco drove an Alfa, not an 18-year old Fiat like his father.
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So, fathers and sons.
Franco the Fiat executive and his farmer Dad.
And the old soldier from South Carolina — like Dad he’d been in in signals but attached to a howitzer battery. Like Dad billeted in a house in Trocchio’s lee. Like Dad a farmer, of tobacco in his case. Things aren’t what they were, he told me, what with everyone trying to stop this tobacco thing, I don’t know. And his son Fate, an urbane PhD, President of his own company, like me shepherding his father through the world his Dad had made safe for him.
As for us, or me, I am where I came from, more or less — grandson of a migrant coal-miner who built his own house, grew his own veggies and kept his own chooks. Too principled for any job involving authority over another man. Never sold anything for more than he paid for it, says my Dad. A coal miner and a socialist but never a communist like Uncle Jack, his brother-in-law. Never entirely comfortable with my father’s middle-class dabblings in butchery and farming and being a boss. Represents the moral high point of the century of the common man now ending, I reckon.
I come from that, and also the son of a farm hand, P&T worker (post and telegraph that is — security, depression style), soldier, butcher, cow cocky, local politician, shopkeeper. Aggressive (not just brute stubborn like my grandfather), a charmer (without a doubt; it shows in his writings and I feel it in me like a vestigial genetic trait), innocent (he never slept with the girls he charmed) — and thoroughly abrasive at times, now, in his old age.
My father and my father’s father, both young once, as I once was. They’re dead now or soon to be. They walk around in my bones and look out of my eyes. When I walk, they move my arms. They occupy my head, too. When I think, it’s me thinking, I’m sure of it, but they comment and they oversee, as God is supposed to.
So we admire Agostino’s prosperity. He has high walls and a mesh fence with an intercom. Behind the door two curly-haired hunting dogs beg for attention, one of them leashed to a long wire. He shows us his tractor and an array of implements. He shows us his tool shed. He shows us his hens and their chickens and their eggs. He shows us racks of rabbits in hutches, covered with straw in a shed. He shows us his beans and rows of small lettuce and a patch of aubergine.
We go inside and he shows us his shotgun and a photo of himself in a group of smiling hunters with the five pheasants they have downed. One of the amici died of a tumore at age forty. There is a photo of Olympia, looking serious but healthy. I tell him my father is sad for him — and why had she died? Again it was cancer.
His face sagged a little. He lived alone, he said. He showed us his four bedrooms and his two bathrooms, and again we thought we had an invitation to stay. He showed us his bar and we drank some more — Cointreau.
Agostinoe was vigorous and alert still, and like my mother’s father Hugh he was a countryman, but that didn’t make them alike. Agostino reared his rabbits and chickens to eat, but Hugh McCarroll, a charming man and a great worker like the rest of his clan, reared Southdown sheep, as squat and no-nonsense as butter-boxes, on broad pioneer acres to shear and to sell (writing his price on the palm of his hand as he negotiated, and revealing it, eventually, after softening up his target — that’s my price, he’d say).
Agostino had more in common with Jack, Dad’s father, the coal miner emigré from Lancashire who came to mine coal in the Northland scrub, who kept hens and pigeons in his back yard and who never, ever wanted to be a boss. So one chews it over and wonders whether class and the habit of accepting authority are not more significant than language or locality.
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Dad was beyond everything and I drove back to the Hotel where we went up to our room and he got straight into bed. I took myself down to the bar and had a drink and wrote. He came down later, looking anxious. Where had I been? My bed hadn’t been slept in and he was still fully dressed — why? I settled him down and we went upstairs again. He undressed and was soon once more asleep. He slept right through to morning. I had dinner by myself, smoked Scottish salmon first, then gnocchetti with tiny yellow mussels in purple shells, prawns and squid rings, served with tomato salsa and huge basil leaves and crowned with a purple and white octopus. I had this with bread and a half bottle of Orvieto and by the time I’d finished I could hardly stagger upstairs myself.
I opened the door carefully. Dad was lying on his back snoring gently, his cheeks sunken and mouth open in that sleep posture that reminds us we’re all mortal. Next day he was fine.