We wasted the morning rather disastrously. First we spent ages looking for the Commonwealth War Cemetery — and drove into a kerb while doing so, bending the wheel rim of our poor little car and damaging the plastic hub cap, which fell off. We got to the cemetery, where we met an English veteran and his wife. This was a beautiful green place with a view of the Abbey. We signed the visitors’ book and walked through the ranks of New Zealand dead, most of them killed in March and May-June. Some un-named. Four thousand graves in all, and a memorial listing the names of another four thousand with no known graves. Many Indians. Dad pointed to words carved under someone’s son’s name (“no greater love”), sobbed and walked on, polishing his glasses. Age has not wearied them, dead at twenty-one — twenty-four — thirty — a few in their forties — but the years since have condemned.
Our tyre was nearly flat. A pleasant mechanic straightened the rim and re-inflated the tyre but couldn’t replace the hub cap because we’d lost part of the assembly. We went back to the spot and found it, then to-ed and fro-ed through town debating the way up the Liri Valley, where the New Zealanders had pursued the retreating Germans.
Dad wanted to retrace this but the morning was already gone. We turned off Route 6 for Roccasecca, one of the hillside villages one sees from the plains. It was a gloomy place, almost deserted but for two old ladies gossiping on chairs in the street, and the usual impatient cars. We went on, looking for San Padre I think, driving along a narrow winding road between high rocky hills.
Here the German rearguard had picked their spots to blow the road and fire on the hapless engineers as they made their repairs. It was beautiful and desolate, now almost deserted, with more of the rampant red flowers (and yellow bushes) that flourish throughout the region.
However, we were lost, and ended up at Casalvieri, a reasonably satisfactory place but not where we expected. We decided to head for Arpino, which was also on Dad’s list of stopping places. The countryside quickly became more populous, and prosperous, by the look of it. Holiday home territory perhaps. We had panini at a pleasant Bar in Arpino and decided we’d had enough. It was time to be at Agostino’s. We drove back to, and down, Route 6 and went straight to the house. It was quite clear that we weren’t expected, though Agostino was friendly enough, so after a brief stop to proffer the Baileys we drove the few kilometres back to Cassino and booked in at the first Hotel we saw, Hotel Alba — more pleasant than the Forum, but unfortunately full after two days, so we would have to move again.
We ate dinner at the adjoining Ristorante Mario, which was excellent – the best in town, said Agostino and Franco later. I thought the bill might be excessive in that we didn’t get to see the menu until I had ordered antipasto, and what I had seemed clearly extravagant. It was too. Gorgeous mozzarella and ricotta, prosciutto, chewy salami and fat oily olives. I think I was supposed to select from the platter rather than eat the lot. Dad had more salmon and some fruit salad. I had fettucine alla pomodoro and we went to bed. Dad’s stomach was upset again and kept us awake.
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The next day was another success, you have to say. In the morning Dad rested while I broached the walls of commerce in search of clean laundry and lire. The Bank of Napoli was approached through a sophisticated airlock system. You went into a chamber which closed behind and inspected you before releasing you into the bank. It was secure enough to use on a submarine. One felt that these people were not going to lose their money, or ours, to any crook. I managed to blunder in (after relinquishing my umbrella) without reading the instructions, which warned people with pacemakers not to enter if they wanted full value from their hardware.
Everyone behind the counters looked like Mafiosi, although they were nice enough. I approached the wrong counter but the heavy-set man behind it put me right about the process and shepherded me through the rest of it in a most amiable way, coming across occasionally to make sure I was being properly served. The people at the head of my new queue claimed the full attention of the clerk (a middle-aged mafioso with a cigarette in his mouth and an expressive way with his shoulders and his hands) for a very long time. When he’d explained to his customers how to do whatever it was they didn’t know how to do (which didn’t seem to be connected with deposits or withdrawals) he worked out my own needs, and with his approval I went back to my first amico for the money. My friend was mildly annoyed that (despite searching through the till and his own pockets) he couldn’t give me my exact entitlement. He rounded up, leaving me ahead by about 8% of one caffe, a worthwhile saving.
In the meantime our laundry was progressing at the self-servisio. I waited out our time on the plastic chairs looking through old L’Espressos for bare breasts and drove back to the hotel, still with a full set of hubcaps.
We went from there to an exhibition in town which turned out to be essentially a display of postcards in a bookshop about the destruction and reconstruction of Montecassino and the town.
We bought eight postcards (actually we got one free, which seemed fair in the circumstances) and walked down the street looking for lunch. We entered a rather upmarket bar and I ordered water for myself, tea for Dad (he’d long since abandoned coffee completely), a foccaccia for me and toast for him. It wasn’t bad and the waitress eventually decided there was no harm in being friendly, since we were playing no active roll in the bickering which practically everyone seemed — and seems — to indulge in.
Dad chewed his way through his sandwich and decided he needed a bottle of brandy for his gut. He was disgusted when the outcome was a little sample bottle for 3,000 lire and, as best he could, he said so. I left him to it, but eventually had to help him with the money. I ordered a caffe which the rather patient barman gave me for free as well as 500 lire off our bill, which was good of him. I told Dad we hadn’t done too badly.
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We drove up Montecassino but the place was closed until 3.00pm. Italian families were eating picnics in the sun. The still air was full of their conversation, reflected off the rock, the car park, the surrounding walls, the facade of the Abbey. Still waiting for it to reopen we drove back down past cyclists and walkers out for vigorous exercise, and stopped at a lay-by halfway up the mountain for a more enlightened outlook on the battlefield.
We were taking snaps when an approaching bus sounded its horn at us. Our open car doors were in its way. Veterans of a British Division piled off the bus and a Lieutenant-Colonel started to lecture them about the lay of the land. A woman who had come to the rail next to me started to exclaim about the corn-flowers. I asked her which they were, wanting a name for the tea-rose coloured flowers so common to the whole area. No, she said, the cornflowers are the blue ones. I don’t know what the maroon ones are, but they’re rampant in the Lake District too. I hadn’t noticed the blue cornflowers before, but they were spread before our feet, cool amongst the rocks.
We talked. Her husband had not been at Cassino but his regiment had. He’d been three years on Malta and then been part of the British Invasion of Italy, in a 3” mortar battery. The Stukas! he said, shaking his head. They were worse here than in Malta. For a while. Without air support his unit was surrounded and captured. He did time in Italy and Germany and was badly treated — starved and beaten. He ended the war by walking home. He’d written and privately published two books, which I promised to read. They got a wide distribution, he said. A chap in Launceston has one. One is out of print. He was an invalid after the war for ten years. We wanted to come to New Zealand, she said, but we thought our own government should pay for his medical care. As for that chap, she continued, pointing out the Lieutenant-Colonel, I’m surrounded by squaddies who don’t agree with a thing he says. We ended up swapping addresses. When Dad kissed her good-bye she was delighted. Oh, Raymond I’ve got a toy boy, she said.
When we returned to the Abbey the crowds were back. We walked up into the initial lawned cloister with its bronze statue of Benedictus, the second with its glorious view over the Liri valley and up the steps past marble statues of Benedictus and Scolasticus (Benedictus had survived the bombardment) into the benefactors’ cloister before the basilica. Inside the bronze doors a service was in progress. We sat and listened to the chanting over the whispers of the tourists echoing like a wind (or the monks’ singing) throughout the building. Dad had had enough.
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We had dinner again at Marios. Before leaving we said goodbye to our waiter (Mario, but not the Mario) – Grazie per tua pazienza.
Eh! Normale! Normale! he said. He’d spent twenty years in Germany and felt that since we were hopeless at Italian maybe we’d know something of that. But we were monoglot Kiwis.