We’d managed to lock our keys in the car at the Cemetery. I decided the easiest way to deal with this was to let Avis worry, so we looked out the local office to explain. Two nice young guys were shutting up for lunch. How could you do that? they wanted to know. Eh, I said, and pointed to my head with a shrug. Are you Americani? they asked. No, Nuova Zealanda. They laughed.
They told us to go back to the Hotel and they’d be in touch at 2.30. In that heat it seemed like a good idea. Where can I get a taxi? I take you, said one, prego!
We had lunch. At 2.45 they turned up with our car. Grazie, I said. How much? Niente they said. Really? I asked in English. No, I must pay!
No! Normale, normale, servizio, and they drove off full of smiles.
§
In the afternoon, feeling the need for a better sense of the battles, I took the car with Dad back up Monte Cassino. We stopped at Castle Hill and looked over the almost vertical slopes the New Zealanders had climbed, under fire, to dislodge the Germans from the fort, then up to the huge slopes higher still, which the Gurkhas had traversed at night to take Hangman’s Hill — an impossible accretion high on the mountain near the Abbey, the highest point reached by the Allies. Down those slopes two hundred German paratroopers had counterattacked. By the time those not dead had retreated most of the British defenders of Castle Hill were themselves casualties. We drove on. Hangman’s Hill had been supplied by air until, like the Castle, it had been abandoned. It was difficult to imagine where its defenders could have sheltered from German fire.
But in the end the Germans were defeated elsewhere, not by the bombardment of the monastery or the slaughter in and above the town. Cassino had always been just part of a broad front, but here, as I said, it was the Poles who had finally taken the central ridge running down from Monte Cairo in the north, and which overlooked the monastery itself. With the high ground taken, the monastery, for so long a potent symbol to the New Zealanders, was useless to its defenders. It was then that they retreated, leaving the Poles to enter, finally, sieze the remaining wounded and hang their flag from the ruined walls for those below to see.
§
That night was our last in Cassino. We ate well, with Dad becoming gradually less suspicious of the food as time went on. When we were finishing an elegant old Italian asked us if we minded if he smoked. Dad certainly didn’t and was lighting up himself in no time. Somehow a conversation developed and I said that Dad was a soldati from the war here for the commemorations. Lei padre – a Cassino? the Italian asked. Si. He became most enthusiastic and said he had written a book, a diary, and he rushed out to get a copy for us from the hotel. We had seen it in the display case, but not bought it because it was in Italian. Monte Lungo 1943 – Monte Cassino 1944 by Umberto Cassattano.
Quand’era vanità sperare, follia combattere. I didn’t know there were Italians fighting on our side, said Dad. We met one the other day, I said — he shook your hand again at the railway station. He was very keen on New Zealanders, remember? Not everyone respected the Italians, however. An Englishman in Orvieto told us the Italians could fart harder than they could fight. There were about 7,000 Italiane Fanterie, said Umberto.
He was a volunteer and fought from Monte Lungo through to Forli. He showed us his youthful photo in the book. Probably something to do with the partisans, I said. Dad told him about Olympia, and the story of the mortars pursuing her as she came home from looking for food. He became even more excited. There was a chapter in his book, I took from what he said, about a woman in Cervaro who had cared for children and found food for them during the battle. He read us the lines in the book, tracing them with his finger, the two of them breathing smoke all over me as I looked over their shoulders. The same woman?
Olympia? asked Dad, getting excited himself. I decided this was too obviously a case of deepening misunderstanding and poured cold water over the matter by pointing out that the events took place several kilometres from each other and that Olympia was feeding her family, not waifs. The maitre d’, as the only English-speaking Italian, was called in to verify, which he did, reading in English from the book with a sweet concern to preserve the sentimentality of the two old soldiers. Umberto signed his book for us, con molto cordialita e sympatica, I took photos, we shook hands warmly and left for bed.
§
The next day we left, driving back up the Autostrada to Rome. We reached the ring road and turned right, then made a lucky exit on to the Appian Way which took us with only one wrong turn directly into the city. The famous road was as ordinary, as bustling and almost as fraught as the drive through Naples. I knew the car would be a problem, but still laboured under the delusion that we could find somewhere cheap and central to stay in the old city. Instead we drove round and through interminable one-way mazes (stumbling occasionally into forbidden squares completely devoid of traffic) and found absolutely nowhere to leave the car while I looked out somewhere to stay. Dad was becoming increasingly frustrated.
I don’t know how but we suddenly popped out in the Villa Borghese area and immediately saw a Hotel. Bugger it, I said, that’ll do. There was a parking space opposite but the flower seller who thought he owned it made it perfectly clear that we couldn’t have his spot. Two hundred metres down the street we found somewhere illegal but free and walked back to the Hotel.
The concierge laughed when I told him it was two-and-a-half times our budget but in the end “bugger it” was the only option. I left Dad smoking in the lobby and went back down the (I suddenly realised) one way street to the car. It took an hour and a half to find my way back to the Hotel and park on the pedestrian crossing outside the Hotel.
By that time Dad, chain smoking, was seriously contemplating the prospect of finding his own way home and I had realised, after mile upon mile of criss-crossing over and under Rome, that it is not wise to be stranded with a car in the middle of a very strange city with a one-sheet, indexless, Avis street map that offers no clue as to which of the endless streets are one-way.
Where can I park my car? I asked the concierge, who laughed again. I finish in an hour, he said — when I drive out, you drive in! I parked the little Rover in his space and we left it there, pilgrims no longer.
