Westburn Blues

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Westburn Blues - book excerpt

Chapter One 

“Dante, go to soldier. In dugout behind cow shed,” Old Mario said.

“A soldier?”

“Talk. He is British, from Scotland.”

Mario gave Dante food wrapped in a clean dish towel, a jug of milk. “Agate milked the cow,” he said, and handed Dante a flask of his own red wine. “Feed him.”

Sergeant Alfred Forte, Seaforth Highlanders, came from Kempock, the small town next to Westburn. In July, Germans had captured Fred in Sicily and transferred him to Italian custody to a POW camp near Rome.

Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, taking her forces out of the war. The guards had vanished, and Fred had walked out of the camp. He’d no desire to be taken again by German forces occupying Italy and sent to a POW camp in Germany.

Dante and Fred weighed each other up. Fred wore ancient countryman’s work clothes, a stout navy cotton jacket and grey cotton trousers, a black beret placed straight on his head—kit given him by friendly Italians when he went on the run and passed from hand to hand, sending him on to Liguira and Garbugliago. His broken footwear, with a dirty sock protruding from the cracked upper of the left boot and a gap between the sole and the upper of the right, told of his long hike, two hundred miles through the Apennines to his father’s village.

The time in captivity had affected Fred, sapping his self-confidence, making him wary, afraid of recapture. The long walk up the Italian Peninsula, often navigating by night, had reduced him to skin and bone, draining the fighting spirit right out of him. In the flickering light of a candle made by Old Mario from sheep fat, a dishevelled, gaunt man, not yet twenty-five, stared at Dante. Fred cowered at the back of the dugout, holding a thick wooden shaft, trying to merge with the bales of straw, rough wooden plough, firewood pollarded from olive and chestnut trees, scythes, spades, hoes, a thresher, flails, rakes.

Dante, sixteen, was dressed in the torn remains of a velvet suit jacket bought by his grandmother before wartime rationing bit, the sleeves finishing above his wrists, over a soiled blue shirt. Ragged velvet trousers hung at half-mast above rough-worn peasant’s boots, repaired more than once by Old Mario, and now finally with wooden soles, shoe leather being impossible to find at this stage in the war. He shuffled under Fred’s vacant gaze, glad that the foreigner couldn’t see the holes in his socks.

“That stick in your hand,” Dante said. “Put it down.”

He said it again in English.

“Sorry,” Fred said.

Dante laid the food and drink on a roughhewn table. He pulled a stool and a bucket to the table.

“Sit down,” Dante said, pointing to the stool, and sat on the upturned bucket. Dung smell wafted in from the byre, but Fred was too hungry to notice.

Fred drank the milk in two gulps straight from the jug. He wiped his mouth with a soiled handkerchief, then rubbed his hands, took the clasp knife from Dante’s hand, cut two thick slices from Agate’s round loaf, piled hard cheese shavings on the bread, laid translucent wafers of cured ham over the cheese, and wolfed it down. He cut a slice of polenta into squares and popped them into his mouth, one after the other.

“Delicious,” Fred said. He took a long pull from the flask of Mario’s sour red wine, then swallowed more. “Been a while since I had wine.”

“The ham,” Dante said, “is from wild boar. My grandfather shot one a while back; cured it himself in the stagionatura. He kept quiet about it. If the Fascists knew, they’d stop our meat ration.”

They spoke Italian. Dante held out his hand.

“I’m Dante Rinaldi. I’m from Westburn.” They shook hands.

“Alfredo Forte, from Kempock; call me Fred. My dad’s Italian, and my mum’s Scots; born in Kempock. But he’s British; had a passport since they married.”

“How long have you been on the run?”

“About six weeks.”

He told Dante about his escape and the Italians who’d helped him along the way. “I’d never have made it without them. Makes me proud to be a Scots-Italian. I came here; it’s where my family came from. I might try to get to Switzerland.”

When the Italian soldiers abandoned Passo Corese near Rome, there were 4,000 POWs; too many for a successful escape. With his Italian looks and fluent Italian, Fred reckoned he’d a better chance of getting away. He approached his C.O.; told him he had relatives in Liguria, living in Garbugliago, a village in the hills behind La Spezia and the Cinque Terra, who were bound to assist him to the Swiss border. The C.O. gave permission.

A friendly Italian soldier, a camp guard heading for home, gave Fred a school atlas.

“Leave before Germans come,” he said.

Fred exited the camp wearing his shabby battle dress that identified him as an escaped POW. He’d have to get rid of it. Navigating the Apennines running the length of the peninsula would be hard, but safer. He carried his few belongings in a sack with cloth shoulder straps cut from an abandoned shirt and sewn on with his service housewiff. Peasants who saw Fred, a soldier hiding from Germans and Fascists, pass while working their small holdings, fed and sheltered him. One family—the father had worked in Scotland—gave him work clothes, and he got rid of his British Army battle dress. Fred passed for Italian. A family of charcoal burners advised him to watch out for the hard fit men of the Guarde Forestale who might take him prisoner. Fred, ever on the alert, ignored the natural beauty of the mountains travelling northwest to Garbugliago.

“You look Italian; speak good Italian,” Dante said. “That must have helped.”

“It did. What about you? How did you end up here?”

“My grandparents had come back to Italy by the time I was born,” Dante said.

Old Mario and Agate had sold up in Westburn in 1925 and returned to Garbugliago. Agate melded with her village and never returned to Scotland, though she wrote often to her son, Luigi.

Dante’s grandfather came back from Italy to Westburn in December 1938; his first visit since he had returned to Garbugliago. Old Mario intended taking his only grandson to Italy for several months to attend school, to spend the summer on the family small holding, and to become Italian.

Going back to Italy returned Mario Rinaldi to his peasant roots: his pale Westburn face retreated, and the Ligurian sun transformed his complexion to the colour of the family’s polished mahogany table. Like the treasured, well-used furniture, his face showed signs of wear: the lined forehead; deep gashes on either side of his mouth that vanished into a full and luxuriant moustache with waxed, pointed ends. A sombre countenance under his habitual flat cap, a meagre dewlap, a thin fold of skin on his jaw, mouth working in small movements chewing and smoking twisted black stogies, thumbs hooked in waistcoat pockets, he might have passed for a rural Mafioso. Past seventy, Old Mario, a lean, muscular countryman, was strong as the mature chestnut trees bordering his small farm.

“I thought my grandfather was wonderful when I met him. He had a silver tongue.”

The twelve-year-old Dante had loved the stories about life on the farm: hunting wild boar, rabbit and hare; shooting birds; harvesting olives; picking grapes; milking the family’s only cow; moving the handful of goats to fresh pastures; and Old Mario making and drinking grappa and wine.

Dante’s parents did not want him marooned in Italy if war broke out. But Dante, full of boyish enthusiasm, pleaded, begged his parents to let him go.

“Only for summer holidays, Celestina,” Luigi said, always deferential to his father. So Dante went to Italy, but on condition that he return in August to Westburn for the new school term.

“My first time away from home and I never slept the night before we left,” Dante said. “In the mornin’ I was goin’ crazy wi’ excitement.”

Dante and his grandfather left Westburn for Italy in January 1939. They spent four days on the train, crossing into Italy from France. Old Mario waved his passport.

“British and Germans, go to war,” he said. “Mussolini strong. Il Duce is clever, he join Germany. British lose war.”

Dante kept his British passport hidden in a linen pouch under his shirt.

“Old Mario, back then before the war, he was dead keen on Mussolini,” Dante said. “The war and the German Army cured him. I had no idea how much my life would change, an’ no’ for the better.”

Depressed and hungry from the wartime rationing, missing his family, Dante dwelt on the happy times in Westburn before the war.

“I never realised how much I liked Westburn. Someday, Ah hope I’ll get home to my mum an’ Graziella, my big sister.”

“What stopped you going home?” Fred asked.

In 1939, the British and French armies faced the German Army on the Siegfried Line. Skirmishes along the front and dogfights above the lines disturbed the calm of the “Phoney War.” By sea, the U-Boats attacked Allied ships: at the beginning of September, the U-30 torpedoed and sank SS Athenia with the loss of 98 lives. Two weeks later, the U-29 torpedoed and sank the carrier HMS Courageous. The family refused to risk Dante’s life bringing him home by ship. Obtaining permission to leave Italy and travel overland into a war zone was not easy.

“Safer to stay here,” Dante said. “Then Italy declared war, and it was too late.”

“Bad, that was bad,” Fred said.

Poor grieving Dante could not understand why his country had made his father a prisoner for being an Italian. A man who’d fought on the Allied side against the Germans and Austrians in the Great War, surviving the horrors of the White War on the Dolomites, was wounded on the Piave. Dribs and drabs of worrisome news reached Garbugliago. Then, late in 1940, the letter from the Red Cross arrived telling him that his father had drowned when the Arandora Star went down a hundred and twenty-five miles west of Ireland. Old Mario and Agate mourned for their son, and they wept for their distraught grandson. Dante felt the British and the Germans murdered his dad. He raged for months afterwards, and he cursed the war, the British, the Germans, and Mussolini.

“My dad’s dead; killed on that boat, the Arandora Star.” He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Fred laid a hand on Dante’s shoulder. He had much to tell Dante about the sinking of the ship, but not yet.

“God forgive me,” Dante said, “but when I thought about my dad, an’ the disaster at Dunkirk, the Germans thumpin’ us, the British an’ the last of the French taken off the beaches on boats, I said the British had it comin’.”

“It’s all right, son. I understand. Mum and Dad know your family,” Fred said. “Funny we never met; but then I’m older.” He wanted to cheer Dante up. “My dad used to take me to the Italian grocers in West Stewart Street. Did you ever go there?”

“Sometimes, for a treat,” Dante said. “I loved it.”

The Italian grocery in West Stewart Street, owned by a man from Garbugliago, had always been packed with a bounty of Italian delights: pasta, cured hams, rich-smelling cheeses, and the wine that the men drank when they played cards in the back shop reserved for the men. They played Scopa, a Neapolitan card game. Luigi took Dante among the men for almond biscuits, a cup of drinking chocolate, a spoonful of sweet jam or a dainty glazed fruit.

“I was there when the cops raided the shop,” Dante said. “They scared me. There was a right commotion.”

“That was in 1938,” Fred said.

“Yes.”

The police entered the shop looking for Fascists and Italian propaganda. All they found were old editions of Italian newspapers: Il Secolo, published in Genoa; La Nazione, the La Spezia daily. Near the wine racks they found bottles of Val Polcevera, Colli di Luni del Tugullio, and Riviera Ligure di Ponenti Golfo wrapped in ancient broadsheets of La Stampa and Corriera della Sera. They left the wine and removed the newsprint.

Most Italians in Scotland took little interest in politics in the homeland; they were glad to have done well and planned to stay in Scotland. But the British popular press described them as traitors. Some families recently arrived, sent wives and children back to Italy. The men stayed working. Italians worried more but carried on.

Fred handed the flask to Dante, who swallowed a mouthful or two of the red wine. He thought the boy might benefit from talking about his Westburn memories; and he could do with cheering up himself.

“Your grandfather told me he’d lived and worked in Westburn for many years.”

“That’s right. My grandparents came over in the 1890s, but they came back here to Garbugliago before I was born. I first met Old Mario in 1938.”