Fontanellato, who had originally called them Tedeschi , Germans, were now very friendly. She herself was an accountant and she worked in the Banca d’ Agricoltura in the village.
When Wanda was not at the ospedale she was either working at the bank or else taking supplies to the other prisoners in the surrounding country. Fortunately, the weather was still good. Meanwhile, I got on with the ‘prep’ which she had set me; but without her I found the garden a rather creepy, shut-away place. Occasionally a low-flying German aircraft roared overhead; almost equally loud were the roars of outpatients who were having their teeth extracted without the aid of painkillers, by Giulio who not only acted as infirmiere but also stood in as a dental surgeon in urgent cases in the absence of the real dentist who only visited Fontanellato once a week.
I had another companion in the garden. A little mongoloid child called Maria. She was olive-skinned and had a squat, pear-shaped body, a thick almost non-existent neck, a very large head, low brows, a vestigial nose and pig-tails. In fact just as Giulio looked like the Walrus, to me, Maria resembled the picture of Rebecca, the little girl who was always slamming doors, the one on whom the bust of Abraham had fallen and laid her out, in Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Having done little else for the past year but read, I found that I had a tendency to make such literary comparisons; but it was one which I felt I ought to curb, otherwise the little world I inhabited would be entirely populated with figures of fiction – the superiora as the Gaoler’s Daughter, Giulio as the Walrus, Maria as Rebecca Offendort, the daughter of a wealthy Banker who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater, and so on.
Looking at Maria it was difficult to guess her age; in fact she was nine but looked older. She was loosed on me every morning at eleven o’clock by the suore who were glad to have her off their hands for an hour. She used to enjoy being with me because I didn’t tease her as some of the nastier inmates and one of the older suore did; I liked having her with me, providing that shedidn’t hurt me too much. For Maria was immensely strong. She used to creep up behind me, seize one of my fingers in a powerful lock and bend it back until, unless I freed it, she would have broken it like a rotten stick.
Once she almost succeeded in throttling me with one of her pig-tails which she wound round my neck in much the same way as Indian thugs used the handkerchief to strangle their victims. Sometimes she tried to bite me or gnaw off one of my ears; but mostly she was affectionate and when she was she used to plonk herself in my lap like a five hundred pound bomb, and together we used to look through old copies of La Domenica del Corriere , a magazine which always had highly coloured and skilfully executed illustrations on its covers, pictures of British battleship sinking, Bersaglieri performing terrific feats of valour with shells bursting all round them, and more domestic incidents, some of them macabre – one depicted a cloister full of nuns being attacked by a hungry lion which had escaped from a zoo during an air raid. Maria liked this picture very much. She used to look at the lion and make wuffing noises like a little dog; perhaps she identified the suora it was beginning to consume as the one who used to tease her when she thought that no one was looking.
Every day the news got worse. On the twelfth of September Radio Roma broadcast the news that Mussolini had been rescued by German parachutists. The station was now in the hands of the Germans, and temporarily at least, it seemed more reliable and less euphoric than the B.B.C. which, according to Wanda who had heard it, had actually broadcast on the same day the sound of the bells of St Paul’s ringing out in rejoicing at the invasion of Italy.
On the thirteenth and fourteenth the news from Salerno was really awful. Rome announced that the
When Wanda was not at the ospedale she was either working at the bank or else taking supplies to the other prisoners in the surrounding country. Fortunately, the weather was still good. Meanwhile, I got on with the ‘prep’ which she had set me; but without her I found the garden a rather creepy, shut-away place. Occasionally a low-flying German aircraft roared overhead; almost equally loud were the roars of outpatients who were having their teeth extracted without the aid of painkillers, by Giulio who not only acted as infirmiere but also stood in as a dental surgeon in urgent cases in the absence of the real dentist who only visited Fontanellato once a week.
I had another companion in the garden. A little mongoloid child called Maria. She was olive-skinned and had a squat, pear-shaped body, a thick almost non-existent neck, a very large head, low brows, a vestigial nose and pig-tails. In fact just as Giulio looked like the Walrus, to me, Maria resembled the picture of Rebecca, the little girl who was always slamming doors, the one on whom the bust of Abraham had fallen and laid her out, in Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. Having done little else for the past year but read, I found that I had a tendency to make such literary comparisons; but it was one which I felt I ought to curb, otherwise the little world I inhabited would be entirely populated with figures of fiction – the superiora as the Gaoler’s Daughter, Giulio as the Walrus, Maria as Rebecca Offendort, the daughter of a wealthy Banker who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater, and so on.
Looking at Maria it was difficult to guess her age; in fact she was nine but looked older. She was loosed on me every morning at eleven o’clock by the suore who were glad to have her off their hands for an hour. She used to enjoy being with me because I didn’t tease her as some of the nastier inmates and one of the older suore did; I liked having her with me, providing that shedidn’t hurt me too much. For Maria was immensely strong. She used to creep up behind me, seize one of my fingers in a powerful lock and bend it back until, unless I freed it, she would have broken it like a rotten stick.
Once she almost succeeded in throttling me with one of her pig-tails which she wound round my neck in much the same way as Indian thugs used the handkerchief to strangle their victims. Sometimes she tried to bite me or gnaw off one of my ears; but mostly she was affectionate and when she was she used to plonk herself in my lap like a five hundred pound bomb, and together we used to look through old copies of La Domenica del Corriere , a magazine which always had highly coloured and skilfully executed illustrations on its covers, pictures of British battleship sinking, Bersaglieri performing terrific feats of valour with shells bursting all round them, and more domestic incidents, some of them macabre – one depicted a cloister full of nuns being attacked by a hungry lion which had escaped from a zoo during an air raid. Maria liked this picture very much. She used to look at the lion and make wuffing noises like a little dog; perhaps she identified the suora it was beginning to consume as the one who used to tease her when she thought that no one was looking.
Every day the news got worse. On the twelfth of September Radio Roma broadcast the news that Mussolini had been rescued by German parachutists. The station was now in the hands of the Germans, and temporarily at least, it seemed more reliable and less euphoric than the B.B.C. which, according to Wanda who had heard it, had actually broadcast on the same day the sound of the bells of St Paul’s ringing out in rejoicing at the invasion of Italy.
On the thirteenth and fourteenth the news from Salerno was really awful. Rome announced that the
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