ITALIAN POSTSCRIPT
By JOHN BAIRSTOW
Women washing might indeed stand as a symbol of the country. They can be seen in winter standing in the snow, slapping the clothes on the sides of ice-fringed cisterns ; or, in pouring rain, standing ankle-deep in the mud of the river's edge. Sometimes they put sheets and towels in an empty tub, cover them with a cloth piled with wood ashes, and then pour on boiling water. As some of them say, the war has compelled them to return to the way of life of zoo years ago. The children, instead of going to school, sit by the spinning-wheels at home ; and old looms, which have been neglected for years, have been brought out and put into use again. The clothes than many country people wear have been grown, spun, woven, dyed and tailored at home. Where once the land was ploughed with tractors the great white oxen toil slowly as in a medieval landscape, following the urgent tuggings of some bare- footed youngster barely half their height ; and in some parts large areas have been turned over by the vanga." Corn has been sown by hand again, and-it is- now lush and sturdy, -though -without the usual mathematical neatness. Italian civilians are full of their losses. They recount them eloquently' to anyone who will listen, and most soldiers have heard the tale so many times that they can rattle off the list themselves—horses, oxen, sheep, pigs, fowls, clothes, wine, farm implements, household utensils. They know too the oft-repeated tale of days spent in shelters in the fields with la cicogna (" the stork," as they call our spotting plane) droning about, and nights full of anxiety with drunken German soldiers carelessly showing lights, and our bombers roaring overhead. But soon after the departure of the Germans the bicycles are dug up and put together again ; the concealed clothes brought out, washed and pressed ; the knives and forks, rusty from underground damp, polished up.. There are, perhaps, a few regretful glances cast at the hooks where the pots and pans used to hang, some compliining because the well has been made unusable by rubbish thrown down 'it, but there is too much to be done to waste time repining. There are doors and window- frames and valuable timbers to be salvaged from the dug-outs they were compelled to dig for the oppressor, rooms to be cleared and put in order with makeshift repairs, cart-loads of household goods to be fetched back from the remote farms which have harboured so many refugees. Above all, there are the neglected fields to be tended. Though neglected is not entirely true. There were some who worked even under fire. One old man, a veteran of the first Abys- sinian war, was trimming his vines when the liberating tanks roared through the countryside towards him, while three fields away a tard3 German soldier was driving away the last ox of a neighbouring' farmer.
The people of the country, however, have been comparatively fortunate. It is not a pleasant sight to see the dazed inhabitants of some bomb-shattered town or, village return to poke about among the rubble of their homes, collecting pitifully small heaps of sal- vaged goods. But even in such scenes of waste 'and wreckage there are compensating joys. To one village, three days after liberation, returned an Italian soldier who had been serving with the British since he had been taken in Greece. Four years without news of his family, he had got leave to visit home as soon as the papers announced that it was free. He arrived, tired and dusty, on a bicycle to find all safe and sound. Such reunions will be taking place for many months yet. In one recently freed town the only watchmaker doing business was a Sicilian soldier who had made his way from Yugoslavia after the armistice and settled down there. He was impatient to start off to his family in Messina, and told civilians who brought watches for repair that he would be gone in a week.
Flares are shooting up all round the horizon, and the church bells are ringing madly as they rang in Ionia when news was received of the armistice. They will be ringing from V . . . Church, high up in the Apennines, the home of Don Francesco G G. . ., who was arrested, and narrowly escaped shooting, for harbouring and helping escaped British prisoners of , war. He will probably show you a letter scribbled hi pencil on a leaf of a Field Service Pocket Book, thanking him for his assistance. They will be ringing in F F. . the home of Agostino M . . ., the market gardener. Under the Germans he spent miserable and hopeless days crouched under the trees at the end of his fields to escape forced labour. He had fought in the Great War. German soldiers had taken away his medals, but the parchment decree of the War Ministry granting them still hung on the wall of the room he occupied. Now he is finished with wars and can pursue unhindered his one declared ambition, to have every year the first and best tomatoes in F. . . There will be " festa " tonight in M M. . where the fishermen glide slowly over the bay at night, with submerged lights that look like great glow-worms from the top of the cliff, as they search for the shoals of anchovies.
We hope soon to return to the land of which Tacitus wrote that " the sky is continually overcast with rain and cloud." But we have seen the myth of sunny Italy exploded. There is sunshine in stfmmer, but it is too hot, the roads are too dusty, the flies are -too numerous for us to wish to stay here. We shall have memories of the moun- tain slopes of the Salerno coast with their bright wealth of lemons, of Lake Trasimene in the moonlight, of the nightingales of Ferrara, of countless " casas " where we have spent pleasant evenings. In a few weeks the " contadini " will be working from dawn to dusk in the harvest fields, and WAVE leave them there few_who have known .them during the past two years will wish them anything but luck.
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