What the Traveller Saw Read Free Page B

superior prison camp situated in what is known as the Pianura Padana, the great plain through which the River Po flows on its way from its source in the Cottian Alps on the French frontier to the Adriatic. This camp was in a disused orphanage on the edge of a large village called Fontanellato, which is now very close to the Autostrada del Sole, and the nearest city was Parma on the Via Emilia, the Roman road that runs through the pianura in an almost straight line from Milan to the Adriatic.
    There, once a week, parties of us were allowed to go forroute marches in the surrounding country under a general parole that we would not try to escape, but we were nevertheless still heavily guarded. The route chosen deliberately avoided villages.
    We walked along flat, dusty roads on which we rarely saw a motor car, only cyclists and carts drawn by oxen; past wheat fields, fields where what resembled miniature forests of maize (Indian corn) were growing, in which I longed to hide myself and make my escape. We marched along the foot of high, grass-grown embankments, known as argine , built to protect the land from the torrents that at certain seasons poured down from the Apennines into the nearby River Po, and also from the Po itself, a powerful, dangerous and unpredictable stream.
    We also saw fields of tomato plants that when ripe would be used to make salsa di pomodoro , sugar beet, groves of poplars, the trunks of which, soaring up overhead, were like the pillars in a cathedral, endless rows of vines which produced the naturally fizzy red wine known as Lambrusco. And we saw rambling, red-tiled farmhouses, some of them very large, with farmyards full of cows and pigs and ducks and geese and the inevitable savage dog on a running wire. And there were barns, sometimes with open doors, through which we could see big, mouth-watering Parmesan cheeses ripening in the semidarkness. We were permanently hungry and it was strange to think that, apart from the meals I had been served in the cavalry barracks in Rome, I had never eaten a proper Italian meal in Italy – all the food I had eaten in the prison camps had been cooked by British cooks.
    On these walks we saw very few people, probably they were ordered to make themselves scarce. Most of those we did see were contadini , bent double working in the fields and all wearing straw hats with huge brims to protect themselves from the fearful heat of the sun. Sometimes they waved but because of these hats it was difficult to know who waved, men or women or both. Others, women and girls mostly, seenmomentarily through half-closed green shutters on the upper floors of the farmhouses, also waved a bit apprehensively. No one was obviously unfriendly. And in all these expanses of pianura there was not a tractor to be seen.
    Our presence in the orphanage provoked lively interest among the inhabitants of our village, Fontanellato, and as the local cemetery was located alongside the orphanage large numbers of them, most of them women, both old and young (the young men were mostly in the armed forces), some of them on bicycles, took more numerous opportunities to pay their respects to the dead than they had done before we arrived on the scene. In fact I first saw the girl I was subsequently to marry on her way to the cemetery with a group of friends, all of them on bikes. I waved to her from one of the windows overlooking the main road. She waved back and I was shot at by a sentry who was careful to miss, which was a warning against looking out of those particular windows.
    On 8 September 1943 the Italian government asked for an armistice. On the following day we all broke out of the orphanage with the connivance of the Italian commandant and took to the countryside to avoid being sent to Germany, which we did by a hair’s-breadth.
    It was an extraordinary situation. Up to this moment, apart from various interrogators and members of the camp staff with whom we came in contact, few if any of us had ever