Tuscan Roots Read online

  Tuscan Roots

  Angela Petch

  Reviews

  ‘[Angela] has a very vivid, natural and direct way of writing…[Tuscan Roots] is moving and interesting about the Italian parts of the war…and [has] lovely touches of humour.

  Congratulations and Italian kisses on both cheeks!’ Julia Gregson, best-selling author of “East of the Sun”, “The Water Horse” and “Jasmine Nights”

  ‘I stayed in bed all day to finish this book, and had tears rolling down my face when I did. Brilliant read…would like to read more from this author.’ Jill Pennington, author of “The Diary of a Single Parent Abroad.”

  ‘…a lovingly researched account that will intrigue and ultimately surprise. Those who love Italy, its geography and culture, will be drawn to this book as will readers with a curiosity for how war can divide and unite people of differing backgrounds.’ Pelham Shipp

  ‘Through this beautifully crafted and wonderfully atmospheric tale of love, this book transported me from the Italian hills of the Resistance to the greyness of post-war London and back again to breathe the smells and tastes of modern Tuscany. The only thing missing for me as I read it was a glass of Chianti!’ John Casey

  ‘If you love Italy, you will love this book. If you love history, this novel will show you an aspect of WW2 you may well not have encountered before. Angela Petch brings Tuscany to life; the customs; the people – you can taste the food, smell the wild flowers, see the scenery. But also feel the hardships of the war…I read the book over a weekend, not wanting to put it down…’ Sue Lovett

  ‘A touching story, embellished by authentic and vivid descriptions of both the rural landscape and way of life.’ Kim Manley

  ‘Writing to aspire to…in my opinion Angela’s book deserves a wider readership…’ Alexander Kreator, Allrighters’ Joint Serious Fiction Writing Book of 2013

  ‘I neglected my house and garden until I had finished this lovely story and would love to read more from this author.’ Allie, Ipswich

  ‘…truly gripping. I sobbed at the end (I am a hopeless romantic) and thank you for giving us all such a wonderful story.’ Mike Wilkie

  ‘A wonderful read – it is a great combination of a true account and fiction that I truly couldn’t put down. The twists in the plot are intriguing as they are exciting with the descriptions of Italy allowing your imagination to really picture the scenes whilst reading. I would recommend this to anyone!

  Elizabeth Pepper

  Quant’è bella giovinezza

  che si fugge tuttavia!

  Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:

  del doman non c’è certezza.

  Lorenzo de’Medici (1449 – 1492) How lovely is youth

  Which is over far too soon!

  Grab your happiness while you may: There is no certainty in a tomorrow.

  (Author’s translation)

  In memory of Paul Francis Sutor

  Copyright © Angela Petch 2018

  The author asserts her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Chapter 1

  February 1999

  On a dingy, February morning in Camden, Anna is still in bed drowsing after a bad night. She listens to commuters scurrying to work on the street below, half gloating at not having to join the bustle.

  Life feels wobbly. She’s lost her job, her mother’s just died. They say things happen in threes and she wonders what will come next.

  Just as she’s nodding off her doorbell rings. Sighing, muttering, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she untangles herself from her duvet-nest and opens the front door of her second floor flat.

  ‘Parcel for you, Miss.’ The young postman waiting smirks and looks her over with a grin as she wraps her dressing-gown tighter. Taking the parcel, she shuts the door firmly in his face, slaps over the kitchen floor in her slippers, flicks on the kettle switch.

  The package is bulky. It’s something she’s been expecting but relegated to the back of her mind. At the reading of her mother’s will last week, the solicitor had mentioned she had been left a file of assorted papers, as well as the sum of £50,000. Harry and Jane, her brother and sister, had been given everything else. While Peregrine Smythe of Smythe & Sons, in his crumpled Savile Row pin-stripe, had been droning on, Anna was watching a trapped fly batting against the windowpane. From time to time she’d glanced at her older brother and sister sitting opposite, thinking how fat and bald Harry had become, how Jane could almost be a stand-in for Hyacinth Bucket with her immaculate hair-do sprayed stiff and crisp.

  She makes herself a mug of Earl Grey, taking it back to bed with the package. Inside the brown paper wrapper is a cardboard box, the lid tied down with an old shoe-lace which she pulls open. Lifting the lid, she sees a brown envelope bearing her name, written in her mother’s flowery handwriting, as well as note-books, bundles of papers rolled up in a perished elastic band and folded fabric.

  She withdraws a folded sheet of lined notepaper from the envelope, cheap and old-fashioned, with a spray of violets printed in the top left corner, probably from Woolworth’s. Her mother has written in English, which she spoke with a strong accent, but wrote well.

  Willow’s End,

  August 16th, 1997

  My darling Anna,

  As you read this you will have already been to my funeral. Maybe there were a few tears but I hope it was also a happy occasion, with some of my favourite Italian music played in church and a ‘spaghettata’ afterwards. I imagine there were a few stories shared about me. Maybe the family will have recalled my quick temper and my dreadful mistakes with English. If people were kind about me or harsh, then so be it. ‘Pazienza!’ as we say…

  I have so much to tell you. Maybe this is the coward’s way out – to write it all down instead of telling you face to face. It was hard to know what was for the best. If I had told my story when I was alive, the results might have been cataclysmic. ‘Cataclismico, disastroso…’ they are nearly the same words in Italian. There are many similarities but, oh so many differences between the English and Italians - as I found when I first came over here. But, more of that later.

  When the doctors told me my cancer was inoperable, I decided to sort out my papers and write you a long letter before it was too late. Let us call it a kind of diary. At the reading of the will, my solicitor will have mentioned these would be coming your way. I imagine you will have felt that, as usual, you were being left out. Apart from the money, Harry has ‘Willows End’ – I know he will cope with the draughty old place, he always loved it and it will go with his new status as Company Director. Jane has my jewellery. She always loved dressing up with it when she was a little girl.

  And you have this brown box containing my scribblings. I hope by the time you finish reading, you will understand that I never intended to make you feel left out, my darling. Maybe some details have been forgotten over the years but I have tried my best to fill in wherever I could.

  Read it when you have time. Do with it what you will. It is my inheritance to you.

  Your loving Mamma.

  She leans back against the pillows, intrigued but at the same time angry at her mother for being so enigmatic. Theirs has always been a difficult relationship. Sometimes she’d be folded into her arms but for the most part, Mamma was distant, undemonstrative. It didn’t help being constantly teased by Jane and Harry who wer
e embarrassed teenagers when Anna was born.

  ‘You were an accident, one big mistake,’ they tormented her, not realising how near the mark they were. She’d grown up feeling less loved than them and nothing but a nuisance most of the time.

  Strangely, she had felt closer to her mother when she was in Claremont Rest Home, where she died. When Ines was confused, Anna knew how to soothe her.

  ‘Tell me about your life in Italy before you came to England, Mamma,’ she would prompt.

  Sometimes Ines would oblige, although Anna couldn’t follow most of what she was trying to tell her. It was a bit of a ramble. Other times she would refuse to talk, content to sit staring out of the windows at the gardens and the sea. On one of the last visits, she was tired, lapsing into a dialect which Anna couldn’t follow. She didn’t mind when her mother was quiet. There was room enough for both of them in her silence and the pair would sit holding hands, Anna giving her mother space to wander through her thoughts. Sometimes a sound or a smell seemed to spark a memory and she would start to talk as if an event had only just happened. Perhaps a motorbike would zoom by on the promenade and it was as if she was in the past again.

  Her sentences were random.

  ‘The others have gone down to the city today. It’s too hot to dance but the ‘Tedeschi’ are in the next valley now. They’ve been clearing the hamlets…’ Then Anna would humour her, treat her accounts as everyday occurrences, ‘Really Mamma? And what happened next?’

  But there were times when she felt like an intruder, listening to what should have been private moments: ‘If they find out, I’ll be in such trouble but it was so hot. My blouse clung to my body, my hair floated on the water like weed. I nearly drowned, he held me tight…’

  Anna didn’t respond. She’d change the subject or fetch her mother’s box of photos from her bed-side cupboard and they’d look at family snaps together.

  On some afternoons, her mother would sit with tears flowing down her cheeks and Anna would gently wipe them away. She’d cling to her daughter, ‘He came back Anna, he came back. But I won’t leave you - you’re a good girl. My special gift.’

  Suddenly her thoughts are interrupted by her mobile ringing, making her jump.

  ‘Anna! I was only a tad late…couldn’t get away any sooner. Where did you get to?’

  It is Will. And he is peeved.

  An explanation doesn’t readily come to mind. Right now she doesn’t feel like telling him that, yet again, she’d grown tired of waiting for him in the restaurant; that she hates the way waiters cast pitying looks as she drinks her wine, trying to make the glass last longer in case he eventually turns up.

  ‘Can I come over?’ he says, ‘I’m in a taxi. Be there in, say, fifteen minutes?’

  She glances at her watch. Seven thirty. No work to get up for. No reason not to have Will in her bed during the day-time – it would be an unexpected treat. But her appetite for sharing Will, for snatched evenings or parts of days, is dwindling.

  He lowers his voice. The cabbie is probably eavesdropping on his famous passenger whose distinguished features are regularly seen on Channel Four News.

  ‘I could stay the whole night, darling. Tricia’s away at her health spa for two nights.’

  A whole day and night together would have been bliss a few weeks ago. But she’s not in the mood.

  ‘I’m not feeling so good today, Will, I’ve a bad migraine’. (She’s never had a migraine in her life.) ‘Look, I’ll call you soon.’

  Before he has a chance to persuade her otherwise, she snaps her mobile shut and switches it off. She needs space to think. The question of Will can be sorted when she feels more sorted in herself.

  She throws her phone onto the bed next to her mother’s papers. There seem to be a lot of them. She doesn’t know if she can really be bothered. Mamma had never wanted to talk much about her Italian life when she was alive. It seems a bit late to be doing so now from beyond the grave.

  Settling down under her warm duvet, she falls asleep.

  Chapter 2

  It is dark when Anna is woken by the long bellow of a car horn. She glances blearily at her bedside clock and realise she’s slept through most of the day - it’s now five o’clock in the afternoon.

  This morning’s package has fallen onto the floor from her bed. An assortment of papers, note-books and envelopes have spilled out – some of them numbered with red crayon. Number one is a large brown envelope. Number two is a scuffed school exercise book. Instead of lines, the pages are segmented into little squares, like graph paper. She remembers Mamma explaining how different types of copy books were used by different school-years in Italy, laughing when Mamma described the overalls and huge bows they wore to primary school – even the boys. She had taught her a few simple words in Italian when she was little but never when father was around. He went berserk if he heard her speaking Italian.

  ‘You’ll confuse them. How many times do I have to spell it out, woman?’ he’d shout, his face turning purple.

  Then there would be a row. There was always a lot of shouting. Anna would retreat to the bottom of the garden and climb the copper beech or hide under the stairs clutching Edward Bear to her chest, whispering into his furry ears, ‘There now Eddy Teddy, soon be over, they’ll stop soon, you’ll see!’

  She plumps up her pillows and opens envelope number one. Inside is a hard-backed, vellum ledger. As she opens it, a slip of paper falls from between the covers. The hand-writing is again her mother’s.

  Anna,

  Here is part of your father’s story. I found this book in his shed when I was sorting out his effects. Do you remember how it was a “no go” area for us all? Your father’s sacred den!

  I never knew he spent his time writing in there. I thought he was simply escaping from us, with the excuse of mending something or other.

  I have read it through but it is only part of his story. I think he must have written it after the war. It doesn’t seem like a journal to me. He was on the move a lot – as you will see if you read on – and he wouldn’t have had time to keep a record.

  I decided to add this to my own record of what happened, to try to fill in the missing bits of our story. They say everybody has a book inside them but what I have written isn’t fiction, it’s the truth. And I believe our story deserves to be told. The war still casts its long shadow over our lives even though more than fifty years have gone by.

  It made me sad to read your father’s words. For a while he transported me back to the time when we fell in love. How things change. What a lot of rubbish life throws our way.

  Mamma.

  Anna has a vivid childhood memory that haunted her as a little girl - another type of ‘occupation’ in Dadda’s shed, besides writing and mending second-hand furniture. She was about nine years old. Unusually, he had left the shed door unlocked that afternoon and she’d slipped in to have a nose. A magazine lay open on his work-bench, revealing a photo of a woman’s legs spread wide, her breasts naked. She didn’t understand the ‘rude pictures’ and it didn’t feel right to gawp. Backing out of the shed, she fell over a bucket, sending it clattering onto the path. Her father, hoeing in the vegetable garden, looked up and rushed over, shouting, twisting her ear, ‘I thought I told you never to go in there.’ He’d slapped her hard on the back of her leg and she’d run up the path and into the kitchen, sobbing. Mamma was ironing while listening to music on the radio.

  ‘Darling, whatever is the matter?’ She unplugged the iron, resting it on the side of the kitchen table.

  ‘Did you fall? Show me.’

  ‘I hate him, I hate him.’

  Her mother pulled her onto her lap, wiping her tears with the corner of her pinafore.

  ‘Now tell me what happened, tesoro. Stop crying, I can’t understand anything if you keep making that noise.’

  Her father stormed in, reached for the tin on the dresser where spare coins were kept.

  ‘You spoil that brat. Next time I find her in my shed
she’ll get a hiding and won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ He pulled on his jacket. ‘And you needn’t wait for me for supper. I’m going out and I’ll be back late.’

  The door slammed.

  Her mother sighed, pulled her closer. ‘Never mind – we’ll have a special supper - just you and me on our own, with spaghetti and gelato for afters.’

  She held her daughter close and safe and Anna listened to the kitchen clock ticking as her mother rocked her.

  ‘I meant it’, Anna sobbed. ‘I hate him. He’s always so cross. I think he hates me too.’

  ‘Shh – don’t talk about hate.’ Ines undid Anna’s plaits, re-plaiting them as she searched for words. ‘Your Dadda doesn’t hate you. Not one little bit. Sometimes he just hates life…how can I explain? Now, be a big girl and listen to what I’m going to tell you and try to understand.’

  She lifted Anna from her lap and fetched onions, celery and carrots to chop up for the meat sauce.

  ‘Come and help me with supper. We’ll have a little talk.’

  Together they prepared the sauce and now, whenever Anna eats pasta and ragù, she always associates this meal with the strange conversation of that evening. Afterwards, she felt less of a child, as if her mother had been trying to give her a glimpse into what it was like to be a grown-up.

  ‘Dadda wasn’t always such a crosspatch. But the war changed him, you see. Lots of horrible things happen in wars and he had a difficult time. It was difficult for everybody - but the young men saw cruel things that people do in times of war. We must make allowances for his tempers. Now, lay the table and we’ll eat’.

  And as far as mention of her father in the war was concerned, that had been that. Her mother never spoke about it to her ever again. Anna’s childhood was filled with shouting, slamming of doors, stormy arguments and her parents’ constant bickering. There were moody silences at meal times and then snatched moments, when her mother would scoop her into her arms, cuddle her, pouring out Italian as if she could no longer keep the words inside. But that happened only when her father wasn’t around.