Tales from the parlour and the trenches

By Gregorio Giungi

“Tales from the parlour and the trenches” tells the true story of Enea Milesi. More than just a biography – tragic and intense - of a character whose life in Italy straddles the 19th and 20th centuries, this is an historical novel in which the protagonist’s emotions and personal struggles become a pretext for depicting, in a politically incorrect manner, the events of the First World War.
Fought in the chaos of Italy’s trenches and the country’s military unpreparedness the war is a “Great Fair of Human Flesh”. Enea, a young man on the brink of adulthood, leaves for the front in 1916 armed with spartan determination following his brother’s death in action. He survives the conflict distinguishing himself by his bravery and military skill, but returns from the trenches of Northern Italy a changed man.
The Second World War ensues and Enea “suffers through it as a civilian” in constant fear for the life of his wife and children and the safety of his property. In the years that follow he faces the inevitable epilogue of his own existence.
“Tales from the parlour and the trenches” opens a window on a man’s private and intimate life, on his relationships and family dramas, against a backdrop of warfare. Enea shares with his fellow soldiers “bread, blood, danger and shit” and his story is both an unforgettable tableau of a lost age and a moving testimonial from a generation that knew how to smile in the face of death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregorio Giungi
• Release date: Dec 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311774651

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Castel D’Emilio, 4th November 1956

My name is Enea Milesi. Today, on the thirty-eighth anniversary of our Victory which falls during the distressing autumn of 1956, I have decided to write my memoirs. I dedicate them to my four daughters, but in truth I am not writing only for them … I am writing for anyone who would like to perceive the full force of what my eyes have witnessed and to share what I have felt. I seem to have spent the latter part of my life postponing this appointment but now I know that the time has come. ‘Papà’s memoirs!’ – I can almost hear them, my daughters – ‘He had to write a book to tell us something about his life … he couldn’t just talk to us, could he?’ This the sarcastic and slightly bitter comment from my girls … Maria Clara, Costanza, Magda and Lidia, chatting away in conspiratorial hushed tones, as they always do when they huddle together in the drawing-room, cigarettes hanging from their fingers.

And they are not entirely wrong.

I have never found it easy to talk about my past. To be honest, I have never found it easy to talk in general, and I think this has much to do with my past … I believe this is the case for anyone whose life has been marked by a War.

Well, I have lived through two of them.

The first, the one that will always be the War with a capital W for me, I fought in as a soldier. The second, I experienced as a civilian. I know that both were ‘World Wars’, and that the second one is considered, especially today, the most important and most horrific, but, for me, the only one that can be considered ‘Great’ remains the First one: for the horror, the bloodshed … the sacrifice that characterized The First Great Fair of Human Flesh … because it was during the First war that I stared Death in the face, that I understood what Death was, and I have never forgotten what it looked like.

During the second war, on the other hand, with my wife and daughters I simply experienced hunger, in addition to shame and fear. Do you find it strange that the fear of dying was, at that time, something new to me? That having met Death on the front line, more than twenty years beforehand, I had not already experienced it?

I felt many emotions during the Great War, but not fear, believe me: my emotions went beyond fear, that’s all … I was often shocked and disgusted, yes, but enthusiastic at the same time … I was taking part in our Fourth War of Independence, the one that was to complete Italy’s unification process, establishing its sovereign status, free from the yoke of foreign rule … this somehow anaesthetized me … Was it the exuberance of youth? Was it the result of the education we received at the time, as sons of the Risorgimento¹? You, the reader, can judge. I am not able to do so myself, even today. Only one thing I pray: before condemning me or appreciating me, read until the end of these pages. You will need to, if you want to pass a just judgement.

First of all, with immense patience and with the memories I retain (or perhaps what I heard repeated when I was older), I shall attempt to tell you about my childhood. I still have clear recollections of when I was a young man, and I also still have a few of the letters that I wrote from Constantinople to Turin. My memories of the period of the 1915-18 War are clear too, and I still have all the letters that I wrote home during that time and also a small diary which I hold on to jealously. When I re-read it – something that I have done only a couple of times until now– it helps me re-live the most intense and tragic events of my life. Now, many years later, those moments seem like a dream to me … and lifting the Morphean veil that covers those distant days, I feel a strange sensation: it is as if my life splits in two and I see and re-live those events not as if they were my own, but as they would appear in the outline of a novel or as images of a film, of which today I am only a spectator, while then I was the leading actor.

BEGINNINGS

What are my earliest memories?

I was born in 1888 in Ancona, and I can still see myself as a tiny baby, asleep, or just half-asleep, in an iron cradle with a tall canopy frame and a draping veil, in my parents’ bedroom. The furniture is red mahogany, and at the feet of my cot is a terracotta fire-place, with two andirons shaped as figures of women on either side of the fire-place’s columns. A fire burns inside it and lights the room’s ceiling which is decorated with unusual geometric patterns, while the wind blows down the chimney. Below, in Via del Comune – now called Via Pizzecolli – an old newspaper-seller walks by shouting out the daily headlines at regular intervals, and the rhythm of his wooden leg hitting the pavement beats the time. I see Mamma, her face still young leaning over my cot, with my father whose hair, even then – an odd family trait that keeps repeating itself down the generations – was virtually white, a full head of it mind you, with a beard which still maintained a darker tone. My father takes my hands which I have been keeping in between my legs, maybe to protect them from the cold, and crosses them over my chest, saying to Mamma: ‘This is how a little angel should rest.’ This is, perhaps, my earliest memory. Then the years went by, so slowly for me at the time, and there I was, a little brat always sickly, wandering around the house in those skirts that children, both boys and girls, were made to wear in those days and that caused me to fall over all the time. Despite my sickliness, I was sufficiently robust to survive various illnesses and falls and I made it to 1894. In that year, my family started to spend the summers in rented villas in the vicinity of Ancona, returning to the centre of town to the house in Via del Comune later in the autumn. My memories of those holiday villas are very vague, but the one I remember slightly better is that belonging to the Veschis, which is still there today, just above Piazza d’Armi in Piano S. Lazzaro, a little south of the city. It was a beautiful house, with a ground floor a little below street level and a first and second floor where all the bedrooms and facilities were; below the roof was a small loft where Irnerio used to sleep, my grandfather Enea’s butler-cum-nurse. I used to spend a lot of time up there in the loft, observing out of a little oval-shaped window Piazza D’Armi spreading below, with its green lawn and so many daisies as to seem covered in snow. Of that villa – which I later found out had been purchased by some family relatives of ours, the Ferrettis, and which I never visited again – I remember, most of all, two coloured glass doors that led on to the sitting-room and adjacent dining-room from the entry hall. I was hugely attracted to those colours, so intense on the polished glass – red, green, blue and yellow – and I used to enjoy passing the time, entranced, looking through the glass doors, so I could see everything covered in those colours. On that small estate there was also a large greenhouse for growing lemons, but it was already in a state of abandon at that time, full of wild rabbits and lizards that gained access to it through its dilapidated glass walls. I treated it as my secret hiding place, my ‘ghost-house’: it attracted me and scared me at the same time, and I used to test my courage by forcing myself to go inside it, only to end up jumping at the smallest animal noise, and then running for my life as the noises became louder and closer. At the farthest end of the garden there was what we called the ‘games area’, a small cricket field where our jovial gang of brothers, sisters and cousins played anything but cricket. Part of the reason was that on the rare occasions when we did play cricket we had to face the sabotage attempts of an intruder: the little country-girl Stella. Stella was from a nearby church summer camp and she would infiltrate the thick bushes around the estate and, from there, count out aloud our game scores, always incorrectly, thus making our afternoon cricket games endless. To no avail were our interruptions which would start with threats of retaliation against her and were followed by punitive expedition attempts: the young girl always escaped at breakneck speed and was impossible to catch.

My grandfather would sometimes come and observe us, keeping himself to himself, and his stern look would disappear into a smile as soon as I turned round to look at him. It is his smile from those summer days the thing that I remember best about him: may God forgive me, but I saw more affection in his smiles than I ever saw in the smiles of my mother and father – which also happened to be very rare. My grandfather Enea was responsible for the first strong emotion that I remember to have felt, as well as for my first intellectual efforts at childhood logic. Most of all I was puzzled by the fact that we shared a first name: if I was Enea, how could he be too? How could two different people be called by the same name? But it is the farcical scene of my official introduction to him that I shall never forget. It was 1892, I think, and, for my birthday – which would have been my fourth – I was made to wear my first proper little suit, black and white striped with short trousers; my father had carried me in his arms to my grandfather, leading a kind of solemn procession which saw my mother following behind him and which came to an end before my grandfather, who was waiting for us in his study: a man of short stature, of advanced years and rather portly. As soon as I felt myself becoming separated from my father’s chest, as he put me down on the floor so I could stand before my grandfather, I ‘christened’ my first grown-up suit by wetting my pants out of fear, such was the awe I felt for that man who was so important to everybody, in our family, and who was always spoken about with reverential respect. It took me some time to overcome that feeling of intimidation and to understand that the important patriarch was actually an honest and nice man. When my grandfather was taken gravely ill and died in a short space of time, not long before my tenth birthday, I had the distinct sensation that we had lost the person in the family whose role was to love us, while my parents’ role was obviously that of raising us.

After my grandfather’s death, certain things changed. The most significant change was that we started spending our winters no longer in Ancona, but in Piacenza with our maternal grandparents, Alice and Giuseppe Nasalli Rocca. For us youngsters it was always a great joy going there, both because of the long journey that strangely excited us (with a brief stop in Bologna to see other relatives), and also because of the stay in that enormous beautiful house, with a large welcoming family, where we were always received by a swarm of cousins the same age as us, who couldn’t wait to play! Piacenza was like a second motherland … I remember the great hall above the porch, which was the ‘playing field’ for our favourite games, always rowdy and full of cheer, interrupted only rarely by the arrival of grandpa Giuseppe; we were in great awe of him, just like we had been a few years earlier of grandpa Enea, even though, by this stage, we were no longer children. Once again, as time went by, I learnt to appreciate this real gentleman, such a genial character, erudite and cultured, always affectionate towards us and very sociable, quite different from those laconic types we were accustomed to in our home region, the Marche. In Piacenza I began to study in earnest for the first time. Our home tutor, Mrs Serena, was a stricter and more demanding teacher than Mrs Albertini, our teacher in Ancona, and my mother began teaching me French with great commitment. And there were so many punishments! If I showed indolence or if I performed below par in my studies, my mother would make me stand in a corner between two doors and the doors would be opened to ‘imprison me’ against the wall. My brother Corrado, who was perhaps a little more of a dunce than I was and also older, was eventually sent to boarding school in Cremona.

When the winters in Piacenza were over – and they were never too long – we would return to our home in Ancona, in Via del Comune. Spring in Ancona meant that the youngest amongst us would be taken for long walks, sometimes by our nannies Eulalia and Leonilde – house staff to whom we were entrusted for this purpose – and other times by our eldest sister Raffaella. Regardless of whom we were with, we would always set out at the same time, in the early afternoon, varying, if anything, the route. The most popular walks were: the one in the direction of the monument by Porta Pia and the arches of Via della Stazione, and the one that took us outside Porta Farina. In both cases we would walk near some low walls and these were the real attraction, because we were allowed to climb on top of them and walk along them for a while, which seemed like an incredible lapse in the tiresome rules of prudence to which we were accustomed … and so we loved it! In particular, the wall of the route that took us by Porta Farina led way beyond Porta Farina itself, over where you can now find Piazza Don Minzoni – the new square until recently called Piazza Mussolini – and there we would come across allotments and laundresses doing their washing outside and it was like being in the open countryside … Nonetheless, we used to prefer the walk to Porta Pia and the arches, because the tallest wall was there, the one that bordered the sea, and running along it without fear of falling made us feel invincible. Also, while walking under the arches, we always used to come by some little old ladies selling sweets and fruit, who – careful not to be noticed by our nannies or our sister – would never fail to stick a bonbon or a small piece of fruit in our pockets. We couldn’t believe it! … Those small gifts delighted us, not only because we enjoyed eating them, but also because we felt as if we were doing, again, something forbidden, with the complicity of those kind old ladies. During those walks, I would sometimes get taken to the barber shop. I remember the day when the barber found a single grey hair amidst my black hair for the first time. I was eleven years old. I was not particularly troubled by this event, because I knew that these kind of genetic oddities were not unusual in my family, but I shall never forget the barber’s face when it happened.

SANTA LUCIA

It was in June of 1900 that we started to spend the summer at Villa Santa Lucia for the first time. The villa – located inland from Ancona – stands in the immediate vicinity of Castel D’Emilio, a rural village of the town of Agugliano, eighteen kilometres west of the city. It had been built by my grandfather Enea twenty years earlier inside our family’s large landed estate, around an old building used as an oil mill and almost abutting on an old Franciscan convent, which had lain abandoned for more than a decade. I had been taken there before as a baby only for short stays, and I had no memories of the villa, so I can truly say that I only discovered my family’s summer residence on that day in June. We travelled there by horse-drawn carriage, with a coachman that my father knew well and trusted; we left Ancona for Castel D’Emilio in the evening, on one of the first days of the month, and we arrived in Santa Lucia – which stands at the final junction before the village, in the open countryside – in time for dinner. Past the property’s front gate – a wrought iron gate, not particularly large and green in colour – we travelled along the road lined by pine trees that borders the wood inside the estate and we emerged into the garden. There, waiting for us, smiling outside the front door of the family residence was the old Nena, the house cook who had prepared supper for us. The house was distributed over three floors: a ground floor with the main rooms and the kitchens and two further floors with a large number of bedrooms. On the top floor was also a living-room, overlooking the magnificent countryside that extends towards Agugliano. I was too tired to notice any of this at the time. I only remember vaguely the first impression I had of the dining-room: there were corner-cupboards with iron gated doors and two grandfather clocks beating the hour, almost simultaneously; on one of the walls was a narrow rectangular opening used for transferring plates and food from the next-door kitchen. I do not remember the details of the following days spent at Santa Lucia, but I remember the immense joy I felt at being able to run with my brother and sisters around the park that seemed huge to me at the time, and I also recall our excursions, venturing to explore the inside and outside of the estate, half an acre in total of woods and garden, like young pioneers. The fields, woods and wild recesses near the villa held no secrets from us; they were like extensions of our home: Santa Lucia – a place that no one ever referred to as a ‘villa’ – was to become an enchanted place in my perception, not simply a house anymore. It became a theatre of imaginary cloak and dagger adventures for the gang of Milesi siblings: Corrado, Raffaella, Camilla, Maria Alix and Enea, the youngest. The ‘expedition’ route that most excited us was the one that led into the cane thicket belonging to Sandrini, a farmer that everybody referred to as Martello² and who, as our family’s mezzadro³, lived in a country house belonging to us a few hundred metres outside the borders of Santa Lucia. The cane thicket was to us youngsters an inextricable jungle, where myself and Corrado – and sometimes other friends or visiting cousins – faced common thieves and exotic marauders that threatened our sisters (despite the fact that our sisters were more like boys than defenceless young maids). Those expeditions came to an abrupt halt when Sandrini had the dangerous idea of shooting at my father with his hunting rifle. My father had gone to inform him that he wanted to relieve him of his duties and replace him with another farmer, someone more hardworking and ideally less dishonest and troublesome. Sandrini was a drunk prone to violence when inebriated.

His nickname ‘Martello’ was thought to derive from the hammering power of his fists, which caused him to spend more than one night in the custody of the Carabinieri of Agugliano. On the occasion of the shooting Sandrini actually missed and my father became convinced that the farmer didn’t really intend to shoot him. After Sandrini was arrested by the Carabinieri, Papà not only refused to seek damages against him, but even helped him in court with his deposition and procured him a lawyer that succeeded in getting him acquitted – the judge understood that the victim was not interested in obtaining a conviction – and therefore released him from prison. Sandrini left Castel D’Emilio as soon as he was freed and we never saw him again. This didn’t prevent my mother from complaining to Papà about his behaviour and she did so with rather unusual vehemence. It certainly was not our mother’s habit to seek a confrontation with our father and, if it had ever happened before, it hadn’t happened while we children were at home. I think that the attack on my father made her temporarily lose her customary polite composure and she’d gone completely berserk. After