A Fool's Alphabet (3 page)

The German offensive was in its last spasm. Goaded by the Führer, who spoke from the safety of Berchtesgaden, the exhausted infantry came forward once more. The Major was ordered to take his company up in the late afternoon to counterattack. In a ten-acre field ahead of the front trenches they ran into well-stocked German positions. The air again seemed to turn to metal and the men began to fall in numbers.

Sugden, who was advancing twenty yards to Russell's left, was lifted from his feet by a shell. This time he did not come down. The Major himself fell backwards with a bullet through the helmet. Crouched in a shell hole, serving as a pit for two bren, Russell was firing vainly towards the German lines when he felt the air taken from his lungs as though his ribcage had been crushed. Then he felt no pain, but was aware that the top of his battledress was filled with hot liquid. He fell forward in the mud. He had not heard the sound of the shell.

It was dark when he regained consciousness and the firing had stopped. He heard a British voice calling out for help, about twenty yards to his left. He tried to move, but found that the shell had not only pierced his chest but a second splinter appeared to have broken his right leg. Once more his cheek was against the wet earth as he struggled to stay conscious. He concentrated on calling out for help, though for all he knew it might just as well attract German sniper fire as medical aid.

For hours he lay shouting as loudly as his damaged chest would allow. The other man fell silent. Towards dawn he heard an urgent British voice from fifty yards away. It was a search party, with a doctor, who had heard his cries. As
they came towards him, machine-gun fire started from the woods, and they dropped to their fronts. It took them a quarter of an hour to reach him. The doctor gave him morphine and bandaged his leg. Russell directed them towards the second voice. Two of them then lugged him towards a ditch at the side of the field. A Very light fired from the German lines showed them suddenly bright against the dark landscape, and as the firing began they bundled him into the ditch. They covered the hundred yards back to the trenches in slow dragging bursts. The top of the ditch was continuously strafed and Russell felt the two halves of his tibia rub together. Back in the dug-out he was given a second dose of morphine; the main supply was with the doctor, and he was still on his stomach in the field searching for the second survivor.

The next day Russell was removed to the tented hospital by the shoreline. Half conscious by now, he was only mildly upset when the German artillery shells began to land in the hospital area, smashing the wooden struts and planks that held the stretched canvas in a semblance of roofs and floors, killing medics and wounded alike.

That night he was on a naval ship that steamed slowly out of Anzio, south towards Naples and Castellammare, and this time there would be no quick return. Castellammare, he said to himself as he lay sweating in his bunk. A castle on the sea. Castellammare . . .

The town of Anzio, once the summer haunt of the Emperor Nero, receded from view astern of the plodding ship, its villas in ruins, its whitewashed cottages reduced to their constituent mortar, sand and brick, as though their existence as houses had been no more than a playful and temporary escape from the enduring facts of powder and earth. The water of the bay erupted with turbulent belches where the stray shells continued to fall from the night sky.

In Capua, some twenty miles north of Naples, the spring was unusually warm. From his farmhouse bedroom Russell could
see the flocks of birds wheeling in the uncultivated foothills of the Caserta mountains to the north and watch the farmworkers busying themselves in the moist coastal plain to the south and west.

He had been sent to recuperate with an Italian family after being discharged from hospital; his wounds were not as serious as had at first been thought. The doctors in the beach hospital had saved his lung on the first night, and the leg had been broken cleanly. What was prescribed now was rest. The Major had defied expectations by recovering from his head wound; he was anxious to rejoin his men, but had insisted that Russell take time off. The Red Cross, whose convalescent centres were full, had been able through its network of volunteers to place some wounded men with sympathetic families.

Russell's family consisted of a large bearded man who ran the farm, his wife, three even bigger sons, and their cousin, a nineteen-year-old girl called Francesca whose parents had sent her from Rome.

On his arrival Russell, still struggling to overcome a fever induced by an infection in his leg, had slept for three days. He awoke to an unaccustomed sight. His eyes were used to a view of Bell's socks hung out to dry first thing in the morning, or to Padgett's naked back as he went through his rudimentary ablutions. He was aware of a knocking on the door, and footsteps on the bare boards. Shutters were opened on rusting hinges and a draught of air filled the room. He looked up and into the almost black eyes of a dark-haired girl, who took his hand and moved it to one side so she could lay a small tray containing bread and coffee on the bedcovers. Her face shone with concern, though in her eyes there was also a hint of shyness, as if all her sympathy could not overcome a feeling that he would not want her there.

Russell had a rough grasp of Italian and was able to thank the girl, Francesca. She had studied English to a modest level and was able to ask him how he felt. ‘Much better,
molto bene
,' he replied. And it was true; the fever was gone, the
constriction in his ribs was tolerable, the pain in his leg was less severe. He felt clear-headed at last, and hopeful.

After some exchanges about the weather, the town of Capua, and Francesca's family, an awkward silence fell.

Francesca stood up and smiled, then made as if to leave. Russell held up his hand. ‘No, no. Please stay.
Voglio . . . Italiano
. . .' He could not think of the word for ‘to learn'. ‘. . .
parlare
.'

Francesca laughed, a movement which caused her dark hair to sway back from her white neck. She sat down on the edge of the bed, and the lesson began.

In the succeeding days Russell began to get out of bed and walk around the farm with the aid of a stick that the Red Cross had sent with him. He offered his help with the running of the farm, though there was not much that his physical state allowed him to do. He could manage to chop firewood for the range using a short-handled axe, sitting at one end of the cavernous kitchen. At the other end Francesca or her aunt would usually be cooking. Russell tried not to let them see how much he enjoyed watching them. He also liked to spend time in the uncle's workshop. He was able to mend an old wireless, and to do some simple woodwork, renovating window frames or planing new floorboards for the bedrooms. He liked everything about the place, from its position on the rising ground down to the rough linen sheets in which he slept. The quiet of the night, after the guns of Anzio, rolled over him.

His lessons with Francesca proceeded well. Soon he could speak enough Italian to converse with the family, though their accents seemed different from the one Francesca taught him. Although he was supposed to be the pupil, it became clear after a week that Francesca was in fact learning more English than he was Italian. Her mind was as quick as her movements, though as reluctant to draw attention to itself; when he pointed out what had happened she chided him and told him he must in that case try harder. He couldn't help noticing that she did so in English.

At nineteen she was seven years younger than him. She was also the gentlest creature he had ever met. He became aware after no more than a week that there was something in her character which transcended anything to do with the way she looked or the things she said; it was as if this part of her had been made for him alone. He was surprised in some way by this, because it had never occurred to him before that such a process could have taken place in a foreign country.

One day Francesca came running up the stairs to his room with a newspaper. Monte Cassino had fallen to the Poles, the British had broken through to the east, and the Americans were driving up the middle. At Anzio they had broken out of the beachhead at last. ‘We're shooting the works,' the American general had assured the British. The two armies would meet, and Rome would be theirs within days. Francesca's eyes were shining in excitement. They pored over the newspaper together. Russell felt disappointed at having missed the action.

A week later he had a letter from the Major, forwarded from a poste restante at Naples. The break-out had been sudden, bloody and determined. Many more men had died. The Major did not have space for detail, but in the savage fighting it appeared that Bell had, in the parlance of the company, gone berserk, going on a one-man charge, taking out two machine-gun nests and providing cover for a dangerous advance by his platoon. He was to be recommended for a medal.

Russell was expected to report to the Infantry Reinforcements Training Depot, a no man's land for the recovering wounded.

As the time grew near for his departure, Russell wondered what he could say to Francesca. The day he was due to leave he went for a walk in the scrubby orchard at the rear of the house. He was able to move with freedom and expected the medical officer's report in Naples to be positive. It was an
intense summer's day, with the southern Italian sun softened by only the faintest westerly breeze. Russell felt the grass of the orchard already dry and long beneath his feet.

He tried to think of the life he would resume, but it was impossible. Nottingham. England. Sunday afternoons, buses, work. The beer in the pubs, the expectations of friends and colleagues. Would his Italian adventure seem insane when he looked at it from this perspective? Without the habit of self-examination, he had only instinct on which to rely. When he saw Francesca in the courtyard, filling a bucket from a pump, he took her by the arm and led her back into the orchard.

‘I have to go tomorrow, Francesca,' he said.

‘I know.'

He stood still and looked at her closely. Her normal vitality seemed to have left her when he brought up the subject of his leaving, but this might have been no more than politeness.

‘And then I won't see you again,' he said.

‘No, maybe not.' She was looking down at the ground.

‘I shall go back and fight and then when the war is over I shall return to England, to the house I told you about.'

Francesca said nothing, but remained with her eyes fixed on the ground. Russell felt he had missed a chance. He had had no rehearsal for this kind of thing.

Francesca suddenly looked up. ‘Tomorrow I will come with you to Naples, yes? I can take you to the station. I will make some food to take.'

Her eyes were wide and shining up into his. He felt grateful for the way she had saved him from his own silence. Spurred by the feeling of gratitude, he reached out to her with both arms. She laid her head on his chest and squeezed his waist tightly.

She did not in the end make a picnic but accompanied him to the station, where he left his kitbag, and then went with him to a restaurant for lunch. They ate fish and salad and drank white wine that tasted of herbs.

‘You will wait for me, won't you?' he said. ‘Even when I've gone back to England?'

‘Ah,' she said, half mocking and then with growing concern, ‘it is you who must wait for me. First until I am twenty-one and then until the war is over.'

‘I will.'

Resting his elbow on the table, he reached out and took her hand. He could see from the intensity of her look and of her movements that for her the passing of time would be difficult. For him another month or two would make little difference; he had in any case to negotiate his own survival.

‘And we will marry in my parents' village?' she said.

‘If that's what you would like.'

He looked at his watch and felt the pressing anguish of his departure. He drained his coffee cup. Francesca cried all the way to the station. He forbade her to come on to the platform. Even as he was kissing her goodbye she kept making him repeat his promises. ‘You will write each week. And as soon as the war is finished you will visit. And you won't mind about my grandmother at the wedding?'

As the train slid from the station he could still hear her voice in his head. ‘And then we will live in the countryside. And the child, the child?'

THE BOY WAS
born in the bathroom of his parents' house on the edge of Berkshire, where the Downs look one way into Wiltshire and another towards Oxford. The doctor, a shy man from Swindon, told Francesca Russell to move the bed into the bathroom to be closer to the hot running water. With hands prone to shake at the memory of night-time bombing missions over Germany, the doctor had no stomach for blood and was alarmed by the female body. Although he had delivered half a dozen babies before the war, he could no longer really remember what all that hot water was supposed to be for. He entrusted the close work to the local midwife, an efficient woman from Wantage.

Francesca Russell underwent terrible pain as she gave birth. It being the middle of the day, her husband was at work and she had only the midwife to ask later why the human body was so inconsiderately designed. Her son was not in fact particularly large. He was damp and red with a smear of gingerish hair across his scalp.

Pietro Thomas Russell, as he was later christened in the Catholic church, was one of the few children in the district not to have been declared a prodigy by his parents at the age of six months. He liked to sleep. Not necessarily at night, or only at night; but after meals, before bed and throughout the morning. His mother fed him lovingly and sang to him while he opened his mouth. He took the food with a steady unembarrassed zeal. Francesca, proud of his appetite, wondered if she should be boiling and drying quite so many
nappies every day. When she cut down on the amount she gave him to eat, the baby began to sleep less and to show at last some interest in the waking world.