Hood Pebbles From My Skull

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30373-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 152 Seiten

'This enthralling autobiographical fragment by Stuart Hood, a World War II British intelligence officer, tells of his escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Parma and his life on the run with Italian partisans in the Resistance.' New York Times 'I wanted to do two things. Firstly, give a picture of peasant life. I felt indebted to my peasants who had sheltered me, and admiration for them. The other thing was to make sense of what had happened. I discovered new facts I hadn't understood at the time. This in itself raised the question of remembrance and how one shapes memory, its truth and gaps.' Stuart Hood, 2002 'Combines the mesmeric readability of good modern fiction with a feeling of lived experience to which few novels can attain.' Listener 'A remarkable, haunting book.' Raleigh Travelyan, Sunday Times

Stuart Hood was born in Scotland in 1915 and studied at Edinburgh University. He served in the British Army from 1940-1946. His war service took him to the Middle East, to Italy (as prisoner of war, escapee and guerrilla fighter, mainly with the Monte Amiata military formation) and northwest Europe. Subsequently he was posted as Staff Liaison Officer with the American 9th Army at Rhine Crossing, and finally as Political Intelligence Officer in Germany. His highly regarded autobiographical work, Pebbles from My Skull, describes his experiences in Italy during the war. He joined the BBC in 1946 and successively was head of the Italian and German programs; head of the World Service; and finally Controller of Programmes at BBC Television under the chairmanship of Hugh Carlton Greene. Subsequently he was a TV critic for the Spectator under the editorship of Nigel Lawson and forged a successful career as writer, scriptwriter and producer for film and television. From 1973 to 1978 he held the Professorship of Film and Television at the Royal College of Art. He wrote several novels, among them A Storm from Paradise (1985, winner of the Scottish Book Award ), The Upper Hand (1987 ), The Brutal Heart (1989), A Den of Foxes (1991) and The Book of Judith (1995). He also wrote books on television, broadcasting and mass media. On Television (1997, co-authored with Thalia Tabary-Peterssen) became a classic text in the subject. Stuart Hood was also a distinguished translator of modern European literature by authors including Dino Buzzati, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ernest Junger. Ennio Flaiano, Beppe Fenoglio, Ricardo Bacchelli, Dacia Maraini, Enrico Palandri, Gianni Celati, Aldo Busi and Theodor Plivier.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hood, Stuart

Leseproben

1

It is a strange sensation to step into a landscape. For months you have lived like a beetle on a leaf, bound by some tropism to a tiny patch of activity. The landscape has surrounded you on all sides but you have never stepped out into it. So at first you walk warily.

We walked out into the landscape at a bugle-call. It burst along the corridors of our orphanage, leapt the convent wall, flurrying the enclosed nuns, and spread over the plain to the men in the fields and the women on the steadings.

Fall in A

Fall in B

Fall in every company

For the last time we fell in in threes and then, a long straggling group, walked through the fence and into the fields. The watch-towers were empty. By the cemetery wall a couple of guards were siting a light machine-gun to cover the entrance to the village. We followed a little stream. Frogs plopped into the water as we passed. A couple of women walked over to watch us, smiled but did not speak. It was just after midday.

We walked into September and the maize harvest.

In September the cobs make an orange heap on the barn floors. The stalks stand brown and skeletal in the fields, hung with tattered, parchment leaves. The men walk through this insubstantial jungle and clear the land for ploughing. It is easy work and pleasurable, like all licensed destruction. One stroke, well-aimed, cuts the roots out of the earth and the stalk leans over, snapping as it falls. In the barns women and children, old men and vagrants, sit round the piles and strip the cobs. Dry, they will stuff the peasant mattresses. The men in the fields heap the stalks and set them ablaze. The flames are high but almost invisible in the sun. All over the plain the flames rise and sink to a circle of ash. But you can only guess at these other fires, for each field is shut in, fenced off by willows, by the vines looped from trunk to trunk, and by the poplars. This is a landscape lush and claustrophobic, full of water — ditches, rice-fields, irrigation canals — cut by occasional deep gullies (they are thick with acacias and rank herbage), and completely dominated by the sky. In summer that sky is a thin diaphragm stretched taut over the plain, holding and reflecting the heat. In July or August it can darken suddenly; clouds build up to a thunder-head, black below, piling up in white breastworks of ice and hail. The rain moves across the plain in a long grey screen. The thunder drums to and fro. But in September the weather is set and will not change until the grapes are gathered and the ploughing begun. In October it breaks.

The landscape is dominated by the sky. There are a few vantage points: the pale yellow bell-towers of the village churches, a keep rising out of a moated village, a convent or an orphanage. But even from the fourth floor of an orphanage turned prison the prospects barely change. You can see a little further, see a little more green, see yet another bell-tower, something of the foothills, and the pylons where the grid steps over the Po. Really to see the plain you must get out of it, up on to the hills. Then it tilts gently to the horizon, wide and open, cut by a railway and a Roman road, veined with watercourses, patched with villages and town and farmsteads. In the hills you dominate the plain and feel free.

That was one of the reasons why we made for the hills.

We: two men in their late twenties with nothing in common except the shock of capture and the boredom of captivity. When I was born his father was dead — killed at Kut-al-Amarah. Cycling across London to school, he had his life clear before him: Sandhurst and a commission in the Gurkhas. Fatherless, he had learned the practicalities of life. I had mooned away my schooldays, getting by with a certain parrot facility for words. Walking the long bare beaches of the north, I had fantasticated on life, in which I had neither compass nor points of reference. What I knew, I grasped instinctively; what I felt, I did, following my hunches.

Two sets of memories. His of the Frontier, the jeels of Kashmir, the mess and the playing-fields. Mine of university politics, milk for Spain, Battleship Potemkin, and fine chalk-dust swirling in the class-rooms.

Two different physiques. Ted, broad and powerful, brown, with an Asian look and a thin black moustache, as if he had been assimilated to his own squat soldiers. As we stood in the ranks at morning or evening roll call I looked clean over his head. Myself, tall, thin, sthenic, with a narrow head like a collie-dog’s.

We had agreed to make for the hills together. But not right away. For a couple of days we lay in a green gulley, sleeping and planning in the sun. The others disappeared by twos and threes. We sat on in the sun and watched the men clear the maize-fields and planned lazily, discussing the points where the Allies must land — the mouth of the Po, the Riviera, Viareggio — and in a great pincers movement cut the Germans off from the Brenner. If they were delayed more than a few days then we would start walking. Meanwhile we watched by day the men at work in the fields and at night walked over to the nearest farmhouse. It was called Toccalmatto, the madman’s lot. The family’s name, ironically, was Tedeschi, the Germans.

If you strip life to its essentials they are warmth, food and somewhere to sleep. A peasant house caters for all three needs. Essentially the kitchen is the primeval cave, with at one end a fire of dry brushwood that sends fingers of flame up round the pot, and subsides quickly into a bed of hot ash, grey with a glowing heart. The floor is stone-flagged. In one corner is water carried from the well in copper pitchers, for drinking or washing. From the roof, away from the mice, hang a salami, a home-cured crude ham, and a lump of tallow for greasing boots. The light is a carbide lamp hissing gently over the table. The men sit first and the women serve a thin broth of minestra, or polenta poured like golden lava on to a wooden platter. The bread the man of the house cuts, holding the big flat loaf to his chest and slicing wedges from it with his clasp knife. The wine is harsh. Cheese finishes the meal with maybe a handful of nuts or grapes, or a poor pear or a medlar. In the hearth the brushwood stalks hiss and groan, dripping their sap into the ashes. After supper the fire dies; the lamp begins to flicker; men and women go out singly or in twos to give a last look at the oxen and to relieve their bodies in the byre. Then they turn back to bed.

But those who are not of the household — vagrants, odd men, strangers, boys helping out with the work — sleep with the oxen, which are white, or brindled grey and brown, long-horned, with huge liquid eyes and wet muzzles dripping mucus and saliva. Throughout the night there is a faint clank of chains from their head-stalls, a continual shifting noise as they stir, chew the cud, or dream. From their bellies come long rumbling eructations as they digest the chopped fodder of leaves and grass. Their dung splashes on the floors and flecks the men sleeping in the corner on their bed of sacking and straw. By morning the air is warm and thick from the breath of the beasts; the atmosphere, heavy with ammonia. As you walk out into the yard your eyes stream with tears. A dash of cold water clears your head. In the kitchen the woman is fanning a charcoal stove to boil a pan of thin milk. The children run in and out, hungry, smelling of sleep, urine and unwashed clothes. The man of the house comes in. The oxen have been fed and watered. He is taciturn, turning over in his mind the day’s work. Breakfast is home-made bread broken into a bowl of warm milk, sweetened with greyish sugar. The peasant pushes his bowl from him. Andumma, he says, let’s go.

Day after day we went out into the fields and cut the maize stalks. Our hands hardened and calloused. Our muscles ached and then ceased to ache. One day we admitted to each other that the landings would not come — not quite yet and at midnight we started for the hills.

Our guide was a son of the house. Ted left behind a gold ring saying he would fetch it ‘after the war’. When we reached the railway line the guide left us. We were in peasant clothes — old jacket and trousers, a collarless shirt. In a sack on our backs we carried our battle-dress. We dropped the sacks over the fence and began to squirm through the wires. They creaked rustily in their staples. Away across the plain a dog barked. We lay, holding our breath and listening. With immense care we dragged our legs through the wire and crawled over the grass verge and on to the ballast. It dug into the joints of the knees. The rail was cool to the touch. I laid my ear on the steel with some childhood memory of listening at a level-crossing for trains far down the line. We crossed the first track. More ballast. The metal tip of my army boot rang against a rail. We crouched waiting for a shout, a challenge, a shot. Far away there were lights — a signal-box or level crossing. We moved on. Grass at last. The second fence we took more carelessly than the first. Then we were on a white dusty road, not talking yet but feeling gay and elated. Through the rest of the night we walked south with the hills rising in front, promising haven. The castle was our landmark.

In the farmyards the dogs woke and rushed, yapping, to and fro. We knew that from their collars a cord went up to a slipring on the wire strung between the eaves of the house and a pole in the corner of the yard. They could not touch us. Geese hissed at us by a pond; ducks stirred on the...