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grew up in a small village in Southern Italy amidst enormous poverty, isolation and ignorance…
From my birth, as Mother used to tell us, everyone thought I was kind of “special.” I was delicate, fragile and had white, soft hands. Most unusual for a contadino’s son[1] whose destiny was to till the soil and gather the harvests. Mother used to say that I might be a doctor one day, judging from the white and delicate hands.
My recollections of our life in the village comprise in the main the years up to when I was thirteen years of age – just before we came to Australia.
Before age six, I don’t have any clear memories. I only know what Mother told us.
I was raised during the “times of scarcity and hardship” of the war years of “39-45,” when not only was work scarce, but also supplies and imported goods, on account of the war effort. Transportation was almost at a standstill. Nothing was coming into or leaving the village. People were left to their own resources. If you had, you ate; if you did not have, you did not eat.
Around the time when I was about four to five years old, Mother and Father would have been living in the village for about 15 or 20 years. The house was given to them as dowry by our Nonna[2], our father’s mother. The house actually joined Nonna’s house but was not adjacent. The join was sort of back-to-back. To actually get to Nonna’s place you had to walk around past two or three other houses.
There was nothing regular about how the houses joined in those parts. Each house was a different shape to suit the terrain and the windings and turnings of the landscape. Moreover, in the passing of time, people made all kinds of outrageous extensions and additions, often resulting in the roof of one house pouring water on someone else’s windowsill or doorstep. But no one complained. It was the way of the village.
Nonna’s roof sloped downwards toward our house and joined to it at the back. Roof water had nowhere to go but through our house.
Our house had the upper storey added on when Mother and Father moved in, so a duct or channel had to be constructed to drain Nonna’s roof water. This duct went through the rear of our house and came out right next to our front door, where I used to amuse myself no end on rainy days, playing with the water spouting from the mouth of a pipe in the wall, just a few feet above the ground.
The mouth of this duct protruded out of the wall by a few centimetres and the water just gushed out, at some speed, falling about a meter or a meter and a half out on the common walkway outside our house. There was no way you could tell that the water originated on Grandmother’s roof two or three houses down the alley.
This mysterious spring gushing out of the wall of our house fascinated me for years, and I never thought to question it. I used to play with it, fill buckets of water from it, damn it up with my hands and then watch the reservoir of water gush out in volumes.
I always loved to play with water after the rain. I would spend hours making miniature dams, redirecting the water flow along the laneways and making mini waterfalls. Mother used to watch me and smile as she returned from her daily trips to the fields, or from the upstairs window, if she happened to be in the house.
One day, as I was getting tall enough to “see” over the top of our loggia’s (terrace) wall, one of my sisters pointed out Nonna’s roof to me. I eventually made the connection as to how Nonna’s roof water made its exit at our front door. You could see that, instead of sloping out toward the street, the tiled roof sloped backwards against the rear of our house.
I was eight when I first went to school. The normal age to attend school was seven. But when I was seven I was still too scared to venture out and actually expose myself to external interactions. I put up a tantrum, I cried, I fought and I struggled. I was not going to school, and that was that!
To this day I cannot say what the actual fear was, except that it must have been a fear of the unknown. The teachers were foreigners; they pulled your ears, and beat you with a stick if you did not know your lessons. Then there were the bigger, tougher boys, who did things to you…
I guess that the reason I managed to escape going to school at age seven was because Mother could see that I would not have been able to handle it. “Lasciatelo stare” she would say – leave him alone – he will be okay in his time. And so I gained another year of freedom in which I could spend my time doodling with white calcite pebbles, making all kinds of shapes and figures on our loggia, the terrace outside the upstairs rooms, under that huge grape vine that grew gigantic black grapes every year.
I had a fascination for drawing clock faces and other simple shapes. I also drew human faces, not that I had any flare to be an artist, but I just liked to doodle. When I ran out of white calcite pebbles, I would use a piece of charcoal, which would have been readily available from our fireplace.
In the course of one afternoon I would have the entire floor of our loggia in a mess. I don’t remember ever cleaning it though. I wonder who did! It would not have been my sisters, I don’t think, so it must have been Mother.
Anyway, when I finally turned eight, the time came again for the struggle and the justification as to why I should not go to school. But this time Mother took a more active role. No, she did not lecture me or give me a beating. I cannot remember that ever happening.
She just dressed me up, shoes and all – it was awkward having to start wearing shoes after eight years of walking bare-foot – and she did up my shoelaces. She made sure I had a clean shirt (it felt strange being clean and all dressed up). She took me by the hand and she walked me to school. She kept reminding me not to be afraid. She was going to explain to the teacher that I was to be looked after and not beaten or yelled at, because I was a good boy.
And she did that. She spoke to the teacher of first class on the side whilst she still held my hand, and he seemed to be congenial enough. As it happened, he was a paesano, not a foreigner. This made it all that much easier to speak to him. They eventually took me to a seat, and I was in school.
Everything and everywhere in the village was within walking distance, so I had no problem in getting back home that afternoon. I was not the least afraid. The teacher was not at all frightening and no one got beaten up. “Was that a teacher?” I remember saying to Mother and to the elder sisters. “He is just an ordinary person! He wears a beret just like Father’s!”
I liked school from then on. I already knew about obedience and that you were supposed to learn things in school, so I always tried to be good and orderly. I did not know then how to pay attention and I think it must have been years before I actually “heard” anything. But, whenever the teacher wrote down stuff on the blackboard, I used to copy it down just like everyone else, and take it home and show it to Mother.
I spent, altogether, five years in school. By the time I was twelve I had completed primary school. I was the first in the family to finish the primary grades up to fifth class.
By this time there was talk of our coming to Australia, so there was no question of my doing superiore[3] - the “intermediary” grades. Besides, where was Mother going to get the money? And again, I was old enough now to go out and work in the fields or keep a goat or two.
There were many other instances when Mother used the full force of her will and influence to protect me and to stand up for me. Several instances when she came to speak to the schoolteachers on my behalf are examples of the kind of strength she had.
My memory of Mother’s loom is that it was enormous. Although a contributing factor for this may be due to the fact that I was very young, I still think that it must have been huge, because she made sheets, towels, and patchwork blankets (pezzare) on it. To be processing a patchwork bed cover of that size onto the pick-up roller plus the end supports on either side, the overall width must have been at least 2-3 meters. As for the height, I think it must have been more than the average person’s full height because over and above the height of the working space where Mother tossed the shuttle and guided the threads, and operated the main hand piece, there was all that space and equipment holding the reels of cotton and other mechanisms that defied the logic and comprehension of an eight year old child.
I was Mother’s most regular helper, as I recall. Sometimes I would be filling up the bobbins using this other contraption[4] that you opened and closed much like an umbrella. The difference was, though, whereas an umbrella peaks at the top end, this contraption was a bit like two umbrellas back to back, with the spindly bits on both top and bottom. The concave bit in the middle was designed to hold the ream of cotton that was to be transferred onto the bobbins.
When the apparatus was secured in the open position, it was comprised of a series of criss-cross strips of fine wood arranged to support the matassa – a ream of cotton or wool. The whole structure was supported in the middle by a central spindle that you had to insert into a specially prepared cylindrical chunk of concrete or heavy wood with a hole in the centre. You placed the wooden axis of the contraption into the hole and wedged it in to keep it in the upright. The criss-crossed section above would then spin around its own axis. You placed the matassa, the hank of cotton or wool, into the open spinning section, took out the leading thread and manually wound it onto the bobbin.
Now the bobbin was inserted onto this other contraption made of a steel rod about ¼ inch in diameter with a round head on top. This head gave it a sort of counterweight. The other end of the rod went into a cup-like object, which you put and held tightly between your knees as you sat on your chair or stool.
The cup’s bottom tapered somewhat. You placed the metal rod into the cup and spun it around with your right hand while with the left hand you guided the thread onto the first bobbin.
The bobbin had to be a snug fit onto the spindle so that it spun with it. If you were clever, you would fit two or more bobbins onto the rod so that you could go from one to the next as the first one filled. This way you did not have to stop and start for each bobbin you filled.
When the bobbins were ready, I would load the first one onto the shuttle and pass it on to Mother who, in turn, would give me the empty shuttle to load, and so on. In this way Mother was able to keep going without interruption. Occasionally, the shuttle would slip off and fall to the ground. I would then have to stop and go and pick it up so that Mother would not have to get up and maybe lose her place on the pattern and the pedalling and so on. She would never omit to say “bravo” – our way of saying “thank you.”
From under the loom you got a pretty close-up view of how things worked. The pedals controlled the pattern that was to emerge on the blanket. I think there were at least four or sometimes six pedals. When you pressed a pedal it caused one strain of the warp to lower. Thus by pressing two or more pedals you created a pattern on the work you were producing.
The shuttle slid in between the strands that were lowered and those that remained elevated. After you threw the shuttle in between the two sets of strands, you pressed the alternate set of pedals and clickety-clacked the hand piece (attached to the comb) two or three times to secure the cross thread – the weft – that the shuttle left behind. Then you repeated the cycle.
The sequence was monotonously regular. There was the thump-thump of the hand piece (the comb); the quick change of pedals, which made a kind of swoosh sound; the shuttle throw in the reverse direction from the last; then the thump-thump of the comb, and so on in regular rhythmic repetition.
When the working area filled, Mother would pause to roll up the completed work onto the pick-up roller situated in front and underneath the working area. Often she would ask me to get her a mug of water during this pause, and I might even be asked to help with the business of rolling up the work just completed.
You had to remove the fixing peg at each end of the roller to allow it to be rolled and pick up the work just completed. The pegs replaced, and the refreshing sip of water gratefully consumed, she would resume with renewed vigour and speed.
At the back, and somewhat above the main working area, was a multitude of gigantic reels of cotton, which provided the threads for the “warp.” There would have been easily 200 reels situated on vertical spindles, allowing them to give up their thread each time the completed work was rolled up on to the pick-up roller. It was always a messy business if one of these threads broke, as it had to be carefully and delicately joined to its mating end before work could resume.
Mother spent a great deal of time at the loom and I filled and loaded a great number of bobbins, especially when I was not yet at school.
She made lots of pezzare for us kids. It was the cheapest and quickest way of making a blanket. You see, she would collect the threads of old and worn out garments and off-cuts and use them for the “weft” of the blanket. For the “warp” she would use ordinary strong cotton. This made the pezzara look like the “patchwork” blanket that the name implied – and it did keep you warm. They were somewhat prickly though, on account of the jagged edges of the off-cuts and stiff strips of cloth.
It was here I spent many hours listening to the clickety-clickety-thud of the hand piece and the swish-swish-swoosh of the pedals and shuttle as each took its turn in the complex operation of the loom’s various component parts. On this wooden mechanical monster, Mother produced many a cotton sheet for us kids, and many pezzare, which kept us warm in winter.
I think she also made fabric for other people. Looms like this were very rare, as was the skill to use it. There may have been perhaps one or two in the whole village.
In this way I got to “know” Mother and to appreciate her skill, patience and wisdom as a parent and as a teacher and provider. This is probably why, later in life back here in Australia, I never had any difficulty in following her advice and listening to her words of wisdom as she guided us all through the weft and the warp of life’s path.
The weather in those parts is quite predictable almost all year round. Dry and hot in summer, biting cold in winter, torrential rains in autumn and early spring, and the occasional deluge in midwinter. These deluges wreaked havoc on our delicately cultivated plots on the riverbanks, bringing upon them a new layer of silt. They had to be totally re-cultivated for the next spring.
The banks of the local river were dotted with little plots people cultivated where they grew greens, tomatoes and often potatoes and corn.
But this account is not about our local freshwater river and vegetable plots. What has brought the weather to mind is the memory of a particularly fierce storm in which our dear mother almost lost her life.
We were all at home, as I recall. The weather had been so bad that no one had dared to venture out anywhere. The rain was torrential; the winds blew with almost hurricane force. Hissing, creaking and howling sounds could be heard all over the house. If you looked out through the glass in the window, you could see trees in the distance waving, swinging and twisting themselves around, the tops almost touching the ground under the force of the horrific winds, which seemed to change direction unexpectedly and unpredictably.
It was not too uncommon an occurrence that in weather like this, tiles would be dislodged off the rooftops and be jettisoned about in any direction. Warnings not to go out lest one of these tiles fell on your head were quite common. We had heard of cases where someone would try to venture out to attend to something of value, only to be hit by a tile flying off someone’s roof.
So we were all inside, those who were home, that is. I do not recall Father being home. He must have been on one of those trips to the mountains or to another village doing barter. Marianna and Giuseppina would be ensconced either in the “kitchen” or “downstairs” where it would be the safest. Disaster struck when, I think, we must have been having supper or perhaps as we were getting ready to take the brazier[5] downstairs.
A gust of wind, greater than all the ones before it, hit the house on the side of the loggia, the terrace, and literally pushed in about a third of the upper wall. The debris fell where the loom would have been situated, but I think that by this time that space had been taken up by a new bed for us growing kids.
In any case, bricks and plaster came tumbling down with the full force of the gust that pushed them and they almost fell on top of Mother. She was agile enough to avoid being crushed, but the only way to escape the tumbling debris was to move backwards. In doing so, she fell down the stairwell that led to the lower level of the house. There being no handrail, I actually saw her disappear down the empty space over the stairs.
Then I noticed that she had caught hold of the floor edge and was hanging on for dear life. She called out and everyone came to the rescue. I can’t quite rightly say that I remember seeing her being pulled up or whatever method was used to rescue her from her predicament. I was probably told to go away while the operation was being carried out.
I have never forgotten this incident, and I think it was probably the first time that I “felt” something emotionally. I imagined the “loss” that I would have felt had she died.