The Hazelnut Grove E-Book

Paula Read

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 339

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

On the surface a young professional couple, Sarah and Luke craved a different, more self-sufficient life. They traded the comfort of a two-bedroom English cottage for a derelict house in northwest Italy. The Hazelnut Grove explores the joys and demands of daring to live in search of a dream. Sarah and Luke's chosen life is part fairy tale, part story of courage and self-reliance as their new neighbour, nicknamed il Cattivo, the nasty one, decides to make war over the desolate hazelnut grove, a two metre strip of land behind their house. Their story is interspersed with anecdotes drawn from the author's family's holiday cottage in rural France. As events unfold that might have driven them away, especially Sarah, who does not share Luke's Italian heritage, a picture emerges not only of how the Italian life has tested Sarah, but also of how she discovered in herself both a grand obstinacy and a respect for the materials and objects of that life. A chunk of rusting metal becomes, in Sarah's eyes, an artefact with potential. Sarah becomes an artist. Set in Piedmont, renowned for its wine and food, a story of abundance and thriving slowly emerges against the challenges of a menacing neighbour, the deaths of beloved animals and the loneliness of getting to grips with an unfamiliar language and culture. When asked by English friends: 'Would you ever move back home again?' Luke and Sarah can only answer: 'We are home.'

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Dedication

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1 bis (Chapter 1a)

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2 bis

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3 bis

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4 bis

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5 bis

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6 bis

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7 bis

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8 bis

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 9 bis

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 10 bis

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 11 bis

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 12 bis

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 13 bis

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 14 bis

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15 bis

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16 bis

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 17 bis

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 18 bis

EPILOGUE

References

The Hazelnut Grove

Paula Read

Published by Leaf by Leaf

an imprint of Cinnamon Press

Meirion House

Tanygrisiau

Blaenau Ffestiniog

Gwynedd, LL41 3SU

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of Paula Read to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. Copyright © 2020 JPaula Read

Print ISBN: 978-1-78864-914-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78864-917-9

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Cinnamon Press.

Cover design by Adam Craig © Adam Craig.

Cinnamon Press is represented in the UK by Inpress Ltd and in Wales by the Books Council of Wales.

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to my cousin and his wife for inviting me into their lives and, of course, for making my research so very enjoyable. If I behaved intrusively, they never treated me with anything but courtesy and kindness. And thank you to my aunt who is the most entertaining of companions.

I also owe a great debt to my creative writing teachers at City, University of London, for their excellent guidance, and to my fellow students, whose critical judgement was always so useful.

Thank you to my editors at Cinnamon Press, for making this possible.

Homage to the memory of my mother and father for the gift of love.

And to my dear family, who patiently read and re-read the text, I owe everything. Thank you Hans, most thorough and incisive of editors, and Lily, who writes the best, most encouraging and generous notes, and Roland, master of technical matters and the laconic comment.

For la maison française

where we are happiest

PREFACE

Piedmont, Italy

The present

Sarah is combing Allegra in the courtyard. She is trying to untangle the fringe obscuring Allegra’sbright brown eyes, but the small dog is making it difficult, tossing her head from Sarah who pursues her with even more determination. They enjoy themselves.

I am sitting with Daisy, my aunt, at the stone mosaic table overlooking the garden, watching Sarah as she squats on her haunches to attend to the dog, her short blond hair tucked behind her ears. She is a slightly built woman in her early fifties and looks nowhere near her age—nor does Luke, her husband and my younger cousin, lean as a greyhound and almost as laid-back. Daisy is Luke’s mother, my late mother’s younger sister, a slim woman (she swims three times a week) and just eighty (much to her disgust, but then as the family always says, it’s better than the alternative). She adds dash to any outfit, even the creased linen shorts and white shirt she is wearing now.

It is early summer. Around Sarah and Allegra, several large earthenware pots are arranged in symmetry. Olive and fig trees grow in them, while in smaller pots, herbs are thriving. The basil is particularly vivid, bright green and each leaf perfect, not one bite mark left by some marauding predator. The house itself, Cascina Cannella, literally ‘Cinnamon Farmhouse,’ is named in memory of their last English cat, a charmingly plump tabby whose plumpness extended to the pads of his paws.

Sarah sets Allegra free and comes to the stone table to join us. There are still a couple of slices of breakfast cake in the bread basket, light sponge with apricots baked into the top, picked from the garden and nicely embedded in the cake.

Do we want more coffee? No, cake morsels are sufficient. We sit looking out over the small copse of fruit trees, a couple of hammocks slung between them. Rosemary, thyme and lavender scramble out from the rocks leading down to the trees. And then, over there, lies the top of the vineyard that stretches away down the hillside. In the autumn, they harvest the Moscato grapes and send them to the nearest winemaker in Asti. The wine from their vineyard is sweet and golden, a perfect pudding wine.

On a previous visit, over several evenings of chat and Dolcetto, a local red wine, we all decided it would be a great idea to tell Sarah and Luke’s story and that I should be the one to do it, given my background in journalism. All of us in the family are aware of how Sarah and Luke bought a dilapidated old farmhouse in rural Piedmont and subsequently made the momentous decision almost fifteen years ago to move to Italy permanently. The three sisters, my late mother Violet, her older sister May, and Daisy, were remarkably close, which meant they maintained a family cohesion. All the cousins knew what was going on in each other’s lives. The idea, however, of telling Sarah and Luke’s story to a wider audience than the immediate family developed slowly, like all the best wines. Piedmont is, after all, one of the most renowned wine-growing regions in Italy. It is the place where you find the great Barolos and Barbarescos, although my favourite is the light and tasty Dolcetto. Wine flows through this story, a happy emollient, in contrast to the scratchy underside of the tale, in which loneliness and fear play their part. It is a story of determination, obstinacy and joy—and of the unexpected.

Luke and Sarah are not their real names. We have decided to change the names of the characters in the book to protect their privacy. Not everything has been a walk in the sunshine in this mountain retreat. Much has happened that might have driven them away, especially Sarah who is not tied to an Italian heritage like Luke. His father, Gino Rinaldi, was born in England of Italian parents.

Their story seems almost as significant to me as my own, which in a sense, it is. A few years before Sarah and Luke looked for a house in Italy, my family had already bought what might loosely be termed a habitable house in rural France (it had running water, a working electric supply and a bidet but no toilet). It was 1992. This wasn’t so unusual. Many people in Britain were encouraged to widen their horizons and think about spending the money that might have been earmarked for holidays abroad for a more ambitious purpose—putting it towards buying their own property in Europe. Borders could be crossed easily. People were curious. There was a willingness to embrace the differences between us. Europe signified space and adventure and shared history, something to be part of, not as it does now in these distorted times, a place to escape from.

*

On Saturday 23 June 2018 I took part in a protest march in London calling for a people’s vote on the final deal agreed by the UK government on the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit. This was an anti-Brexit march, with participants drawn from all over the UK, all intent on demonstrating how much we wanted to stay in the EU and how frightened we were of leaving it. For many of us, this march was unbelievable. Unbelievable because we were still suffering from the shock of the vote to leave the EU on 23 June 2016. How could ‘the British people’ make such a suicidal decision? The vote was close, but the outcome held up as decisive, despite the many doubts about the organisation of the referendum or the number of people voting only representing a portion of the population. Not everyone was allowed a vote. Many British citizens living abroad in Europe, for example, could not vote, even though they were bound to be affected by the outcome.

Leaving the EU is a catastrophe for many and a step away from the vision of a safer Europe many have striven for after the world wars of the twentieth century. That vision was of a progressive union, built on the determination to avoid pitching ourselves back into that pit of political helplessness that engendered hatred and genocide. We hoped for the creation of great and democratic institutions where talking and compromise could take place, where pragmatism and fairness would win and dangerous ideologies would find no takers.

That vision was deluged in hateful rhetoric, the expression of ugly attitudes and the legitimation of lies. And here we are now, exposing our children and grandchildren to a future of division, more hatred, more lies.

When I started writing this book, the most significant decision for a generation in Britain had not yet been taken. This is a book about following a dream, one shared by many, but one that only a few manage to fulfil—the dream of making your life in another country of your choice, choosing how you live rather than accepting the place and culture you are born into. It was possible to make such a dream come true then because of another equally significant decision made by the British people in 1973.

In that year, the UK voted to join the EU, seeking not only a better economic future but a more secure one. That decision opened not only the physical borders to many other countries and cultures, it also opened the eyes, the minds and the hearts of British citizens many of whom travelled to Europe for the first time.

*

Piedmont

There is always a wind in the evening. In the summer, it is welcome, lifting heat from shoulders. You are sitting on the balcony furthest from the main house, looking across and around the valley. Below and over to the side, you can discern through the balcony railing the top branches of the trees in the shadowy hazelnut grove. Lights are distributed sparingly across the broad, dark slopes. People and animals are settling into the warm night.

The farm dogs have nothing to bark at. The occasional light moving in a series of S bends shows people are still on the move, negotiating the sinuous mountain roads. On a summer’s evening it’s easy to feel that there is no more beautiful place on earth.

But turn to the winter. Then there is no sitting on the balcony furthest from the main house. It’s too cold. The wind is bitter and sometimes the snow is in vast piles, weighing down the trees in the hazelnut grove that stands to the side of the house and around which curves the road.

Then, Cascina Cannella could be considered almost as some mediaeval fortification, some mountaintop fastness only reached by the steadfast and determined.

The building of life in Cascina Cannella is a fairy tale, but one in which the characters have had to draw on amounts of courage and self-reliance they might never have discovered in themselves if they had chosen a different life. The Hazelnut Grove is a story of moving to another country in search of a dream, but one that recognises what such an adventure demands. What if you sell all your worldly goods, abandon a home you have been building for years in the country of your birth, quit a job you enjoy, say goodbye to your family and friends, and give up entirely that certain place of safety, to take a chance on a dream that at times becomes an ordeal? This is what happened to Luke and Sarah.

They remain, still, blithely indifferent to the political machinations of either the country of their birth or the country that is their home. The politics of governments do not seem to reach them here on their hillside. They can gaze out over a timeless landscape and feel safe in their enchanted world. Will this last?

The late Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg wrote in 1951, a few years after the end of the Second World War, of how intimately connected we are and yet how we fail to communicate with one another. She had reason to be disquieted. Her husband Leone Ginzburg died in the prison of Regina Coeli in Rome after beatings and torture by the German police. The German forces were occupying the northern half of Italy, after the fall of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1943.

It seems that, in many European countries, the old post-Second World War certainties are crumbling. Trust in the great democratic institutions diminishes, fears about immigration rise and metastasize, truth is a distortion so that free speech becomes speech without responsibility. There is a swelling of ignorance and even pride in that ignorance. The expectation that things will continue as they are, that you can live your life undisturbed, may no longer be based on sound foundations, if it ever was.

Sarah and Luke are residents in an adopted land, voluntary exiles. They feel at home, but are they safe?

CHAPTER 1

The House on the Hill

Piedmont, Italy

May 1999

It was as if the occupants had just stepped out to run an errand or two and not returned. Inside the house, it was cooler, dark and smelled of mushrooms, mouse urine and cold stone… there was still a smell of smoke from a leaking chimney. Personal belongings were scattered. In the kitchen, a plastic water bottle hung from a hook by the small, stained sink, its porcelain surface crazed with a spider’s web of thin cracks. And by the sink lay a piece of dried soap, blackened and streaky, next to a limp towel. Family photographs with curling edges lay on surfaces. Old copies of Famiglia Cristiana (Christian Family) were piled in corners. There was an old sewing machine in a large wooden cupboard and a very small television perched on a tall narrow table.

They breathed damp, musty air. The soil floors were green with mould in places. Hazelnut shells were everywhere, discarded by the only occupants, the mice and rats.

Sarah knew it was the house for them…

*

The house did not seduce them at first. As they approached it via a dirt track, Sarah and Luke’s initial impressions were that the building was nothing special. As they turned the corner to its front, the house was obscured by vast spreading fig trees and fierce undergrowth. Together, they formed a huge, three-metre-high hedge. It might have been the setting for ‘Sleeping Beauty’, so tall and forbidding were the trees, so abundant the growth.

An apricot tree and two fig trees stood guard as Luke and Sarah fought their way through the vegetation to reach the house, which was there, waiting for them.

Shutters hung off their hinges; all the protective metal bars on the kitchen windows were bent, probably by thieves, according to their estate agent Signora Gallo.

They walked around the stone house, which was large, simply constructed and clad in a decaying buttermilk plaster. At the back and standing at a right angle to it was the hayloft. It was full of old wicker wine baskets and planks of wood and makeshift rabbit hutches.

Inside, downstairs, there were two large rooms on either side of the staircase. Upstairs, there were two large front bedrooms and an empty derelict space at the back, where a crude bathroom had been constructed. At least, this was what the house literature said. In reality, it was like a kind of pokey downstairs toilet that you might find in an English house, but located upstairs.

The plumbing was primitive—in fact, pretty much non-existent. The toilet waste simply flowed down a delightful orange plastic tube that descended to the cellar and then opened out onto the neighbour’s land.

The ceilings of each room were vaulted. Sarah could see that beneath the flaking paint and plaster, there would be brick vaults and wooden beams. She could almost picture how they would be if she could get her hands on them. The house was furnished but had been left empty for some eight years. You would not have guessed, though. Sarah had the sensation the owners might return at any time to collect their scattered belongings.

The surrounding air was warm from the May sunshine. Derelict though it was, the house seemed to welcome them; its smells and decay did not have the tang of the cold and the dank. Instead, it offered the lightly toasted flavours of musty rooms, long unused, and of other people’s possessions, their faint perfume released in the awakening softness of the air. The approaching summer held the promise of luxurious heat and light, which they craved after working through another overcast and rainy English winter.

Then they entered the main bedroom and pushed open the old wooden shutters. What they saw took their breath away—a timeless Italian mountainside stretching before them, covered in miniature vineyards, all bearing Moscato grapes. The vines were distributed in neat rows down the hillside. Blossoming fruit and nut trees were all around—apricot, Morello cherry, hazelnut—so much space, so much sky. Across the valley, Luke and Sarah gazed upon other vine-clad hillsides.

That day in May 1999 was warm and pleasant. There was a light breeze. This was it.

*

Summer always meant Italy. It was where Luke and Sarah came for their holidays, leaving England behind with its lowering skies and everyday pressures. And it was where they were happiest, whatever the region.

They used to fly to Italy, renting a car there to explore the different regions—roaming through Tuscany, Abruzzo, Apulia, Calabria—on and on, never able to decide on a favourite, each place exerting its own powerful attractions. This was the 1990s, at least two decades before the 2016 British referendum on leaving Europe, when belonging to the European Union seemed incontrovertible. European borders were open. People in Britain were unconstrained by fear of the unknown, of being unable to speak the language, of Europeans doing things differently. They were free to explore, learn and experience the unfamiliar. They were used to this freedom. They had grown up with it.

Despite the limitations of travelling on an aircraft, Luke and Sarah managed to return to England laden with bottles of wine, always Italian of course. They tested the limit as to how many bottles you can physically bring back, squashed into a suitcase, on a regular flight—apparently, thirty-eight.

The miracle of the channel tunnel, which opened in 1994, meant they could travel directly to the continent by car, avoiding the fuss of airports or bouncing across the ocean on the ferry, save time and money on car rentals and, importantly, stay in control of their own itinerary and destinations. This was much too great an opportunity to pass up. Luke was almost incapable of controlling the quantity of bottles of wine he felt compelled to buy. It was too easy to say, ‘Oh just one more, we can fit it in.’ But of course, one bottle then became an entire case.

On one occasion, there was just no room in the car for the wine. Even after packing the car with dirty washing to act as padding in every nook and cranny to optimise the amount of usable space, the problem was still unresolved. There were just too many bottles.

Eyes narrowed in silent concentration, Luke contemplated his wife, a small slender woman who didn’t take up much space, then contemplated the remainder of the wine that they had not managed to fit into the car. Ultimately, he came down in favour of Sarah’s company rather than using her spot to pack the rest of the wine, but it was close…

At one point, Luke had around 1,000 bottles stored in England, but was nevertheless single-minded in his pursuit of another wine to try, another wine to introduce to his willing tasters among family and friends. All of this was an indication that what began as one of Luke’s principal passions, would one day become a way of maintaining an independent life, working for himself as a freelance supplier of Italian wine to his discerning circle of friends. On those Italian holidays, Sarah was no slouch in stocking the car with Italian food either. Heavenly journeys, although at the time she was stuffed in like an inferior box of vegetables, the cases of wine taking up the most comfortable positions. But still, heavenly—the air in the car suffused with all those smells of the produce grown in earth warmed by an Italian sun.

So when the small ad appeared in the back of Decanter magazine on that day in April 1998, it could not have presented itself to more susceptible readers.

With no serious thoughts about buying a vineyard, or looking at Italian property, Luke nevertheless sent for more information. Seven days later, a large, brown envelope arrived. The company appeared professional and had included literature on the local area, a guide to buying houses in Italy, as well as information on the actual houses. Most were expensive, but three did not seem unreasonable. Luke and Sarah, with no intention of buying a house in Italy, studied them closely.

*

Think back to the late 1990s. The internet was not yet all pervasive. Sarah and Luke had made plans to go on holiday in May of 1999 to northern Tuscany. A detour of some three hours to Piedmont in Italy’s northwest was not such a big deal. A three-hour drive to see three houses. Still daydreaming, off they went. After all, they had no intention of buying a house, it was just one of those things you sometimes do on holiday (or this was what Sarah believed for the longest time; for Luke living in Italy was one of his life’s ambitions, but one he kept relatively quiet. He didn’t want to scare Sarah away from the idea). They did not do any research on what other house agencies might be around in Italy at the time—no internet, so it would not have been easy. They did not choose the area.

‘The house chose us.’

The viewings

They had arranged to meet the estate agent in a bar in a small town with several café/bars, a hardware shop, some food and general stores and restaurant or two, all surrounding a sandy market square, fringed on all four sides with hazel trees. Luke and Sarah were curious about what they would find. Would estate agents in Italy be honest in their descriptions of the properties? What did ‘habitable’ mean? Habitable for humans or mice? Running water? Would that be from a tap or down the walls?

The day arrived. It was after 11am and a pleasant 22 degrees Celsius. Sarah and Luke sat in the designated bar, drinking espresso. Cappuccino would have been out of order. No Italian would order it that late in the morning. Above all, they wanted to fit in, not stand out as English tourists. Sarah was surprised to find that she felt nervous and also oddly self-conscious. She looked down at her dress. It was a light blueish cotton and quite short. Too short? There was quite a lot of slender thigh sticking out from under the dress. She crossed her legs, tugged at her dress a bit, then took out a mirror from the small rucksack she had set down against the metal chair leg. She grimaced, ran her fingers through the short bob of blond hair.

Luke glanced at her, smiling.

‘You look great. Really tanned.’

‘Are you nervous?’

‘Well, I suppose so. Yes, a bit.’

‘You can do all the talking—I can’t even think of a single word in Italian at the moment.’ Sarah scowled in a mock self-deprecatory way.

‘Is that her?’

A small woman with reddish hair, pulled straight back into a tight chignon, was approaching. Was she the agent? She was looking around as if searching for someone. She looked straight through them, so Luke took the initiative, ‘Are you Signora Gallo?’ he asked in his imperfect Italian.

The woman was rather taken aback.

‘Yes,’ she replied, as she scrutinised them closely.

Luke and Sarah had thought they looked smart. Luke was dressed in shirt and trousers, rather than his usual loose t-shirt and shorts. Sarah’s dress was a nod towards the potential formality of the meeting. She preferred a t-shirt and shorts too.

It was obvious Signora Gallo was suspicious of them. Were they time wasters? In fact, later in the day, it became clear that this was what she had thought at first—that they were students with no intention of buying. At that point, Sarah and Luke were already thirty-five years old and Luke’s fine blond hair was starting to show signs of grey.

Still, they were not what Signora Gallo was expecting. The area of Piedmont was becoming a target area for foreigners seeking second homes, particularly the well-off northern Europeans.

Signora Gallo had arranged for them to see the three houses during the day, which didn’t seem a huge number, but the many winding roads and hills meant it would take nearly the whole day to see them all, even though they were all local.

Ghosts

The first house was situated up a dirt track next to some non-Italian inhabitants with a very noisy, menacing dog. Not a good start.

Sarah was spooked from the outset, her skin tingled with goose bumps. It felt like the original owners were still here, as if they were planning to share the house with the new inhabitants. This would have been difficult, of course, as they were dead.

Luke was not going to be put off. There is a steeliness inside the amiable persona he presents to the world. The two of them continued to wander around the house.

It was also filthy, which wasn’t going to endear it to Sarah. The rooms were covered in a slick of dirt, not simply the dust of time, but the ingrained dirt of things never having been cleaned thoroughly. Food was strewn around and there was mould in the kitchen sink.

Luke and Sarah both felt disappointed. But what had they expected? And anyway, they kept telling themselves, it’s not like we’re definitely going to do this. One thing this first visit did was lower their expectations drastically.

*

Signora Gallo drove them to the second house. As the road wound up a steep hill, Luke and Sarah kept expecting to come on the house at every turn. They were growing more and more tense. When these two get tense, rather than quarrel, they become very, very quiet. They had virtually stopped breathing as they neared the top of the hill, so fiercely were they holding their breath. And then, just when they figured they would never reach the top, there it was. Their house, perched above its vineyard, looking out over the hills, all of them covered in vineyards.

And, there and then, it felt as if they had driven home.

CHAPTER 1 bis (Chapter 1a)

When my husband and I set off back in 1992 to look for a house in France that a) we could afford and b) had a roof and walls, just like Sarah and Luke, we were also ridiculously disappointed at what we were first shown. We had been seduced into thinking that abandoned picturesque houses in rural areas were ripe to be purchased by keen but not rich outsiders. We left the two children, just two and four years old, with my parents, who were willing babysitters, in a highly unsuitable cottage with a slippery spiral staircase and everything within reach of inquisitive fingers. And we left the two dogs in familiar kennels, but still howling, as we drove off to the ferry port to spend five days exploring the bargains of Normandy.

One of the first houses we were shown by our estate agent Monsieur Duval, a suave, portly gentleman with an immaculately pointed beard, looked like an air raid shelter. It was situated by the side of a country road, built from some mix of breeze block and stone, and rendered in a grey glaze of concrete. Inside, it was painted a mournful green. I felt like I was in an empty swimming pool with mould on the walls. It was a nightmare. Really? This was what was on offer for our budget? Let’s just pack and go home. We were depressed.

But then Monsieur D mentioned the Normandy beaches. We perked up. Could we afford a house near the beach? Indeed we could. The second house we were shown was not so much near the beach, as an integral part of the beach. The sand had backed up onto the rear wall of the house so that when you went in via the front door, you were overwhelmed by the darkness. Where you might have expected light, there was only shade. All the windows at the back of the house were blocked with sand piles. It was as if a sand storm in some Arabian desert had swept through and half buried the building. This was a house you would have to excavate before you could enter it.

I was familiar, therefore, with that sinking feeling when it becomes clear that what you might have fantasised about, almost despite yourself, may be unavailable.

And yet, miraculously, our house found us, just as their hidden house found Sarah and Luke. I will never forget the moment in November 1992 when we drove up the narrow farm lane and saw the French house, our house, alone on a patch of wildly grassy land, its honey-grey stone walls bathed in the mist of a Norman morning.

CHAPTER 2

A vineyard of our own

The house hidden behind the trees had stolen their hearts. Luke and Sarah could think of nothing for the rest of the holiday. Back in England, they made the decision to buy it. Only one viewing, no survey. Were they mad? Chasing a dream? Yes and yes. But, as Sarah says, ‘it felt right.’

It wasn’t a secret to anyone who knew Luke Rinaldi that his dream was to live in Italy. One of the reasons is evident in his name. He grew up with a father, Gino Rinaldi, who was born in England but whose roots were Italian and who looked Italian and who behaved like a lot of English people’s idea of an Italian. He was a small man with a quiff of dark hair, expressive hands and an eye for women. He spoke English as if it ought to be Italian. He was not what you usually found in a Lancashire seaside town in the mid twentieth century.

Gino didn’t grow up in northern England. Luke never knew his paternal grandmother, the Italian woman who died giving birth to the three-pound (1.36 kg) baby Gino—and to a twin sister, who weighed five pounds (2.27 kg) but who did not survive. Luke’s mother Daisy (my aunt) recounts how the family transported the surviving boy from the north to the south of England to be brought up by his paternal aunt who had married an Englishman and who now lived in the south (‘they took him on a train, all the while rubbing him in cod liver oil.’). This was where the handsome young Gino was raised and where he eventually met and married the exceptionally pretty Daisy, with her short curly hair and ‘the best pair of legs in the county.’ They were each barely twenty years old.

Their honeymoon was in Tuscany, the birthplace of Gino’s dead mother, before Tuscany became dismissive shorthand for the champagne socialists of the English middle classes, or admiring shorthand for the beauty of Italy, depending on your taste. This was the 1960s. Daisy had never been abroad before (‘people didn’t did they?’), nor had she drunk wine. On their honeymoon, they drank Orvieto, a pale yellow wine tasting of citrus fruits and apples, which Daisy never drinks these days without mentioning the honeymoon connection.

Gino then plucked Daisy from her southern roots and they moved from south to north to join the wider family’s business. The north seemed to Daisy’s family an immense distance. It might as well have been Tuscany in their eyes.

Daisy always maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Italian side of the family. She remembers stepping out of line a couple of times (she never learned not to), expressing views the family found unacceptable. ‘Don’t ever, ever go against the family,’ she was warned, a fist in her face or a pointed finger at her nose, depending on the accuser.

Nevertheless, Daisy couldn’t help but be entranced by aspects of Gino’s background. It was so eventful and exotic, compared with her sedate upbringing in the dour post-war years in southern England. Luke’s childhood was steeped in things Italian because of Gino. This Italian connection, the apparent romance of Italy, seen from a great distance and experienced only through holidays and the softened and somewhat rose-tinted views of Italian relatives long settled in England, suffused the lives of Luke and his older brother and sister. Their father’s story, with its grief-stricken beginning, coloured their lives. Italian-American crooners Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra provided the soundtrack they heard around the house as they were growing up. The family all agreed that Gino looked like Tony Bennett, with his distinctive nose and wolfish smile. Italy represented a beautiful ideal, something different from the everyday, a place of dreams.

Luke was particularly susceptible to the dream. He was drawn to the history of the land of his father’s ancestors and tells the stories told to him of the partisans trudging through mountains, their broken feet clad only in cardboard. He felt most keenly the prejudice his father suffered as a man of Italian ancestry living in post-Second World War Britain (‘you fucking wop’ was a common epithet). For most of his adult life he had fantasised about living in Italy, preparing for such a possibility from an early age, choosing to learn Italian at school, for example, not something your average fifteen-year-old boy in England does.

His was a disrupted life at that point. His parents were divorcing (that eye for the women) and decided to send him, the baby of the family, to boarding school in an effort to protect him from the fallout. He lived in the school during the week, apart from the rest of the family, only coming home on weekends. Maybe the fact that, in effect, he left home earlier than he might have expected gave him the courage to pursue the Italian dream more doggedly.

He made at least three attempts to achieve this, even before he met Sarah.

In one of these attempts, Luke had been lured to Sicily, ostensibly to learn the wine trade. He was working for a pet food producing company, just twenty-three years old, and dreaming more about wine than dog biscuits.

‘I left my job after one and a half years because I got an offer from a guy when I went on a trip to Sicily, to come and run a wine business for him in northeast Italy, I thought it was my big chance. Turned out I was wrong…’

‘What came of that?’ I ask.

‘Nothing. What came of that was experience of life.’ Luke returned to the UK after just four weeks.

So what went wrong?

‘It was January, it was freezing cold, it was snowing and when I got there, I was expecting him to take me to a completed winery, where I would be learning about the wine, learning about the business.’ Luke could see it all—he would become the manager, eventually, be responsible for the winery and at such a young age too.

But when they arrived at the… winery, it turned out to be a ruin. Work was supposed to be starting on it that week. The Sicilian expected Luke to get stuck in and do everything he said. He wasn’t significantly older than Luke, but he ordered him around as if he were a particularly aggressive paterfamilias.

‘That meant getting the witch’s broom and cleaning all the cobwebs off the roof—I don’t know why I was doing that, because the building all had to come down anyway.’

Three things stick in Luke’s mind from that time. He and the Sicilian were both staying in the same hotel. Luke’s Italian was still quite basic. They communicated tortuously—Luke struggling to understand, the Sicilian making no allowances for his limited language, speaking always at a rapid-fire pace. He asked Luke if they made wine in England. The perfect question because Luke’s leaving present when he quit his job at the food company was the World Atlas of Wine.

‘I’d been reading it because I thought it might be useful for what I was about to do.’ Luke has a rueful expression. ‘Winemaking in England was just starting in those days. So I said there’s very little, but yes there are vineyards in England, they’re making sparkling wines in the south of England and Kent. And he replied: “No they’re not.” I said: “Yes they are.” He said: “No they’re not. You can’t believe everything you read in books.” I thought, hang on, I’ve just come out of university, I thought that was what life was all about.’

The second thing Luke remembers is thinking ahead and wondering if he could get down to Sicily, to the winery there that was already up and running.

‘Why don’t I go and learn things in Sicily?’ he asked the Sicilian.

‘You’ve got things to learn here.’

So that didn’t work.

And the third thing is the car episode. The Sicilian had a Citroen 2CV ‘a bit like Mum’s.’ We grin, thinking of Daisy’s beloved yellow Citroen with the brown stripe

‘It was freezing cold—because it does get very cold in the northeast—and his car wouldn’t start. He got out, looked under the bonnet, couldn’t do anything about it, so he shouted at me: “Come and watch me, watch me and learn how to do it, don’t just sit there, watch me and learn what to do.”’

Luke is imitating the Godfather here.

‘I thought that’s it, finito. So over dinner one night, I told him. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not going through with this, I’ve decided to go back home.” He blanked me, the whole time. From that moment on, he never said another word to me.

‘When he took me to the station to get the train, I thought: he hasn’t given me my money yet, he hasn’t given me any money; I need that money to get home. I asked him for it: “Can I have my money please.” So he got out his money, started counting it and then just threw it at me. And that was it, ciao, ciao.’

The Sicilian had transformed from paterfamilias to sulky teenager. This did not deter Luke from his pursuit of the Italian dream. Of course it didn’t. Luke had grown up believing in the dream of Italy; he had been nourished on stories of the courage and resilience of Italians. He had spent childhood holidays in one or other sun-dappled Italian village. He could not forget the scents of the rosemary, the thyme, the oregano growing in the hot yellow earth. The Sicilian drama just made him more determined. It did not define, nor contain, Luke’s version of Italy

*

In many ways, it is easy to understand how Luke came to the conclusion that Italy could become his permanent home. How, then, did Sarah get drawn into this romance? For Sarah, the move was a much greater leap into the dark. She had a lot more to lose. And as it turned out, she had a lot more to endure.

For Sarah, there was much to fear.