Shelter Page 9

  ‘Lily-livered disgrace.’ Fredo’s breath was so close now that it was forcing the words right down Seppe’s ear canal, their poison dripping into his very core. He cringed, and Fredo hissed in satisfaction.

  Don’t reply. Don’t give him the pleasure.

  ‘What’s the matter, mummy’s boy? Can’t speak now, is that it? I’ve been hearing things from home about your sister, you know. If I thought you were despicable before that’s nothing on what I think now. You deserve everything that’s coming to you.’

  Seppe whirled round, fists raised. Fredo couldn’t – mustn’t – bring Alessa into this. The ever-present guilt beat his pulse faster, and his blood surged. ‘You leave my sister out of it!’

  Fredo laughed and idly sidestepped a jab. ‘Ah, so it’s not just a Livorno rumour. Think you’re so clever, not writing home, don’t you?’

  Cleverer than you, you piece of shit. I saw you, tongue sticking out, frowning over every word.

  ‘If you believe that’ll keep you safe from Papa, you’ve got another think coming. No chance; no chance at all. I told my family you and I had been reunited here, two Livorno boys back together again to represent our esteemed city. I took extra care to express my great sorrow that you’re a collaborator for the English now. My mother will be delighted to inform your father you’re safe – what an honour, to take news to the Major! The Major has friends everywhere. There will be only too many campmates willing to make life that little bit harder for the disgraceful son of a northern dignitary, a founding member of the fascio. All your father has to do is send instructions.’

  Fredo had got word to the Major? Seppe’s fist shook; he jammed it into his pocket, feeling for his whittling knife. Fredo was right. There would be innumerable devotees of his father and his father’s more powerful cronies. Would his father send word to Fredo and the like? Would he even bother? The Major’s concerns were normally much more immediate. But Fredo was clearly determined not to let it lie, and that was enough.

  Seppe turned and ran. He wove between the rows of latrines and hit the main passage between the accommodation blocks. His legs were pumping now, his heart dictating the pace. Running away again, are you? His father’s voice, taunting. And now the Major knew how to reach him, after months of ignorance.

  The boundary fence stopped his flight. ‘Che cazzo è!’ Seppe bent double, panting, looked through the chain-link at the diamonds of the world beyond. How could he get out there? If he was out there, beyond Campo 61, he’d be safe, away from Fredo. The camp wasn’t benign any more.

  Fredo hadn’t followed him. He hooked his fingers on to the wire and looked out. The spring drizzle caressed his face. The camp sat at the top of a hill, Wynols Hill, the guards called it. Those bushes a few feet from here must be marking a perimeter of some sort, though they were pretty straggly. There were a few houses beyond the hedge, away across the fields, black eyes staring in at them over here on the camp, the shrieks of children audible from time to time when the wind blew their merriment up towards them. Sometimes, before curfew, some of the older, more embittered captives would come here and jeer at the distant houses as if this lack of liberty were their fault.

  Down there alongside the houses must be the road they’d come in on. The trucks weren’t transporting new arrivals now as much as they were taking the campmates to their forest work placements. The trucks arrived back as he finished in the carpentry shop each day, the men jostling to wash before the meagre evening meal was doled out.

  Off to the left lay the reason Campo 61 had been built here: the expanse of dense forest. It seemed like something out of those fairy tales Alessa had loved as a kid. No, don’t think of Alessa now. The woods stretched as far as he could see, their verdant promise darkening as the light was lost to the density. He needed to get out there, in the forest. If he stayed up here with Fredo he might lose control and become his father. At the core of the shame and self-doubt that he whittled and smoothed to forget, was this most humiliating fear of all.

  The guard on the gate of Campo 61 was asleep, his snores rumbling below the birdsong. Seppe tiptoed towards him, examined the lock. It would be easy enough to eke in the blade of his whittling knife and persuade the padlock open, but why would he? He wasn’t escaping, not really. There was nowhere he could go. But the promise of a few hours in the forest was intoxicating. Could he get away with it?

  Seppe rattled the lock, jangled it again until its clinks punctuated the guard’s sleep; his head jolted forwards, cap in danger of tilting off.

  ‘Where do you think you’re off to?’

  Seppe tilted his head in the direction of the forest. ‘To the trees. To work.’

  ‘Miss the truck, did you? Fair play to you for walking down there; there’s plenty who wouldn’t.’ He unlocked the gate, waved Seppe through, shivered back down into his seat, chasing sleep.

  The track and spiky emerald hedgerows behind the camp quickly gave way to trees. They rose in their hundreds, oak and beech, ash and yew, careless and lurching, twisting and turning him on the path. The walk wasn’t a problem, not after all those miles in the desert, sand scissoring between his toes while the pack on his back sweated into him. Seppe delved in his pocket for the whittling knife and pulled out the little piece of wood that slowly, surely, was becoming a tiny owl like the one that perched on the fence of Campo 61 at night. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He was outside. He strode more upright. So this is what freedom might feel like.

  Eleven

  ‘I’M NOT GOING, AND I’m not doing poxy brush clearing, and that’s THAT!’ The noise exploded out through the gap in the door of the hut into the woods and Seppe grabbed his hand back.

  ‘I don’t care if the others are all off. What’s that got to do with it? It’s only me I’m talking about, not the whole lot of us. You have to let me stay and help with the felling.’

  Seppe pivoted so that he was beside the hinge of the door, peered through the gap at the commotion. The words weren’t being spoken so much as fired and he understood them about as little as he had the bullets he’d faced in the desert, but their intent was equally clear. How many people were in there? He squinted. Only the two of them, by the looks of things. The way the girl was ranting, he’d expected to see a squadron’s worth of men lined up. She was getting ready to go again, her arms bent like a boxer’s. She was quite stocky, at least in that great big overcoat, and her face was suffused by a frown.

  He had happened upon the hut almost by accident after leaving the camp this morning, just needing to get out. As he made his way into the forest, leaves whispered above Seppe’s head, crackled beneath his boots, the ground crunching despite this constant light rain. The world was alive out here, the scent of bud and blossom in every breath a stark contrast to the thud of bombs into sandbanks, or worse, the iron tang of blood and the screams when a shell hit a target. This was a place where you could hide, where you could start again. Hypothetically, this would be a place where he could also run, but for what purpose? No English town would harbour a foreign soldier in their midst, and he’d end up back in the Regio Esercito facing who knew what.

  A thought germinated. Could he find work out here? The camp trucks discharged dozens of Italians every day to do the work of those British men away fighting. What a stupid, stupid world they all lived in, that sent men away from this tranquil place to die, only to replace them with their apparent enemies. Not for the first time, Seppe frowned at the senselessness of it all.

  He stepped gently onto and over a fallen branch, unsure if it would take his weight. If his father could see him now, on his way to work for the enemy, there would be blows, and rows.

  But his father seemed increasingly far away the further into the forest he walked. The trees whispered agreement, branches shifting. His shoulders relaxed, the music bubbled up inside him; he started to hum.

  He clambered onto a moss-covered tree stump and stared downhill. Below him in a clearing was what looked like a worksite. An enormous p
ile of tree trunks was chained together. Two women wearing berets with headscarves underneath them squatted beside a trunk on the ground, beside the pile. They might know who was in charge of allocating the jobs. He scrambled down the bank into the clearing.

  ‘Where did you spring from?’ The woman at the near side of the trunk dropped her chain and strode forward, smiling. She was young, barely eighteen or nineteen. He pulled off his cap, welcoming the warmth through his fingers.

  ‘I am looking for …’ Come on. What was the English for what he was looking for? He pointed at the trunk on the ground, then spotted the badge on her beret. A fir tree at its centre glinted in low rays.

  ‘I work with wood.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ The girl turned back to her partner, uninterested and seemingly too distracted to pick up on his foreignness. ‘Let’s try this again, shall we?’

  Seppe skirted the edge of the clearing. A tin cup lay haphazardly on the floor beside a sawn-off oak stump. He righted it and placed it on the stump where its owner would more likely see it.

  Across the clearing was a wooden shack. It would be interesting to see how it was put together. Was it someone’s home? He moved cautiously towards it. It looked like it might fall over in a strong breeze.

  The door was slightly ajar. It had been so long since he’d been inside a dwelling that wasn’t an army barracks or a prison camp that the urge to look inside surprised him with its intensity. He glanced around but the girls were busy trying to move their errant tree trunk onto the pile.

  Seppe put his hand to the door. It was damp, the grain saturated and bulging. Some kind of pine, not one he’d ever worked with in Livorno. It was splintery in this damp, but it didn’t look like it had warped.

  ‘I’m telling you, I don’t want to go to Scotland. I’m staying put here, and I want proper work!’ What was happening in Scotland? He couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, only a muttering that rose and fell like tragedy. The girl was in the same uniform as the ones dancing the trunk between the chains, but he couldn’t tell if she’d got a fir tree on her hat, too, because it lay upside down beside her feet. Her long fair hair flew as she gesticulated. You didn’t need much English to tell she wasn’t winning the battle, but she wasn’t giving up.

  ‘Tell me why I can’t get the hardwoods down. Go on. I know I’m a girl – do you think I don’t? And how has that ever stopped me doing twice the job of your men? You need me for as long as this war’s on, not that any of you yokels have noticed the war. You don’t care about clothing, so the coupons don’t bother you, and the only time the stupid paper mentions it is if a pig’s gone missing and someone’s agitating about what the War Ag will make of it. People are dying, you know. Real people.’

  The girl raised her fists again and Seppe recoiled.

  There was a shuffling from within. Were they coming out? The last thing Seppe wanted was to be caught spying. But he didn’t dare move; they’d hear him.

  He shuddered at the shrieking hinges, but the pair inside seemed too deep in their row to notice. The hut seemed even smaller from within, though maybe that had to do with the girl, who filled it with her wayward hair and stabbing arms. She appeared to be a little older than the others out in the yard. The man – what had the girl called him? Frank? – looked a good decade or two older than Seppe, his brown hair darker than the girl’s but not as black as Seppe’s own. He was leaning on the desk, looked worn out from the intensity of the girl’s argument.

  The air was thick with tobacco, a denser scent than that at the camp, though. It tickled down into his throat and he coughed.

  ‘What the hell?’

  If only he could retract the cough. But he couldn’t, of course he couldn’t; and now they were both staring at him. Frank put both palms flat on the table and pushed up, limping over to Seppe at the door.

  ‘Who do you be and what do you be after, now?’ His voice was guttural, seemed to fit the forest more than it fitted this slight, wiry man. What had he said, exactly?

  ‘I am Giuseppe – Seppe. I am Italian.’

  The girl laughed, a short bark. ‘Here’s the enemy, wandering around free as a bird and nobody down here seems to care. We’ll all end up murdered in our beds at this rate.’

  Frank glared across at the girl. ‘That’s enough from you, Constance Granger. Might seem odd to you with your city ways, but we have a need of them POWs down here, what with the planting and the felling and the rest of it. It wouldn’t be enough to just have you twittering girls.’ His words lilted and undulated like the leaves swaying in the breeze. Just when Seppe thought he had the shape of a sentence, it tipped away from him again.

  ‘What do you want, boy?’

  Seppe swallowed, lifted his head and forced himself to look Frank in the eye. ‘I want to work with trees.’ He sounded stupid, so stupid. His fingers went again to the whittling knife, stroked its blade. It was hot in here – was that embarrassment? No, over there, behind the girl, something was glowing. Must be a stove.

  The girl snorted. ‘Join the queue. Frank’s not letting nobody except the inbreds do the interesting work on his damn trees.’ She glared at the foreman, stuffed her hands in her pockets. Seppe watched Frank closely. What was he going to do? If his father had been cheeked like that, the belt or pan would come out, the one with the lead bottom to it. But Frank had sat back down, was shaking his head. He didn’t look like he was about to attack.

  ‘You do know as well as I do, girl. You were sent down here for lumberjill training, not to stay for good; that’s how it works. Be grateful I’ve kept you on at all.’

  ‘But it’s cockeyed, Frank, you know that! You don’t have to start all over again every time; you should let me out there properly. I can get the oaks down, I bet I can. I’m flying through those softwoods and it can’t be much harder.’ The words danced past Seppe without meaning anything much. They had the rhythm of poetry but could have been another manifesto.

  Frank sighed. ‘Beats me why you didn’t want to leave with the others, to be honest.’

  It was as if he’d snuffed her out. The girl’s arms dropped and she slumped. Seppe’s own heart was beating faster, the anxiety rising for reasons he didn’t understand.

  When she spoke again, it was somebody else’s voice, closed and quiet.

  ‘I just didn’t want to, all right? I came here, and I’m staying put here, and that’s that. And you know I can do the job, Frank, you had me showing those rookies from Hull how to place the wedge earlier this week. Let me stay.’

  ‘All my men work in pairs, you know that, and there’s not a one of them as would step down to let a wench take their place. Aye, you’re not bad for a girl, but that’s not the same as doing the job day in, day out, like them who were born here. I’ll give you that the blokes we’ve got left might be a bit old and creaky, but the forest’s in ’em, ent nothing they need to be taught. Even if you know how to fell the stands, you couldn’t tell your oak from your spruce without pointers, I saw you.’

  ‘But I can – I know trees.’ Need propelled the words from Seppe. ‘I work with wood. Look.’ He offered up the whittling knife and the half-carved owl like a prayer. The girl and Frank stared at him as if he might be insane, or dangerous, or both.

  Frank turned away first, dismissive. ‘Making trinkets is nothing like getting trees down, lad.’ No, no, Seppe understood that, but how to explain it? He ran a finger around his collar, shifted his feet.

  ‘I not sure … yet … how is best way to cut the tree. But I know which is oak, which is spruce. On my way to you, I see beech and yew and oak and ash. I can show you, now, if you like?’ What was he doing? There would be no point entering into a tree-spotting competition with this man who was created from the bark itself.

  ‘Aye, well it’s easy enough to tell ’em apart, don’t need a Johnny Foreigner like you showing off.’

  ‘But knowing the trees, it will help with the, the –’ Seppe looked down again at the paperwork on the table, all stamp
ed with the British crest. The word he needed was there in big letters underneath the coat of arms, and it was the same as the Italian for once ‘– the quotas. If I am knowing which tree to come down, then I can help to get quotas on time?’

  ‘Them quotas are my business and mine alone, and I’ll thank you not to go snooping at every blessed thing you see in here.’ But Frank’s voice slowed as the thought came in to land. ‘What are you doing here in the first place, eh?’

  ‘We are captured and kept in Africa, then –’

  ‘No, not that. Why haven’t you already been assigned a job?’ The foreman’s face darkened. ‘Not one of them blackshirt fascists, are you? Thought they weren’t allowed to leave the camp.’

  Seppe felt sick at the idea and his answer came out more vehemently than he’d intended. ‘No. I am not them. I have job that keeps me in and I want to be out. I am carpenter for camp. Make things.’

  Seppe waited. Even the girl had realised it was best to be quiet now.

  Frank shook his head again and the room became smaller, hotter. ‘Sorry, lad, I can’t risk it. Too many of you Italians we’ve had out here, friendly enough, but more shirkers than workers. This ent just a place of work; you lads don’t seem to be able to understand that. This is my home, and with so many of our kind gone to fight this faraway war –’ Connie shot him a look and he held her off with a raised hand ‘– it’s up to me to make sure our forest stays as intact as it can be despite them Home Timber Production demands. You lot treating it like a holiday camp don’t help me one little bit.’

  ‘But I …’ Seppe’s stomach dropped.

  Frank shuffled the papers on his desk. The little finger on his left hand was missing, a scar barely visible. One of his feet stuck out at an angle from the desk; his boot was mosaicked with wood chippings.

  ‘I am not them.’ It was all there, pent up behind the words. Frank and the girl stared.

  ‘Aren’t you now?’ The foreman looked like he might almost smile. ‘And none so fond of them, neither, by the sounds of things.’