A Small Place in Italy, Eric Newby
Eric Newby's books were one of my favorite discoveries in 2012 (and from my own TBR shelves to boot). That year I read several accounts of his adventures, usually with his wife and long-suffering travel partner Wanda. And then last year I completely neglected them, though I still had some of his books unread. I was hunting around the TBR shelves the other day, unable at first to settle on anything, when I chose this one pretty much at random. I'm glad I did, it did felt like meeting old friends again.
The opening chapter gives a quick overview of Eric Newby's experiences in Italy in World War II, where he was first a prisoner of war and then, after escaping, on the run for four months (a story told in greater detail in his book Love and War in the Apennines). His future wife Wanda was among those who helped him, as did the country people in the hills of the Parma region. He and Wanda returned often to Italy, to visit his rescuers as well as her family in Slovenia (in a region annexed to Italy in the early 20th century). They had always hoped to buy a house in Italy. In 1967, they finally decided to do it, spurred in part by rising real estate prices. They wanted to live in the north, along the Apennines, and the house they finally found was in northern Tuscany, near the Ligurian Coast (the handy map in the front of this book was helpful and instructive). At the time, Newby was the travel editor of the Observer, so they could only visit during his holidays, generally in the spring and autumn.
Writing almost thirty years later, in 1994, Newby details the complicated process of buying a small two-story farmhouse, I Castagni (The Chestnuts), near a small village called Fosdinovo. The house needed major repairs and upgrades, including adding a bathroom. I thought that this was going to be the story of the house, and in fact I kept thinking that the title was "A Small House in Italy." Though Newby devotes several chapters to the work done on the house, he is as always more interested in people, starting with their new neighbors, and in exploring their corner of Italy. The Newbys are the first foreigners to settle in the area (Wanda likes to remind people that she grew up in Italy), and they are warmly welcomed. They go everywhere they are invited, from the first day. Arriving on Good Friday, they join the traditional procession through the village streets, ending with services in the parish church. Each year they also join neighbors in the vendemmia, the harvesting of grapes for wine, in days of hard work in the autumn heat.
Newby makes frequent references to his war-time adventures, comparing and contrasting the lives of the local residents with what he experienced living among them in 1943-1944. He finds some surprising overlaps, but over the twenty-five years that the Newbys own their house, they see more and more changes in the traditional ways. The country-side becomes increasingly urbanized, with people moving out from the cities and with more outsiders like the Newbys themselves setting in Italy.
As usual Newby describes the food of the region in some detail. He seems to have thought his readers would be unfamiliar with the basic dishes (though he cites Elizabeth David's Italian Food, published in 1963). He takes care to explain what pesto is, as well as bruschetta and pecorino cheese (reading this did make me hungry). He also discourses at some length on mushrooms, which grow wild in the forests around the area, the collecting of them and the cooking of them. Local residents had to move quickly to stay ahead of professional funghi seekers from the cities, who often raided the best spots.
This was a quieter book than some of his others that I have read, though it does include an account of a tramp along the crinale, the main ridge of the Apennines, which sounded absolutely miserable (cold buffeting winds and rain blowing along alpine heights). I enjoyed learning about the region as well as the neighborhood of I Castagni, and watching Eric and Wanda Newby find their place in it. Like them, I was sorry to say good-bye, when they finally decided they had to sell the house. I hope the people who live there now enjoy it as much as the Newbys did.
Showing posts with label Eric Newby. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eric Newby. Show all posts
Monday, March 24, 2014
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Growing up in Fascist Italy
Peace and War, Wanda Newby
This is the year that I discovered Eric Newby on my own TBR shelves, and so far I've read six of his memoirs and travel books. In five of the six, his wife Wanda joined him in the adventures that he chronicles. In the first I read, Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric briefly told the story of how they met, while he was a prisoner of war in Italy during the Second World War, which of course was the subject of another of his books, Love and War in the Apennines. I read a great review of this (under its more evocative British title) over on Leaves & Pages, which is also where I learned that Wanda Newby had written her own account of those years. As soon as I read that, I immediately started looking for a copy.
Her book, subtitled "Growing Up in Fascist Italy," is divided into four sections. The first, "My Country and My People," covers the first ten years of her life. Wanda Skof was born in 1922, in an area of Slovenia called the Kras, which had been annexed to Italy at the end of the First World War. She was the youngest of eleven children born to her parents, with her brother the only two to survive infancy. Both her parents were Slovenian, with deep roots in the Kras, and Wanda grew up among its fields and mountains. She describes the villages, the people, their way of life, with affection and an eye for detail. This is an area of the world I know very little about, and I found this section really interesting.
The people of the Kras felt themselves removed from the Italy to which they technically belonged. Those who spoke Italian at all spoke a local dialect. Benito Mussolini, who had risen to power with his Fascist party, suspecting the Slovenes in northeast Italy of disloyalty, determined to keep them under tight control. As the Fascist presence in the area grew, Wanda's brother Slavko, eleven years her senior, joined many other Slovenes emigrating to Argentina. Her father, a schoolmaster, was considered a potential subversive who might incite his students to revolt against the Fascists. The government began a program of transferring teachers, sending Slovenes south to Italy proper, and bringing in properly-indoctrinated Italians into Slovenian schools. Two years after her brother's departure, when Wanda was ten, her parents learned that they were being sent to a village called Fontanellato near Parma, in the central plains. Like many of the transplanted families they found some difficulty in adjusting to a new community, a new way of life, and a new language. For Wanda's family, their Catholicism gave them one point of continuity in the town, particularly for her mother, who was slower to learn Italian. All three of the family already spoke German, which would soon prove an advantage.
The second section of the book, "First Steps in Italy," covers the family's move and explores their new community. Here again Wanda describes their neighbors and the life of the community. She made friends among the local children, and later her fellow students at the high school in Parma, a city she came to love. She was still in school when Mussolini began to prepare the country for war in Africa. Her father strongly opposed war and Fascism, and much of the surrounding country was Communist in sympathy (a unique Italian version of Communism). In the third section, "Rumours of War," Wanda describes the lead-up to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the events that followed, which seemed quite remote to the people of Fontanellato. Despite rationing and other restrictions, war remained remote until the first troops from the area were drafted and sent to Russia in 1941; most disappeared without a trace, never to return.
There was great excitement in the village in 1943, when residents learned that a POW camp would be built there. Wanda and the other young women often found excuses to walk or ride by, exchanging smiles and waves with the hundreds of young British prisoners. The camp had been open only a few months when the news came that Italy, following the Allied invasions in the south, had asked for an armistice. Before the Nazis moved in to re-establish Fascist control, the commandant of the camp allowed all of the POWs to leave. Some would head south, hoping to reach the Allied force; some north, heading for Switzerland. Eric Newby, with a newly broken ankle, was unable to travel. With the village doctor, Wanda and her father risked their lives to help him evade the authorities. In the process, as he and Wanda got to know each other, they fell in love. The last section of Wanda's book parallels his, though it continues her story after he was recaptured and sent north. The book ends with their reunion and marriage in April of 1946.
Though Wanda Newby's writing does not have the same verve as her husband's, I enjoyed this book. It was interesting to see the events of Love and War in the Apennines from her point of view, and to learn more about the local people's efforts to help the escaped prisoners and to resist the Fascists, German and Italian alike. In addition to introducing me to the Kras and its Slovenian people, it is also the first memoir I have read of life in Italy before, during and immediately after World War II. It is of course one person's account, from the unique perspective of an individual "Slovenian by birth, Italian by education and English by adoption" (as the author's note states). It is also written from the perspective of a young girl in a country village, and it does not discuss the political or military situation in great detail. And then it ends too soon for me. As I've mentioned before, I would love to read Wanda's account of her experiences as a war bride in England. We get only a few glimpses in Eric's book covering those years, Something Wholesale.
This is the year that I discovered Eric Newby on my own TBR shelves, and so far I've read six of his memoirs and travel books. In five of the six, his wife Wanda joined him in the adventures that he chronicles. In the first I read, Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric briefly told the story of how they met, while he was a prisoner of war in Italy during the Second World War, which of course was the subject of another of his books, Love and War in the Apennines. I read a great review of this (under its more evocative British title) over on Leaves & Pages, which is also where I learned that Wanda Newby had written her own account of those years. As soon as I read that, I immediately started looking for a copy.
Her book, subtitled "Growing Up in Fascist Italy," is divided into four sections. The first, "My Country and My People," covers the first ten years of her life. Wanda Skof was born in 1922, in an area of Slovenia called the Kras, which had been annexed to Italy at the end of the First World War. She was the youngest of eleven children born to her parents, with her brother the only two to survive infancy. Both her parents were Slovenian, with deep roots in the Kras, and Wanda grew up among its fields and mountains. She describes the villages, the people, their way of life, with affection and an eye for detail. This is an area of the world I know very little about, and I found this section really interesting.
The people of the Kras felt themselves removed from the Italy to which they technically belonged. Those who spoke Italian at all spoke a local dialect. Benito Mussolini, who had risen to power with his Fascist party, suspecting the Slovenes in northeast Italy of disloyalty, determined to keep them under tight control. As the Fascist presence in the area grew, Wanda's brother Slavko, eleven years her senior, joined many other Slovenes emigrating to Argentina. Her father, a schoolmaster, was considered a potential subversive who might incite his students to revolt against the Fascists. The government began a program of transferring teachers, sending Slovenes south to Italy proper, and bringing in properly-indoctrinated Italians into Slovenian schools. Two years after her brother's departure, when Wanda was ten, her parents learned that they were being sent to a village called Fontanellato near Parma, in the central plains. Like many of the transplanted families they found some difficulty in adjusting to a new community, a new way of life, and a new language. For Wanda's family, their Catholicism gave them one point of continuity in the town, particularly for her mother, who was slower to learn Italian. All three of the family already spoke German, which would soon prove an advantage.
The second section of the book, "First Steps in Italy," covers the family's move and explores their new community. Here again Wanda describes their neighbors and the life of the community. She made friends among the local children, and later her fellow students at the high school in Parma, a city she came to love. She was still in school when Mussolini began to prepare the country for war in Africa. Her father strongly opposed war and Fascism, and much of the surrounding country was Communist in sympathy (a unique Italian version of Communism). In the third section, "Rumours of War," Wanda describes the lead-up to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the events that followed, which seemed quite remote to the people of Fontanellato. Despite rationing and other restrictions, war remained remote until the first troops from the area were drafted and sent to Russia in 1941; most disappeared without a trace, never to return.
There was great excitement in the village in 1943, when residents learned that a POW camp would be built there. Wanda and the other young women often found excuses to walk or ride by, exchanging smiles and waves with the hundreds of young British prisoners. The camp had been open only a few months when the news came that Italy, following the Allied invasions in the south, had asked for an armistice. Before the Nazis moved in to re-establish Fascist control, the commandant of the camp allowed all of the POWs to leave. Some would head south, hoping to reach the Allied force; some north, heading for Switzerland. Eric Newby, with a newly broken ankle, was unable to travel. With the village doctor, Wanda and her father risked their lives to help him evade the authorities. In the process, as he and Wanda got to know each other, they fell in love. The last section of Wanda's book parallels his, though it continues her story after he was recaptured and sent north. The book ends with their reunion and marriage in April of 1946.
Though Wanda Newby's writing does not have the same verve as her husband's, I enjoyed this book. It was interesting to see the events of Love and War in the Apennines from her point of view, and to learn more about the local people's efforts to help the escaped prisoners and to resist the Fascists, German and Italian alike. In addition to introducing me to the Kras and its Slovenian people, it is also the first memoir I have read of life in Italy before, during and immediately after World War II. It is of course one person's account, from the unique perspective of an individual "Slovenian by birth, Italian by education and English by adoption" (as the author's note states). It is also written from the perspective of a young girl in a country village, and it does not discuss the political or military situation in great detail. And then it ends too soon for me. As I've mentioned before, I would love to read Wanda's account of her experiences as a war bride in England. We get only a few glimpses in Eric's book covering those years, Something Wholesale.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Very slowly down the Ganges
Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby
Earlier this year, when I finally got around to reading Eric Newby's Round Ireland in Low Gear, which had been on my TBR stacks for years, I was instantly smitten. I went on quickly to his book of autobiographical essays, A Traveller's Life, and I started collecting and reading his other books. I was especially interested in Slowly Down the Ganges, an account of a trip he took in 1963 with his wife and intrepid fellow adventurer Wanda. While I knew their trip wouldn't be anything like the Governor-General's tour of 1837-1839 that Emily Eden chronicled in Up the Country, or even Lilah Wingfield's A Glimpse of Empire in 1911, I was looking forward to comparing their experiences of India. But I was as unprepared as they were for the constant mishaps and the miserable travelling conditions that they suffered on their excruciatingly slow journey. Things got so bad at one point that Wanda threatened to leave not just the trip, but their marriage as well.
Had I paid more attention to the title of this book, I would have realized that the Newbys' journey was a mirror image of Emily Eden's. She started from Calcutta, heading up the Ganges on her way to the Punjab. The Newbys started theirs in the far north, as close as they could get to the river's source in the Himalayas, to travel its length down to Calcutta. Eric Newby admitted in the introduction that theirs would not be a great journey of exploration: "This was no uncharted river. Millions lived on its banks. . ." He wanted to explore that river, which he had first seen twenty years before, as a young officer stationed in India during the early months of World War II.
I love rivers. I was born on the banks of the Thames and, like my father before me, I had spent a great deal of time both on it and in it. I enjoy visiting their sources: Thames Head, in a green meadow in the Cotswolds; the river Po coming out from under a heap of boulders among the debris left by picnickers by Monte Viso . . . I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to retain some of the beauty with which they were born. For me the most memorable river of all was the Ganges.
It took him more than twenty years, but he finally got back to the Ganges. On his forty-fourth birthday, he and Wanda set off on their 1200-mile journey. This was on December 6, 1963, and as with their first biking tour of Ireland, the main problem was one of timing. In northern India, winter is the dry season. When they set out, the water level in the river was falling an inch a day. In the first six days, they ran aground 63 times; with their three boatmen they ended up dragging the boat for much of the first hundred miles of the trip. The boat itself was on loan for only a few days, and there were none for sale, at least that they could afford. The Newbys frequently had to abandon the river, taking trains between towns, at each stop searching for a boat to hire or borrow. Those they did manage to find were small sailing or rowing boats, with little space for the native crews, let alone passengers and their gear. The living conditions aboard were primitive and Wanda, as the only woman, must have found them particularly difficult.
The Newbys being who they were, they still found much to enjoy in the river and in India itself. At one point, Newby described himself,
- a typical traveller in India, at one moment elevated by the splendour of the country; the next cast down by its miseries. The only thing that was constantly agreeable was the river; life on it was sometimes hard, but it was always supportable, and in some strange way it produced feelings that were a combination of elation and contentment which neither of us experienced anywhere else.
The Newbys followed their usual pattern of travel, talking to everyone they met and visiting every temple, fort, palace, and battlefield they could find (or Eric could drag Wanda to). As in his book on Ireland, Newby quoted history and legend and religious epics. Some of the names were familiar from a class on Indian history that I took long ago, though I had forgotten that there was a real Sher Khan, an Afghan invader in the late 1500s. Newby was particularly interested in the holiest sites on the Ganges, the confluences where other rivers join the great mother. He and Wanda were present at one of the major winter festivals, joining the millions who came to bathe in the icy sacred waters.
In his introduction, Newby informed his readers that his book "is not a book about India today; neither is it concerned with politics or economics." It is certainly not a travel guide, but a personal account of a particular voyage, very much off the normal tourist tracks. Even more than Lilah Wingfield, the Newbys immersed themselves in India, in the life of the river and the people who lived along it. I have no desire to follow in their footsteps, at least on those first miserable stages, but as always I am glad to travel in their company.
Earlier this year, when I finally got around to reading Eric Newby's Round Ireland in Low Gear, which had been on my TBR stacks for years, I was instantly smitten. I went on quickly to his book of autobiographical essays, A Traveller's Life, and I started collecting and reading his other books. I was especially interested in Slowly Down the Ganges, an account of a trip he took in 1963 with his wife and intrepid fellow adventurer Wanda. While I knew their trip wouldn't be anything like the Governor-General's tour of 1837-1839 that Emily Eden chronicled in Up the Country, or even Lilah Wingfield's A Glimpse of Empire in 1911, I was looking forward to comparing their experiences of India. But I was as unprepared as they were for the constant mishaps and the miserable travelling conditions that they suffered on their excruciatingly slow journey. Things got so bad at one point that Wanda threatened to leave not just the trip, but their marriage as well.
Had I paid more attention to the title of this book, I would have realized that the Newbys' journey was a mirror image of Emily Eden's. She started from Calcutta, heading up the Ganges on her way to the Punjab. The Newbys started theirs in the far north, as close as they could get to the river's source in the Himalayas, to travel its length down to Calcutta. Eric Newby admitted in the introduction that theirs would not be a great journey of exploration: "This was no uncharted river. Millions lived on its banks. . ." He wanted to explore that river, which he had first seen twenty years before, as a young officer stationed in India during the early months of World War II.
I love rivers. I was born on the banks of the Thames and, like my father before me, I had spent a great deal of time both on it and in it. I enjoy visiting their sources: Thames Head, in a green meadow in the Cotswolds; the river Po coming out from under a heap of boulders among the debris left by picnickers by Monte Viso . . . I like exploring them. I like the way in which they grow deeper and wider and dirtier but always, however dirty they become, managing to retain some of the beauty with which they were born. For me the most memorable river of all was the Ganges.
It took him more than twenty years, but he finally got back to the Ganges. On his forty-fourth birthday, he and Wanda set off on their 1200-mile journey. This was on December 6, 1963, and as with their first biking tour of Ireland, the main problem was one of timing. In northern India, winter is the dry season. When they set out, the water level in the river was falling an inch a day. In the first six days, they ran aground 63 times; with their three boatmen they ended up dragging the boat for much of the first hundred miles of the trip. The boat itself was on loan for only a few days, and there were none for sale, at least that they could afford. The Newbys frequently had to abandon the river, taking trains between towns, at each stop searching for a boat to hire or borrow. Those they did manage to find were small sailing or rowing boats, with little space for the native crews, let alone passengers and their gear. The living conditions aboard were primitive and Wanda, as the only woman, must have found them particularly difficult.
The Newbys being who they were, they still found much to enjoy in the river and in India itself. At one point, Newby described himself,
- a typical traveller in India, at one moment elevated by the splendour of the country; the next cast down by its miseries. The only thing that was constantly agreeable was the river; life on it was sometimes hard, but it was always supportable, and in some strange way it produced feelings that were a combination of elation and contentment which neither of us experienced anywhere else.
The Newbys followed their usual pattern of travel, talking to everyone they met and visiting every temple, fort, palace, and battlefield they could find (or Eric could drag Wanda to). As in his book on Ireland, Newby quoted history and legend and religious epics. Some of the names were familiar from a class on Indian history that I took long ago, though I had forgotten that there was a real Sher Khan, an Afghan invader in the late 1500s. Newby was particularly interested in the holiest sites on the Ganges, the confluences where other rivers join the great mother. He and Wanda were present at one of the major winter festivals, joining the millions who came to bathe in the icy sacred waters.
In his introduction, Newby informed his readers that his book "is not a book about India today; neither is it concerned with politics or economics." It is certainly not a travel guide, but a personal account of a particular voyage, very much off the normal tourist tracks. Even more than Lilah Wingfield, the Newbys immersed themselves in India, in the life of the river and the people who lived along it. I have no desire to follow in their footsteps, at least on those first miserable stages, but as always I am glad to travel in their company.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Something Wholesale
Something Wholesale, Eric Newby
This book, subtitled "My Life and Times in the Rag Trade," is part autobiography, part biography, part business history, and part travelogue. That is a lot of parts, some of which don't fit neatly together. Unfortunately, I think Eric Newby was trying to cover too much ground here, and the book sometimes feel a bit thin and disconnected.
The autobiographical sections cover his return to England after his years as a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany during World War II. I haven't read much from the point of view of British ex-servicemen of this period, and I wish he had written about this in more detail. He was very much at a loose end and clearly suffering from depression (if not post-traumatic stress), so with the best of intentions his parents pushed him into the family business, Lane and Newby. They were a firm of wholesale clothing manufacturers, and a large part of his job entailed taking models of the clothing they produced out on the road, visiting buyers for stores and shops, trying to get orders. This meant long weeks traveling by train, up into Scotland and then south towards London. Newby escaped whenever he could for excursions into the country-side, carrying along boots and walking clothes, but he doesn't go into much detail about his adventures. When not on the road, he was immured in the Lane and Newby premises in London, trying to learn the business (I found the business sections a little hard to follow sometimes).
One day he ran into an old army buddy who told him, "I've just seen Wanda. She wants to know when you're coming." Newby met Wanda when he was a POW in Italy, a story he told in Love and War in the Apennines. They had kept in touch after the war, but this reminder from his friend sent him off to join M.I.9, which got him to Italy and Wanda. He was actually there to locate those Italians who had assisted the POWs, to see if any of them needed assistance in their turn. I'm sure there were some great stories there, but Newby skips right over that period, jumping ahead six months to his return to England with his new wife. Wanda appears in two later chapters, one involving a disastrous holiday in Dungeness and the other the birth of their first child. I would love to know more about her experiences, an Italian citizen of Slovenian descent coming to England as a war-bride. I've read accounts of English and European women coming to the U.S. and Canada as war-brides, but never one going to England. I had to remind myself that this is her husband's book, not hers.
Something Wholesale is also Eric Newby's affectionate tribute to his father George, who was 45 when his first and only child was born. "We were separated by a great gulf of years, and when I was old enough to appreciate him the world which he knew and of which he was a part had passed away." This book tries to capture something of his father's character and his world, and I think those are its best parts. The senior Newby, who was apprenticed to the clothing business in 1887, at age 13, was also a sportsman all his life. He loved boats and rowing, though his son would classify it as obsession. Work, while financing boats and rowing, was something one did in the intervals. His son's accounts of their excursions reminded me both of Three Men in a Boat and of the Gilbreth family in Cheaper by the Dozen (though with ten less children). Unfortunately, his father's casual attitudes toward business taxes would eventually doom the firm. In 1953 they were presented with a cumulative tax bill of £17,000, due within the week.
After leaving the family firm, the younger Newby continued to work in the fashion industry for several years, while he also began his career as a traveler and a writer. The Epilogue is an account of a trip to Paris in January of 1985 with the editors of the British Vogue, for the spring fashion shows.
"In doing so I was partly inspired by nostalgia, partly by a genuine enthusiasm for fashion, which in spite of the very different way of life I have pursued since abandoning it, has never been extinguished in my, I hope, still fairly manly bosom."
It comes a bit oddly, thirty and forty years after most of the events in the book, but his enthusiasm for fashion is clear.
If this book doesn't measure up Love and War in the Apennines or The Great Grain Race, it was a pleasant read. There are some funny stories, some poignant ones, and Eric Newby is always good company.
This book, subtitled "My Life and Times in the Rag Trade," is part autobiography, part biography, part business history, and part travelogue. That is a lot of parts, some of which don't fit neatly together. Unfortunately, I think Eric Newby was trying to cover too much ground here, and the book sometimes feel a bit thin and disconnected.
The autobiographical sections cover his return to England after his years as a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany during World War II. I haven't read much from the point of view of British ex-servicemen of this period, and I wish he had written about this in more detail. He was very much at a loose end and clearly suffering from depression (if not post-traumatic stress), so with the best of intentions his parents pushed him into the family business, Lane and Newby. They were a firm of wholesale clothing manufacturers, and a large part of his job entailed taking models of the clothing they produced out on the road, visiting buyers for stores and shops, trying to get orders. This meant long weeks traveling by train, up into Scotland and then south towards London. Newby escaped whenever he could for excursions into the country-side, carrying along boots and walking clothes, but he doesn't go into much detail about his adventures. When not on the road, he was immured in the Lane and Newby premises in London, trying to learn the business (I found the business sections a little hard to follow sometimes).
One day he ran into an old army buddy who told him, "I've just seen Wanda. She wants to know when you're coming." Newby met Wanda when he was a POW in Italy, a story he told in Love and War in the Apennines. They had kept in touch after the war, but this reminder from his friend sent him off to join M.I.9, which got him to Italy and Wanda. He was actually there to locate those Italians who had assisted the POWs, to see if any of them needed assistance in their turn. I'm sure there were some great stories there, but Newby skips right over that period, jumping ahead six months to his return to England with his new wife. Wanda appears in two later chapters, one involving a disastrous holiday in Dungeness and the other the birth of their first child. I would love to know more about her experiences, an Italian citizen of Slovenian descent coming to England as a war-bride. I've read accounts of English and European women coming to the U.S. and Canada as war-brides, but never one going to England. I had to remind myself that this is her husband's book, not hers.
Something Wholesale is also Eric Newby's affectionate tribute to his father George, who was 45 when his first and only child was born. "We were separated by a great gulf of years, and when I was old enough to appreciate him the world which he knew and of which he was a part had passed away." This book tries to capture something of his father's character and his world, and I think those are its best parts. The senior Newby, who was apprenticed to the clothing business in 1887, at age 13, was also a sportsman all his life. He loved boats and rowing, though his son would classify it as obsession. Work, while financing boats and rowing, was something one did in the intervals. His son's accounts of their excursions reminded me both of Three Men in a Boat and of the Gilbreth family in Cheaper by the Dozen (though with ten less children). Unfortunately, his father's casual attitudes toward business taxes would eventually doom the firm. In 1953 they were presented with a cumulative tax bill of £17,000, due within the week.
After leaving the family firm, the younger Newby continued to work in the fashion industry for several years, while he also began his career as a traveler and a writer. The Epilogue is an account of a trip to Paris in January of 1985 with the editors of the British Vogue, for the spring fashion shows.
"In doing so I was partly inspired by nostalgia, partly by a genuine enthusiasm for fashion, which in spite of the very different way of life I have pursued since abandoning it, has never been extinguished in my, I hope, still fairly manly bosom."
It comes a bit oddly, thirty and forty years after most of the events in the book, but his enthusiasm for fashion is clear.
If this book doesn't measure up Love and War in the Apennines or The Great Grain Race, it was a pleasant read. There are some funny stories, some poignant ones, and Eric Newby is always good company.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Setting sail for Australia in 1938
The Last Grain Race, Eric Newby
I have been reading Eric Newby's books a bit randomly. I started with Round Ireland in Low Gear, about a trip in 1985. Then I read A Traveller's Life, an autobiography that takes him from his birth in 1919 up to 1973. The third book I read was Love and War in the Apennines, an account of his experiences as a POW in Italy in the Second World War. I've decided to read the other books that I've collected in order following the chronology of his life, which also means reading them more or less in order of publication. The first of these, chronicling his first great travel adventure, is The Last Grain Race (published in 1956).
When Newby was 16, his father took him out of school and found him a position at a London advertising agency, Wurzel's, which could have served as a model for Pym's, where Peter Wimsey works in Murder Must Advertise. Two years later, in August 1938, Wurzel's lost a major account and large sections of the agency were laid off. Newby found to his mortification that his job was safe, in part because his salary was so insignificant.
In the two weeks before the ship sailed, Newby struggled to learn the parts of the ship, the sails and rigging, translated into the mix of languages the polyglot crew used. Writing twenty years later, he went into great detail in describing these, perhaps because ships like the Moshulu, rare in 1938, were disappearing completely. He did helpfully identify one "Technical interlude," with the note, "Surface on page 47." Reading these sections reminded me so strongly of Patrick O'Brian that I started to wonder if O'Brian had himself read Newby. My copy even includes a very familiar-looking ship's diagram identifying the masts and sails. Newby, like Stephen Maturin, was a complete landlubber when he first stepped on board, but unlike Maturin he sailed before the mast. He was lucky to find an ally, his own Barrett Bonden, in Jansson, one of the "donkeymen" who ran the small diesel engines.
The voyage out, which took almost three months, was south and around the Horn of Africa, in the great Roaring 40s (below the 40th parallel of south latitude).
In between these frantic hours of danger were days of boredom, with routine chores around the ship, some familiar from O'Brian's novels like polishing brass and chipping rust. The crew, many of them younger men, were chronically short on sleep and constantly hungry. I don't know how they survived on a diet based on pickled beef and pork. Just reading about it made me a little nauseous, as did the bathroom arrangements.
Newby struggled to learn his way around the ship, and to fit in with a crew who did not welcome an Englishman. On this voyage he set a pattern for his future travels: making connections, finding friends, opening himself to new experiences, observing and learning all he could, never hesitating to ask questions, and keeping his sense of humor about it all. I have enjoyed every trip I've taken with him, and I'm glad to have several more ahead.
I have been reading Eric Newby's books a bit randomly. I started with Round Ireland in Low Gear, about a trip in 1985. Then I read A Traveller's Life, an autobiography that takes him from his birth in 1919 up to 1973. The third book I read was Love and War in the Apennines, an account of his experiences as a POW in Italy in the Second World War. I've decided to read the other books that I've collected in order following the chronology of his life, which also means reading them more or less in order of publication. The first of these, chronicling his first great travel adventure, is The Last Grain Race (published in 1956).
When Newby was 16, his father took him out of school and found him a position at a London advertising agency, Wurzel's, which could have served as a model for Pym's, where Peter Wimsey works in Murder Must Advertise. Two years later, in August 1938, Wurzel's lost a major account and large sections of the agency were laid off. Newby found to his mortification that his job was safe, in part because his salary was so insignificant.
"I was furious . . . I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel's was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed ... too unimportant to be sacked ..."He left the next day for two weeks' holiday, and he never went back to Wurzel's. Instead, he applied for an apprenticeship with a Finnish shipowner. Gustav Eriksson owned a fleet of sailing ships that ran the "Grain Race," carrying ballast out to Australia and bringing back tons of grain to Europe. Newby was accepted as an apprentice, on payment of a £50 premium, and ordered to report to the Moshulu in Belfast harbor on September 26th. There he began his education as a sailor on a four-masted ship, an education hampered by the fact that he was the only English-speaker sailing with a crew of Finns and Swedes. He had been on the ship less than two hours when the Second Mate sent him "Op the rigging!" to the very top of the mainmast, 160 feet above the deck.
In the two weeks before the ship sailed, Newby struggled to learn the parts of the ship, the sails and rigging, translated into the mix of languages the polyglot crew used. Writing twenty years later, he went into great detail in describing these, perhaps because ships like the Moshulu, rare in 1938, were disappearing completely. He did helpfully identify one "Technical interlude," with the note, "Surface on page 47." Reading these sections reminded me so strongly of Patrick O'Brian that I started to wonder if O'Brian had himself read Newby. My copy even includes a very familiar-looking ship's diagram identifying the masts and sails. Newby, like Stephen Maturin, was a complete landlubber when he first stepped on board, but unlike Maturin he sailed before the mast. He was lucky to find an ally, his own Barrett Bonden, in Jansson, one of the "donkeymen" who ran the small diesel engines.
The voyage out, which took almost three months, was south and around the Horn of Africa, in the great Roaring 40s (below the 40th parallel of south latitude).
"At midnight on [December] 4th, the wind was north-north-east, force 7 [30 mph]. Down to topsails now, her upper and lower yards naked, gleaming yellow like great bones in the moonlight, she was a terrible wild stranger to us. At the wheel a Swede and a Dane were fighting to hold her as she ran 13 and 14 knots in the gusts. I knew then that I would never seen sailing like this again. When such ships as this went it would be the finish. The windbelts of the world would be deserted and the great West Wind and the Trades would never blow on steel rigging and flax canvas again."The Moshulu made landfall at Port Lincoln in South Australia on January 8, 1939. On March 11th she set sail on the return voyage with almost 5000 tons of grain in her holds. Her homeward course was eastward along the 40s, to pass the tip of South America and then turn north. This part of the trip was even more dangerous, with gale-force winds and wild seas:
"Moshulu was running ten knots in the biggest seas I had ever seen. As I watched, the poop began to sink before my eyes and the horizon astern was blotted out by a high polished wall, solid and impenetrable like marble. The poop went on dropping until the whole ship seemed to be toppling backwards into the deep moat below the wall of water that loomed over her, down and down to the bottom of the sea itself. At the moment when it seem that this impregnable mass must engulf us, a rift appeared in its face and it collapsed, burrowing beneath the ship . . ."Newby was nearly washed overboard twice, as the crew struggled to set sails. I cringed every time the captain sent them aloft in the storms, out along the icy yardarms to wrestle with the tons of heavy sodden canvas. Miraculously, none of the crew was lost at sea. The ship returned to Belfast on June 27th, having won what would turn out to be the last Grain Race.
In between these frantic hours of danger were days of boredom, with routine chores around the ship, some familiar from O'Brian's novels like polishing brass and chipping rust. The crew, many of them younger men, were chronically short on sleep and constantly hungry. I don't know how they survived on a diet based on pickled beef and pork. Just reading about it made me a little nauseous, as did the bathroom arrangements.
Newby struggled to learn his way around the ship, and to fit in with a crew who did not welcome an Englishman. On this voyage he set a pattern for his future travels: making connections, finding friends, opening himself to new experiences, observing and learning all he could, never hesitating to ask questions, and keeping his sense of humor about it all. I have enjoyed every trip I've taken with him, and I'm glad to have several more ahead.
Saturday, April 7, 2012
A prisoner of war in Italy
Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby
This book is an account of seventeen months that Eric Newby spent in Italy during World War II, first as a prisoner of war, and then after the Italian Armistice in September 1943, a fugitive from both the invading Germans and the remaining Italian fascists. Like many of his fellow British soldiers, he was hidden and helped by the people of the countryside. Among them was a young Slovenian woman named Wanda, whom he married after the war.
I have read some military history on the Second World War, but that was years ago. More recently my reading on the war has focused on the Holocaust, and on the home front in both Britain and the United States. I don't know much about the war in Italy, or about life for army POWs, so what Newby was writing about was new to me.
He was captured with four other British soldiers off the coast of Sicily on August 12, 1942. All members of the "Special Boat Section", they formed a unit sent ashore to blow up German bombers to prevent their attacking a convoy then approaching Malta with critically-needed supplies. The operation, code-named "Whynot," which Newby recounts in detail, was a complete failure. The men missed their rendezvous with the submarine that was to evacuate them, and they spent hours in the water before being rescued by fishermen, who turned them over to the Italian forces.
The next section of the book covers the year he spent as a POW. He focuses on the last six months, after he was transferred to a camp located in a village near Parma in northern Italy, in what had previously been an orphanage. It was attached to a convent of cloistered nuns, who did the prisoners' laundry and sometimes hid encouraging notes in their clothes. Newby approaches this section as something of a sociologist. He looks at how the men spent their time, explains the devastating effects of flocks of girls parading past the camp, and describes its social organization. There was a definite hierarchy in the camp, headed by the "O.K." people, who ran everything. Newby had a "marginally O.K." friend, who was his entrée into the fringes of society. He tells us,
Wanda helped arrange his escape from the hospital just before he was to be arrested. He spent the next four months hiding with country folk in small mountain villages, moving from place to place. For several weeks he worked on a farm, backbreaking labor moving stones out of a field. Later a group of villagers built him a concealed shelter in a forest and kept him supplied with food, and he was joined there by a friend from the orphanage camp. More than once he had to leave a refuge because his hosts feared discovery, or because they learned that troops on their way to arrest him. Twice he was denounced to the authorities by fascist sympathizers, and the second led to his final capture in December of 1944. Newby wants to pay tribute to all the people who helped and hid him and his fellow soldiers for so many months.
Newby has no intention of presenting himself as a hero, however. He is completely and disarmingly candid about his own incompetencies. He freely admits his fear of horses and his general wimpiness:
I'm glad that I had already read Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life, which I posted about back in February. Though not a full-scale biography, it gave me an overview of his life (at least up to 1982), so that I could put this book into context. It continues this story with two chapters on his experiences as a POW in Germany, after his re-capture. What neither book tells me is how he was able to keep in contact with Wanda during those years, and what they were like for her, before he returned to Italy in December of 1945 to propose. The romantic in me hopes maybe that story will be told in one of his other books.
This book is an account of seventeen months that Eric Newby spent in Italy during World War II, first as a prisoner of war, and then after the Italian Armistice in September 1943, a fugitive from both the invading Germans and the remaining Italian fascists. Like many of his fellow British soldiers, he was hidden and helped by the people of the countryside. Among them was a young Slovenian woman named Wanda, whom he married after the war.
I have read some military history on the Second World War, but that was years ago. More recently my reading on the war has focused on the Holocaust, and on the home front in both Britain and the United States. I don't know much about the war in Italy, or about life for army POWs, so what Newby was writing about was new to me.
He was captured with four other British soldiers off the coast of Sicily on August 12, 1942. All members of the "Special Boat Section", they formed a unit sent ashore to blow up German bombers to prevent their attacking a convoy then approaching Malta with critically-needed supplies. The operation, code-named "Whynot," which Newby recounts in detail, was a complete failure. The men missed their rendezvous with the submarine that was to evacuate them, and they spent hours in the water before being rescued by fishermen, who turned them over to the Italian forces.
The next section of the book covers the year he spent as a POW. He focuses on the last six months, after he was transferred to a camp located in a village near Parma in northern Italy, in what had previously been an orphanage. It was attached to a convent of cloistered nuns, who did the prisoners' laundry and sometimes hid encouraging notes in their clothes. Newby approaches this section as something of a sociologist. He looks at how the men spent their time, explains the devastating effects of flocks of girls parading past the camp, and describes its social organization. There was a definite hierarchy in the camp, headed by the "O.K." people, who ran everything. Newby had a "marginally O.K." friend, who was his entrée into the fringes of society. He tells us,
"I wanted the opportunity to observe the O.K. people at close quarters and some inner voice told me, quite correctly for once, that this was going to be my last chance ever to do so in the whole of my life. Before the war I had rarely spoken to O.K. people, let alone known any well enough to talk to."This period, marked above all by boredom, ended with the Italian Armistice on September 8, 1943. At the time, Newby was in the infirmary with a broken ankle. Since there was no plaster in the camp, he was confined to his bed. The British troops, anticipating the arrival of Allied forces in the next day or so, prepared to leave the camp. When it became clear that the Allied advance would be slow and difficult, the escaped prisoners had to decide whether to head south, which meant crossing the German and Italian lines, or north, hoping to reach Switzerland. With his broken ankle making travel impossible, Newby had no immediate choice in the matter. As Italian civilians gathered with clothing and food for the British soldiers, he finally saw a doctor, who whisked him away to a hospital. Newby discovered later that he was hidden in the maternity wing, where the agonies of women in labor terrified him. Here Wanda visited him, as she did other hidden refugees. She taught Newby Italian and practiced her English with him, and as they became better acquainted they fell in love.
Wanda helped arrange his escape from the hospital just before he was to be arrested. He spent the next four months hiding with country folk in small mountain villages, moving from place to place. For several weeks he worked on a farm, backbreaking labor moving stones out of a field. Later a group of villagers built him a concealed shelter in a forest and kept him supplied with food, and he was joined there by a friend from the orphanage camp. More than once he had to leave a refuge because his hosts feared discovery, or because they learned that troops on their way to arrest him. Twice he was denounced to the authorities by fascist sympathizers, and the second led to his final capture in December of 1944. Newby wants to pay tribute to all the people who helped and hid him and his fellow soldiers for so many months.
"I finally decided to write the book because I felt that comparatively little had been written about the ordinary Italian people who helped prisoners of war at great personal risk and without thought of personal gain, purely out of kindness of heart."He is clear about the risks. Both the doctor who got Newby into the hospital and Wanda's father were arrested, as were scores of others; some of them were sent north to Nazi concentration camps. These civilians were already suffering the deprivations of the war. Food was scarce, and other necessities, some as basic as salt, were in short supply. Some found the strain of helping was too great. Newby was refused refuge in one house because the family "had fear." The word paura (fear) was constantly in the air. Yet people moved beyond that fear, to do what they could, to help. Many who had sons fighting on the Russian front offered help hoping that their sons would in turn find help, not knowing that few would ever return. It was humbling and inspiring to read about their generosity, like the "righteous" who at the same time were risking their lives to save Jews, and to wonder how I would meet that challenge. This book is a wonderful tribute to them.
Newby has no intention of presenting himself as a hero, however. He is completely and disarmingly candid about his own incompetencies. He freely admits his fear of horses and his general wimpiness:
"I invariably faint away during performances of King Lear, Coriolanus, any Greek tragedy worthy of the name, and in any film in the course of which operating theatres and torture chambers form part of the mise en scène . . ."More seriously, he was not immune to paura, not just for himself but also for Wanda. At times it was only the sense that he owed something to the people risking their lives to protect him that kept him going. But he did keep going, and that persistence, that stubborn unwillingness to give in, is itself heroic.
I'm glad that I had already read Eric Newby's A Traveller's Life, which I posted about back in February. Though not a full-scale biography, it gave me an overview of his life (at least up to 1982), so that I could put this book into context. It continues this story with two chapters on his experiences as a POW in Germany, after his re-capture. What neither book tells me is how he was able to keep in contact with Wanda during those years, and what they were like for her, before he returned to Italy in December of 1945 to propose. The romantic in me hopes maybe that story will be told in one of his other books.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Literary crushes, and chapters in a traveller's life
A Traveller's Life, Eric Newby
I have a new literary crush. Does anyone else get those? It might be an author, or a character, or even a historical figure. It leads to spending as much time as possible with the crush (which usually means buying lots of books), trawling the net for their life history, and going on and on about it to friends who are probably thinking, "There she goes again." Sometimes the crush settles into long-term relationship (Peter Wimsey, Lymond, Terry Pratchett, Abraham Lincoln); sometimes I wake up one day and realize that the magic is just gone (Elizabeth George, Julia Spencer-Fleming).
Last year's set included Elizabeth von Arnim, George Templeton Strong, Cornelia Otis Skinner's family, and Ulysses Grant. I met my latest, Eric Newby, thanks to the TBR Double Dare. I'd had his book Round Ireland in Low Gear on the TBR stacks for years and never got around to reading it until now. I added A Traveller's Life last year, just from the back cover blurb:
Like any book of short stories, some chapters are stronger than others. I enjoyed the early ones about his childhood and school days. Two chapters cover his apprenticeship in 1938-1939 on a grain ship sailing round-trip from England to Australia. I don't think two short chapters can do justice to a voyage like that, and in fact Newby wrote a book about the trip, The Last Grain Race (currently sitting in my shopping cart on Amazon). There are chapters on his World War II service in the Middle East, including time as a prisoner in Italy (Love and War in the Apennines, already awaiting the end of the TBR challenge), his celebrated travels through the Hindu Kush (which inspired his first book) and down the Ganges, and his varied career choices (like his father he worked in the fashion industry, before turning to journalism, which he also chronicled in a book). In his later years, he and his wife Wanda bought and restored a house in Tuscany. The book he wrote about their experiences apparently started what I think of as the "Year in Provence" trend.
Newby definitely wasn't one for the safe packaged tour. The penultimate chapter recounts a trip to Haiti in 1972. Even more perilous was a trek one year earlier, to the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula (home of the marvelous Biblical texts discovered by the Sisters of Sinai). Travel through the desert was dangerous enough, but tensions were high as Egypt and Israel clashed over Sinai. Though there were only eight monks in the monastery at that time, Newby felt the pull of the place: "The longer I remained within the walls of the monastery . . . every day I became more disinclined to leave it. . ."
I feel equally disinclined to part company with him, and I'm already looking forward to the next chapter.
I have a new literary crush. Does anyone else get those? It might be an author, or a character, or even a historical figure. It leads to spending as much time as possible with the crush (which usually means buying lots of books), trawling the net for their life history, and going on and on about it to friends who are probably thinking, "There she goes again." Sometimes the crush settles into long-term relationship (Peter Wimsey, Lymond, Terry Pratchett, Abraham Lincoln); sometimes I wake up one day and realize that the magic is just gone (Elizabeth George, Julia Spencer-Fleming).
Last year's set included Elizabeth von Arnim, George Templeton Strong, Cornelia Otis Skinner's family, and Ulysses Grant. I met my latest, Eric Newby, thanks to the TBR Double Dare. I'd had his book Round Ireland in Low Gear on the TBR stacks for years and never got around to reading it until now. I added A Traveller's Life last year, just from the back cover blurb:
"Eric Newby's life of travel began with strange adventures in prams, forays into the lush jungles of Harrods with his mother and into the perilous slums of darkest Hammersmith on his way to school. Such beginnings aroused his curiosity about more outlandish places, a wanderlust satisfied equally by travels through the London sewers, by bicycle to Italy and through wildest New York."Newby writes in the introduction, "This book is not an autobiography." The first chapter comes closest, telling the story of his birth in 1919, and placing it in a very specific context: what people were doing, how they were living, where they were working and shopping and what they were earning, particularly in his corner of southwest London. From there, the book becomes a series of episodes centered around travel, moving chronologically through his life. It was published in 1982, five years before Round Ireland, and the last chapter is dated 1973, when Newby left his position as travel editor of The Observer.
Like any book of short stories, some chapters are stronger than others. I enjoyed the early ones about his childhood and school days. Two chapters cover his apprenticeship in 1938-1939 on a grain ship sailing round-trip from England to Australia. I don't think two short chapters can do justice to a voyage like that, and in fact Newby wrote a book about the trip, The Last Grain Race (currently sitting in my shopping cart on Amazon). There are chapters on his World War II service in the Middle East, including time as a prisoner in Italy (Love and War in the Apennines, already awaiting the end of the TBR challenge), his celebrated travels through the Hindu Kush (which inspired his first book) and down the Ganges, and his varied career choices (like his father he worked in the fashion industry, before turning to journalism, which he also chronicled in a book). In his later years, he and his wife Wanda bought and restored a house in Tuscany. The book he wrote about their experiences apparently started what I think of as the "Year in Provence" trend.
Newby definitely wasn't one for the safe packaged tour. The penultimate chapter recounts a trip to Haiti in 1972. Even more perilous was a trek one year earlier, to the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai Peninsula (home of the marvelous Biblical texts discovered by the Sisters of Sinai). Travel through the desert was dangerous enough, but tensions were high as Egypt and Israel clashed over Sinai. Though there were only eight monks in the monastery at that time, Newby felt the pull of the place: "The longer I remained within the walls of the monastery . . . every day I became more disinclined to leave it. . ."
I feel equally disinclined to part company with him, and I'm already looking forward to the next chapter.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Cycling through Ireland
Round Ireland in Low Gear, Eric Newby
I have mentioned before that while I am not a great traveler (or perhaps because I'm not), I enjoy travel narratives, and I have quite a few on my shelves. Some of them are about places I have been or hope to go to one day, others are about trips that I know I will never take. Round Ireland in Low Gear is one of the latter. Though I would love to visit Ireland, it certainly won't be on a bike tour in November and December.
This is the first of Eric Newby's books that I have read, and I feel like I have made a fascinating new acquaintance whom I can't wait to meet again. I'm excited to see how many books he wrote, about such varied journeys. I already have another of his books, A Traveller's Life, on the TBR pile. Newby reminds me of Patrick Leigh Fermor in the breadth of his interests, particularly in this book in the history of Ireland. But while his prose can't match Leigh Fermor's, he also seems a little less intimidating. His sense of humor and willingness to risk looking like an idiot remind me of Calvin Trillin and Tony Horwitz (and like Trillin, he always reports on the food).
In the fall of 1985, Newby and his wife Wanda (an interesting person in her own right) decided to take a cycling tour of Ireland. They chose the fall because it was the dormant season of the apparently demanding garden and orchard at their Dorset home. After Wanda declined a walking tour, and Newby reluctantly accepted that a balloon tour was impractical, they settled on bicycles. Their first trip, through County Clare, and their second, along the southern and southwestern coastline, were both gruelling slogs through mud, rain, and snow. At one point a gale-force wind blew Wanda clean off her bike. I wasn't surprised that they occasionally gave in and took trains, buses and even taxis.
The third trip, in June of the next year, was more successful. Not only was the weather much better, but as Newby wrote,
In addition to Ireland's political and social history, which Newby wrote about with objectivity, he was also interested in its literature and in its religious history (which is of course intertwined with its politics and society). He and Wanda visited countless shrines, holy wells, and ruined monasteries, and on a later visit on his own, he made the ascent of Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain of St. Patrick. (On a less sanctified visit, he and Wanda raced their bikes up and down the corridors of the dorm at the storied Catholic seminary, St. Patrick's College at Maynooth.)
I learned from this book that Newby met Wanda during World War II, when he was a prisoner in Italy. He wrote about their experiences in a book called Love and War in the Apennines, and if I had it here right now I think that would be the end of the TBR challenge. It has gone straight on my post-challenge reading list.
I have mentioned before that while I am not a great traveler (or perhaps because I'm not), I enjoy travel narratives, and I have quite a few on my shelves. Some of them are about places I have been or hope to go to one day, others are about trips that I know I will never take. Round Ireland in Low Gear is one of the latter. Though I would love to visit Ireland, it certainly won't be on a bike tour in November and December.
This is the first of Eric Newby's books that I have read, and I feel like I have made a fascinating new acquaintance whom I can't wait to meet again. I'm excited to see how many books he wrote, about such varied journeys. I already have another of his books, A Traveller's Life, on the TBR pile. Newby reminds me of Patrick Leigh Fermor in the breadth of his interests, particularly in this book in the history of Ireland. But while his prose can't match Leigh Fermor's, he also seems a little less intimidating. His sense of humor and willingness to risk looking like an idiot remind me of Calvin Trillin and Tony Horwitz (and like Trillin, he always reports on the food).
In the fall of 1985, Newby and his wife Wanda (an interesting person in her own right) decided to take a cycling tour of Ireland. They chose the fall because it was the dormant season of the apparently demanding garden and orchard at their Dorset home. After Wanda declined a walking tour, and Newby reluctantly accepted that a balloon tour was impractical, they settled on bicycles. Their first trip, through County Clare, and their second, along the southern and southwestern coastline, were both gruelling slogs through mud, rain, and snow. At one point a gale-force wind blew Wanda clean off her bike. I wasn't surprised that they occasionally gave in and took trains, buses and even taxis.
The third trip, in June of the next year, was more successful. Not only was the weather much better, but as Newby wrote,
"I had what seemed to me a brilliant idea about how to overcome one of the principal factors that made cycling so unpopular with Wanda, namely, hills. . . My idea was to ride westwards from Dublin . . . along the banks of the Grand Canal, which begins where the River Liffey meets the Irish Sea in Dublin Bay and eventually comes to an end at Shannon Harbor."I love canals, and I hope someday to take a trip by canal boat. On this trip they stayed in Banagher, near Shannon Harbor, which is where Anthony Trollope "started work for the Post Office as a surveyor in 1841 and wrote his first two novels . . ." I had been looking for a mention of Trollope, whose years in Ireland were so formative, though I had forgotten where he had his headquarters.
In addition to Ireland's political and social history, which Newby wrote about with objectivity, he was also interested in its literature and in its religious history (which is of course intertwined with its politics and society). He and Wanda visited countless shrines, holy wells, and ruined monasteries, and on a later visit on his own, he made the ascent of Croagh Patrick, the Holy Mountain of St. Patrick. (On a less sanctified visit, he and Wanda raced their bikes up and down the corridors of the dorm at the storied Catholic seminary, St. Patrick's College at Maynooth.)
I learned from this book that Newby met Wanda during World War II, when he was a prisoner in Italy. He wrote about their experiences in a book called Love and War in the Apennines, and if I had it here right now I think that would be the end of the TBR challenge. It has gone straight on my post-challenge reading list.
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