‘What do you mean?’
‘It is yours by law, the same as the points and the whistles.’
‘Listen here, ginger, you’re at it, aren’t you?’ At this point, the altar boy, never at a loss for words, was about to go into details about the origin of this unexpected inheritance, but the signalman arrived and took over from the lad. ‘The station-master who was here before you,’ he recounted, ‘was an absolute fanatic for animal breeding. He spent more time in the hen house than in the telegraph office. These creatures breed at an alarming rate, so when he was pensioned off and had to move out, he left all these creatures to the newcomers, that is to yourselves.’
‘Oh, thank you, a real godsend,’ my mother exclaimed.
‘Yes, sure is a fine gift, but I’ll be curious to see how you manage to deal with this lot,’ continued the signalman. ‘Apart from the fact that every day at least half a dozen of them will scarper, one or two are sure to end up on the line just when the trains are due.’
‘Well, I hope at least part of the carcass can still be salvaged,’ was my mother’s comment.
‘Your only problem,’ came back the guffawing reply, ‘is to make up your mind whether to serve rabbit stew or roast rabbit. That’s all there is to it.’
* * *
You will by now have guessed that our station was completely isolated. The only inhabitants were ourselves and the district signalman, who also looked after the points, and his wife. Down below, at the foot of the embankment, facing the cliff which rose from the depths of the lake, stood the police station with mooring for a motorboat and a little light-boat called Torpedine.
The silence at night-time was interrupted only by the steady beat-beat of the pump which drew water from the lake to fill the huge tank that supplied trains in transit to and from Switzerland. I was unduly fond of that humming sound: it seemed the very heart of the station, calm and reassuring.
Another pleasing sound was the screech which announced the arrival of a train. Sometimes the whistle of manoeuvring trains woke me up, but I had no problem in getting back to sleep, totally contented as I was. I can say that I grew up with the rattle of railway carriages and the creaking of brakes in my head, while my mind’s eye was filled with the flashes of light from the Torpedine sparkling on the water, on the sky and on the mountains before creeping in through the window shutters.
Since we were on the border, there was always a problem with smugglers or desperate people trying to cross secretly in the goods carriages. Every train waiting in the station had to be searched by police and customs, and my sleep was often disturbed by the signals conveyed by the whistles and flash lights of the detachment on duty. I couldn’t sleep through the banging on the sides of the carriages, the slamming of doors and the orders to check more thoroughly such-and-such a coach. Then the shouted signaclass="underline" ‘All clear!’ I would be lying tensed up throughout the inspection, and only when I heard those words could I breathe freely. I always imagined some man or boy clinging onto the underside of a coach, finally able to get away to the other side. I fell asleep with a smile and a sigh of relief.
We are in 1930. The refugees in transit were usually persecuted anti-Fascists trying to reach Switzerland or France. I remember one particular night when I awoke with a start after hearing shouts, orders and a shot. I rushed to the window and peered out at what was going on below. They had seized a man fleeing the country and were dragging him off to the police station. The next day I saw them throwing him onto a truck bound for Luino, where the prison was. Later on, my father spoke to me about political fugitives, and although I did not understand much about it, that scene has remained indelibly imprinted on my memory, like a dark stain.
To meet boys of my own age to play with, I had to clamber up to the village. It was a sheer climb of at least three hundred metres, enough to leave anyone out of breath.
It was not hard to make friends with those children. They were huddled together in the piazza outside the church, and were more than a little curious to get to know a ‘foreigner’ like me. They all spoke a harsh, Swiss-style dialect, with ‘z’ in place of an ‘s’, but they did not drag out their vowels as did the people in the Canton of Ticino.
To try me out, they improvised a couple of rather heavy practical jokes: as I was doing a pee down the cliff side, they tossed a cloth soaked in burning naphtha over me. It was a miracle I got away without scorching my willy. For the second test, they stuffed an enraged lizard — a ghez in the local dialect — down my trousers. They laughed uproariously as I leapt and tossed about in a frenzy, before managing to do a cartwheel which fortunately was enough to send the creature scuttling off.
These scoundrels were nearly all the sons of smugglers with one almost surreal exception — the gang leader was son of the local police chief. There were also two girls in the village whose fathers were customs men, but their parents did not want to see them in our company. The ‘shoulder-boys’, the name given to the smugglers who carried baskets with merchandise across the border on their shoulders, had other professions apart from contraband. Almost all tended flocks of goats or sheep, were woodcutters or builders of the dry-stone dykes used to shore up the fields and woods which would otherwise have tumbled into the valley at every downpour. The customs officers were very tolerant: they were well aware that the labours of the shoulder-boys were scarcely likely to bring them wealth, but every so often they would receive orders to round up one or two of them to show that they were alert, on top of the job and deserved the miserable pay they received. So every now and then, a couple of smugglers would be marched off. To me it all seemed like a game. I watched the arrested shoulder-boys going down to the railway station: they had not even a chain on their wrists and chatted away to the customs officers or policemen as though they were off to have a drink together.
I loved wandering around the high crests, or climbing up the streams which had dug out deep gullies in the rocks, cutting into the mountainside and leaving scars of ugly, crooked furrows as they tumbled down into the valley. Certainly I never went on my own. I would claw my way up behind the Pino boys who were two or three years older than me. The policeman’s son was nine years old, and so had been elected leader and guide. To listen to him, you would think he knew every water channel and cave in that labyrinth … in fact he regularly got us lost!
Once, we were hauled out by a smuggler who heard our desperate yells. He appeared to us, in the cross light filtered through the dark overhang of the ditch, like the vision of a saint. He was the uncle of one of my friends, and by an incredible coincidence was called Salvatore (Saviour). I, as I have already said, was the smallest of the gang, and so he hoisted me onto his shoulders, and from that perch I looked down with a certain haughtiness at my companions. I believed I was the living reproduction of a fresco on the facade of the little church at Tronzano, where a giant saint carried the infant Jesus across a river. The baby Jesus is giving a blessing. Now that I had the chance, I too administered a swift blessing … giggling as I did so. Already a blasphemer at that age!
As we approached the village, night was falling. My worried mother had gone up to the piazza in Pino and there had met up with other mothers who were also waiting for their respective children, but none of them showed any signs of anxiety, quite the reverse, since they were accustomed to our late-coming. As we reached the piazza, they came over to their sons without a word. No comment, no reproaches. My mother lifted me down from Salvatore’s shoulders, gave me a hug and asked: ‘Were you afraid?’ Lying through my teeth, I answered, ‘No, Mamma, I had a great time.’ Hugging me ever more tightly, she said simply, ‘Oh, what a poor liar you are, my poor little crackpot.’ (‘Crackpot’ was the tender nickname by which my mother regularly addressed me.)