When memories come back to you, wrote W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz, his digressive novel about history and how it is remembered, their dreamlike quality sometimes makes you ‘feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain’. Malcolm Gaskill’s exploration of the wartime adventures of his great-uncle Ralph, captured in Italian-occupied Libya in 1942, came from just such a memory, a ‘haunting’ dream experienced by his mother about her long-dead uncle. Finding a diary kept by Ralph while a prisoner, and fascinated by the ‘imperfections of memory’, Gaskill set off on a seven- year forage into the past that took him from archive to archive, retracing Ralph’s several attempts to escape. In the process he got to know the Italian families who sheltered him, some of them as interested as he was in their parents’ pasts.
Born in 1914, near Doncaster, Ralph was taken on by North Eastern Railways as a morse code ‘telegraph lad’, before serving in the Coldstream Guards and joining the police force. Called back into the Guards in 1939 as a military policeman, he took part in the retreat from Dunkirk and was then sent with his regiment to North Africa. After his capture by the Afrika Corps he was handed over to the Italians, whose prisoner-of-war camps were disease ridden, overcrowded and lacking in food. Conditions did not greatly improve when he was transferred to mainland Italy, to a camp near Brindisi, built to house 1,200 men but soon containing 6,000. From Ralph’s diary, Gaskill reconstructs the boredom, hunger and desolation of camp life, made worse by the bullying and brutality of the carabinieri guards, though, as a warrant officer, he suffered less than many. Teaming up with a British pilot called Charlie, a founder member of the Special Air Services, he attempted a first bold escape; but the two men were soon recaptured.
A move to a healthier camp in the north of Italy at Chiavari, not far from Genoa, brought copious Red Cross parcels, musical instruments and sports equipment. The prisoners were allowed to swim in the river and walk in the hills. There was a debate about whether Mrs Beeton or Ginger Rogers made the greatest contribution to western civilisation.
The Italian armistice, in September 1943, when Italy abandoned the Axis powers and prepared to join the Allies, found Ralph still in Chiavari. But his camp commander hesitated too long to free the prisoners and the occupying Germans quickly herded them on to trains, destined for captivity in Germany. When their train slowed down in the Italian mountains, Ralph and Charlie carved a hole in the floorboards of their carriage and managed to climb down on to the tracks.
Charlie spent the rest of the war fighting with local partisans above Lake Garda. Ralph set out for the Swiss border, but, exhausted and pursued by the Germans, found sanctuary with a peasant family. And here, for the next 15 months, moving between various farms, he stayed until liberation in the spring of 1945, becoming one of some 16,000 Allied prisoners of war in Italy – out of 80,000 – who were never captured. The story of the courage and selflessness of the ordinary Italians who risked their lives to save them is one worth retelling,
Gaskill alternates between these exploits (covered by the diary Ralph kept until he reached Chiavari and the later time through exhaustive research and some conjecture) and his own retracing of Ralph’s steps, seeking out local historians and making friends with the descendants of those who had taken him in. In the process, he paints a vivid picture of the country’s 18-month civil war, as Italian fascists fought Italian partisans while the Allies advanced north and the Germans retreated. Though he found tantalising suggestions that Ralph helped the resistance, Gaskill was ultimately unable to uncover any real proof that he did.
For Ralph, what Gaskill calls the ‘uneasy thrill’ of going home to a relentlessly grey and impoverished Britain was made worse by discovering that his mother had died. He returned to police duties and then joined the prison service in Dar es Salaam, later taking similar jobs in post-colonial Africa. He died, aged 62, on holiday in Spain. He had married just before the war, but the couple had no children. For the reader it is sometimes hard to warm to a man who emerges as selfish, rigid and mildly dishonest, whom even his relations considered ‘frosty and remote’.
It is as a picture of what can still be discovered about the second world war and its many sideshows that The Glass Mountain is at its best. Gaskill’s diligence as a researcher seems phenomenal. British and American military archives and regimental papers, diaries, letters and the papers of the Monte San Martino Trust (set up to give educational opportunities to the descendants of the Italian families who helped the Allied prisoners of war to escape, and were little rewarded for their pains) were all mined and found to contain rich material. Facebook produced contacts; local historians contributed fascinating details; and the families of the helpers dredged up memories of their own. Part biography, part social history and part somewhat overlong travelogue, the book is a testament to the power of dogged research and to those twists and turns of memory which, however unstable, illuminate and inform the present.
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