You have a Lot to Lose by C. K. Stead

Author:C. K. Stead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

On the road

On 20 March I wrote ‘Spring is making another of its spectacular false starts’; but they couldn’t go on being false, and soon there were camping expeditions. When I look at the map of northern Italy they seem daring, even heroic. We bought a roof-rack for the car, two tents, sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses, a gas camping cooker and light, and a small folding table. We planned expeditions each with an intended ‘summit’. The first, in April, took us away north to Lake Como, where we pitched our tents in sight of the Alps snow-capped across the lake; and then eastward to Venice where we camped on the Lido and were in the Square of St Mark’s (the intended ‘summit’) for the May Day celebrations. On the way back we stopped at Sirmione on Lake Garda, in honour of Catullus and of Tennyson’s beautiful tribute to the place and the poet, with its incomparable rolling-on rhyming vowel sounds:

Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row,

Sweet Catullus’s all-but island, olive-silvery Sirmio.

The second expedition, a month or so later, took us to Tuscany, Pisa and Florence, where the summit for Kay and me was Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery; and for the kids, the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In those days there were tourists, but nothing like the numbers that now invade Europe, so we could walk into the great galleries off the street, no charge, no reservation or ticket needed. At the Leaning Tower, still at that time open to the public, I climbed with Oliver and Charlotte while Kay remained down on the grassy surrounds with Margaret. Looking down from away up there, hanging on to the scary rail-less and sloping floors, we watched while a gypsy stole the pushchair Kay and Margaret had wandered away from; and saw Kay pursue and recapture that essential piece of equipment. On the same trip the chair flew off the luggage rack at high speed, and I parked on the autostrada shoulder and trudged back what might have been half a kilometre to recover it, and found it at the side of the road, guarded by two carabinieri, who reprimanded and warned me, but (because Italians are nice when small children and their parents are in question) patted my shoulder and let me return with it to the car and tie it more securely.

On the way home we stopped at Rapallo because I knew Ezra Pound had lived there, and we wandered about hoping we might see and recognise him. It was a town I would get to know very well later on through my Pound studies; but I did not then know that Ezra, though still alive, had by this time moved in with his long-time American mistress Olga Rudge, in Venice. Perhaps I passed him there and didn’t know. Next year he was dead.

What struck me often, observing our children on these trips, was how much that was in each character sprang from the particular mix of elements from the gene pool.

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