My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More)

CHAPTER 3. The French Friend

Years later, in the summer of ’44, as the Second World War was drawing to a close, a man came from France to visit us, and he embraced my father with incredible affection … they had been friends since their early youth and had got to know each other in Montpellier where my father had emigrated to find work on a building site. As maguts, that is boy-masons, they had every day climbed together up the scaffolding of big houses under construction.

In those days, in 1913, bitter disputes were underway to secure workers’ emancipation, to win rights, a decent salary and above all safety in the factories and yards. The strikes and accompanying demonstrations were invariably broken up with unthinkable ferocity. The workers were charged not only by the police but also by the army and cavalry. However, at the end of it all, the trade unions had managed to obtain some advantages.

On the very day they went back to work on the building site, the whole scaffolding collapsed and around fifteen workers, including my father, were thrown to the ground. Ten survivors, some dying, were rushed to hospital. My father was one of the more fortunate ones: he had broken his leg in several places and a blow to his back had left him semi-paralysed.

On his release from hospital, he was taken home by Andres, as his fellow magut was called. Andres’s mother looked after him as though he were her own son. My father often said that he owed his life to that woman.

When he was well enough, he moved to Germany, still in the company of Andres. They found employment in a site in Hanover, just as the First World War was about to break out. Andres went back to France, my father to Lombardy. Two years later, Italy entered the conflict and, still not yet nineteen, my father found himself in the front line on the Carso.

From their conversation, I discovered that the letter sewn into my jumper which I had brought to the anarchists at Bellinzona was to be handed over to him in France. Andres was then in charge of the Association for the Aid of Political Refugees, whom France had ‘welcomed’ in such large numbers. Naturally my father had requested Andres and his organisation to give asylum to the fugitives and to help them find work and accommodation.

Both my father and Andres had been active in the Socialist Party (obviously each in his own country) before and after the war. In those days, the workers’ movement had found its raison d’être in solidarity with the persecuted, no matter which party or democratic group they belonged to.

But let us go back to my boyhood in Pino.