I took the train to Italy, of course. I was seventeen; it would be twenty years before I boarded my first plane, rushing to my mother’s deathbed in Tel Aviv though I knew mine wasn’t the hand she longed to hold. I should be clear that I’m not the one you want either. You shouldn’t get your hopes up. We’ll come to that.
I was meant to be having a year out, to grow up, because I’d been a year ahead of my age all through school. We’d all sat round the table after lunch one day the previous summer, even Dad though it was harvest time, to discuss my future, and Maman had said that however good my marks, even if I were to be offered a place I was too immature to go straight to Oxford. Edith has seen nothing of the world, she’d said, lighting a cigarette which made Gran wince and open the window. She may be able to pass exams and I’m sure she will talk well about books in an interview but her Italian is that of a schoolgirl and even her French could be better, she has been almost nowhere and seen almost nothing, Oxford would be wasted on her. It is a ridiculous plan. I will write to my friends and put together un petit tour, she can go to Teresa in Florence and then perhaps un stage at Marcel’s bookshop. An English country childhood is all very well but one does not send one’s daughter to Oxford for her to marry a farmer and live on a farm, n’est-ce pas?
I had glanced at Dad, the farmer whose wife Maman in fact was though she could hardly be said to live on the farm, but he had nodded and smiled through worse than that over the years and he said yes, Rachel, I dare say you’re right, let’s see. Do you want to go travelling, pet, he asked me later when I was helping with the milking, would you like to stay with your mother’s friends, and I said yes, I think so, yes, I would, because although of course I disliked being called immature and also I could think of many things I had seen and understood on the farm that I would not have seen and understood elsewhere, I certainly had an appetite for more, for tree-lined city squares and great museums, for parties and lectures, for everywhere and everything.
And then months later, as my exams began, Maman had
written to me from the artists’ commune in France where she was spending the spring, to say that instead of going to Teresa in Florence I was to go to my sister, who would be staying in a villa in another part of Italy and would need a companion while she had a baby. Maman had followed the letter with a rare international telephone call late one night. I could almost feel the price of the minutes pulsing across the Channel and half of England, through the curly wire in my hand and into the reckoning of my grandmother, hovering behind me in the hall at the farm. Stay on the train from Milan until the end, until Como Lago, Maman said. If you get off at Como San Giovanni, you’ll just have to carry your own bags down the hill, don’t think I’m springing for a taxi. She produced phrases like ‘springing for’ with a flourish and an exaggeration of her accent, zink, spreenging, like one of the French mam’zelles in the school stories I loved. Yes, I said, I understand, I will. And you’re to look after your sister properly, she said, don’t go wandering off, for once she needs help and it will be good for you. As if wandering off were my habit, not hers, as if she had not herself diagnosed in me a deficit of wandering.
I don’t suppose, Gran had said at the end of that phone call, your mother thought to ask about your exams? I don’t suppose Rachel thought she might go to Lydia herself?
So here I was, on the train as instructed, wandering curtailed or at least redirected by Lydia’s misadventures. I carried two bags, an ill-chosen fake-leather handbag already giving at the seams under the strain of three books and a large sandwich I’d bought in Milan and been too shy to eat on the train, and the old Army-issue canvas knapsack Daddy had given me. Not stylish, darling, but if you’re not travelling in style it’s easier to have your hands free. On the understanding that Italy was hot, I’d rolled up a couple of washed-out cotton frocks that had fitted well enough the summer before, and the bathing suit I’d used for years of school swimming; you’d think even then I might have had the wit to consult a map and notice that Lake Como is nearer Switzerland than the Mediterranean, and I knew fine well my sister’s baby wasn’t due until the autumn. I would, Maman said, depending on how Lydia did, be needed for perhaps a fortnight or a month after that.
I stood up as we left Como San Giovanni, illogically anxious that I might miss the last stop, swung the canvas sack on my shoulders, the handbag across my body. The various straps bunched my dress, made it even shorter. It was already clear to me that Italian girls did not take trains unaccompanied and that the rising hemlines of the mid-sixties had not reached the thigh of Italy, but here was the lake, absurdly blue, and wooded hills deeply green, stucco buildings absurdly pink, golden afternoon light everywhere, the whole scene at once novel and familiar. Beaker full of the warm South, because it was still obvious to me then that the North was north of our farm in Derbyshire and the South was south of it. The train stopped and I struggled with the door, being accustomed to the English way of opening the window and using the handle on the outside, was helped by a man whose gaze rose from my legs only to my chest, to the solid upholstery I had inherited from Gran’s line of hill-farming women. I ignored his offered hand, settled the straw hat from which I’d removed the school ribbon, hurried across the platform towards the water. The boats leave every hour until 8 p.m., Maman had said, and there’s no reason you should be later than that. There were unfamiliar smells on the air: flowers, fish, sunshine. If I have to wait, I thought, I will eat the sandwich, I will perhaps treat myself to a cup of tea or even an ice cream, though I knew I didn’t really have the nerve for a café alone in Italy and certainly didn’t have money to spare.
I crossed the road, looking the wrong way but looking twice,
my shadow sharp at my side, saw the piers and the boats waiting and found the ticket office, biglietteria. Senza unica per Lenno, per favore, grazie, the first time I used Italian in the wild somehow astonishing, this code learnt like the formulae in Physics and Chemistry turning out to be a real language producing real ferry tickets after all. Even so, I almost failed to board the boat because I was so unnerved by the absence of a proper queue, so reluctant to push in though I had been waiting as long as anyone else and it wasn’t clear what I might be pushing in to. A man in a braided cap and uniform said something to me and when I hesitated said, you go or no? Yes, I said, sÌ, and let him hand me onto the steamer just before he cast off the ropes. The outdoor seats were still free despite the crowd, so I took the one at the front, shrugged off the knapsack but looped my arm through the strap so it couldn’t be stolen while I folded my arms on the railing and rested my chin, waited for the show to begin. I remember feeling the engine’s throbbing in my bones, the blend of nausea and thrill. I wanted to tell Nancy, look, here I am, two months ago we were wearing school uniform – well, to be strictly fair I was still wearing a certain amount of school uniform – and inventing humiliating excuses for using the staircase reserved for teachers and prefects, and now I’ve made my way right across Europe and here I am about to cross Lake Como all alone but more exciting than all alone, in the company of Italians, some of whose Lombardy Italian I can understand.
Don’t worry, I’ll spare you my nostalgically recalled adolescent raptures over the scenery. I’d just ask you to remember that I’d grown up in post-war Derbyshire, that I was accustomed to bomb craters all over the towns and cities of northern England, by then overrun with brambles and morning glory but sites of explosion none the less, that the rain-hammered ruins of aerial bombardment were ordinary, that rationing meant I’d eaten my first orange when my mother brought them back from Israel in her suitcase, peace-offering or bribe, and here were trees bright with oranges and the scent of their blossom heavy as we came into each small harbour; here were figs, which I knew only dried and chopped in suet puddings, ripening on the trees; lemons weighing down glossy leaves; hillsides silvery with olive groves when I had only read about olives – yes, I know, done before, done to death, but like most clichés there is a reason. I was seventeen and hungry in every way.
Débarques à St Abbondio, Maman’s letter said. She always switched to French for disembarkation. Get off, she said, in English you are always getting, food and clothes and ideas and on and off, it’s a lazy verb. I alighted. I made landfall. I stepped ashore. I had not expected to be met, we were not that sort of family. Daddy, sometimes, if he remembered your train time – if you had told him your train time – and if he could spare the time and petrol, would drive down to the village and wait in the ancient Land Rover which smelt of manure and dogs, but mostly we stood on our own two feet, even Lydie tottering up the mucky lane in unsuitable shoes with her smart leather case banging against her perfect calves. I hitched the knapsack. My shoes, polished by Daddy and re-soled before I left, had a few miles in them yet. There were pink and red and white geraniums spilling from troughs fixed to the metal railings along the cobbled promenade, railings as exotic to me as the flowers since all the municipal metalwork in England had been torn up for munitions in the early days of the war, before I was born, and never replaced. There were trees of uniform heights planted at uniform distances in stone-lined beds in the pavement and between them wooden benches, freshly painted, unoccupied. I would have liked to sit down a moment, collect myself, but I would have felt conspicuous. Even more conspicuous. There were men sitting at tables in front of what must have been a bar, three little boys who stopped playing on the pebble beach to watch me, two women also disembarking with baskets and packages from their shopping in Como. Turn right and walk straight through the village, the letter said.
The sun was still bright on the promenade. The air and the breeze seemed dry; then as now, I was accustomed to damp. We are half-aquatic, we people of the North Atlantic’s unnameable archipelago, Ireland and Northern Ireland and the British Isles, the Republic and the North and the dis-United Kingdom, the smaller island and the bigger one and the tax havens round the edges which tend to be the warmest and driest of the lot. We have, at least, a climate in common. Weather fronts do not divide us. We go out in the rain, we breathe the fog, we swim our chilly waters. You probably don’t count yourself among us but maybe you will, after reading this, maybe you will naturalize, though I doubt any story will alter your body’s perception of the air, of dryness and humidity. I heard for the first time the shrilling of cicadas, could not yet stop hearing it. There was always birdsong in England then, the quiet of my adult life was not yet falling, and so the Italian birds were less noticeable than they are to me when I travel now, but there were voices I had not heard before in their chorus, unfamiliar wings on the air. The buildings were all a shade of orange-pink I associated with curtains, somehow louche or feminine or not serious enough for outdoor use, and their deep-set windows had white wooden shutters which I had seen only in pictures. My feet slowed as I passed the canopied window of the panificio e pasticceria, displaying piles of prettily shaped biscuits studded with nuts and chocolate; bronzed bread buttoned with olives and tomatoes, gleaming with oil; further back, layer cakes and small creamy confections. I would return, I thought, when I had the lay of the land, when I knew how much money I could spare for such indulgences. If any. I still had my sandwich, after all, a sort of overgrown bread roll exotic enough with its dried beef and peppery salad filling.
I carried on. The pavement ended with the houses. High walls ran between the dusty road and the hillside, and on the other side the lake sparkled and lapped. I would climb some of those hills, and I would swim in the lake which must surely be warm enough, under all this sun. After you leave the village, Maman wrote, take the first turn up the hill and the gate is on your right. Here it was, a large double gate, fancy wrought iron, behind which a gravel drive lined with glossy-leaved pink-flowering bushes curved up daisied grass. Bloody hell, Lydie, I said. Cypress trees towered over the lawns and I couldn’t see the house. The villa. I took a deep breath and tried to turn the handle of the gate. Maybe it was just stiff. Maybe I should lift not turn. But the big keyhole was plain, oiled, in use. I looked again for a bell, maybe you were supposed to ring, maybe I was oafish, trying to let myself in. What if it was the wrong house after all, what would they think, some travel-stained foreigner trying to get in? (Always getting, you English, in and out, up and off.) I walked up the road a bit, to see if there was another house, if I could have made a mistake, but there wasn’t, not that I could see. After the end of the pink wall there was farmland, cows, and then the mountainside, only one villa to the right of the first road after the end of the village. I tried the gate again, hurt my finger. Trust sodding Lydie to immure herself like Sleeping Beauty. What was I supposed to do, mount my charger and hack through a century’s growth of thorns? No mobile phones, of course, in those days; if I’d had a telephone number for the villa, I could perhaps have returned to the village and negotiated the use of the panificio’s telephone, but I didn’t. Nor, I reflected, did I have anything like enough money for a hotel, let alone a ticket back to England, or even to the South of France where I had a postal address for my mother’s hosts but no telephone number. I should have to sleep in an olive grove, hitchhike my way back to Derbyshire, starve to death like Jane Eyre on the moor except that I would be surrounded after all by ripe oranges and figs and I still had my sandwich. I sat down on the grass verge, which I later discovered to have been a mistake, insect bites in places you don’t want them, and ate half the sandwich and the last bit of the fruit cake from home, and then I gave thanks again to Daddy for the knapsack and climbed over the gate.
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From Ripeness by Sarah Moss. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Moss.
