The Creative Journey - My Interview with Aunty Maria
Aunty Maria turned 96 years old this week. My mother-in-law’s sister, Aunty (or Zia) Maria has outlived my own mother and my mother-in-law. The reason I mention it is because Aunty Maria has been a big part of my creative journey. I didn’t know that when I met her. I only know now how seemingly insignificant people can be an enormous part of your creative journey.
When I first met Aunty Maria in Tuscany, she was about sixty years old. I was a young girl with no knowledge around how Maria’s generation lived. I had no idea that in rural Tuscany, many farmers lived in extreme poverty. I thought Tuscany was all candles in Chianti wine bottles, red and white checked table clothes and lashings of food. It was Maria who told me otherwise. She piqued my interest in the country folk. She told me how my husband’s family was raised with no running water, gas or electricity. How they brushed their teeth with sage and coal. How she cared for the chickens at five years old, the sheep at ten, then the pigs from fourteen. Maria, almost illiterate, was schooled till second grade. None of her friends went past third grade. A sharecropper’s kid in Italy with a fifth-grade education was a like a demigod.
It was Maria who set me on the path to setting up The Promise to how it reads now. Unknowingly, this 96-year-old woman directed my creative journey. Because her story, partly here below, blew me away. Here is an extract from an interview with Maria, that ultimately ended up in The Promise. She was born in 1927, and now has dementia. She can no longer speak and has almost total memory loss. That we have part of her story here, is wonderful. I am incredibly grateful I was able to interview her when I did.
When news came to Consuma that a high-ranking Roman police officer was looking for a young girl to help with domestic duties, Maria’s mother and father put her forward for the job immediately. She was eleven years old. Apparently, the rich Romans knew they would find a girl from the Tuscan Casentino mountain area because it was well-known they were poor. Though Maria’s five sisters had routinely been sent down to work in Florence, none of them had been sent so far away from home. Maria was excited and terrified. Her eyes took on a faraway look as she remembered exactly what she was wearing the day she said goodbye to her family and caught a train from Arezzo to Rome on her own.
In 1939 Mussolini had been pushing a cheap, rough, blanket-type material onto the market. Many people had made dresses, pants, jackets and pinafores from the red-brown fabric even though it was infamous for turning rock hard when wet. Maria’s was a simple dress with two big pockets at the side. Her hair had been braided into two long blonde plaits that were tied with red ribbons. On her feet were plain black shoes and woollen tights, spun from the farms’ lamb’s wool and knitted by herself. Maria’s suitcase was a square piece of cloth tied into a bundle and attached to the end of a stick. Inside the bundle was one other change of clothes and a spare pair of underpants. Her mother had also given her some rags and an explanation as to how to use them. Maria was not yet menstruating and Nonna Angiolina knew it would happen soon.
It was mid-morning on a crisp November day when it was time to go and Nonna Angiolina was out working in the fields. Maria called out ‘mamma!’ and put her hand into her pocket to find her white handkerchief so that she could wave goodbye with it. Maria didn’t know that her new employer’s address in Rome fell out with her hankie.
By the time the horse-drawn cart arrived in Arezzo she was brimming with excitement. She’d never seen a big town or a train before. But halfway through the train journey, her world came crashing down. She realised she had lost her address in Rome.
At first, I didn’t understand why Maria started to cry at this point in her story. Her face twisted into deep sadness as she recalled her long-ago terror.
‘I had no money to go back to Arezzo and no money for when I arrived in Rome. All I could remember was Commissario Terni, the name of the man I was to work for. I was so frightened.’ As I began to imagine her fear tears sprang to my eyes too.
‘My father had told me to only ask a policeman for information if I got into trouble. I was not to trust or talk to anyone.’ Maria said she was sobbing by the time she got off the train in Rome. She walked around looking for a policeman till finally, she saw a uniformed man with a funny hat at the end of a long stretch of red carpet. She walked the length of the red carpet crying. She told him she was lost and begged him to help her find a certain Commissario Terni. But he would not even look at her, let alone speak to her. Maria was devastated that she could be so ignored. She didn’t know that he was a Royal Guard, unable to break his silence. Still, Maria did not leave his side, staying by him until a change of guard arrived. The new guard did speak to her, though she could answer few of his questions.
‘I didn’t even know I was from Tuscany. I could barely even write my own name. But I did say I’d come from Arezzo to work for Commissario Terni,’ said Maria wiping the tears from her face.
From that information, the Royal Guard took Maria to the police station nearest the railway. From there they rang police headquarters and located Commissario Terni. His driver duly arrived to pick her up. She stayed in Rome, earning six cents a month, till the war broke out more than a year later.
From this interview, I knew what I wanted to write about, and why. I also knew exactly where this new book would sit in regard to publishers and agents who want genre, genre, genre. I had moved to Italy; I would tell the untold stories of elderly Italians. This interview with Maria helped me work out the perspective of my new book and ultimately my next book. As well as why the stories were unique so that I could pitch them.
Aunty Maria helped me find my voice.
Happy 96th birthday Maria. I am grateful you came into my life and lifted me onto a creative path that has filled me with such joy.
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2023 Art of Writing Dates
NOW FULL - Thursday, February 9th to Sunday, February 12th, 2023, Brisbane, Australia
Sunday, May 7th to Thursday, May 11th, 2023, Florence
Sunday, June 4th to Thursday, June 8th, 2023, Florence
Sunday, June 25th to Thursday, June 29th The Next Draft, for finished manuscripts.
Sunday July 9th to Thursday, July 13th, 2023, Florence
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If you’d like to share any comments or thoughts, I’d be happy to hear from you. Email me directly at lisacliffordwriter@gmail.com.
