Read The Hazelnut Grove

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78864-917-9
Verlag: Cinnamon Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 238 Seiten

On the surface a young professional couple, Sarah and Luke craved a different, more self-sufficient life. They traded the comfort of a two-bedroom English cottage for a derelict house in northwest Italy. The Hazelnut Grove explores the joys and demands of daring to live in search of a dream. Sarah and Luke's chosen life is part fairy tale, part story of courage and self-reliance as their new neighbour, nicknamed il Cattivo, the nasty one, decides to make war over the desolate hazelnut grove, a two metre strip of land behind their house. Their story is interspersed with anecdotes drawn from the author's family's holiday cottage in rural France. As events unfold that might have driven them away, especially Sarah, who does not share Luke's Italian heritage, a picture emerges not only of how the Italian life has tested Sarah, but also of how she discovered in herself both a grand obstinacy and a respect for the materials and objects of that life. A chunk of rusting metal becomes, in Sarah's eyes, an artefact with potential. Sarah becomes an artist. Set in Piedmont, renowned for its wine and food, a story of abundance and thriving slowly emerges against the challenges of a menacing neighbour, the deaths of beloved animals and the loneliness of getting to grips with an unfamiliar language and culture. When asked by English friends: 'Would you ever move back home again?' Luke and Sarah can only answer: 'We are home.'

Paula Read started out as a journalist and subsequently trained as a languages teacher. She lives in London now, but has also lived and worked in France, Canada (where she worked as a French/English interpreter) and the USA. The Hazelnut Grove is about the joys and woes of moving to another European country at a time when Europe signified something to be part of not a place to escape from. She has had several short stories published and is currently working on a second non-fiction book about the fate of forced labourers from occupied France in World War II.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Read, Paula

Leseproben

PREFACE

Piedmont, Italy

The present

Sarah is combing Allegra in the courtyard. She is trying to untangle the fringe obscuring Allegra’s bright brown eyes, but the small dog is making it difficult, tossing her head from Sarah who pursues her with even more determination. They enjoy themselves.

I am sitting with Daisy, my aunt, at the stone mosaic table overlooking the garden, watching Sarah as she squats on her haunches to attend to the dog, her short blond hair tucked behind her ears. She is a slightly built woman in her early fifties and looks nowhere near her age—nor does Luke, her husband and my younger cousin, lean as a greyhound and almost as laid-back. Daisy is Luke’s mother, my late mother’s younger sister, a slim woman (she swims three times a week) and just eighty (much to her disgust, but then as the family always says, it’s better than the alternative). She adds dash to any outfit, even the creased linen shorts and white shirt she is wearing now.

It is early summer. Around Sarah and Allegra, several large earthenware pots are arranged in symmetry. Olive and fig trees grow in them, while in smaller pots, herbs are thriving. The basil is particularly vivid, bright green and each leaf perfect, not one bite mark left by some marauding predator. The house itself, Cascina Cannella, literally ‘Cinnamon Farmhouse,’ is named in memory of their last English cat, a charmingly plump tabby whose plumpness extended to the pads of his paws.

Sarah sets Allegra free and comes to the stone table to join us. There are still a couple of slices of breakfast cake in the bread basket, light sponge with apricots baked into the top, picked from the garden and nicely embedded in the cake.

Do we want more coffee? No, cake morsels are sufficient. We sit looking out over the small copse of fruit trees, a couple of hammocks slung between them. Rosemary, thyme and lavender scramble out from the rocks leading down to the trees. And then, over there, lies the top of the vineyard that stretches away down the hillside. In the autumn, they harvest the Moscato grapes and send them to the nearest winemaker in Asti. The wine from their vineyard is sweet and golden, a perfect pudding wine.

On a previous visit, over several evenings of chat and Dolcetto, a local red wine, we all decided it would be a great idea to tell Sarah and Luke’s story and that I should be the one to do it, given my background in journalism. All of us in the family are aware of how Sarah and Luke bought a dilapidated old farmhouse in rural Piedmont and subsequently made the momentous decision almost fifteen years ago to move to Italy permanently. The three sisters, my late mother Violet, her older sister May, and Daisy, were remarkably close, which meant they maintained a family cohesion. All the cousins knew what was going on in each other’s lives. The idea, however, of telling Sarah and Luke’s story to a wider audience than the immediate family developed slowly, like all the best wines. Piedmont is, after all, one of the most renowned wine-growing regions in Italy. It is the place where you find the great Barolos and Barbarescos, although my favourite is the light and tasty Dolcetto. Wine flows through this story, a happy emollient, in contrast to the scratchy underside of the tale, in which loneliness and fear play their part. It is a story of determination, obstinacy and joy—and of the unexpected.

Luke and Sarah are not their real names. We have decided to change the names of the characters in the book to protect their privacy. Not everything has been a walk in the sunshine in this mountain retreat. Much has happened that might have driven them away, especially Sarah who is not tied to an Italian heritage like Luke. His father, Gino Rinaldi, was born in England of Italian parents.

Their story seems almost as significant to me as my own, which in a sense, it is. A few years before Sarah and Luke looked for a house in Italy, my family had already bought what might loosely be termed a habitable house in rural France (it had running water, a working electric supply and a bidet but no toilet). It was 1992. This wasn’t so unusual. Many people in Britain were encouraged to widen their horizons and think about spending the money that might have been earmarked for holidays abroad for a more ambitious purpose—putting it towards buying their own property in Europe. Borders could be crossed easily. People were curious. There was a willingness to embrace the differences between us. Europe signified space and adventure and shared history, something to be part of, not as it does now in these distorted times, a place to escape from.

*

On Saturday 23 June 2018 I took part in a protest march in London calling for a people’s vote on the final deal agreed by the UK government on the country’s withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit. This was an anti-Brexit march, with participants drawn from all over the UK, all intent on demonstrating how much we wanted to stay in the EU and how frightened we were of leaving it. For many of us, this march was unbelievable. Unbelievable because we were still suffering from the shock of the vote to leave the EU on 23 June 2016. How could ‘the British people’ make such a suicidal decision? The vote was close, but the outcome held up as decisive, despite the many doubts about the organisation of the referendum or the number of people voting only representing a portion of the population. Not everyone was allowed a vote. Many British citizens living abroad in Europe, for example, could not vote, even though they were bound to be affected by the outcome.

Leaving the EU is a catastrophe for many and a step away from the vision of a safer Europe many have striven for after the world wars of the twentieth century. That vision was of a progressive union, built on the determination to avoid pitching ourselves back into that pit of political helplessness that engendered hatred and genocide. We hoped for the creation of great and democratic institutions where talking and compromise could take place, where pragmatism and fairness would win and dangerous ideologies would find no takers.

That vision was deluged in hateful rhetoric, the expression of ugly attitudes and the legitimation of lies. And here we are now, exposing our children and grandchildren to a future of division, more hatred, more lies.

When I started writing this book, the most significant decision for a generation in Britain had not yet been taken. This is a book about following a dream, one shared by many, but one that only a few manage to fulfil—the dream of making your life in another country of your choice, choosing how you live rather than accepting the place and culture you are born into. It was possible to make such a dream come true then because of another equally significant decision made by the British people in 1973.

In that year, the UK voted to join the EU, seeking not only a better economic future but a more secure one. That decision opened not only the physical borders to many other countries and cultures, it also opened the eyes, the minds and the hearts of British citizens many of whom travelled to Europe for the first time.

*

Piedmont

There is always a wind in the evening. In the summer, it is welcome, lifting heat from shoulders. You are sitting on the balcony furthest from the main house, looking across and around the valley. Below and over to the side, you can discern through the balcony railing the top branches of the trees in the shadowy hazelnut grove. Lights are distributed sparingly across the broad, dark slopes. People and animals are settling into the warm night.

The farm dogs have nothing to bark at. The occasional light moving in a series of S bends shows people are still on the move, negotiating the sinuous mountain roads. On a summer’s evening it’s easy to feel that there is no more beautiful place on earth.

But turn to the winter. Then there is no sitting on the balcony furthest from the main house. It’s too cold. The wind is bitter and sometimes the snow is in vast piles, weighing down the trees in the hazelnut grove that stands to the side of the house and around which curves the road.

Then, Cascina Cannella could be considered almost as some mediaeval fortification, some mountaintop fastness only reached by the steadfast and determined.

The building of life in Cascina Cannella is a fairy tale, but one in which the characters have had to draw on amounts of courage and self-reliance they might never have discovered in themselves if they had chosen a different life. The Hazelnut Grove is a story of moving to another country in search of a dream, but one that recognises what such an adventure demands. What if you sell all your worldly goods, abandon a home you have been building for years in the country of your birth, quit a job you enjoy, say goodbye to your family and friends, and give up entirely that certain place of safety, to take a chance on a dream that at times becomes an ordeal? This is what...