Heroes & Haberdashers
Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines
In the winter of 1943 young Eric Newby, later to become known for his jaunty accounts of his adventurous travels, was facing probably the hardest test of his life. Captured by the Germans while on a secret mission to bomb a German air field and incarcerated in Northern Italy, he had escaped and was on the run in the Apennine mountains. During those long months on the run he was fed and sheltered by poor peasant farmers who risked torture and execution to help him. His life was also saved by the cool head and steadfast character of a Slovene girl called Wanda, and as well as describing a spine-tingling escape, this book is the beginning of a love story that lasted the rest of Newby’s life. After the war he returned to Italy to find her, and as he tells us in his hilarious sequel Something Wholesale (SFE No. 41), against all the odds, reader, she married him.
Eric Newby, Something Wholesale
Who would have thought that the adventurous traveller and decorated wartime hero Eric Newby had started his working life in the rag trade? But that is the story he tells in this characteristically jaunty and very funny book. Lane & Newby, ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’, occupied a warren of offices in Great Marlborough Street and here young Eric was put to work in the Mantle Department, and forced to accompany Mr Wilkins, the head salesman, on one of his twice yearly excursions to drum up orders in the great industrial towns of the North. As Eric blundered his way through the various departments, things were beginning to go wrong. Eric’s father, an Edwardian patriarch with a light-hearted attitude to accounting, had been running up debts, and during the Fifties Lane & Newby finally collapsed. By this time, however, Eric was laying plans for an excursion to the Hindu Kush – and the rest is travel history.
A Romantic Escape
Love and War in the Apennines is a book of romantic escape, overseen by the suffering of war, which shows how it ripples out across society and into fragile human lives.
Read moreMisadventures in the Rag Trade
It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu...
Read moreLarge Busts and Slim Margins
It remains one of the more surprising facts of life that the intrepid traveller Eric Newby, who by the time I knew him had the weatherbeaten cragginess of a man only happy when halfway up the Hindu...
Read more
