A Taste of Slightly Foxed

The combination of the current issue of the quarterly – Issue 62 – and Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby makes an ideal introduction to the world of Slightly Foxed and a perfect present.

Slightly Foxed Issue 62

In this issue: Laurie Graham pays an unusual visit to the Blandings piggery • Adam Foulds hangs out with a Russian count • Ursula Buchan meets some extremely likeable people • William Palmer gets a new angle on evolution • Olivia Potts picks fruit with Jane Grigson • Charles Elliott shares a fearful passage to Australia • Rebecca Willis enjoys ‘The Saga of the Century’ • Richard Conyngham finds he’s very up and down in the Andes • Peter Radford puts on a burst of speed • Pauline Melville struggles with Jane Austen, and much more besides . . .

SF Edition, Love and War in the Apennines (No. 47)

‘That night something happened to me on the mountain. The weight of the rice coupled with the awful cough which I had to try and repress broke something in me. It was not physical; it was simply that part of my spirit went out of me, and in the whole of my life since that night it has never been the same again.’

It was the winter of 1943 and 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 in 1942 while on a secret mission to bomb a German airfield in Sicily and incarcerated in Northern Italy, he had escaped during the chaos of Italy’s surrender to the Allies and was on the run in the mountains.

This is the story he tells in Love and War in the Apennines, a book he dedicates ‘to all those Italians who helped me and thousands like me, at the risk of their lives’. During those long months on the run he was fed and sheltered by poor peasant farmers who hated the Italian Fascist militia as much as he did and risked torture and execution to help him. As well as being a spine-tingling escape story it is a fascinating picture of life in these remote mountain communities which at that time had changed little since the Middle Ages.

It is also the story of a love affair which lasted the rest of Newby’s life. Readers of Something Wholesale (SFE No. 41), his hilarious account of his brief career in the fashion business, will know that after the war he returned to Italy to seek out a Slovene girl called Wanda, whose cool head and steadfast character had helped him for a long time to evade recapture and survive. As he tells us in an epilogue, after surmounting ‘every kind of obstacle’, they married in 1946. So, though his wartime experience in the mountains may have marked him for ever, Newby’s extraordinary story ends on an upnote. An irresistible book by an irrepressible man.