03. Piazza Rossi Nicola – The school
I remember the nuns in our Kindergarten and I recall the broken tiles in the kitchen over there. To warm ourselves up, we all sat around a tripod brazier. The nuns made us sing and then at noon they gave us a bowl of soup.
At school there were two multi-grade classes. Every child came to school with a piece of wood; the teacher would put it into the stove to warm up the classroom. Some mornings there was so much smoke that I could not breathe.
One teacher came from Sanremo. She was old with a loud voice, but also kind of nice. Every now and then, she made us do the cleaning like dusting the teacher’s desk. She intimidated us because she always carried a black stick and she would hit you on the hands as punishment. If you didn’t understand something, she would strike your desk with her stick. Teacher Quartaroli brandished the stick and we were scared. My friend and I did not like the stick and one day, when it was our turn to dust, we looked at the open window together and we understood each other immediately without saying a word — and, in an instant, we threw the stick out of the window onto the roof in front of us. Then total chaos followed. The teacher got very angry, especially because no one in the class would say who had done it.
As children, we went to school even though there was war. We played hopscotch and when the warplanes passed by, they rushed us downstairs, piled up inside a small storage closet that — thinking about it now — if they had bombed the school, we would all be dead. For us children, it all became a bit of a game and I don’t remember being scared.
Our homes did not have a radio, or just in a few. At school there was a radio: our teachers listened to the news on the progress of the war, they read the newspapers and talked to us about what was happening. Our schoolteachers also talked about life — they taught us how to live. For us they were like guides.
I remember the first newspaper: the Caffaro, from Genoa, and printed on light blue paper.
When my father was at war, my mother got up early to go working in the fields. Before going to school, I gave my brother his baby bottle, turned on the stove to heat up my caffelatte, took my brother to the kindergarten and then I went to school. But I was fine — I never felt the lack of anything.
When I was 10 years old, I went to pick olives after school. I was in the fifth grade when I started working in the carpentry shop. When I was 12, I collected firewood for the baker up in Montenero.
I went to school in the morning and then in the afternoon I worked as a cleaner at the local after-work club, where there were spittoons for those who chewed tobacco and spat continuously. I was a child — and the spittoons were so disgusting!
