The Girl With A Peach

The perspective of the ordinary soldier has been largely neglected in the many accounts by PoWs who escaped from their camps in Italy after the Armistice in September 1943. The authors were in the main officers, resulting in an incomplete picture of the experiences of the 50,000 escapees.

In a valuable addition to literature on the PoW story, MSMT trustee Anne Copley has set out to redress this in her new book The Girl with a Peach, published by the Trust. Whilst initially planning a route back to Allied lines, the Other Ranks’ greater suffering under capture, transportation and imprisonment meant they were often relieved to eventually find a friendly face and an invitation to stay until liberation.

Thus, this is a story of young men from different nations, who prior to the war had never been far from home, coming face-to-face with the former enemy. And this enemy was alien in another way too, because the poverty-stricken Italian sharecroppers (contadini) who bravely and generously opened their doors to hide escapees were living a medieval existence that would have been totally strange to them.

The highly readable The Girl With A Peach describes how these Allied servicemen came to terms with their predicament. Many, like their officers, sought to reach safety by joining up with the Allied army in south Italy, or reach neutral Switzerland. But many lived for months with their Italian hosts in north and central Italy waiting for the Allies, delayed by stiff German resistance, to reach them.

In doing so, they had to get used to unfamiliar circumstances, learning the language, working in the farmers’ fields, getting used to eating polenta, and socialising, all the while dodging the Germans and the Fascists. The contadini opened their hearts and the young men, themselves from different backgrounds, responded in kind, as Anne reveals from the stirring accounts that she has unearthed.

This “strange alliance”, as it has been dubbed, somehow bore fruit. The outcome in many cases was a bond of friendship that lasted lifetimes, and which still endures between descendants of the PoWs and their helpers today.

The Girl with a Peach, Courage and compassion in wartime Italy, by Anne Copley, is published by the Monte San Martino Trust and is available from bookshops and Amazon.