Julia MacKenzie
In 2017, a long-dead uncle appeared in a dream to historian Malcolm Gaskill’s mother. The spectral figure of Ralph Corps seemed to be pulling her into the shadows. Gaskill knew little about Corps beyond odd scraps of family memory: a wartime military policeman, captured in North Africa, a PoW, an improbable escape from a train using a knife and fork, and recollections of him as a “cold fish”, a postwar colonial prison officer. However, the dream prompted Gaskill to discover more, and thus began what became a seven-year search in archives and on the ground in Italy, just as those with some memory of wartime events were fading from sight.
This is a journey that will be familiar to a number of MSMT supporters who have traced the Italian families that sheltered their forebears and, like Gaskill, have experienced some of the “best lunches of their lives” with those descendants. Gaskill, known for his books on 17th-century witchcraft, brings all his skills as a historian to the task, but the book also has elements of a detective story as he uncovers Corps’ past.
He was fortunate in finding Corps’ own record of his imprisonment from June 1942 to May 1943 in PG 65 Gravina-Altamura in Puglia, written in three exercise books while later on the run in Italy, but he fleshes out the narrative by consulting other PoW memoirs held by the MSMT and the Imperial War Museum, as well as other archives, and the deft use of numerous published accounts by former PoWs. At key moments, when the trail goes cold, new leads are derived from the Allied Screening Commission files held by NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington and material from Italian archives. As a result, this is a tale that can stand in for many (they are all different yet all the same), telling the story of the Allied PoWs in wartime Italy.
Early on, Gaskill made contact with Domenico Bolognese, a campaigner to conserve the site of PG 65, with his own family history to uncover. The two men soon bonded and shared the thrill of the chase on numerous road trips following Corps’ trail, first as he escaped the camp in March 1943 with RAF pilot Charlie West (they were recaptured after six days); then transfer north to PG 52 Chiavari in Liguria; escape in the hills north of Verona from the train taking them to Germany in September 1943 (and they did use a knife and fork to cut through the floor of the cattle truck); and finally the months on the run when they were sheltered by Italian families and Charlie fought with the partisans.
Such was the connection between Gaskill and Bolognese, and their identification with the wartime story, that they started to slip into calling each other Ralph and Charlie. However, Gaskill’s search was not just for what happened to his relative in the war; it was for something more, the quest to know and understand someone in the past. The result is that the figure in the dream is pulled forward from the shadows and emerges as a more complex character than his relatives ever imagined. But what is memory and how much can we ever really know anyone? However difficult, as Gaskill movingly shows, it is part of being human to want to try.
