Ruth Murphy
A significant part of my work for the past few months has been devoted to selecting my book’s protagonists. On the PoW side, this has been found in Major Ronald Loftus Cummins, whose file is part of the Trust’s archive.
Ronald Cummins served with the Durham Light Infantry and was a PoW in Camp 29, Viano — a camp for senior officers. But Cummins’ file is extraordinary for its extensive collection of letters between himself and his wife Brenda, whom he met in Dorset during the Battle of Britain, and for the diary he kept upon escaping from Viano in September 1943. Also preserved are countless letters from Brenda’s friends and family, along with official communications from the War Office and the Red Cross, all of which evoke a “world” around them that holds both the domestic and the military.
Ronald and Brenda had a son, Peter, born in November 1941. Through Brenda’s loving descriptions, Ronald comes to know his son; he will not meet him until he returns to England in July 1944. Subject to consent from Cummins’ descendants, his story — told exclusively through these contemporary documents — will be intersected with other testimonies from wartime Italy. Supporters are welcome to share with me anything they think may be of interest in relation to the above.
In my search for first-hand accounts of the war from an Italian perspective, I recently spent a week in Italy’s Archivio Diaristico Nazionale (National Diary Archive) in the small Tuscan town of Pieve Santo Stefano. There, I consulted a selection of wartime diaries. Among these was the diary of Ivano Amoretti, an 11-year-old boy who chronicled the major events of WW2 alongside the movements of “gli inglesi” up the Italian peninsula and the constant air raids in his own town of San Remo. Ivano is both war-obsessed and yearning for the war’s end. His irreverent, child’s-eye view is a very different kind of voice to that of Senior British Officer Ronald Cummins; and yet bringing their accounts side by side summons surprising affinities.
As was envisaged from the outset, the book I am writing pieces together a variety of contemporary sources relating to PoWs’ experiences into one story. The scope of the book has broadened as my research has developed. If the relationship between PoWs and their Italian helpers is at the heart of the Trust’s mission, my research seeks to connect accounts written by PoWs with sources from other, contrasting wartime experiences in Italy. This gives the reader a picture of the war as it was lived by a group of individuals whose voices record it in different shades. Ronald Cummins and Ivano Amoretti are two main characters in this collage. Finally, such a plurality of perspectives also has the advantage of consolidating PoW experiences within the broader history of Italy in WWII.
An invaluable memoir
At Cambridge, this June saw the donation of a unique document to the MSMT’s archive: the 1944 memoir of Ralph Corps, great-uncle of writer and historian Malcolm Gaskill and the protagonist of the latter’s recent book The Glass Mountain.
This is an exciting addition to the MSMT collection. Ralph Corps’ memoir was written in hiding in late 1944, on three Italian school exercise books. The memoir concentrates on his escape from PG 65 Gravina in March 1943. Corps was recaptured with his fellow fugitive, but would later make another escape from a train north of Verona after the Armistice, and spend over a year in hiding in the area around Lake Garda. As Gaskill records in The Glass Mountain, his memoir begins with the line: “Contrary to enemy propaganda life in a prison camp is not a happy one, and every ex-prisoner of war will, without exception, second that statement.” The original manuscript of circa 35,000 words has been deposited alongside Gaskill’s transcription. I had the honour of formally accepting the memoir from Ralph’s family on behalf of the Trust in the Cambridge University Library on June 13th.
