Freya Stark Read Online Free
Author: Caroline Moorehead
slaughter house’ with little shelter for the troops. From the hills above Villa Trento the nurses watched the fighting, a front that weaved and recoiled like a snake through the vineyards. The shelling made the windows rattle.
On 24 October two divisions of enemy troops broke through at Caporetto, and the retreat began. On the 28th, Freya noted in her diary that they had been travelling for twenty and a half hours, frequently stuck in heavy rain and persistent winds. ‘The retreat looks like a panic; Udine evacuated; wounded trudging in the rain.’ Along the side of the road lay dead horses; lorries and men shuffled through shuttered streets. The unit reached Padua on the 30th; their stores and kit had gone and twenty of their thirty-five cars had been lost. The intention had been to reform and continue the hospital; the order now came for the unit to go
in riposo
. Freya, no longer needed, made her way back to Dronero.
Shortly after Armistice Day, Robert Stark returned to Italy. The war years had not improved Flora’s relations with Vera, over whose life and marriage she now seemed in complete, domineering control. With her father, Freya, more assertive than ever after five years of independence, formed a plan to buy a cottage some way from Piedmont, where Flora could be installed, and the three of them set off to wander along the now deserted coast of the Riviera. As they walked, Robert and Flora kept fifty yards apart.
They found what they wanted at La Mortola, not far from Ventimiglia and five minutes from the French border, in a small pebbly bay adjoining a property with famously beautiful water gardens. There was a vineyard, two and a half acres of land and a cottage with four little rooms, separated from the sea by the railway. The name of the property was L’Arma. It was peaceful and very beautiful.
The idea had been to provide some escape for Vera and also somewhere for her to bring her children. L’Arma also had to be made to pay. Freya had just over £90 a year to live on, her father having settled some capital on her; Flora, having sunk everything into Mario’s factory, nothing. While Flora painted cupboards and dressers for the little house, Freya hauled water up the steep slopes and learnt to prunethe vines. One year she tried carnations and stocks, another, vegetables. In between fretting about the bills, she read the
Georgics
. Notebooks of the time contain dates for planting fruit trees, scraps of poetry, extracts from political speeches and recipes. In the summer evenings she would walk down the hill and swim out into the bay, where the fishermen caught anchovies and sardines by lamplight. If sometimes lonely, she was also fully occupied and, whether consciously or not, schooled herself to develop a ‘preference for this world as it is, and an inclination to deal with things one after another, even if they happen to be time and eternity’.
It was now that Freya became a smuggler, enjoying a talent and a nerve for it that was to give her considerable satisfaction and her friends considerable anxiety in the Middle Eastern years to come. A naval family nearby owned an early Sienese painting. A French collector saw it and offered £1,000 to its owner, and £100 to Freya, if she could get it to him. Freya borrowed a cart and pony, placed the masterpiece inside, seated a Scottish friend and her bags on top, and led the party over the border. Friends were later to call her, with affection, ‘compulsively unscrupulous’; Freya, who saw no moral wickedness in them, relished such adventures.
After five years of war, Freya now rediscovered the mountains with W. P. Ker, her climbing companion since the early days of their friendship, but only for long days, not serious overnight mountaineering, for he declared that he loathed women climbers. In the immediate post-war years their expeditions became annual rituals, after which Freya would bring Ker back to L’Arma and force him to bathe, not as he
On 24 October two divisions of enemy troops broke through at Caporetto, and the retreat began. On the 28th, Freya noted in her diary that they had been travelling for twenty and a half hours, frequently stuck in heavy rain and persistent winds. ‘The retreat looks like a panic; Udine evacuated; wounded trudging in the rain.’ Along the side of the road lay dead horses; lorries and men shuffled through shuttered streets. The unit reached Padua on the 30th; their stores and kit had gone and twenty of their thirty-five cars had been lost. The intention had been to reform and continue the hospital; the order now came for the unit to go
in riposo
. Freya, no longer needed, made her way back to Dronero.
Shortly after Armistice Day, Robert Stark returned to Italy. The war years had not improved Flora’s relations with Vera, over whose life and marriage she now seemed in complete, domineering control. With her father, Freya, more assertive than ever after five years of independence, formed a plan to buy a cottage some way from Piedmont, where Flora could be installed, and the three of them set off to wander along the now deserted coast of the Riviera. As they walked, Robert and Flora kept fifty yards apart.
They found what they wanted at La Mortola, not far from Ventimiglia and five minutes from the French border, in a small pebbly bay adjoining a property with famously beautiful water gardens. There was a vineyard, two and a half acres of land and a cottage with four little rooms, separated from the sea by the railway. The name of the property was L’Arma. It was peaceful and very beautiful.
The idea had been to provide some escape for Vera and also somewhere for her to bring her children. L’Arma also had to be made to pay. Freya had just over £90 a year to live on, her father having settled some capital on her; Flora, having sunk everything into Mario’s factory, nothing. While Flora painted cupboards and dressers for the little house, Freya hauled water up the steep slopes and learnt to prunethe vines. One year she tried carnations and stocks, another, vegetables. In between fretting about the bills, she read the
Georgics
. Notebooks of the time contain dates for planting fruit trees, scraps of poetry, extracts from political speeches and recipes. In the summer evenings she would walk down the hill and swim out into the bay, where the fishermen caught anchovies and sardines by lamplight. If sometimes lonely, she was also fully occupied and, whether consciously or not, schooled herself to develop a ‘preference for this world as it is, and an inclination to deal with things one after another, even if they happen to be time and eternity’.
It was now that Freya became a smuggler, enjoying a talent and a nerve for it that was to give her considerable satisfaction and her friends considerable anxiety in the Middle Eastern years to come. A naval family nearby owned an early Sienese painting. A French collector saw it and offered £1,000 to its owner, and £100 to Freya, if she could get it to him. Freya borrowed a cart and pony, placed the masterpiece inside, seated a Scottish friend and her bags on top, and led the party over the border. Friends were later to call her, with affection, ‘compulsively unscrupulous’; Freya, who saw no moral wickedness in them, relished such adventures.
After five years of war, Freya now rediscovered the mountains with W. P. Ker, her climbing companion since the early days of their friendship, but only for long days, not serious overnight mountaineering, for he declared that he loathed women climbers. In the immediate post-war years their expeditions became annual rituals, after which Freya would bring Ker back to L’Arma and force him to bathe, not as he
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