HOME TRUTHS: Lella

Lella left the rubble of post-war Italy to a home beside Melbourne’s
bubbling Darebin Creek, and discusses what really makes a house a casa.

Name Lella

Lives in Ivanhoe

Please finish this sentence: Home is where… language and culture thrive and survive.

Describe your childhood home

For the first eight years of my life I lived between the house I was born in – our two-room-and-a-kitchen home in the small town of Motta San Giovanni, Italy, near that ribbon of sea between Sicily and the mainland – and my grandmother’s home in the country. During World War II, we were alerted to impending bombings by small red pamphlets dropped from low-flying aeroplanes and felt safe in the bomb shelter not far from my grandmother’s. We were huddled in the bomb-shelter the night that they bombed the house I was born in. While the window frames landed on the bed my mother and I would’ve been asleep in, the house as a whole survived.

Early on in the war my father, who was soldiering with the Royal Italian Army (known as the Regio Esercito), was captured by the Allies in North East Africa. Along with some 10,000 prisoners, he was held in a British Prisoner of War Camp in Kenya where unchecked hunger, malnutrition, torture and deadly diseases reigned supreme.

Never for an instant did my mother consider the possibility that her husband wasn’t returning home. Over eight tumultuous years, every spring she would raise the lid of the trunk that all of my father’s clothes were asleep in, lift out his woolen overcoat and hang it from the back of a chair in the open air. Under egg-yolk sunshine, she’d awaken it into shape with a rug beater and release dust-motes to the breeze. I loved sinking my hands into the overcoat’s pockets, but all I’d find was emptiness.

With all the men on both sides of our family working or serving in the military in other parts of Italy, ours was a household of creative women. Italy was crippled rubble. There was no running water, no sewers, no electricity, no TV, no internet; only a single public telephone line to serve the whole town. The only means to receive news bulletins was through a single radio set nestled between bottles of mint liqueur in the only bar in town. But while the women in my family had style and panache, they wouldn’t dream of entering the bar.

In our home every meal was earth grown, and every garment handmade. From my mother, grandmother, aunties, I learned that with wool from a single sheep, one could fashion ten unique garments. And with a few kilos of flour (especially at Easter and Christmas), we’d cook-up many different aromatic dishes that lasted up to a week.

While the war ended in 1945, due to his precarious health condition my father was not repatriated until 1947. The official reason given was that they had to assign him an escort as a witness in case he died while on the ship home.

Did you ever have to make a home away from home? 

Upon my father’s return I was moved out of the large double bed in my parents’ bedroom which, up to then, I had been sleeping in with my mother, and was relocated to a narrow single bed on the side of the dining table in the front room.

In the beginning, being back home was an invigorating period for my father. The gloom around our house had lifted and new plans for the future were forged. Because at the time of my birth I had been baptised in water, the first ceremony my parents held was for eight-year-old me to be formally baptised in the church.  But, at a time when PTSD was not recognised and medical support for all kinds of chronic health issues was not readily available, my father’s health deteriorated. In the Italian Army he had been a Morse Code operator, however, determined to be the breadwinner, over the next three years he laboured on infrastructure projects, tunnelling through the mountains that bordered Italy and Austria. Work in the tunnels was dangerous; unsuspecting workers were not only prone to being crushed by large boulders, but the tunnels were also a prime site for silicosis disease.

By the end of 1950, our family comprised Mum, Dad and my two gorgeous sisters Maria and Silvana, both born after dad returned home. At the time, Italy was economically moribund, and no one anticipated the industrial development that was to revolutionize the country over the next decade. Undeterred by possible disappointments, my father decided to migrate. Out of the three countries (Argentina, Australia, and Canada) that he could have applied to, my father, without rancour or ill-will towards his former captors, chose to migrate to Australia in 1950.

This time the separation between my father and us lasted five years. That’s how long it took him out of his weekly wage of six pounds (which he made digging channels for the Bendigo Water Commission), to pay back the money he had borrowed for his ticket to Australia, cover his living expenses, send a small monthly sum to my mother for basic living expenses, and save for our four tickets on the P&O Oronsay.

Leaving behind all the family that sustained us during the war, we sailed out of Naples on 31 May 1955. The ship was our new home for nearly one month.

Our first home in Australia consisted of two rooms lit only by a single globe and a kitchen behind a fruit shop. There was a wood stove at one end, and a little basin on the opposite wall. It was here that news of two of my grandparents dying one after the other reached us. It was here that homesickness overcame my mother, and it was here that between the stove and the basin, a horrendous domestic accident scarred one of my sisters.

Where’s home for you?

I was immediately attracted to my home in Ivanhoe by the gurgling Darebin Creek that borders my land – so reminiscent of the narrow stream that ran besides my grandmother’s house. There was also a gnarled olive tree and a now defunct almond tree that beckoned to me thirty-two years ago. As much as the creek and the trees reminded me of my childhood, spiritual nourishment by those that love and understand you is something else. Today I find myself distanced for ever from those that speak my mother tongue, celebrate rituals that glue people together, and ferociously strive to have family members included in their burial lot, on the other side of the world.  

What does home mean to you?  

In Italian, the single word “casa” is synonymous with house and home. It is within the physical structure called casa that we take refuge in time of distress. Surprises are spilled across dinner tables. Secrets are often revealed. Where – generally speaking – burning passion is consummated. Deliberate or accidental procreation takes root. In my case, it was the shell that provided the privacy my mother needed when giving birth to all three of us. It is also within the confine of the sealed cave called “home” that some of the most heinous crimes on women and children are perpetrated.

In 2015 I went to Italy to primarily, visit my grandparents’ burial sites. However, the most vivid memory of that trip is of the door to the house I was born in, hanging from a semidetached hinge. I was surrounded by caring people who took me there, but what I really wished for was to be alone with my remembering.

Do you have any ‘home truths’ for people dealing with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?  

When I hear people lament a few weeks of social distancing caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, I think of the stolen generation of children separated from their mothers, in some cases forever. I think of unmarried mothers coerced into giving away their babies for adoption. I think of barefoot children and orphans in refugee camps in Syria. And I think of my mother’s unplanned long separations from my father, eight years because of the war, five years because of migration.   

Interview Maria O’Dwyer Illustration Janelle Barone