A SCOTTISH LOVE AFFAIR

It has taken the best part of fifty years for Guy Grieve to learn the real reason behind his mother’s love for Scotland, and it is a story that shocked him to the core A Scottish love affair

It has taken Guy Grieve fifty years to learn the real reason behind his mother's love for Scotland

Afew weeks ago I picked my mother up at the eye hospital in Glasgow where she was having a few checks. I pulled up in our refrigerated van to pick her up, she clambered in and we headed west for Mull.

On the way she rolled ciggies and poured out a shot of bourbon into a cup she had cut from the bottom of a plastic water bottle. We played music and had a good laugh as we drove. Sadly I’ve given up the sport of smoking yet that does not stop me from enjoying the sight of someone contentedly rolling moist Virginia tobacco and simply not taking life too seriously.

Once back at my mother’s flat in Tobermory we sat and talked as sunlight reflected off the sea, filling the room with pleasing little arcs of light. Seagulls called and every now and then a watchful black back gull would glide with menacing intent past the window, no doubt targeting the chip van bin or some other undefended morsel.

We got onto the subject of Italy and her time as a child there during the war. I asked her if she had ever been truly scared during that period. She sat back and with a sigh said: ‘Yes, a few times.’

She first told me about the night a drunk German had ordered her family out of their shelter during an air raid. It was not that surprising to hear about a German behaving in a frightening manner, but then she told me something I knew little of and it deeply shocked me.

With a sigh and shaking her head she said, ‘Marocchinate’. The Free French had supplied units of North African soldiery, mainly from Morocco but also from Algeria and Tunisia. These ‘allies’ had joined the war effort in Italy and at Monte Cassino, especially, these units known as Goumiers had engaged in rape on an industrial scale.

The famously useless French General in command, Alphonse Juin, did little to control them. Over 60,000 women were raped, it is estimated, by these appalling men, and 800 men died trying to defend them.

My mother told me of a searing hot day in July when she was walking with her mother to visit her grandmother. A jeep of leering Goumiers started following them. My grandmother grabbed my mother and started making fast for a door within a larger door at a house along the road.

My grandmother whispered fervently: ‘Giuliana… Pray the door is unlocked’. They reached it just as the jeep pulled up and the men disembarked. It was open. They quickly locked it and knelt behind it wrapped in a cloud of fear. ‘I was truly scared then,’ my mother tells me quietly.

My mother’s hometown, Maddaloni, just down from Monte Cassino, was famed for its artisanal chair-making. Every courtyard was filled with strong-armed men turning wood. The guild of chairmakers got together and discussed the arrival of the Goumiers, and a trap was laid one night.

A few Goumiers walked right into it and found themselves surrounded by short hard men armed with chair-legs. They were killed like rats and the town was left in peace as a result.

After a silence I asked her if she had any good memories. She smiled and lit another ciggie. A few weeks later my mother was on her balcony overlooking the main street. To her disbelief a long column of men wearing what she then thought were dresses marched in playing strange music.

Ahead of them a pig, their mascot, trotted proudly with its head held high, on a long lead. My mother waved and a soldier looked up then broke away and ran up the stairs. My mother and her family were terrified hearing his hob nailed boots echoing in the stairwell until he reached their landing.

They opened the door ajar in reply to his polite knock. The Jock lowered himself to his heels and held out a tin of Lyle’s Golden syrup. ‘That’s when I fell in love with sugar and Scotland,’ my mother told me with a smile made poignant with tears.

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We sat and talked as sunlight reflected off the sea, filling the room with light