Читать книгу Amedeo: The True Story of an Italian’s War in Abyssinia - Sebastian O’Kelly - Страница 8

In 1995 when I was a magazine editor, I asked the great Bill Deedes of the Daily Telegraph to go to Milan to interview Indro Montanelli. In Italian journalism Montanelli, who died in July 2001, was a figure of similar stature and, like Lord Deedes, he had served in the Abyssinian war, although as a volunteer officer rather than as a newsman. I decided that I would go along too, acting as a consigliere–translator, but really to eavesdrop on their conversation.

The founder-editor of Il Giornale, Montanelli had split with his proprietor, Silvio Berlusconi, over his political ambitions – the tycoon had just become prime minister for the first time – and, at eighty-eight, was about to launch a daily newspaper. He and Bill Deedes were well matched. Bill, the inspiration for William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, had risen to become a cabinet minister, editor of the Telegraph and the most illustrious figure in our trade. Montanelli, who became a pressman after the conquest of Abyssinia, was purged from the Fascist Corporation of Journalists for writing with insufficient fervour about the Italian victories during the Spanish Civil War. He moved to Helsinki, to teach Italian literature, and was therefore conveniently on hand to cover the start of the Second World War. He interviewed Hitler after the fall of Poland and reported on the Finnish war from the Russian front. Back in Milan in 1944–5, he was sentenced to death for his critical writing by Mussolini’s Social Republic, but was saved by the war’s end. By the Seventies, he was equally unpopular with Italy’s extreme left, and was shot in the legs by the Red Brigades as he walked along a Milan street.

‘I won’t mention the mustard gas they used in ’35 until last,’ said Bill conspiratorially, while we waited outside Montanelli’s office. A few minutes later, the Italian appeared, tall, donnish and a little stiff, in contrast to Bill who, at eighty-two, was a sprightly, irrepressible figure. After greeting us cordially, for he had long known of ‘Milord Deedes’, Montanelli sat back behind his typewriter, lit a cigarette and waited for what he imagined would be an amiable chat to begin.

‘Now, about the gas you used on the Abyssinians …’ Bill began, astonishing us all (and pronouncing it, to my glee, as ‘gash’).

‘Basta con il gas!’ Montanelli groaned, having heard quite enough about it in the preceding sixty years. ‘We are guilty. Guilty. Now let’s talk of something else.’

Forty minutes later, having made himself understood without any help from me, Bill was satisfied that he had got enough from the interview: a handful of telling facts about the new newspaper, a bit of background and a quote or two from ‘your man’, as he insisted on calling Montanelli. ‘Just like filling a punnet of strawberries,’ confided the indefatigable reporter.

We adjourned to a restaurant Montanelli suggested beside the Castello Sforzesco, where the two old men reminisced happily, and they trumped each other’s stories. When Montanelli remembered his friend Kim Philby, an apparently lazy and drunken correspondent during the Spanish Civil War – until the spy’s death a jar of caviar used to be sent from Moscow to Milan every Christmas – Bill recalled his bringing Mrs Philby back from Beirut to London after her husband’s defection. A government minister at the time, he was returning from the colonial handover in Singapore when he was ordered to detour to the Middle East to pick up the traitor’s wife, who sat at the back of the plane behind curtains, in purdah.

On my prompting, the talk then returned to Ethiopia in the Thirties, and the two began recalling such figures as Marshal Badoglio, Graziani, the Duke of Aosta and Haile Selassie. Both spoke lyrically of the country, its peoples, ancient culture and the beautiful women (about whom, writing in Scoop, Evelyn Waugh had caused Bill some difficulties in regard to Mrs Deedes). Also at lunch was the writer Vittorio Dan Segre, who the year before had published a brilliant, semi-novelised account of Amedeo Guillet’s guerrilla exploits, aimed at young Italians who knew almost nothing of their country’s colonial past.

‘What a magnificent man,’ said Montanelli, who had been a friend of Amedeo for many years, and about whose adventures he, too, had written in the early sixties. I was intrigued, and for a while they indulged my interest. At last, however, Montanelli raised himself unsteadily to his feet to return to the office.

‘If you want to know more,’ said the great editor. ‘You must go to Ireland …’