Perugia — Formation College

V-J Day anniversary! A year ago to-day I was on my way to British Formation College at Perugia in Central Italy, hitch-hiking from Senegalia on the Adriatic coast. The great news about V-J had come over the radio at about three o'clock in the morning, and our hospital at Senegalia was en fete, while all the British units had declared a holiday. V-J page 29 Carried with it much more a sense of reprieve to the British than to the New Zealanders: the far east loomed large for most of them, and cracks about Burma were becoming increasingly common between Jon's Two Types.

Perugia is the capital city of one of the loveliest of the Italian provinces, Umbria. In Umbria a radiance seems to rise from the raisin-coloured earth ploughed by the huge, gentle, milk-white oxen, with scarlet tassels hanging from their wide horns, and the silvery olive trees, dark cypresses and flowering fruit trees are always lovely notes of color in the clear Italian light. Approaching Perugia from the plains, and seeing its towers and spires crowing the green hill, one thinks of nothing so much as one of the story-book towns in the cartoons of Walt Disney, but on entering the town one discovers that it possesses a stronger beauty and endless character. It's beautiful medieval streets are tranquil now, the restless turbulence and pugnacity which made it the hardest of all cities to subdue from Etruscan times onwards only suggested in the frowning strength of the buildings and the city walls. The tide of war more or less passed Perugia by, the only damage it suffered being from one or two misaimed bombs and some purely gratuitous destruction with hand grenades on the part of some German troops who had been billeted in the Benedictine monastery of San Pietro. The nearest troops were the New Zealanders at Lake Traimeno, so it was an ideal place for Formation College.

Anyone who could persuade his Unit to release him for a month seemed to be eligible to attend, and the British were very kind in allowing New Zealanders to enter the College also.

At Wing 3, the Modern Arts Wing, there were people from as far south as Taranto and as far north as Upper Austria, and the emblems of many famous divisions could be seen on various sleeves. The College was staffed by Army officers seconded from their various Units, and they were a brilliant group of men, mostly teachers in civil life. We could choose our own course from a syllabus which embraced English, Latin, French, History, Psychology, Drama, and one or two other subjects. We were expected to take one main subject, such as English, and one or two subsidiary ones, and attend Community Periods which were held three times a week. At community periods anything at all might happen, from a "British Way and purpose" lecture, or a gloomy and highly statistical analysis of the declining British birthrate, enlivened by our gong-happy suggestions that a sliding scale of civil honours for twins, triplets, and so on, with a D.B.E. for a tried but failed, might be inaugurated, to uproarious sessions when the Dean and Captain Scotland, the drama lecturer, recited such gems as

"Candy's dandy

But Likker's quicker"

or Tennyson's Oriana with "arse uppards" substituted for the refrain "Oriana." There were only two women students attending this first course, so inhibitions were few.

The English course covered quite a lot of the N.Z.U. prescription for stage I, with the added advantage that Sharp read quite a lot of the texts aloud in class, and prose spoken in his beautifully modulated voice was much more easily appreciated. The drama lecturer, Scotland, was a lanky young man with a tremendous enthusiasm for his subject, of which he was a master; and he had recently taken a double 1st in English and History at Oxford. We enjoyed his lectures so much that everybody in the practical section tried also to attend the literary and historical drama section lectures. In our section we did play readings, Scotland pushing ideas in and dragging them out of us, making us feel that we were creating the reading ourselves. Our big piece was a little thing of A.A. Milne's, The Man in the Bowler Hat, which we staged for the entire Wing at the end of the month. The furore which this created amongst an enthusiastic audience was only eclipsed by one written by Scotland and acted by the staff, Romeo and Juliet without Music.

At 11 each morning there was a break for elevenses, coffee and cakes, or char and wads if you like, served by Naafi waiters in one of the courtyards, where we all gathered around a pillared circular wellhead. The weather was always hot and cloudless, so the courtyard served ideally as a common room for our hundred and fifty or so students. In between lectures we read in the library, which had the merit of being divided into small sparsely furnished rooms, where we could read and smoke and talk occasionally if we liked. The college was housed in a mellow 14th century orphanage connected with a convent, and I liked to think that it might have been this convent which Pope Paul III gave himself permission to visit, on which occasion the nuns "marveled that the Vicar of God on earth should so far humiliate himself as to visit such vile servants as they were." And the Pope seated himself in the choir "all of his own accord, without being helped by anybody, and like a meek and gentle lamb... and being seated, he said to the sisters, 'Come everyone of you and kiss my foot.'" After lectures we would stroll back to the page 30 mess up the narrow winding streets, where fat comfortable Mommas in little dark fruit shops would call out to us to buy the luscious Umbrian peaches or fat bunches of black grapes, for just a few lira a kilo, or perhaps we would go around to Army School, which was in the Royal Italian University for strangers. This Foreigners' University was an interesting place; it was housed in the Palazzo Gallenga, a 17th century palace hard by the Porta Etrusca, and under the fascists it had held summer sessions for foreigners in Italian, Etruscology, and History of Art, with fascist ideology thrown in. Now it's stately white and gold rooms and splendid library were being used as an Army School, but it is soon to revert to the Italians.

Perugia is very rich in interest. It was an Etruscan town, and there is a splendid Etruscan museum; also Perugino, Raphael's master, was born here, and when we were there the Art Gallery had a most amazing exhibition of five centuries of Umbrian, Sienese, and Florentine painting in honour of the anniversary of his birthday: that wonderful collection which is Umbria's heritage from her past glory as leader of the Umbrian School of painting led by Bonfigli in the mid-15th century.

Then there were ancient and lovely churches, convents and monasteries one could explore at leisure, with San Pietro's the exquisite 10th century Benedictine foundation, adorned with all the beauty the love and riches of the Order could lend it through the centuries, always beckoning one from its vantage point on the hill of Capraio at the south of the town, a lovely pale brick group crowned by a delicate campanile. The Albergo Rosetto furnished even more potent inspiration in the shape of Wolfschmitt's liqueurs, and the quiet twilight hour usually found us at peace in its little garden, absorbed in a game of draughts and a bottle of kummel, every move closely followed by the Italian waiter and the Rosetta's cat. The bottom dropped out of our world when the A.T.S. and the Domestic Science Wing requisitioned the Rosetta, and the Town Major ruined all our staff work by putting it and its bar out of bounds to us.

Dinner was usually between 8 and 9 at the mess, complete with orchestra and a bottle of chianti. The Kiwis would come down from Trasimeno to enjoy the fleshpots on most evenings, and the news that the long table had been usually the signal for a quietly disposed UNNRA child welfare worker living at the Brufani to light out of town to have her dinner in the woods. The first and the last nights at Perugia were the wildest though; the first was V-J night, of course, and I remember four ex-Pacific Kiwis from the Division making me welcome and how we accounted for a bottle of champagne each without really noticing. On the last night, we invited the staff of Wing 3 to have dinner at the mess with us, and the evening ended uproariously in the students' ante-room. With rousing French ditties led by the French master, and a wild game of football with someone's desert boot.

After dinner and some reading or dancing, the evenings were always warm and inviting enough for a stroll around some fresh part of Perugia, up and down the fascinating alleys, so twisty and steep, under flying buttresses and archways, around sudden corners where the Virgin and Child gaze serenely down from terra cotta plaques; and every now and then one would emerge in the open by some of the old city walls, where the hill drops away and the Tiber valley spreads out below, with the dark lines of the Appenines beyond, and the lights of Assisi twinkling. The end of every day was an odd half hour sitting on the broad steps of the cathedral, still warm from the day's sunshine, looking across the Piazza San Lorenzo to the loveliest foundation in the world and the Palazzo Pubblico, that most subtly beautiful building with the brazen griffin and lion of Perugia above the great door.

At weekends Assisi and Gubbio and other nearby towns were near enough for a day's visit, which meant that we had to hitch hike as no one at the College had to hitch hike as no one at the College had any transport. Unhappily, the arrival of transport was the signal for the end of the course, and for me it meant a roundabout trip by jeep by way of Florence and Venice back to the filth and noise and squalor of Bari, and my mess overlooking the petrol point, with Perugia and Wing 3 a vision of lost tranquility.

K.M.