Signora

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When I first met her in the summer of 1962, she was Mrs Thompson. By the following year she had become Mrs Mourton.  Years later I discovered that she was born Giovanna Guzzeloni.  But in the villages of Southern Italy she was always Mrs Thompson, or simply  'Signora'. Her friends called her Gianna.

She was petite, probably just over 5 feet tall. She had thick black hair, always elegantly but practically styled, a longish, thin nose and piercing black eyes. She looked typically Italian. That first summer she was about 40 years old when we met at Ciampino airport in Rome. She looked cool and elegant in a blue and white striped cotton dress while the rest of us sweated as we struggled with our luggage. She spoke precise, fluent English, with the slightest hint of an accent. I assumed she was Italian and, with a name like Thompson, married to an Englishman or American.

We walked together across the tarmac towards the WW2 vintage Dakota airplane which was to take us to Pescara on the Adriatic coast. I was a gauche 17 year old schoolboy and she engaged me in small talk. I clearly remember the smile that played across her lips when I asked her if she knew England well. I was aware I’d made a faux pas and I think I blushed.

I was in Italy with about 40 other English boys to take part in summer work camps, painting and decorating nurseries for the Save the Children Fund. Gianna was the Fund’s representative in Italy. Her work was far reaching: she administered  sponsorship schemes for individual children, distributed donated clothing and food, built and ran nurseries, trained their staff, encouraged projects to build roads and establish orchards - in fact anything that might benefit the impoverished communities of Southern Italy. In the mid 20th Century much of the South still had a largely peasant population of shepherds and subsistence farmers, and poverty remained endemic. The villages we were to work in were close to the valley of the River Sangro in the province of Abruzzo. The Sangro flows eastwards from its source high in the Apennines and meets the Adriatic near Ortona where Gianna and the Fund were based and where we assembled after the flight from Rome in the rickety old Dakota.

In Ortona we got to know James Mourton, a man in his 40s who worked for the Fund in the UK. There was never any sign of a Mr Thompson and it became clear that Jim and Gianna had a close relationship. It was Jim who gave the introductory talks about the villages and the work we were expected to do there. The villages were remote and economically deprived; the land suffered from erosion and many of the younger males were absent working as economic migrants in the heavy industries of Northern Europe. Gianna’s philosophy was that ‘aid’, whether in the form of clothing, powdered milk or nursery provision should not simply be donated, no matter how deserving the case, but should be earned by providing labour. Thus, mothers were expected to clean and maintain nurseries in lieu of fees for their children and if the village needed new washing facilities, then the Fund might help with materials but the men of the village should provide the labour. Voluntary labour for the good of the community was an alien philosophy to the average Italian peasant, we were told, but by working together we would demonstrate the effectiveness of this philosophy, plus the Fund would get some spruced up nurseries.

The experience of working in what was still a mediaeval peasant society had a strong cultural impact on me and over the two summers my respect and admiration for Gianna grew. The villagers treated her like a cross between Mother Theresa and the Queen. She knew most of them by name. The children would flock round her car when she drove onto the village piazza on one of her visits and everyone vied for her attention. By 1963 the Fund had provided her with a large Citroen estate car in which she was always driven by Sorino, her handyman/driver and protector. He had wavy black hair, flashing gold teeth and wore a quasi military uniform of khaki shirt and trousers with various SCF badges stitched onto the breast pocket and shoulders. There was nothing that Sorino couldn’t repair, no deal he couldn’t barter and nothing that he couldn’t acquire…..somehow. And there was a third member of Gianna’s household:  Ida her housekeeper/cook who, the year we were in Civitaluparella, was in charge of our work camp kitchen.

Gianna fascinated me: a quiet, almost regal but formidable woman who had spent her working life amongst some of the poorest people in Europe. I knew nothing about her background and any attempts to discover more were firmly quashed by Giovanna Dall’ Asta, one of Gianna’s assistants. I have a clear memory of asking Giovanna if she knew anything about Mr Thompson. She told me that he had died several years previously, that the subject was never discussed and under no circumstances should I ever raise it with Gianna or Sorino.

One day in 2008 I was idly surfing the internet when the following flashed up on my computer screen: ‘…. after meeting Giovanna "Gianna" Thompson, a representative of the British Save the Children Fund, the course of her life was forever changed.’ It was a review of Ann Cornelisen’s book ‘Where It All Began.’ The book was published in 1990 and had recently been reissued. In it Cornelisen describes how, in 1954, an accidental meeting led to her working for Gianna, and how their friendship grew. As Ann gained Gianna’s trust, she learned about her unusual upbringing and the love affair that changed her life. Suddenly I was finding answers to questions that had intrigued me for over 40 years.

 Ann Cornelisen was as fascinated by Gianna as I had been. She describes ‘a dark, minute, easily amused woman in her early thirties…her feet were tiny….and her hands, which could do the finest embroidery or lull any suffering child or animal to sleep, were small and stubby. She was bird-like in figure and face; she had rather too long a nose and large, luminous brown eyes, deep set under the smoothly defined brows and lids usually seen on only the silkiest marble statues.’

This was the Gianna I remembered.

 She was born Giovanna Guzzeloni in Italy in about 1922, Ann Cornelisen gives no dates in her narrative. The Guzzeloni’s were a prosperous Milanese landowning family with property in the city and in the Italian Lakes. Her father, Guido, was an engineer specialising in naval turbines. He was tall and slender, had served in the British Navy during WW1, and could easily have been mistaken for an English gentleman. Her mother, on the other hand, was completely English but could easily have been mistaken for an Italian. Lilian Guzzeloni was small, dark and fiery. When Guido was wounded during the war she travelled alone across Europe to be with him, terrorising the hospital staff to ensure that he received the best treatment. Gianna was a combination of both parents: she looked Italian just like her English mother and had something of her mother’s fiery temper, but she also had her Italian father’s English reserve.

Gianna had a privileged Italian upbringing and was educated  by Ursuline nuns. Mussolini’s power grew during the 1920s and both Gianna’s parents were anti-fascist. Guido’s opposition was conducted quietly, although he helped to smuggle dissidents across the border from their country estate. Lillian was more outspoken but she was protected by the family’s social position. However, when Gianna was 10 or 12 (reports vary) Guido died and Lillian was blacklisted. Mother and daughter fled to England, settled in Lincoln and Gianna became an English schoolgirl. She was a talented artist and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Later she studied child development at university and worked for the Ministry of Education in an experimental group for difficult children. As Ann Cornelisen writes: ‘Her resume might almost have been invented to satisfy the Save the Children Fund’s requirements for its representative in Italy.’

In 1947, with a remit to establish nurseries and infant feeding stations, she set off for the Abruzzo region of Southern Italy, an area she knew little about other than it had been devastated during the war and the people were homeless and starving. It was there that she met Ernest Thompson. 


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