“It was a moonlit garden,
near a large ballroom
A soldier and his sweetheart
they were walking hand in hand ”.
NEW YORK – In the almost absent literature on imprisonment in the Second World War two poems emerge, almost seventy years after an encounter, a rarefied story of love and friendship, in a Scottish moorland, Glenluce, two hundred kilometers southwest of Edinburgh. She was a young poet, her name was Betty Parker, his Bruno Fiorini. Every memory moves those of other people, who think back to a grandfather, a distant relative who has ended up who knows where. War stories often look alike but ultimately remain unique. One of these is told in a book entitled “Betty, I’m Bruno”, written by his daughter, Lorena Fiorini, a life spent in Rai, mother of the journalist and presenter of Tg1 Valentina Bisti.
“For my father’s ninety years – says the daughter – I wanted to give him a book about his life as a gift, so I sat next to him to collect the testimony. We have given ourselves an extraordinary time ”. It was 2011, a short time ago the father had disappeared. “I did not know the details of its history – recalls Lorena – for fifty years I could not watch a war program, it was too strong a pain, it was the story of the ‘losers’, the witnesses of the massacre, the pain of the crossing, the uncertain future. Love was needed to bring the skin home ”. For his father the salvation had been Betty, a girl with brown hair, freckles, of which some poems emerged a few years ago, found by a friend of the Fiorini family, Stefano Caccialupi, who had set out on Betty’s trail and found her relatives. And with them a book of poems, now in the possession of Bruno’s daughter.
In those pages there is also this story, which has survived time. Two poems are inspired by the Italian prisoner and the long farewell at the end of the war. “My thoughts will always be with you / now even the waves are unleashed”. And then: “Goodbye my true love, we will never meet again on earth / But we will meet in heaven, on God’s eternal earth”. In another she wrote: “A son of an old gentleman has conquered her heart, since her true love was far away / Amid her tears falling, she thought she heard him calling her / Take them back and tell her that I wore them to the end “.
Private Jack and his Jacqueline: a 77-year love story
by Massimo Basile
Betty does not call him by name, but the reference of the “soldier”, says his daughter, is him. Others, which the girl had delivered directly to Fiorini, have burned over time. When the two met, Fiorini was 24, she eight months older. He was born in Casina Rossa, the Tuscan countryside, near Pratovecchio, Arezzo. The war had torn him from the quiet rural life, made up of racing with the cart, trips with the chrome Torpado bike, the cheering for Girardengo. Captured in the war, Fiorini had been sent to Scotland to work in prison camps. Cabbage and white bread for dinner, straw straws for bedding, a cast-iron stove for warming up in concrete and straw shacks that held up to twenty-eight prisoners at a time. At the end of ’44 Fiorini, after moving to another camp, had had the meeting that would change his memories of the war: Betty, a girl who took care of the family cinema and the hotel, in Glenluce, a few pass from the prison camp. He had written her first letter in English, inviting her to meet him, secretly, near the railway bridge, at seven in the evening.
It was pitch dark, dense fog not to be seen within a meter. “I saw a figure arrive – says Fiorini in the book – I waited a while trying to grasp some details that would allow me to understand the expected presence. Then I plucked up my courage and called: “Betty, I’m Bruno.” From that moment on, the two met almost every day, for two years, as illegal immigrants. He presented her with a ring made from a silver crown on which he had engraved the letters BP, Betty Parker. She dedicated her poems to him and welcomed him into the house in what was a “beautiful and unhappy time at the same time”. The days passed, the war was drawing to a close. Their story had come to an end. Fiorini could not guarantee her a high standard of living, so in 1946 he returned home alone to Italy to start a new life with Ida, a girl from his country with whom he will live forever. Betty remained in Scotland, married and had no children. They didn’t hear each other anymore. They have both been missing for about ten years, but it is as if their bond has never been broken. Poems have been added to the book. And to the memory, the future. Fiorini’s daughter has created a cultural association, ‘Write your story’, and the literary prize “Women between memories and the future”, dedicated to women who look after the memory of the family.
.