Hero on a Bicycle

I
always knew I would write this story one day.

I was nineteen when I first saw Florence, and I thought it was the most beautiful city I had ever seen. I had my sketchbook with me, and I was enchanted by the narrow winding streets, the washing hanging out of the shuttered windows, and the sun-bleached ochers and terra-cotta browns of the roofs and walls, as well as the grand architecture.

This was not long after the end of the Second World War — the time in which
Hero on a Bicycle
is set. Although Florence had been miraculously spared the devastation that had been visited on many European cities during the war, there was a lot of poverty, and food was still scarce for those who could not afford to buy on the black market. Tourists were beginning to trickle back, even though many streets still bore the marks of military occupation. So when I came to write this story, it was easy for me to imagine what the Italian people went through in wartime — when Hitler’s Nazi army was fighting the Allies on Italian soil after Italy’s own strutting dictator, Benito Mussolini, whom they had followed with such fervor, had so miserably let them down.

On Sunday mornings, the ex-Partisans used to gather in the Piazza Goldoni, which was near where I was living. They had been anti-Fascist freedom fighters during the war, and some still sported their red bandanas around their necks to show their Communist allegiance. Although they no longer carried rifles, they still sang their old marching songs while brandishing clenched fists. They were recalling the time when they had roamed the hills around Florence, hampering German troop movements by blowing up bridges and railway lines, and helping escaped Allied prisoners of war rejoin their units. If they were caught by the dreaded German secret police, the Gestapo, it meant torture and execution. When, in 1944, the British and Canadian troops at last entered Florence, the Partisans came out of hiding and joined in the bitter fighting as, street by street, the city was liberated. After it was over, they meted out pitiless revenge upon anyone who had collaborated with the Fascists.

My fictional thirteen-year-old “hero on a bicycle,” Paolo Crivelli, is living with his mother and older sister, Constanza, in their home in the hills outside the city of Florence during that summer of 1944, just as the Allied advance is approaching. Paolo and Constanza’s father, Franco — a passionate anti-Fascist — is in hiding, and none of them know where. Their story was inspired by a courageous family I got to know on that first visit to Florence. The children, like Paolo and Constanza, had an English mother who was persuaded by the Partisans to help escaping prisoners of war. It was a very risky undertaking, as it was punishable by death.

Paolo and Constanza are two young people who find themselves caught up in extraordinary and often terrifying circumstances that demand all their courage. But, like all teenagers, they still hang on to their dreams.

This is my first novel and also the first book I have ever attempted without doing my own illustrations. Luckily for me, it is now possible for young readers to access evocative visual background on the Internet: contemporary newsreels and photographs of Second World War aircraft tanks and weaponry, of Partisans and armies on the march, and of refugees fleeing the bombing, as well as material from my sketchbooks, fashion drawings, and hit songs of the era can all be found online at:
www.heroonabicycle.co.uk
.

W
hen Paolo reached the deserted stretch of road where it was too steep to pedal, he dismounted and began to wheel his bicycle instead. He knew it was far too late for him to be out. He was not supposed to go out alone after dark at all, and so, inevitably, it was something he spent a good deal of his time plotting to do. It was around two o’clock in the morning, and the high walls on either side of the road gave his footsteps a curious double echo; it was, as always, frightening.

His way ahead lay uphill. He was returning home from one of his secret night rides into Florence, which now lay behind him in its bowl of hills, a dark, closely shuttered wartime city. There was very little traffic except for police and army trucks at that time of night. Streets and squares were dark and silent, and the bridges that spanned the silvery, snaking Arno River were all unlit. If he looked back, he could see the familiar ribbed dome of the cathedral and its attendant bell tower, which he had known since childhood, flattened against the silhouette of the northern suburbs. By day they were part of his ordinary world. At this time of night, they were not so reassuring.

The houses on either side of the road were mostly large nineteenth-century mansions, set well apart and looming in spacious gardens behind locked iron gates. Many of them were now closed up. Their owners had abandoned them and decamped to the countryside, where food was less scarce. No hospitable light spilled onto the road, and only dry leaves skittered across the fitful beam of his carefully shaded bicycle light. He began to wonder why he did this. The most exciting part, really, was planning his escape — the elaborate subterfuge of pretending to go to bed early and listening for his mother’s footsteps on the stairs and her heels tapping along the side landing and then waiting for her to say her last prayers of the day and turn out her light. Then came his own noiseless descent, the squeeze through the back pantry window and the agonizing tension of trying to remove his bicycle from the shed without disturbing his old dog, Guido. Maria, the only servant who still “lived in,” occupied the room behind the kitchen, but she slept like a log. His older sister Constanza’s bedroom was on the top floor, and it was a fairly safe bet that if she did hear anything, she would not bother to let on.

The climax of the escapade was the moment when he took off all alone, coasting downhill in the dark with a fresh wind in his face. And it was over much too soon. Escape was essential, though. He had to get away from the boredom and from the pinched wartime austerities of his home: Constanza’s tiresome aloofness, his mother’s goodness, and the burden of endlessly being expected to be helpful. With his father away, a household of women — relieved only by the coming and going of priests, who did not count as men — was no place for him.

The city at night fascinated him. At thirteen, he liked to think he was one of those characters who welcomed the darkness to pursue his own particular purposes, like his current hero, James Cagney, whom he had seen in American movies: hard-boiled, not always on the right side of the law, and devastatingly attractive to women in spite of being short and not very handsome. With these thoughts in his head, Paolo would cycle along streets of shops that were familiar by day but now mysterious, with all their shutters down. Sometimes he would catch a glimpse of lovers in shadowed doorways. He had learned how to dodge drunks and gangs of boys much tougher than he was, to dismount and whisk around corners to avoid the civil or military police, and to keep well within the shadow of the wall in deserted squares. The huddled groups he sometimes came upon, deeply immersed in murmured conversation, cigarettes aglow in the dark and faces theatrically lit for a second by the flare of a match, excited him deeply. So, most of all, did those side streets where doors opened and closed briefly to reveal dimly lit interiors inhabited, according to Maria, by “bad women.”

But, beginning to trudge home in the small hours of the morning, he felt the usual sense of anticlimax and frustration. Nothing had happened, and now he had to face the anxiety of getting back into the house again without being discovered.

He stopped and flung his bicycle against a nearby wall to get his breath back and consider the situation. At that moment, someone came up silently behind him and clapped a strong hand over his mouth.