Caprice

I was four or five when my Italian godmother gave me a book with the rather formal dedication: ‘Ad Angela, perchè non sdimentichi il nostro italiano’ (so you won’t forget our Italian language) – that ‘nostro’ drawing me into an early belonging as warm as it was inclusive. We were about to return to Britain, as we did at the end of every summer since my birth, and Zia Mimmina wanted me to remember my mother- (and mother’s) tongue. The book was Pinocchio, the story of the wooden puppet whose nose was as long as the lies he told. Looking at it again sets me wondering about language, particularly our so-called first, native or mother-language – but also about lies. Robert Creeley once reported how someone asked, at the end of a poetry reading: ‘Is that a real poem, or did you just make it up?’ Between reality and making it up, there’s always language, our passport and go-between, our shared contract and occasion for personal invention. A ‘real poem’ comes, as any writer knows, from the most complex work of making it up.

It may have been that same summer in Naples when I asked the classic childhood question: ‘Mamma, where did I come from?’ There was a moment’s pause, then a brief answer as she hung out the washing on our balcony: ‘from Mummy’s tummy’. Was it the belittling brevity of the answer, its unlikely matter-of-factness, or the insultingly silly rhyme of the English that drew a furious response from me? ‘Non è vero’, I accused, slipping, as our family always ...