Children of the Volcano: Making a Life for Three in Sicily. Ros Belford’s uplifting, humorous memoir building a new life on a beautiful Sicilian island.
I always wanted to live abroad. As a book-loving child growing up in suburban Leeds I’d dream of milking cows with Heidi, walking the Oregon trail, escaping the Nazis in war-time Poland, and — despite the fact that I insisted on holding my nose and closing my eyes every time we had to pass through the saw-dusted aisles of Leeds meat market –being Laura Ingalls in her little house on the prairie, joyously watching Pa butcher a pig.
However, the first time I went abroad, to Italy in the 1980s, I was shocked. I got off the train in Verona and it stank. It stank of drains and sewage and decaying cabbage and forgotten dishcloths and the cracks between the cobbles were filled with cigarette butts and sunflower seeds. But I loved the colour, the sun, the light, the way Italians spoke with their hands, choreographing the air, and the way kids played in the piazza while their parents sat in cafes sipping amber and pink spritzes instead of being dispatched to bed at seven. I loved how people dressed like it mattered what they looked like. No-one had scuffed shoes or creased coat hems, and even the punks had immaculately coiffed Mohicans.
What I loved most, though, was that time in Italy seemed less linear than it was in England, as if it were a space waiting to be filled with whatever delights the day might bring – exquisite miniature pastries behind the etched glass of an Art Nouveau window; a sliver of cantaloupe on a market holder’s knife a flirty glance, a raised eyebrow, a tanned ankle in a tasselled loafer. Italians didn’t seem to mind waiting at the deli, half an hour or more for a custom-made panino, and nor were they embarrassed to take up other Italians’ time as they gave precise instructions to the panino-maker… ‘a touch of oregano, a pizzico of pepperoncino, no, the pecorino a little thinner, yes, so the light shines through… ‘ Italians didn’t appear to mind waiting at all. They chatted and laughed and joked, and time seemed fluid.
I went back to England, learned Italian, practiced by talking to imaginary Italian friends. I finished university, dreamed of living in Italy but didn’t quite have the nerve. Then one day at a friend’s house I found a copy of Cosmopolitan. In among the fashion spreads and perfume ads was a half-page interview with a guy who had set up a series of guidebooks for travellers on a tight budget who were as interested in contemporary life and beaches as they were in high culture and history. The guy was Mark Ellingham; the series was the Rough Guides, and they had published four titles. Italy wasn’t one of them.
‘I could write one of these,’ I said.
My friend spluttered over her cup of tea. ‘They were advertising for writers for Italy last week, in The Guardian.’
Strokes of luck like that don’t happen often, especially ones that could change your life, and I worked harder on that application than I had ever worked at anything before. I don’t know how I would have coped if I’d failed. But thankfully I didn’t,and I was off writing the Rough Guide to Italy, a backpacking travel writer living on a shoestring, unable to quite believe that this was my life, and that by the skin of my teeth I had escaped the ordinary. It wasn’t exactly glamorous. I spent a lot of time copying down bus timetables, I bought food at markets, and I slept in hostels, convents, campsites, and a commune where I helped two members of a Bulgarian heavy metal band sell contraband cigarettes. But it wasn’t humdrum.
Back home I still day-dreamed about moving to Italy, but life got in the way. I married. Had children. Then in 2004 my relationship exploded and I ended up in London, a single mum with two tiny girls, not much money and no fixed home. I discovered then that I was not made to be a victim. I was too proud, too optimistic, too romantic, too bloody determined to squeeze all the joy I can out of life, and so the first thing I did – impractical as it might have been — was to dream up a book that would take me and the girls on a journey around the Mediterranean. It was called Eating the Odyssey and although it secured me an agent, we did not get a publishing deal. I think your daughters will be the stars of this book, one publisher wrote, but readers of books like this want continuity of characters and place.
OK, I thought, desperately mustering my last flimsy vestige of optimism, just because Eating the Odyssey hasn’t worked out, it doesn’t mean that nothing can. I wrote to my editor at the Telegraph. Could I write a series of columns about looking for the perfect place to live in Italy? No, she replied, but I do need an article on the mattanza, the annual slaughter of tuna, on a small Sicilian island called Favignana.
Sicily. I’d never been to Sicily. What’s more I was still as squeamish as I had been as a kid in Leeds market and a quick google produced images of fishermen stabbing tuna with javelins in frothy water pink with blood. But Sicily had sea and sun, the cost of living was low and ina way it felt like destiny had stepped in, and so off we went.
It didn’t work out on Favignana – those fishermen were borderline Neanderthal — but we eventually settled on another island, Salina, volcanic, wild and beautiful, where the girls spent their childhood barefoot, bilingual, learning to swim over volcanic bubbles as Stromboli erupted. For a couple of years I wrote every day while the girls were at school, filling notebooks with the extraordinary things that happened, but as the extraordinary came to seem ordinary, my diary-writing stopped. It was only when we moved back to the UK – for high school and sixth form — that I was able to stand back far enough to see the shape of our story, excavate the meanings embedded within the fabric of reality on the island and begin to write what became my book, Children of the Volcano.
(c) Ros Belford
About Children of the Volcano:
An uplifting, humorous memoir of a mother building a new life on a beautiful Sicilian island.
Reeling from a broken relationship, Ros Belford decides the best chance she has of healing, while giving her daughters a childhood to remember, is to move to Italy and live by the sea.
After a false start in a town where machismo is ingrained, they find the small, lush, delightful island of Salina. Izzy and Juno grow up playing on the beach, learning to swim over volcanic bubbles, hearing tales of Aeolian witches and watching Stromboli erupt on the horizon. It is not entirely paradise, however. The school is atrocious, there are power cuts and an earthquake, and property speculators threaten the island’s fragile beauty. But an eclectic community of islanders take them to their hearts, friendships are forged and Salina becomes home.
Full of humanity, vitality, honesty and optimism, Children of the Volcano is for anyone unwilling to give up dreams of adventure and excitement simply because of parenthood, lack of money and not getting things right the first time.
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