Passage to Venice – I

Many moons ago we spent a few weeks in Italy, a country we all like very much. There was my mother, my father and me, along with a friend who had been at school with me in India and now went to a prep school in England – she was spending the winter break with us in Geneva, Switzerland, and was with us, almost automatically, on our holiday. We drove through snowstorms and over skid-icy roads to get to our first stop, and then wandered through from big city to small town with happy arbitrariness….or so it seemed to us girls, but what did we know then, we were just sloppy teenagers who slept a lot, giggled a lot and worried about washing hair and zapping zits. But it was, then and still now, a trip that was indeed memorable.

It began not-too-early one morning, or perhaps after dinner the nights before. My friend and I were old enough to be ‘grown up’, but young enough to play silly tricks on each other. And we had just gone through the worst – she had done something I cannot remember now, but I retaliated by spraying the most awful perfume that I had been given by a friend for Christmas on her pillow; my mother was most annoyed, since the smell permeated the whole apartment for days after my friend had gone back to school some weeks later. And, when the day was more or less done, my friend tried on a pair of jeans that had fit perfectly when she had bought them in England not that long ago. They didn’t any more. She lay on the floor near the dining table and yanked, pulled, groaned, wheezed, to no avail. So she went to bed in them and the next morning, just before we were ready to leave, she managed to zip them up. Of course, she had to undo the zip once we got in the car, since sitting down made her face turn blue…

My parents piled us into the back seat, a couple of acrylic car blankets snuggled around us to keep the cold out as far as possible. You could just about see the tip of my friend’s nose, but the rest of her was a fuzzy pile of synthetic pile. The heater was on full, everyone was smothered in wool and we started off. We would be in Milan for lunch, my father promised. Life was great, the roads were clear, the sun was shining, the world was a joyous place. And then we drove through the Mont Blanc tunnel that links Switzerland and Italy. The Swiss side was typically efficiently pristine, immaculate, even the snowdrifts along the sides of the road arranged just-so at regular, nicely-shaped heaps of cold whiteness. The border security guards beamed happily at us as we drove into the well-lit tunnel, our collective claustrophobia acting up but not too severely, with only a slight panic expressed by my mother at the thought of so many tons of rock above our little car.

But the other side, even we emerged, was rather different. Italy is warm and beautiful and friendly and happy, we all knew, but the Italy that greeted us was just white. Right after going through the friendly, warm, beautiful and happy security zone that marked our passage into the country, we slid neatly down an icy road to a parking spot at the side. Our snow tires were not enough traction; we had to use chains as well. My friend and I volunteered to do the fixing – lots of rude words muttered as clouds of white mist and a broken nail or two later, we were back in the car, pink nosed and snow spattered, but warmed by the exertion of clipping the very cold metal links together around the very cold rubber tires with a very cold wind whistling down the backs of our necks.

And then we drove on. Slowly. The car turned left around a bend on to a bridge over a small frozen stream and kept turning. There was a squeak, but who it came from was not known – it could have been all of us, or any one. As my father worked his feet furiously on the brakes, changing gear, spinning the steering wheel, trying to get some traction and undo the skid, we slid gently to a halt, just about an inch away from the stone of the bridge wall, the slabs of rock that kept us from sliding straight into the ice beneath.

It was a good start to a good vacation.